After the Bolshevik assumption of power in 1917, the arguably much more difficult task of creating a revolutionary society began. In 1919, to ensure Russian women supported the Communist party, the Zhenotdel, or women’s department, was established. Its aim was propagating the Communist party’s message through local branches attached to party committees at every level of the hierarchy. This dissertation is an analysis of the Communist party’s Zhenotdel in Petrograd/ Leningrad during the 1920s. Most Western Zhenotdel histories were written in the pre-archival era, and this is the first study to extensively utilize material in the former Leningrad party archive, TsGAIPD SPb. Both the quality and quantity of Zhenotdel fonds is superior at St.Peterburg’s TsGAIPD SPb than Moscow’s RGASPI. While most scholars have used Moscow-centric journals like "Kommunistka", "Krest’ianka" and "Rabotnitsa", this study has thoroughly utilized the Leningrad Zhenotdel journal "Rabotnitsa i krest’ianka" and a rich and extensive collection of Zhenotdel questionnaires. Women’s speeches from Zhenotdel conferences, as well as factory and field reports, have also been folded into the dissertation’s five chapters on: organizational issues, the unemployed, housewives and prostitutes, peasants, and workers. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues that how Zhenotdel functioned at the local level revealed that the organization as a whole was riven with multiple and conflicting tensions. Zhenotdel was unworkable. Zhenotdel’s broad goals were impeded because activists lacked financial and jurisdictional autonomy, faced party ambivalence and hostility, and operated largely with volunteers. Paradoxically, these volunteer delegates were “interns,” yet they were expected to model exemplary behaviour. With limited resources, delegates were also expected to fulfil an ever-expanding list of tasks. In addition, Zhenotdel’s extensive use of unpaid housewife delegates in the 1920s anticipated the wife-activist movement of voluntary social service work in the middle to late 1930s. There were competing visions for NEP society, and Zhenotdel officials were largely unable to negotiate the importance of their organization to other party and state organizations. Overall, this suggests that although the political revolution was successful in the 1920s, there were profound limits to the social and cultural revolution in this era.

After having reached a level of influence unmatched by any other element of Soviet government under Stalin and Beria, the security organs of the Soviet Union proved difficult to tame. While it has been argued that the KGB was made subservient to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after the ascent of Khrushchev in the late 1950's, this essay will attempt to show that the security police apparatus was able to maintain a high level of prominence and even autonomy throughout the history of the Soviet Union and beyond. While it may have appeared that the organs were under constraints during periods of unchallenged leadership, the lack of a legislative definition of the KGB's role made the possibility of a coup or putsch a constant threat. During periods of instability, particularly those surrounding the succession struggles, the KGB was able to act independently and was highly influential as to the outcome of these contests. In the latter years of the Soviet era, efforts to alter the system in order to avoid the excesses of previous years revealed the organs to be highly adaptable and cognizant of the need to change to avoid being excluded from the political decision-making process. Through an assessment of the various succession struggles and efforts to place the organs within the confines of legality, the political power of the KGB may be better understood, and placed in a historical perspective side by side with its post-Soviet counterpart, which too is shown to have survived recent upheavals.

This thesis examines propaganda and educational campaigns in the Brezhnev-era USSR, where the Party-state continued the longstanding Soviet attempt to form the country's youth into conscientious builders and defenders of communism. Focusing on the military, military-historical and physical-cultural activity that the state identified as areas of strategic importance in a period of intensifying competition with the capitalist world, the thesis analyses the interactions between propaganda and its producers, and the ordinary and extraordinary young people at whom it was aimed. It finds that state agencies and organisations of the Brezhnev era followed tradition in employing heroic motifs and discourses to elicit heroic behaviour amongst the population, often seeking to apply themes and material from earlier periods directly to the situation of late-1960s and 1970s youth. In particular, propaganda emphasised the importance of both models of wartime heroism, and the characteristics articulated in the 1961 Moral Code of the Builder of Communism - but in a political and social environment now much changed from those in which they had originally emerged. The thesis begins with a study of material surrounding the reinstatement of universal conscription after Khrushchev's army reforms, before examining youth involvement in one of the flagship military-patriotic education campaigns of the period. The second part of the thesis then shifts the focus to a more symbolic, yet no less significant site of the 'defence of the honour of the Motherland': the international sporting arena, particularly during the 1972 Olympiads in 'hostile' West Germany and Japan. Through a case study of coverage of the gymnast Olga Korbut, the thesis argues that, while propaganda-makers still sought to control the Soviet definition of 'heroism', conditions increasingly allowed for the emergence of celebrity and a popular heroism based more on self-advancement and public acclaim than on established Soviet ethical models.

This study explores the life of the prominent Russian Orientalist and colonial administrator Aleksandr Semenov (1873-1958). In the course of his long and versatile career in Central Asia - where he came to in 1901 as a low-ranking member of Turkestan's colonial administration, and where he died in 1958 as the first director of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences - Semenov participated in the transformation of the region from a Tsarist colony into part of what Francine Hirsch has called an 'Empire of Nations'. His influence on national historiography and notions of national identity was especially marked in the case of the Soviet Union's only Persian-speaking republic, Tajikistan, with which Semenov was connected through his interest and expertise in Persianate Central Asia. This thesis even goes so far as to argue that Semenov's scholarship and his work as an advisor to the Soviet government facilitated the very establishment of Tajikistan, which Paul Bergne has described as a nation initially promoted by Russian Orientalists. Further research in Russian archives is required, however, to better substantiate this claim. Rather than focussing on the (early) Soviet period and on so-called national territorial delimitation of Central Asia, as scholars such as Hirsch and Arne Haugen have done, the present study, in the vein of scholars like Vera Tolz and Vladimir Genis, highlights the ways in which both Bolshevik nationalities policy and Soviet Oriental Studies grew out of the studying and ruling of Central Asia in the late imperial period. It does so through an examination of Semenov's career, scholarship and personal networks, and on the basis of his personal archive in Tajikistan's Academy of Sciences, which has not been researched in any systematic way since the early 1970s, and in which no scholar from outside the former Soviet Union has ever worked.

The objective of this thesis is to explain how Dmitrii Shostakovich used Yevgeny Yevtushenko's poetry to create the Thirteenth Symphony. This collaboration between two arts, poetry and music, reflects more than just separate ideas. The five movements of the symphony bring to public conscience the political opinions of Shostakovich regarding life in the Soviet Union.

Estonia's rise to prominence on the leading edge of the Soviet reform process is a consequence of the republic's dual position as an economic role model for other republics and a Soviet exception in terms of lifestyle and cultural orientation. While Estonia's open acceptance of perestroika is clearly a boost for Soviet reformers, the Estonian vision of reform is distinctly different from the direction intended by Moscow. In its capacity as reform leader and radical pioneer, Estonia is a microcosm of the Soviet political economy and the elements that plague attempts to reform the system. An examination of Estonia's role within the Soviet reform movement provides a view of the potentially explosive cultural processes that have now surfaced not only in the Baltic but throughout the Soviet Union. Chapter One presents a descriptive chronological overview of the events that preceded Estonia's Declaration of Sovereignty in November 1988. Chapter Two is analytical in nature and provides a cultural context and background with which to assess Estonian developments. The methodological framework is adapted from Archie Brown's "Political Culture and Communist Studies" and gives a qualitative description of the intensity and psychological power of the cultural factor in Estonian politics. Chapter Three presents Moscow's reaction to Baltic initiatives and describes Gorbachev's attempt to forge a new nationalities policy in the face of deep-rooted conservative opposition. Estonia is a prime example of the seemingly insoluble nationality problems associated with Soviet political reform. In terms of quantitative indicators, Estonia is the most economically successful republic within the Soviet political experiment, and yet it is also the most vociferous in voicing rejection of fundamental Soviet political values. Although the Soviet future remains unpredictable, there are strong indicators that Estonia and the Baltic republics will continue to expand the perimeters of reform at a pace and in a manner that can now only be curtailed by armed force. However, the potential consequences of Baltic initiatives will not remain confined only to Soviet domestic politics. Whether the Soviet Union becomes a benign Commonwealth or Confederacy, or rapidly decays or disintegrates, or regresses into authoritarianism and civil war, the result will have profound consequences for Europe and the rest of the world. Therefore, the importance of Estonia and the other Baltic republics in the process of Soviet decline cannot be underestimated; the Baltic States, although insignificant by global standards, have set an example for other Soviet republics and national groups to follow and will for the near term remain political barometers of the Soviet future. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The urban landscape of Yerevan has experienced tremendous changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Armenia’s independence in 1991. Domestic and foreign investments have poured into Yerevan’s building sector, converting many downtown neighborhoods into sleek modern districts that now cater to foreign investors, tourists, and the newly rich Armenian nationals. Large portions of the city’s green parks and other public spaces have been commercialized for private and exclusive use, creating zones that are accessible only to the affluent. In this dissertation I explore the rapidly transforming landscape of Yerevan and its connections to the development of contemporary Armenian national identity. This research was guided by principles of ethnographic inquiry, and I employed diverse methods, including document and archival research, structured and semi-structured interviews and content analysis of news media. I also used geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite images to represent and visualize the stark transformations of spaces in Yerevan. Informed by and contributing to three literatures—on the relationship between landscape and identity formation, on the construction of national identity, and on Soviet and post-Soviet cities—this dissertation investigates how messages about contemporary Armenian national identity are being expressed via the transforming landscape of Armenia’s national capital. In it I describe the ways in which abrupt transformations have resulted in the physical and symbolic eviction of residents, introducing fierce public debates about belonging and exclusion within the changing urban context. I demonstrate that the new additions to Yerevan’s landscape and the symbolic messages that they carry are hotly contested by many long-time residents, who struggle for inclusion of their opinions and interests in the process of re-imagining their national capital. This dissertation illustrates many of the trends that are apparent in post-Soviet and post-Socialist space, while at the same time exposing some unique characteristics of the Armenian case.

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