What happens to an imperial economy after empire? How do economics, security, and ideology interact at the new state frontiers? Does trade always break down ideological barriers?
"144" Result
Sort By:
This thesis examines how the Soviet construction of womanhood resulted first in females’ active participation in World War II and then in the silencing of women’s war experiences by fabricating a reality in which women’s trauma did not exist. Such a deprivation of women’s agency…
How did the western principles embraced by The Final Act of 1975 play a role in the downfall of the Soviet Union? To what extent have they had a subsequent, lasting influence on the policies of the Russian federation more recently?
The Twelfth World Festival of Youth and Students that took place in Moscow in 1985 has largely been forgotten, but historical analysis of the event reveals that it had significant implications for the Soviet Union and Cold War. This thesis argues that the festival was a public c…
This thesis explores the intersection of gender, war, and politics through American media perceptions and portrayals of Soviet Women from 1939 to 1955. During World War II, the Soviet Union and United States were allies against the Axis powers. At this time, the New York Times r…
From the time Mikhail Gorbachev signed the CFE Treaty in 1990 until Vladimir Putin abandoned it in 2015, the Soviets and their successors in the Russian Federation showed amazing persistence in their relationship with the “cornerstone of European security.” Unlike earlier propos…
This comprehensive study emphasizes the persistence of Poale Zion's political influence, underscores the centrality of ideology and diplomacy in soviet politics, and traces its institutional adjustments to "construction of socialism" in Russia. In the process, Poale Zion interpr…
Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (completed 1940, first published 1966–67) is an attack on Stalin’s regime of lies and terror. Alternating between a fantastical account of the devil’s arrival in Moscow and a pseudo-historical account of Jesus Christ’s trial under Pontius …
Why is economic development, despite being beneficial for society as a whole, often associated with political instability? Can the redistributional effects of industrialization lead to more intense conflict? These issues have been important for most agrarian countries undergoing…
In most writing on politics and migration, music rarely figures as anything more than ornamental, if it appears at all, and conventional narratives of the birth of Russian music generally begin with Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) and construe music’s political role …
This dissertation investigates how post-Soviet Uzbekistan appropriated 15-16th century history and historiographies in constructing a national identity and a national historical memory. I pursue how a particular historiographic problem has played out in history-writing in Centra…
Internal Colonialism: Questioning the Soviet Union as a Settler Colonial State Through the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars
This dissertation explores the issue of fugitive peasants by focusing primarily on the Volga-Urals region of Russia and situating it within the broader imperial population policy between 1649 and 1796. In the Law Code of 1649, Russia definitively bound peasants of all ranks to t…
States are path dependent entities that deviate solely in the face of catastrophic failures in the pursuit of axiomatic ends by conventional means. The inertia of bureaucratic institutions, a foreign policy consensus within a self-reproducing elite of experts, the self-interest …
In 2015 the first book of a young Tatar writer Guzel' Iakhina Zuleikha otkryvaet glaza received two main Russian literary awards: “Bol'shaia kniga” and “Iasnaia poliana.” Her novel depicts the process of dekulakization, mass deportations and life in a labor camp under Stalin. Su…
In 2014, Russia-backed rebels in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) declared independence from Ukraine. In addition to establishing control over large swaths of territory in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, separatists took ov…
This thesis explores Russia’s perception that it has a strategic security interest in Ukraine, and particularly in Crimea, and evaluates whether there are valid reasons to support that perception. These issues were brought into sharp focus as a result of the Euromaidan Revolutio…
Over the last decade research has shown that the stability of international law has been threatened by Russia’s actions including the annexation of Crimea, breaches of airspace, and the approval of the “Sovereign Internet” law. This thesis seeks to examine Russia’s utilization o…
This thesis investigates Problems of Peace and Socialism, the journal of the international communist movement, and its coverage of the Prague Spring and its immediate aftermath. Unlike the Moscow-based journal Kommunist, the journal’s location in Prague and the relatively open-m…