Suchergebnisse

In the late 1950s, the Moscow branch of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of social and residential buildings for deaf people in the city. In this article, I examine the resulting emergence of a defined "deaf space" within the Moscow cityscape, exploring the ways in which this space shaped, and was shaped by, the Soviet deaf community. While such institutional buildings were intended as the ultimate expression of deaf agency, drawing on revolutionary understandings of disability to define the deaf as active Soviet citizens, they also served to frame the deaf as visibly "other," inviting contradictory and often problematic readings of the deaf community's place within the Soviet body politic. By examining deaf people's engagement with the developing politics of Soviet urban space, I thus explore issues of disability, Sovietness, and the complex intersection of marginality and emancipation in the late Soviet era.

In 1991, Leningrad television broadcast a program that has since become infamous. The program's guest, Sergei Kurekhin, claiming to be a political figure and scientist, conducted an elaborate hoax that he presented as a serious historical exploration into the origins of the Bolshevik revolution. Using visual, textual, and scientific evidence, Kurekhin argued that the revolution was led by people who had been consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. As a result, their personalities were being replaced by mushroom personalities, and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was simply a mushroom. This fact, according to Kurekhin, shed new light on many enigmas of Soviet history. Millions of viewers were at a loss: were they witnessing a serious program, a daring prank, a case of unprecedented lunacy? In this article, Alexei Yurchak analyzes that remarkable comedic performance, its social and political effects then and now, and what it may contribute to our understanding of the relationship between politics and
irony.

"Witnessing for the Defense" takes readers into the adversarial courtroom in postreform Russia. A fundamentally new type of public arena, the courtroom allowed representatives of the state (prosecutors) to debate with professionals (defense attorneys and expert witnesses), each side making a case about criminal behavior and justice for society (jurors and the readers who followed reports on trial) to judge. Analyzing how the defense changed over time for the same type of crime, the murder of a lover by the woman whom he had jilted, Louise McReynolds shows how the courtroom provided a place for the discussion of newly emerging concepts and theories from the social sciences. Psychiatry is especially important because it was raising questions of individual personality and personal responsibility that had the potential to undermine the status quo. Thus this article shifts the focus on the legal reforms of 1864 from politics to culture.

Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

An overview of the life and work of the Soviet politician Anastas Mikoian (1895-1978) based on his recently published memoirs, this essay draws attention to the additional knowledge about Soviet politics that can be found in these memoirs. This includes the name of Vladimir Lenin's candidate to succeed Iosif Stalin as general secretary (Ian Rudzutak), the workings of the Politburo from 1937 to 1953, and details concerning the planned evacuation of Moscow in October 1941. In addition, there is information about the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Pospelov committee in 1955, the failure of the CPSU in 1956 to rehabilitate the victims of the open trials of Old Bolsheviks in 1936-1938, and the attempt by Aleksandr Shelepin to replace Leonid Brezhnev in 1967. Memoirs are an imperfect source, and their assertions must be checked against other sources. Overall Ellman concludes that the verdict on Mikoian's life "can only be a shade of grey."

Since the 1930s, the zealous, idealistic proponents of musical revolution in Soviet Russia, the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov (Russian association of proletarian musicians, RAPM), have served primarily as an embarrassing footnote to the history of Soviet music and cultural politics. Scholarly opinion of RAPM is remarkably consistent in its condemnation, as Russian-Soviet scholars and westerners alike dismiss the organization for its "simplistic" (western) or "vulgar" (Soviet) ideology and aesthetics. This consensus suggests that RAPM deserves its place in the dustbin of history alongside the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (Russian association of proletarian writers, RAPP) and other militant advocates of cultural revolution. But the condescending (western) and embarrassed (Soviet) dismissal of RAPM is itself simplistic. Seeing members of RAPM as undertalented and unwitting tools of the regime's agenda, or misguided if well-intentioned deviationists, obscures the important role the proletarian musicians played in the evolution of Soviet musical culture and aesthetics.

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians' language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation incontent.As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which "routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…" Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of "two interdependent but opposed codes," one for "the ritualized world of public life" and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

"As a writer, I would like to examine what kind of soil the personality cult arose from, what social causes produced it. After all, one cannot explain everything in terms of Stalin's individual peculiarities. The philosophers ought to give an explanation."Elizar Maltsev (quoted in Roy Medvedev's Political Diary)Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.

Producción Científica ; El objetivo del presente trabajo es refexionar sobre las defciencias, desde el punto de vista de las garantías procesales, que pueden encontrarse en el procedimiento de prevención y resolución de confictos de jurisdicción penal actualmente en vigor en la Unión Europea. Tras una breve introducción y panorámica general sobre el marco legal sobre confictos de jurisdicción y el sistema de protección de derechos y garantías procesales en la Unión Europea, el trabajo se divide en dos partes diferentes. La primera parte se centrará en identifcar y examinar los principios, derechos y garantías susceptibles de vulneración en una situación transnacional de conficto de jurisdicción penal entre Estados miembros. En la segunda parte del trabajo, el autor refexionará sobre las mejoras que deberían adoptarse para garantizar un mejor estándar de protección para el sospechoso o acusado, incluyendo el análisis crítico de propuestas realizadas por otros investigadores en esta materia. ; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (grant DER2016-78096-P) ; Junta de Castilla y León (project VA135G18)

"Piecing together a fractured European continent after World War I, the Versailles Peace Treaty stipulated the long-term occupation of the Rhineland by Allied troops. This occupation, perceived as a humiliation by the political right, caused anger and dismay in Germany and an aggressive propaganda war broke out--heightened by an explosion of vicious racist propaganda against the use of non-European colonial troops by France in the border area."--Dust jacket

Das Saarland verfügt als jüngstes westdeutsches Bundesland über eine wechselhafte und spannende Geschichte. Dabei ist der (bundes-)politische Einfluss des nach der Bevölkerungszahl zweitkleinsten Bundeslands nicht zu unterschätzen. So verfügt das Saarland nicht nur über die höchste Parteimitgliederdichte aller Bundesländer, sondern hat auch zahlreiche Politiker von bundespolitischer und -historischer Bedeutung hervorgebracht. Darüber hinaus steht es als (ehemaliges) traditionelles Kohle-, Stahl- und Industrieland mitten in einem bedeutsamen Transformationsprozess, den es u.a. als Teil der Großregion mit der höchsten grenzüberschreitenden Mobilität von Arbeitnehmer_innen innerhalb der Europäischen Union zu meistern versucht. Der Sammelband analysiert die Geschichte des Saarlands ebenso wie die Entwicklung des Parteiensystems und der Landesregierungen wie auch die Verortung des Saarlands in verschiedenen Politikfeldern im Vergleich