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M.Litt. et Phil. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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Between February 1940 and June 1941, in four major deportations Soviet authorities moved Polish citizens to work-colonies in the Soviet interior and detained others in various prisons and camps. Based on war-time information, works on the deportations published in the West during the decades of communist rule in Eastern Europe and since reported figures of over 1.5 million deportees, of whom as many as half reportedly died in the USSR. These works held a prevailing view that Soviet intentions towards the deported Poles were genocidal. Recent work with Soviet archival materials has led Polish and Russian historians to revise the number of deportees to 320,000. This substantial reduction has received a mitigated response in the work of Western commentators. A review of published archival materials and of accounts left by witnesses demonstrates that both sets of sources are indispensable to an analysis of the deportations. It also shows that Soviet policies directed against the deportees were not genocidal in their intent and adds a dimension, that of the perpetrators, to the limited conceptualization afforded to the subject thus far. The study shows that under the control of the NKVD the deportations were economic and political components of internal Soviet policy in 1939-1942 and suggests that the Soviet infrastructure was incapable of supplying the resources necessary to fulfill plans set by Moscow. Moreover, the Soviet documentation offers a glimpse into the perpetrators' planning and execution of massive population displacement, thus taking the deportations outside of the realm of conjecture and placing them more firmly within the grasp of historical understanding.

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This thesis contributes to existing discussions of Soviet subjectivity by considering how the efforts of the Party leadership and state agencies to shape personal and collective identities were mediated by the teaching of Russian classics to teenagers. It concentrates in particular on the history of literature course provided by Soviet schools for the upper years. The study addresses the following questions: (1) How was literary expression employed to instigate children's emotions and create interpretive habits as a way of inculcating a Soviet worldview? (2) What immediate effects did the methods have on teenagers? (3) What were the long-term effects of this type of indoctrination? Answering these questions required close reading of material produced by official authorities, such as methodological programmes, teachers' aids, professional journals, and textbooks for class instruction, and also of material produced by those at the receiving end of Stalinist literary instruction, including both sources contemporary to the period under scrutiny (i.e. diaries written between 1936-1941), and later autobiographical material (memoirs, oral history). I argue that for many teenagers growing up during this period, indoctrination in the classroom blurred the boundary between reality and fiction, and provided a moral compass to navigate their social environment, to judge others as well as themselves along prescribed lines, and model their lives on the precepts and slogans of the characters and authors they encountered, particularly the 19th-century radical democrats. Retrospective accounts - interviews, memoirs, and written responses to questions - expose the durability of the moral and ethical lessons derived from Russian classics and reveal the enduring Soviet emotional complex formed by this literary instruction. Investigating the impacts of the study of Russian classics on Soviet recipients, particularly from elite groups such as the city intelligentsia, my discussion highlights the political traction of the literary in, for instance, forming feelings of group belonging and strong emotional responses to differing views. I conclude with a discussion of the relation of this to long-term political effects, including the re-appraisal, in the twenty-first century, of Stalin-era teaching methodology as an effective way of instilling patriotic sentiments in students, and the legacy of Soviet perceptions and practices in the expression of personal and collective identities in the post-Soviet period.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the results of the revolution and its effects on the Russian people. Since the government of the NEP period allowed relative freedom to writers, attention is focused on this time. The writers Kozakov, Malashkin, Grabar', and Nikiforov were chosen because their naturalistic writings would give the most accurate picture of the time. While all four authors deal with the ills of the system, their different methods of investigation give a greater scope to a critical analysis. Each chapter of the paper presents the background of the author, some stylistic elements, deficiencies in the Soviet system and psychological effects on the characters. The writers are dealt with in the following order: CHAPTER I-Mikhail E. Kozakov "Meshchanin Adameyko" CHAPTER II-Sergey I. Malashkin "Luna s pravoy storony" CHAPTER III-Leonid Y. Grabar' "Lakhudrin pereulok" and "Na kirpichakh" CHAPTER IV-Georgiy K. Nikiforov “U fonarya” and “Ztienshcnina” The conclusion points out that the results of the revolution were far from what was expected at its inception. Much, of the Communist ideology worked against the psychological make-up of the people causing endless frustrations. The failure of the Party to consider human character brought out undesirable factions and destroyed some of the most worthy elements in the society; thus, retarding the progress towards its own goal. / Arts, Faculty of / Central Eastern Northern European Studies, Department of / Graduate