Browsing by Subject "Soviet Union"

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.

Group songs with direct political messages rose to enormous popularity during the interwar period (1918-1939), particularly in recently-defeated Germany and in the newly-established Soviet Union. This dissertation explores the musical relationship between these two troubled countries and aims to explain the similarities and differences in their approaches to collective singing. The discussion of the very complex and problematic relationship between the German left and the Soviet government sets the framework for the analysis of music. Beginning in late 1920s, as a result of Stalin's abandonment of the international revolutionary cause, the divergences between the policies of the Soviet government and utopian aims of the German communist party can be traced in the musical propaganda of both countries.

There currently exists no scholarly literature providing a wide-ranging view of the German and Soviet musical exchange during the 1920s and 30s. The paucity of comprehensive studies is especially apparent in the English-language scholarship on German and Russian mass music, also known as "music for the people." Even though scholars have produced works devoted to the Soviet and Weimar mass music movements in isolation, they rarely explore the musical connections between the two countries. The lack of scholarship exploring the musical exchanges between the Soviet Union and Germany suggests that scholars have not yet fully examined the influences that the Soviet and German mass songs and their proponents had on each other during the 1920s and 1930s. Exposing these musical influences provides a valuable perspective on the broader differences and similarities between the Soviet and German communist parties. The connections between Soviet and German songs went beyond straightforward translations of propaganda texts from one language to another; the musical and textual transformations--such as word changes, differences in the instrumental arrangements, and distinct approaches to performance--allow for a more nuanced comparison of the philosophical, ideological, and political aspects of Soviet and the German communist movements. In my dissertation, I consider the musical roots of collective singing in Germany as opposed to Russia, evaluate the musical exchanges and borrowings between the early Soviet communists and their counterparts in the Weimar Republic, and explore the effects of musical propaganda on the working classes of both countries. I see my research as a mediation of existing Soviet and Weimar music scholarship.

“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 dissertation explores the cultural archive of the Soviet cybernetics, computer science, and popular science fiction to see how they all contributed to a distinct “trustful” image of the computer. As interdisciplinary research originating during the Second World War in the USA, cybernetics sought to understand human nature in terms of man-machine metaphors. Within the Western context, cybernetic metaphors dethroned the human from the center of the universe and blurred the distinction between natural and artificial (or technological). Although cybernetics failed to establish itself as an academic discipline in the USA, its influence has been profound and its aftereffects can still be registered today both in academic discussions on digital media and posthumanism and broader cultural mythologies regarding AI takeover and evil machines (be it the Terminator and The Matrix franchises or replicants from Blade Runner). In contrast, the USSR, while having enthusiastically adopted cybernetic ideas and metaphors, didn’t see technology as an existential threat but rather a tool of self-discovery and as a friend who invites for an ethical dialogue.

The dissertation draws upon Michel Foucault and media archaeology and reconstructs the cultural episteme of the computer which is characterized by the fundamentally mathematical understanding of digital technologies, where mathematics not only framed human-computer interaction but, in so doing, “defused” man-machine analogies which were at the origin of the figure of the cyborg in American culture.

The dissertation thus contributes to contemporary debates in comparative media studies. By drawing on the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, the dissertation argues that digital media inaugurate a new stage in the evolution of technology. If the development of industrial technology is conditioned by the potentialities of matter and physical world, digital technologies explore the potentialities of operative representations encapsulated in programming languages, computer abstractions, and interfaces. Since operative representations serve to communicate with both humans and machines, in the case of digital technologies, the cultural is embedded withing the technological. The entwinement of the cultural and the technological accounts for the differences not only in the public image of the computer but also in scientific research, like, for instance, in the case of the AI research used as a case study in the dissertation.