This dissertation examines fifteen films produced in seven political eras from 1926 thru 2008 in Soviet / Post-Soviet Russia. Its aim is to determine if the cinematic presence of Bakhtin’s ten signifiers of the carnivalesque (parody, death, grotesque display, satirical humor, billingsgate, metaphor, fearlessness, madness, the mask, and the interior infinite) increase in their significance with the historical progression from a totalitarian State (e.g., USSR under Stalin) to a federal semi-residential constitutional republic (e.g., The Russian Federation under Yeltsin - Putin). In this study, the carnivalesque signifiers act as a gauge of dialogism, the presence of which is indicative of some cinematic freedom of expression. The implication being, that in totalitarian States, a progressive relaxation of censorship in cinema (and conversely, an increase in cinematic freedom of expression) is indicative of a move towards a more representative form of governance, (e.g., the collapse of the totalitarian State). The fifteen films analyzed in this study include: Battleship Potemkin (1925), End of St. Petersburg (1927), Chapaev (1934), Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946, released in 1958), Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Stalker (1979), Siberiade (1979), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), Repentance (1984, released in 1987), Cold Summer of 1953 (1987), Little Vera (1988), Burnt by the Sun (1994), House of Fools (2002) and Russian Ark (2002). All fifteen films were produced in the Soviet/Post-Soviet space and directed by Russian filmmakers; hence, the films portray a distinctly Russian perspective on reality. These films emphasize various carnivalesque features including the reversal of conventional hierarchies, usually promoting the disprivileged masses to the top, thus turning them into heroes at the expense of traditional power structures.

One of the first Village Prose writers was Yuri Kazakov. In his short stories about life in remote Russian villages, Kazakov was able to combine traditions of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky with traditions of Turgenev and Bunin and created a unique style using psychological parallelism in lyrical prose. Through the aspects of village, nature, time, and native language, Yuri Kazakov exposed the life of the marginals. He was interested in individuals and their personal feelings and thoughts. He did not look at individuals as a part of society but rather as a part of and the creation of nature. Therefore, he found his characters in the remote Siberian villages where the Soviet regime and propaganda minimally influenced people’s lives and their traditional values. His characters cannot be characterized as simply good or bad. Through his characters, Kazakov investigated and explored the complexity of human nature, emotions, and motifs. In his stories, he was able to masterfully unfold human souls and draw their psychological portraits to address timeless philosophical questions about the purpose of live, moral choices, unity of people and nature

The aim of the diploma thesis is to review the position of the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet area by means of the analysis of the Russian foreign policy in this region after the year 2000. The first chapter identifies the theoretical and methodological basis applied in the diploma thesis. The second chapter deals with the formulation of the Russian foreign policy after the dissolution of the USSR and its development in the 1990s. Subsequently, the third chapter contains the analysis of the Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet area after the year 2000 based on four levels of analysis -- the international system level, the state level, the domestic influences level and the individual level. The forth chapter focuses on the analysis of the bilateral relations between Russia and post-Soviet republics on the other hand. With the aim to illustrate different approaches used in the Russian foreign policy in relation to various post-Soviet republics, the examples of Georgia and Armenia have been chosen. The last chapter provides the features of the Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet area after the year 2008 in the light of the Foreign policy concept of the Russian Federation published in 2008.

The master thesis deal with relation between socioeconomic and political development in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and their dependence on extraction of oil, respectively on gold. These raw materials are thought to be their major export products. The aim is to determine the impact of raw material extraction on the macroeconomic development of the countries and the widening of their regional differences and to try to explain the declining or stagnant level of democracy in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan by means of the theoretical concept of resource curse. Methodologically, the thesis is done on the basis of statistical analysis of economic indicators such as GDP, HDI, foreign investment, remittances and world prices of raw materials. For a better understanding of regional differences, simple statistical methods such as index of change and the Gini coefficient were used. The work also analyzed the political development using indicators from Freedom House, Human Freedom and The Economist Intelligence Unit that measure the level of democracy and freedom. Interpretation of results is based on previous research of specialized literature and other media sources specializing on selected area. As a result, the very close linkage between macroeconomic development and...

En Asie centrale la construction soviétique s’est avérée difficile, puisqu’elle impliquait la transformation radicale des sociétés locales. Cette thèse va montrer comment les 70 ans de pouvoir soviétique ont changé pour toujours la société, l’économie et la culture du Kazakhstan. Une attention particulière est donnée à la population kazakhe à partir des premières années soviétiques, jusqu’aux années 2000, à leurs parcours dans la capitale soviétique et ensuite dans la métropole contemporaine. Cette thèse aborde les questions comme la rencontre des anciens nomades Kazakhs avec les Russes dans l’espace urbain, le rôle de l’ethnicité et de la culture locale dans les transformations promues par le pouvoir soviétique et, ensuite, dans le processus de construction nationale. La reconstruction de l’histoire sociale de la communauté urbaine, avec l’aide des archives et d’entretiens approfondis, nous révèle une société complexe qui a su adapter la culture locale et celle soviétique en créant sa propre version du soviétisme. Notre thèse suppose que dans ce contexte, les questions sociales liées à l’urbanisation, qui se perpétuent jusqu’à la fin de l’URSS, influenceront considérablement les transformations d’après 1991 et que sans une bonne attention à l’univers local, nous ne pouvons pas comprendre le passé soviétique en Asie centrale, ni les transformations récentes. Dans la ville, le pouvoir soviétique et ensuite celui du président kazakh Nazarbaev contribuent à construire des espaces publics et une mémoire urbaine qui racontent la modernité du peuple kazakh. Notre recherche montre que la ville est un cas d’étude utile pour développer un discours plus ample concernant les sociétés et les cultures du monde. / In Central Asia the imposition of the Soviet State proved to be difficult, as it implied the radical transformation of local societies. This dissertation shows how 70 years of Soviet power changed forever Kazakhstan’s society, economy and culture. Its focuses in particular on the Kazakh people starting from the first Soviet years to the 2000s, and on their journey towards the Soviet capital and later towards a contemporary metropolis. This dissertation approaches questions such as the encounter of the ex Kazakh nomads with the Russians in the urban space, the role of ethnicity and of the local culture in the transformations promoted by the Soviet State and, later, in the process of nation building. The reconstruction of the social history of the urban community, with the aid of archives and in-depth interviews, reveals a complex society which adapted the local culture and the Soviet one to create its own version of Sovietism. My dissertation argues that in such context, social questions connected to the urbanization, which remain actual till the end of the Soviet Union, will affect considerably the transformations after 1991 and that if we do not pay the just attention to the local universe, we cannot understand the Soviet past in Central Asia, neither the recent changes. In the city, the Soviet power and, later, that of Kazakh President Nazarbaev, contribute to the construction of public spaces and of urban memory telling about the modernity of the Kazakh people. The city is, as I put it in my research, is a useful case study to develop broader questions regarding world cultures and societies.

This thesis explores the process of the Bologna reform in the Ukrainian higher education system. Bologna is one of the most well-known and influential European projects for cooperation in the field of higher education. It aims to create an internationally competitive European Higher Education Area (EHEA) through a range of such objectives as the adoption of a system of credits, cycles of study process, diploma supplement, quality assurance, qualifications frameworks, student-centred education, lifelong learning and the promotion of student and faculty mobility. Through an in-depth examination of higher education actors and policy instruments in the case of the implementation of Bologna in Ukraine, this thesis aims to a) analyse the process of the Bologna reform in Ukraine; and b) examine Bologna as a case of Europeanisation in the post-Soviet context. The study is qualitative and applies two main methods: interviews with key policy actors and text analysis of selected policy documents. These data are analysed through the perspective of policy learning, with a particular reference to the concept of layering. The findings suggest that the Bologna reform in Ukraine has been primarily developing as an interrelationship between policy continuity and change. On the one hand, the study found that most of the key powerful actors and networks in the country, established before the introduction of Bologna, have retained their prior influence. As a result, Bologna has – to a large extent – simply reproduced established relationships and pre-existing higher education policies. The Ministry of Education and Science has been the primary actor pushing for this kind of policy continuity. On the other hand, Bologna has also been partially changing some aspects of the old higher education instruments and the established relations among the actors. These changes have been taking place due to the involvement of civil sector organisations which increasingly became crucial as policy brokers in the process of this reform. The study suggests that the old practices and innovations in Bologna have been interacting in layering – a gradual messy and creative build-up of minor innovations by different higher education actors in Ukraine. The accumulation of these innovations led to more fundamental changes – the beginning of the emergence of a more shared higher education policy-making in the previously centrally governed Ukraine. These findings shed some light on the broader process of Europeanisation in the post-Soviet context. The Ukrainian case thus suggests that at least in the post-Soviet context, Europeanisation is the process in which change and the continuity are not mutually exclusive, but rather closely interconnected.

abstract: This dissertation explores how rank-and-file political prisoners navigated life after release and how they translated their experiences in the Gulag and after into memoirs, letters, and art. I argue that these autobiographical narratives formed the basis of an alternate history of the Soviet Union. This alternate history informed the cultural memory of the Gulag in the Komi Republic, which coalesced over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s into an infrastructure of memory. This alternate history was mobilized by the formation of the Soviet Union’s first civic organizations, such as the Memorial Society, that emerged in the late 1980s. However, Gulag returnees not only joined post-Soviet civil society, they also formed a nascent civil society after their release in the 1950s. The social networks and informal associations that Gulag returnees relied upon to reintegrate back into Soviet society after release, also played an essential role in the memory project of coming to terms with the Stalinist past after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As one of the first and most populous epicenters of the Gulag archipelago located in the Far North, from 1929-1958 Komi saw hundreds of thousands of prisoners, in addition to hundreds of thousands more who were exiled to the region from all over the Soviet Union. While some left the region after they were released, many were not able to leave or chose not to when given the choice. Regardless of where they lived when the Soviet Union collapsed, many former prisoners sent their autobiographies to branches of the Memorial Society and local history museums in Komi. For many, this was the very first time they had shared their stories with anyone. While Komi is unique in many ways, it is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Twentieth Century. This project expands our understanding of how civil societies form under conditions of authoritarian rule and illuminates the ways in which survivors and societies come to terms with difficult pasts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2019

This study examines the rise of populism in Hungary and Poland through the Fidesz and Law and Justice (PiS) parties. As a relatively new terminology, the study begins by dissecting the various definitions of populism to establish a universal set of criteria to define the ideology. The majority of experts suggest that populist leaders campaign using a rhetoric of “us versus them” that encourages the population to feel that its general will is not being accurately represented. This strategy is particularly effective in Eastern European nations whose USSR roots makes them skeptical of globalization and paranoid of any loss of sovereignty. The study outlines three major underlying themes that led to the rise of populist parties in Poland and Hungary. First, the neoliberal reforms enacted during a post-communism shock therapy era created a level of poverty and wealth disparity that made citizens eager to return to the leftist economic platforms of Fidesz and PiS. Second, the newness of Poland and Hungary’s political system and continued communist elite system led to a level of corruption in the new government that left citizens with a growing distrust towards more traditional parties. Finally, both PiS and Fidesz capitalized off of the European migration crisis to stoke socially conservative fears and rally nativism. This study finds that these populist parties are successful due to their ability to capitalize off of the frustrations and fears of the common citizen who feels forgotten in a globalized society.

This thesis examines the historical progression of social and political transitions in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, seeking to establish the development of Putinism in an historical context and assert a definition of Putinism as a governing philosophy which exploits the rhetoric of democracy and civil society to conceal authoritarian practices. Analysis begins with Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘moral position’ as the basis of the Gorbachev reforms and the conceptual introduction of democratic and market mechanics, followed by the rejection of the Soviet system and the mixed legacy of shock therapy under Boris Yeltsin, culminating in the ultimate ascendancy of Vladimir Putin as a response to the perceived loss of national status and social dislocation resulting from the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. Ultimately, it is asserted that Putinism is ideologically grounded in Chekism, fundamentally anti-democratic and inherently kleptocratic, seeking to maintain power and perpetuate a sistema centered on the Kremlin. Through vertical centralization of the state, the development of alternative mechanisms of governance, domination of political discourse, development of a personality cult, state sponsored redefinition of Russian identity and the encouragement of exceptionalist and neo-imperialist policies.

<p>The purpose of the study was to examine teachers perceptions of the impact of societal changes on teacher collaboration in schools within the period of independence of Ukraine (1991 2005). This study provided a description of teacher experiences in a context of large-scale philosophical, ideological, social, political, and economic changes of the post-Soviet era, and the teachers interpretation of the impact of related changes upon teacher collaboration in Ukrainian schools. Research questions were divided into two subgroups: first, questions inquiring into teachers perceptions of the nature of post-Soviet societal changes; and second, questions regarding the nature, external and internal impacts on teacher collaboration. Utilizing constructive postmodernism framework, this research examined teacher collaboration through micropolitical and cultural perspectives.</p> <p>This study adopted a naturalistic orientation, within which an interpretive constructivist approach to methodology prompted the use of qualitative methods of inquiry. The data collection techniques of document analysis, focus group interviews and individual interviews were utilized. Document analysis involved review of national and local acts, decrees, policies, and procedures that pertained to teacher collaboration issued during the period of 1991-2005. The participants in this study were elementary or secondary school teachers in the city of Chernivtsi, Ukraine who had been in the teaching profession within the education system of Ukraine during the period of time from 1991 to 2005. In total, fifty-five teachers from eight schools participated in eight focus group interviews and fifteen individual interviews. Documentary data and participants responses were analyzed according to the research questions and recurring themes with the help of ATLAS.ti qualitative data analysis software.</P> <p>The findings revealed the ongoing struggle between the forces of modernity and postmodernity in post-Soviet Ukrainian society. Gains of deideologization and freedoms of conscience, speech, and religion were counteracted by economic decline, political instability, and social insecurity. Societal transformations were seen as having direct impact on the system of education, resulting in a difficult transition period from the old Soviet to the new Ukrainian system of education.</p> <p>It was found that collaboration among teachers in schools was susceptible to transformations at the macro (societal), as well as micro (school) levels. Macro transformations affected the nature of teacher collaboration in a direct way through changing societal realities, while content and format were usually influenced indirectly through the impact on school structures, reforms and policies, school culture, and micropolitical interactions among professionals.</p> <p>Findings affirmed that in the times of uncertainty and radical changes, personal aspects of collaboration tend to gain more significance than the professional ones. Material welfare, spirituality and morale, social security, societal attitudes, social relationships, and shift in the systems of values and beliefs were found exerting significant impact on teacher collaboration. It was pointed out that discourse on collaboration required a balanced representation of individualistic and collectivistic perspectives. It was concluded that the development of collaborative cultures in Ukrainian schools needed to be a two-fold process, involving both instrumental shaping on the part of teachers and administrators and the presence of societal conditions conducive to collaborative relationships. A number of implications from the findings were derived for theory, practice, policy, further research, and methodology. </P>