Browsing by Subject "Russian history"

“In Search of Friendship” attempts to set straight the confounding record on Russian oil in the twentieth century. Engaging a rich literature centered on questions of national energy dependency, a broad term denoting fraught reliance on potentially scarce fuel supplies, the dissertation poses alternative questions of energy transition, or changes in the state of a given energy system. These questions include the following: Why did the Soviet government neglect its oil industry for more than two decades after coming to power? How did that same government then manage to transform its oil industry into a global leader within less than a decade during the Cold War? And how did it manage to mobilize the material resources, political will, and technical know-how to build the world’s longest oil pipeline, which they named “Druzhba,” the Russian word for friendship? Traditionally, scholars have answered these questions by arguing that the Soviet government repurposed tried-and-true tools of central economic planning as circumstances demanded, changing its underlying economic system little in the process. Applying a business history approach, “In Search of Friendship” counters this narrative by bringing the socialist firm to the center of its analysis to create a narrative of dynamic if ultimately unsuccessful change and innovation. In short, it supplant a story of what one historian has called “history’s cruel tricks” with another story of “best laid plans gone awry.” In the process, it draws heavily on material from more than a dozen historical repositories in Russia, including the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, and the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan.

“Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” examines factory-level efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerized, post-Fordist production. By focusing on labor in the enterprise, it reveals that many of the characteristics typically associated with capitalist flexible production were present in the Soviet Union by the mid-1960s. To the extent that flexible production represents the social corollary of neoliberal political theory, “Making Socialism Work” helps to explain continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political economies.

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.

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.

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 dissertation argues that the emergence of the idea of Eastern Europe in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment West could be attributed not only to geopolitical causes but also to the way that the region was figured religiously. Considered against the backdrop of the rise of global racial order, the idea of Eastern Europe is shown to have its origins in Western theological imaginaries which were transmuted into gendered raciality. Through an analysis of the travelogues by Western travelers to the Russian Empire and its European peripheries, this project traces the rise of Euro-Orientalism, which gets inflected as “Asiatic” in Russia, and “Jewish” in the rest of Eastern Europe. Seen through this Euro-Orientalist lens, Russia is figured as the intra-European antithesis to the West, and the remainder of Eastern Europe, as liminal territories.