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- Creators: Manchester, Laurie
Description
This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within the Soviet Union. A total of 331 displaced persons were interviewed over the course of the study, with most individuals receiving multiple interview sessions. These sessions were divided broadly as A and B sections. The A-section, which the majority of interviewees received and was viewed by the compilers as a broad sociological inquiry, was divided into subsections focusing on Soviet work, government, family, education, communication, philosophy of life, and ideology. The B-sections were used for deeper anthropological inquiries and are potentially more controversial due to the use of Rorschach tests and situational responses. Fewer respondents were continued on to the B interviews which contained a variety of subsections, though most respondents were only asked questions from one or two sections of the greater whole. A portion of the B section interviews do provide valuable insight to my thesis for their focus on the Displaced Person status of the interviewees. The project consisted of 764 separate interviews of the 331 respondents. The interviewers for the HPSSS were primarily graduate students, ranging from history, sociology, psychology and economics departments, with varying degrees of fluency in Russian and Ukrainian. Some of the interviewers went on to become leading experts in Soviet Studies in the years to follow. Others stopped publishing, following the major publication of the HPSSS in the late 1950s, which may indicate a move to the private sector or employment within the federal government rather than academics. While not possible to include within my analysis, the major publications of the study also included the insights garnered from nearly ten thousand written questionnaires of DPs that were tabulated and discarded prior to publication.
ContributorsWilder, Ian (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis director) / Von Hagen, Mark (Committee member) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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 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
Civilian publics at large internalize death and killing in wartime as a given; after all, what is war if not fighting and dying? There exist popularized notions of “rules of war,” as put by a 2014 BBC ethics piece that accepted the notion “that soldiers must be prepared to put their own lives at risk in order to limit civilian casualties.” Here there is no denial that combatants kill and die in war. Yet in another sense, the public sanitizes the permanent reality of death and killing—it constructs careful euphemisms and erects psychological barriers that allow the perpetuation of violence without emotionally confronting the brutal reality of the battlefield. In spite of such concentrated cultural efforts at reconceptualization of death and killing, however, the soldiers and combatants who actually engage in this behavior irrevocably come face-to-face with the reality of death and killing in wartime. It is the “[i]ntimate acts of killing in war,” such as those “committed by historical subjects imbued with language, emotion, and desire” that necessarily challenge and threaten culturally-constructed sterilized preconceptions of deadly violence; still, as Joanna Bourke argues, “[k]illing in wartime is inseparable from wider social and cultural concerns.”
To this end, a war that involves not only the physical intimacy of killing but also mortal struggles between cultures and ideologies arguably complicates the extent to and manner by which individual combatants engage in such behavior. No war fulfills these criteria so cleanly as World War II—it was a conflict that cost more people their lives than any war before, and as a global conflict, it brought vastly differing perspectives of death and killing to the battlefield. World War II represented not simply a struggle for national-ideological survival (though that it clearly was), but more importantly a struggle for the retention of the self through identity.
To this end, a war that involves not only the physical intimacy of killing but also mortal struggles between cultures and ideologies arguably complicates the extent to and manner by which individual combatants engage in such behavior. No war fulfills these criteria so cleanly as World War II—it was a conflict that cost more people their lives than any war before, and as a global conflict, it brought vastly differing perspectives of death and killing to the battlefield. World War II represented not simply a struggle for national-ideological survival (though that it clearly was), but more importantly a struggle for the retention of the self through identity.
ContributorsLondono, Marlon William (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Strand, Daniel (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12