The Cornucopia in the Minefield

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 253-279
Author(s):  
Jennifer B. Spock
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Spiritual Path ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Limited Scope

Abstract The study of monasticism in Russia has found new acolytes since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. With the separation of the Soviet republics, religion became, and continues to become, a vibrant subfield of Russian studies. This article examines the problems inherent in attempting to grasp the day-to-day life of monks and monasteries given their individual characteristics, social classes, roles, and the wide variety, yet often limited scope, of various texts and material objects that can be used as sources. The vast source base is an embarrassment of riches in one sense, but problematic in another as prescriptive and normative texts must be understood in context. One important element that has not been directly addressed is the cacophony of sound, the interruptions, and the distractions of the constant activity of expanding cloisters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How did monks maintain their spiritual path and pious duties when on service expeditions outside the monastery: when engaged in salt-production, fishing, trade, rent-collecting, or other activities outside its walls? How intrusive were building projects, which abounded in the period, or even efforts to adorn the churches? How strict was oversight, or how weak? Such questions still need answers and can only be fully understood by integrating diverse source bases. This article uses Solovki, Holy Trinity, and Kirillov monasteries to exemplify the problems that remain in understanding the daily lives of monastics and their adherents within and without the confines of the cloister.

Trophies of War

2019 ◽  
pp. 212-242
Author(s):  
Brandon M. Schechter
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Red Army ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Clear Objective ◽  
Better Than

This chapter focuses on all manner of trophies, from German prisoners of war to objects looted from houses in the Third Reich. Between 1941 and 1945, soldiers of the Red Army were confronted with an enemy who was often better dressed, wealthier, and initially much more effective. First on Soviet territory and then abroad, Red Army soldiers confronted an alien culture. For average citizens, this trip abroad was a unique chance to go beyond Soviet borders, one that came at great personal risk and with a clear objective—to destroy Fascism and the Third Reich. What soldiers saw along the way was puzzling. They not only reckoned with material objects and institutions that the Soviet Union had purged but were also left to wonder why people who lived materially so much better than they did had waged a genocidal war against them, marked by systematic rape, pillaging, and wanton destruction. The chapter then shows how a Soviet understanding of jurisprudence and a particular perception of the bourgeois world combined with a desire for vengeance to both justify looting and frame Soviet understandings of the Third Reich.

Forms of Social Solidarity in Russia and the Soviet Union

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hosking
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Basic Concept ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Russian State ◽  
The Village

Traditional interpretations of Russian society rest on a contrast between Russian authoritarianism and the liberties of Western societies. According to these interpretations, Russia right up to the twentieth century was a ‘patrimonial monarchy’ in which there was no distinction between sovereignty and ownership, so that the tsar's subjects were literally his slaves. There is no denying the highly authoritarian nature of the Russian state, and, in its twentieth-century hypostasis, its unique capacity to penetrate and affect the lives of ordinary people. But the image of slavery is overdone and partly misleading. At the base of the Russian power structure throughout the tsarist centuries was the village commune. The basic concept underlying the functioning of the village commune was krugovaya poruka, literally ‘circular surety’, but perhaps better translated as ‘joint responsibility’. This chapter discusses forms of social solidarity in Russia and the Soviet Union, focusing on the enterprise and the communal apartment as twin arenas of the daily lives of the majority of the country's townspeople.

African Studies in the USSR

1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (01) ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
Mary Holdsworth
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Specific Pattern ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Basic Knowledge ◽  
African Studies ◽  
The Soviet Union

African studies in the USSR are at present concentrated in Moscow and Leningrad. The two centers have individual characteristics and, in the case of Africa, fairly defined fields of academic interests. Some introductory remarks on the disciplines concerned and on the general organization of higher studies in the Soviet Union will be relevant, before examining African studies in detail. Regional studies have developed strongly inside the Soviet Union, first because the living material for such studies is within the confines of the state; secondly because a society which is consciously remolding its future to a specific pattern needs such basic knowledge, and thirdly because of a tradition in and love of the study of popular cultures going well back into the 19th century. Such studies cut across academic disciplines; field work is predominantly undertaken by “complex expeditions” which, to the core of ethnographers, add archaeologists, linguists, folk-lorists, art historians, and sociologists. Ethnography in the Russian sense is mainly concerned with material culture; folklore deals entirely with recording oral tradition and poetry. In a paper read at the VIth International Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnographers in Paris in June, 1960, Professor Tolstov, President of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, explained the Institute's academic conceptions as follows:- “If one can call economic geography the bridge between geography and economics, then ethnography can be called the link between geography and history. We see ethnography as a complex of academic disciplines which branches outward from a core of ethnography proper”.

Students, Workers, and Social Change: The Limits of Czech Stalinism

Slavic Review ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Connelly
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Support ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Upward Social Mobility

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.

Transcultural Chukotka: Transfer and Exchange in Northeastern Asia, 1900-1945

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-248
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Northeastern Asia ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Soviet Union

In the 1920s – 1940s the indigenous peoples of Chukotka, the northeastern extremity of Asia, were subjugated by the Soviet Union. This article takes a transcultural look at this process and seeks to explore what interactions shaped the region in pre- and early Soviet periods and what was exchanged through these interactions at different times. The cultural flows under study include those of material objects, diseases, language, institutions and ideas. A great deal of attention has been paid to the reception of exchange in indigenous communities, which was reconstructed based on memories and literary works of indigenous people of Eskimo, Chukchi and Even origin. The article aims to incorporate the case of Chukotka, which was subject to “socialist colonization”, into international cultural and social discourse and seeks to test transcultural methodology in a non-capitalist context.

scholarly journals The Excluded: Begging in the Postwar Soviet Union

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 259-288
Author(s):  
Elena Zubkova
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
The 1960S

To what extent was the Soviet state able to control (and oppose) the process of social exclusion and to what extent was Soviet society ready to integrate social outcasts? This article attempts to answer these questions by analyzing the phenomenon of begging in the Soviet Union between the 1940s and the 1960s. The article begins by studying the phenomenon of begging as a reaction to poverty, serving as a survival strategy for the lower social classes who were excluded from society due to poor standards of living. A brief historical overview of the campaign to combat begging in the the USSR from the Revolution of 1917 until the mid-1950s shows both the continuity and shifting perspectives of state reaction to this social problem. This article also analyzes begging, which was an important social phenomenon in the USSR after World War II, through the specific biographies of actual beggars. The article concludes with an examination of the public discourse on poverty in the 1950s and early 1960s, which reveals how both society and the state viewed the issue.

The Global Rise of Diaspora Institutions

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Alan Gamlen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Building ◽  
First Century ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
And Diffusion

Chapter 2 provides a descriptive overview of the data. It defines the forms and functions of diaspora ministries, departments, extra-territorial voting provisions, and discretionary consular functions. The chapter charts the rise of these and other diaspora institutions over the course of the mid-twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It identifies three phases in their spread: one associated with the acceleration of post-colonial nation-state building projects beginning in the wake of World War II and culminating in the disintegration of the Soviet Union; a second associated with the coalescence of the EU and similar regionalization schemes as templates for globalization from the mid-1990s; and a third phase characterized by the standardization and diffusion of ‘models’ and ‘best practices’ for engaging diasporas as part of global migration governance dynamics from the mid-2000s.

History in Wood

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-89
Author(s):  
Alexey Golubev
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Building Material ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Heritage Sites ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Scale Modeling ◽  
The Soviet Union

This chapter turns to other types of material objects that were capable of performing history: timber buildings associated with cultural heritage and historical ship replicas. The last three decades of the Soviet Union evidenced a fast growth in the number of heritage sites related to traditional wooden architecture. The chapter examines the museumification of old architecture as a process that was similar to the scale modeling hobby in its politics, but stimulated the nationalist understanding of Soviet history in its Romantic, rather than Techno-Utopian, interpretation. In particular, the chapter shows how wood, a traditional building material, became a symbol that objectified the “deep cultural roots” of Soviet society and served, because of its texture, as a living witness of its authentic history.

A Soviet Ethnic Cleansing? The Polish-Soviet Population Exchange and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1944–1947

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Dmitry Halavach
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Nationality Policy ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Population Exchange ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Population Politics ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
Soviet Population

Abstract The article examines the population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1944–1947, its role in the shaping of modern Ukraine, and its place in the evolution of the Soviet nationality policy. It investigates the factors involved in the decision-making of individuals and state officials and then assesses how people on the ground made sense of the Soviet population politics. While the earlier scholarship saw the transfer as punitive national deportation, the article argues that it was neither punitive nor purely national nor was it a deportation. The article shows that the party-state was ambivalent about the Polish minority and was not committed to total national homogenization of Western Ukraine. Instead, the people themselves were often eager to leave the USSR because of the poor living conditions, fear of Sovietization, and ethnic conflict. Paradoxically, one of the largest Soviet nation-building projects was not the product of coherent nationality policy.

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