Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: Soviet Union
- Creators: Von Hagen, Mark
- Creators: Benkert, Volker
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.
ContributorsScribner, Quinton Donald (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The first official history of the Great Patriotic War appeared in the Soviet Union in 1960-1965. It evolved into a six-volume set that elicited both praise and criticism from the reading public. This dissertation examines the creation of the historiographical narrative of the Great Patriotic War in the decade following de-Stalinization in 1956. The debates historians, Party and state representatives engaged in, including the responses they received from reviewers and readers, shed new light on the relationship between the government, those who wrote state-sponsored narratives, and the reading public.
The narrative examined here shows the importance and value placed on the war effort, and explores how aspects of the Stalinist period were retained during the Thaw. By focusing on previously unexplored archival material, which documents debates and editorial decisions, an examination of how officials sought to control the state’s explanation of events, motivations and consequences of the war can be examined in-depth. To date, the periodization, terminology and areas of concentration that define the course of the Great Patriotic War are fixated on topics that Stalin’s war narrative favored, assigning significance to events according to Stalinist preferences rather than objective analysis. My study of the war’s historiography shows how contentious its memory became at every level, making it difficult to clearly discern who represented and opposed the party line throughout Soviet society.
The author argues that the collective memory of the war, as propagated by the state, became so all-encompassing that it was often the preferred version, infiltrating individual memories and displacing or blending with personal recollections and factual documentation. Because the war touched the entire population of the Soviet Union, its story became the foundational myth of the USSR, replacing the October Revolution, and was used as a legitimizing tool by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Most recently, it has experienced a revival in the post-Soviet period by Vladimir Putin as a way to unify Russia and build popular support for his administration. Viewing how the public interacted with representatives of the state over the creation of the official history of the war suggests that like no other event, war compels any state, even a totalitarian state, to reexamine its foundations, historical memory, foreign and domestic policies and views on censorship.
The narrative examined here shows the importance and value placed on the war effort, and explores how aspects of the Stalinist period were retained during the Thaw. By focusing on previously unexplored archival material, which documents debates and editorial decisions, an examination of how officials sought to control the state’s explanation of events, motivations and consequences of the war can be examined in-depth. To date, the periodization, terminology and areas of concentration that define the course of the Great Patriotic War are fixated on topics that Stalin’s war narrative favored, assigning significance to events according to Stalinist preferences rather than objective analysis. My study of the war’s historiography shows how contentious its memory became at every level, making it difficult to clearly discern who represented and opposed the party line throughout Soviet society.
The author argues that the collective memory of the war, as propagated by the state, became so all-encompassing that it was often the preferred version, infiltrating individual memories and displacing or blending with personal recollections and factual documentation. Because the war touched the entire population of the Soviet Union, its story became the foundational myth of the USSR, replacing the October Revolution, and was used as a legitimizing tool by Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Most recently, it has experienced a revival in the post-Soviet period by Vladimir Putin as a way to unify Russia and build popular support for his administration. Viewing how the public interacted with representatives of the state over the creation of the official history of the war suggests that like no other event, war compels any state, even a totalitarian state, to reexamine its foundations, historical memory, foreign and domestic policies and views on censorship.
ContributorsMann, Yan (Author) / Von Hagen, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Holian, Anna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation describes the public sphere that coalesced in the Soviet jazz scene during Josef Stalin’s reign. Scholars debate the extent to which Soviet citizens, especially under Stalin, were coerced into cooperating with the regime through terror; willingly cooperated with the regime out of self-interest; or re-aligned their speech, behavior, and thoughts to conform to Bolshevik ideology and discourse. In all cases, citizens were generally unable to openly express their own opinions on what Soviet society should look like. In this dissertation, I attempt to bridge this gap by analyzing the diverse reactions to jazz music in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. I argue that audience engagement with jazz and discussions about the genre in the Soviet press and elsewhere were attempts to grapple with bigger questions of public concern about leisure, morality, ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and patriotism in a socialist society. This jazz public sphere was suppressed in the late 1940s and early 1950s because of Cold War paranoia and fears of foreign influences in Soviet life. In its place, a counterpublic sphere formed, in which jazz enthusiasts expressed views on socialism that were more open and contradictory to official norms. This counterpublic sphere foreshadowed aspects of post-Stalinist Soviet culture. To support my arguments, I employ archival documents such as fan mail and censorship records, periodicals, memoirs, and Stalin-era jazz recordings to determine the themes present in jazz music, how audiences reacted to them, and how these popular reactions overlapped with those of journalists, musicologists, bureaucrats, and composers. This project expands our understanding of when and where public spheres can form, challenges top-down interpretations of Soviet cultural policy, and illuminates the Soviet Union and Russia’s ambivalent relationship with the West and its culture.
ContributorsBeresford, Benjamin J. (Author) / Von Hagen, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Manchester, Laurie (Committee member) / Schmelz, Peter (Committee member) / Moore, Aaron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In the sixty-seven years following the end of World War II, West Germany and Japan underwent a remarkable series of economic and social changes that irrevocably altered their respective ways of life. Formerly xenophobic, militaristic and highly socially stratified societies, both emerged from the 20th Century as liberal, prosperous and free. Both made great strides well beyond the expectations of their occupiers, and rebounded from the overwhelming destruction of their national economies within a few short decades. While these changes have yielded dramatic results, the wartime period still looms large in their respective collective memories. Therefore, an ongoing and diverse dialectical process would engage the considerable popular, official, and intellectual energy of their post-war generations. In West Germany, the term Vergangenheitsbewältigung (VGB) emerged to describe a process of coming to terms with the past, while the Japanese chose kako no kokufuku to describe their similar historical sojourns. Although intellectuals of widely varying backgrounds in both nations made great strides toward making Japanese and German citizens cognizant of the roles that their militaries played in gruesome atrocities, popular cinematic productions served to reiterate older, discredited assertions of the fundamental honor and innocence of the average soldier, thereby nurturing a historically revisionist line of reasoning that continues to compete for public attention. All forms of media would play an important role in sustaining this “apologetic narrative,” and cinema, among the most popular and visible of these mediums, was not excluded from this. Indeed, films would play a unique recurring role, like rhetorical time capsules, in offering a sanitized historical image of Japanese and German soldiers that continues to endure in modern times. Nevertheless, even as West Germany and Japan regained their sovereignty and re-examined their pasts with ever greater resolution and insight, their respective film industries continued to “reset” the clock, and accentuated the visibility and relevancy of apologetic forces still in existence within both societies. However, it is important to note that, when speaking of “Germans” and “Japanese,” that they are not meant to be thought of as being uniformly of one mind or another. Rather, the use of these words is meant as convenient shorthand to refer to the dominant forces in Japanese and German civil society at any given time over the course of their respective post- war histories. Furthermore, references to “Germany” during the Cold War period are to be understood to mean the Federal Republic of Germany, rather than their socialist counterpart, the German Democratic Republic, a nation that undertook its own coming to terms with the past in an entirely distinct fashion.
ContributorsPiscopo, Michael (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Moore, Aaron (Committee member) / Machander, Sina (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
This dissertation explores the roles of ethnic minority cultural elites in the development of socialist culture in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s through the late 1960s. Although Marxist ideology predicted the fading away of national allegiances under communism, Soviet authorities embraced a variety of administrative and educational policies dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural modernization of the country’s non-Russian populations. I analyze the nature and implementation of these policies from the perspective of ethnic Tatars, a Muslim Turkic group and contemporary Russia’s largest minority. Tatar cultural elites utilized Soviet-approved cultural forms and filled them with Tatar cultural content from both the pre-Revolutionary past and the socialist present, creating art and literature that they saw as contributing to both the Tatar nation and to Soviet socialism. I argue that these Tatar cultural elites believed in the emancipatory potential of Soviet socialism and that they felt that national liberation and national development were intrinsic parts of the Soviet experiment. Such idealism remained present in elite discourses through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, but after Stalin’s death it was joined by open disillusionment with what some Tatars identified as a nascent Russocentrism in Soviet culture. The coexistence of these two strands of thought among Tatar cultural elites suggests that the integration of Tatar national culture into the broad, internationalist culture envisioned by Soviet authorities in Moscow was a complex and disputed process which produced a variety of outcomes that continue to characterize Tatar culture in the post-Soviet period.
This dissertation is based on significant archival research and utilizes various state and Communist Party documents, as well as memoirs, letters, and other personal sources in both Russian and Tatar. It challenges traditional periodization by bridging the Stalin and post-Stalin eras and emphasizes on-the-ground developments rather than official state policy. Finally, it offers insight into the relationship between communism and ethnic difference and presents a nuanced vision of Soviet power that helps to explain the continuing role of nationalism in the contemporary Russian Federation and other post-communist states.
This dissertation is based on significant archival research and utilizes various state and Communist Party documents, as well as memoirs, letters, and other personal sources in both Russian and Tatar. It challenges traditional periodization by bridging the Stalin and post-Stalin eras and emphasizes on-the-ground developments rather than official state policy. Finally, it offers insight into the relationship between communism and ethnic difference and presents a nuanced vision of Soviet power that helps to explain the continuing role of nationalism in the contemporary Russian Federation and other post-communist states.
ContributorsRomero, John Mulvey (Author) / Von Hagen, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Kefeli, Agnes (Committee member) / Geraci, Robert P. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019