Browsing by Department "Slavic and Eurasian Studies"

There is a new army marching onto the field of contemporary Russian literature: veterans of the recent Chechen Wars. The war veteran as author and/or protagonist has become increasingly popular, bringing to light social issues concerning the wars, including the presence of social disadaptation due to war trauma. This thesis analyzes the appearance of war trauma in contemporary works, connecting themes arising in the literary works to Russian psychological literature written about war trauma from 2000-2011. The first chapter focuses on the works of Arkady Babchenko, Andrei Gelasimov and Denis Butov and examines the similarities and differences in the manifestation of war trauma in their works. In particular, the thesis will show that the protagonists in each examined work all suffer or suffered from war trauma and disadaptation and are at different steps in the process of recovery from trauma. The second chapter will analyze the discourse in Russian psychological literature over the past twelve years, drawing mainly from studies and discussions presented in Military Medical Journal (Voenno-meditsinskii zhurnal) and Journal of Psychology (Psikhologicheskii zhurnal). This psychological literature provides insight into the work being done in the field of war trauma today, highlighting similarities and divergences in the specific case of Russian veterans of the Chechen wars.

This thesis examines how the recent discovery of massive oil reserves off the coast of Cuba has driven a resurgence of Cuban-Russian relations in the 21st century. The first chapter demonstrates how the Russian government came to conceptualize the export of hydrocarbons as integral to the nation's development. It also examines the internal situation in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union to explain what initiated shifts in domestic policy that allowed for greater external investment. The second chapter discusses the effect of the discovery of these oil reserves, and how the Russians and the Cubans have come together over this issue against the backdrop of larger anti-American tendencies in Latin America. The first chapter relies more on secondary analyses of trends in both nations to help familiarize the reader with key concepts, such as the idea of Russia's energy weapon and Cuba's impetus for change. The second chapter heavily uses newspaper articles and speeches to demonstrate the visible shift in Russian attitude towards Cuba.

This thesis shows that the oil reserves have stimulated both countries to work closely together, though each has their respective reasons.

The identity of the Third Wave Russian Diaspora has been misunderstood through the oversimplification of their ethnic and language identity. In addition, the methodologies of sociolinguistic fieldwork, including bilingual studies in the Russian Diaspora, contain essentialism at their core. The paper explores the problem of the essentialist identity in the study of the Third Wave Diaspora and how it is created and maintained. In the first part of the thesis, I unpack the history of the Third Wave Soviet émigrés to understand why they were essentialized as Soviet or Russian Jews before becoming immigrants and then the Russian Diaspora. As a way to open up the discussion of the problem of studying Russian diaspora as one group, I discuss the methodologies of several key scholars in this field. Then, I specifically look at lexical data that have been studied by scholars on the Russian Diaspora. I use lexical terms I gathered from Soviet dictionaries to analyze and deconstruct the interpretations by the previous scholars. My conclusion is that because of this oversimplification of the Third Wave Russian Diaspora and methodological tendency to essentialize identities in studies, the Russian Diaspora and the language as a result have also been essentialized.

In this thesis, I will analyze a selection of Evgeny Zamiatin’s theoretical works, addressing prominent themes, including the historical and political context of his works, the future and purpose of literature, the role and responsibilities of writers in society, people’s responsibilities toward each other as humans, who creates societal change, and how they accomplish change. I will consider Zamiatin’s definitions of “revolutions”, “heretics”, and “heresy” to demonstrate how they apply to his understanding of the role of writers and the purpose of literature. I will apply the core ideas of these essays to an analysis of how ideas from Zamiatin’s theoretical works manifest themselves in his novel We, with an especial focus on how Zamiatin adhered to his own vision for a brave, “heretical” writer. Through a semiotic perspective, I will explore some of the possible meanings and interpretations of We to reveal the relevance of this work to a twenty-first century audience. All English translations of original Russian text are my own.

This project focuses on the debate over Poland's national significance and future political path argued in the Polish media in the wake of the 2010 Smoleńsk crash. It draws on the primary sources of Nasz Dziennik and Gazeta Wyborcza to represent the most diverse political viewpoints in Poland today. Nasz Dziennik voices the perspective of the conservative right addressed to a national audience and Gazeta Wyborcza presents a popular liberal view styling on such Western models as the New York Times. My methodological approach to this project was informed in some ways by the principles of discourse analysis as I analyzed coverage of the crash (news reports, editorials, interviews) in the period from April 10, 2010 through October 2011; I read approximately eight hundred articles from each publication in the original. My analysis of this debate is organized by what I found to be key themes: issues of authorship (featured authors, their orientation and style), the significance of the crash in Poland's national history and present relationship with Russia, and Poland's place in the European community.

The Russian Federation emerged from the ruins of the USSR a diminished power, attempting to reconcile its imperial past with a new post-Cold War order. However, while the Kremlin may have lost a degree of global influence, Russia maintained the mantel of regional hegemon. Moscow was able to maintain this “privileged sphere of influence” through leveraging Russian diaspora communities–a decisive strategy that Russian leaders continued to refine and direct against the expansion of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Despite being the source of much focus in the foreign policy community in the twenty-first century, research around Russian diaspora communities tend to focus on the mechanics of why Russia projects influence through a diaspora population in a given country. However, the opportunity is often missed to explore how and why the diaspora itself can be co-opted by Russia in the first place. This is due to an under appraisal of how Russia developed and executed its diaspora policy in the 1990s and what Russia learned from this experience. By examining the diaspora policy development and actions of the Russian Federation in the former Soviet space during the 1990s, the West is better placed to understand the execution of Russian policy in the twenty-first century and develop defenses to it. Through a historical assessment of 1990 diaspora policy development and a case study analysis of Russian intervention in the 1990s, this thesis will also answer the contemporary policy question of how Russia can maintain a sphere of influence when it is once again weak due to its war in Ukraine, and examine the course Russia’s future military interventions will take. There are defenses to Russian diaspora policy that can be identified from historical successes and failures, which must inform Western deterrence measures.

The literature on organized crime, while increasingly rich, has yet to create a paradigm to predict and explain the waxing and waning of the private protection industry. In the work that follows, I create a general model and identify factors that help predict and explain fluctuations of protection services within organized crime groups. I derive the four points below from analysis of the Russian case, emphasizing the years after the fall of communism and around and after the rise of Putin. I argue that if the following premises are true in a given country, they predict growth, or at least the existence, of illicit private protection:

1. Within a given state, there is demand for private protection (resulting from neglect or inability of the state to provide protection)

2. Organized crime groups have the ability to provide private protection (i.e. supply to match demand)

3. Within the given state, there is continuity of regime or of people in power (which allows the racket to continue operating smoothly)

4. The state will maintain internal legitimacy even with the existence of private protection rackets OR the state has no internal legitimacy and doesn't have the power to combat groups (weak or failed state)

In the first chapter, I introduce the puzzle of organized crime and the private protection industry. My second chapter highlights scholarly approaches to organized crime and explains the approach and definition I employ in my work. In the third chapter, I explore the history of organized crime in a broad sense throughout the Imperial and the Soviet periods. The fourth chapter focuses on the emergence of the protection industry in the early and mid-1990s, and the fifth chapter is a study of the late 1990s and the disappearance of the private protection industry. The sixth chapter concludes and offers possible topics for further research.

Moscow-based radio station Ekho Moskvy is an anomaly in the authoritarian media climate of Vladimir Putin's Russia for its commitment to hosting a diversity of viewpoints on its broadcasts. Yet no systematic research has been conducted to determine what the station's exceptionalism means in practice or how the station has been able to operate as long as it has (over twenty years). This paper explores the question of a possible adaptation strategies employed by the station during the Putin era, 2000-2010, by focusing on Ekho Moskvy's editor-in-chief since 1998, Alexei Venediktov, and seeks to understand why or how Ekho Moskvy is able to continue operating and hosting diverse viewpoints in a hostile media environment.

In the first part of this thesis, the research contextualizes the business aspect of the station, especially its ownership structure, profitability, and audience. The second part of the thesis examines the relationship of the station with the Russian political elite, and then looks at every program on which Venediktov hosted a discussion with one or more guests and the contents of those discussions and their relation to Putin and Kremlin policies from 2000-2010. This research seeks to construct an idea of how and in what ways each of these strategic elements of Ekho Moskvy's operations add up to an overall adaptation strategy for an exceptional media outlet's survival in Putin's Russia.

This thesis examines the role of paintings in four of Andrei Tarkovsky's films: Solaris (1972), Mirror (1975), Andrei Rublev (1966), and Sacrifice (1986). Through close analysis of these films and the paintings that appear in them, the thesis demonstrates that Tarkovsky's selection and use of paintings reflects his theories and beliefs as a filmmaker and as an individual.

This thesis examines how domestic violence is talked about both in the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union and by the Westerners whom have offered their expertise on the matter. The first chapter shows how there is a divide between Russian journalists and Russian academic scholars in the way domestic violence is viewed and how they believe it can be resolved. Although they both share some consistent values, there is tension between whether a new enforced law can be preventive or if the need to prevention goes beyond the law. The second chapter discusses how Westerners from both the United States and the United Kingdom have used various methods of data collection to find out why the establishment of women's crisis centers have not been as stable and successful as they had hoped. It also explores how Western aid comes with specific standards and how the word `feminism' has become stigmatized in Russia. Both of these chapters use newspaper articles, journal articles, and interdisciplinary analyses of academic texts to show how domestic violence has become recognized as a major problem in Russia, and how both Russians and Westerners are searching for a solution to end the violence.

Conclusions show how there is still a need for dialogue between Russians who are trying to aid victims of domestic violence and Westerners who have been working in this field for many years. This thesis works as a meta-analysis to show the past and current dialogue happening between Russia and `Western' scholars.

Max Frei, whose given name is Svetlana Martynchik, is an important cultural phenomenon in the Russian sphere because she represents a growing push for change. Her approach is to question her reader’s identity by presenting challenges to the current reader-character relationship, as well as through her unique approach to the author-character relationship. In doing so, she questions the current definition of character and uses her creative works to demonstrate what she believes is most important: giving her characters life. For this work, I have studied ten of Frei/Martynchik’s interviews, available on her website, as well as Russian and English fandom websites such as fantlab.ru and Goodreads. Included in this work are four of her short stories, translated by me and available in Russian in the orange Russian Foreign Tales series, Books One, Four, and Six, to demonstrate her approach to the problems of identity in contemporary Russian fiction.

Established in 1922, the Soviet women's journal Rabotnitsa i Krest'ianka acted as agent of the Communist Party by supporting its effort to assume the role of mothers and take full responsibility for Russia's children in state supported institutions. The journal expressed the Party's intentions through agitational articles and testimonials that appealed to mothers' emotions. By 1925, it was clear that the plan had failed. The journal then adopted a new approach encouraged mothers to take greater responsibility for their children. I will show how these changes are represented in the articles, short stories, and testimonials of journal by summarizing and analyzing several examples from the primary text.

This thesis examines how the dead bodies of the Romanovs and of Vladimir Lenin are used as political and cultural capital in attempts to legitimate and shape Russia's post-Soviet government. The first chapter shows how the reburial of the Romanovs invoked tsarist imagery as part of a larger series of invocations of the tsarist past by then-President Boris Yeltsin and other groups to build a new government. However, due to political tension and infighting the only group that benefited from the reburial of the Romanovs was the Russian Orthodox Church. The second chapter explores how the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin is problematic by being unburied and being a reminder of Soviet times. Both of these chapter use newspaper articles, speeches, and interdisciplinary analysis of academic text to show how Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Orthodox Church built, or attempted to build, stability in post-Soviet Russia.

This thesis shows that the dead bodies of Romanovs and Lenin have been used by people in power as a type of political currency, with varying degrees of success. Additionally, this thesis explores how these two sets of bodies demonstrate the importance of the past, both Tsarist and Soviet, in shaping Russia's government.