scholarly journals Three decades of post-Soviet period: analyses of outbound tourism development patterns and environment in Latvia

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Ilze Medne ◽  
◽  
Kristīne Bērziņa

After regaining independence, the borders were opened for Latvian residents, and they had the possibility to leave behind the travel or non-travel principles of the Soviet Union period, as well as go into the global tourism market. Post-Soviet transformation that was seen in different sectors, including the change in tourism and travel habits, which happened slowly. Since every decade of these three post-Soviet decades has its own development characteristics and is impacted by different external environment elements, the aim of this study is to analyse the tendencies of each decade and its most impactful external environment factors in Latvia. Even though the impact of the economic environment has always been meaningful in tourism, the main factor that impacted the first post-Soviet decade was without doubt the political environment. With the start of the 21st century and the improvement of the economic situation, world’s technological achievements enter Latvia’s tourism industry. Different sociocultural factors highlight different outbound tourism tendencies in each decade. Travel habits of Latvian residents have changed over time – values and expectations have changed for travelling abroad. As expectations and knowledge increase, Latvian travellers join the tendencies and travel habits of the collective European travellers.

Author(s):  
Elena Nikolaevna Kananerova

The object of this research is the Soviet historical paradigm in its development. The subject is the achievements of Soviet historians in studying postwar collectivization in Right-bank Moldova. The author dwells on the impact of objective and subjective factors upon the course of historical science during the Soviet period. The article traces the evolution of topics and assessments given in the articles, monographs and collective summary works dedicated to the history of the republic. The novelty of this study is consists in the analysis of the works of Soviet historians from the perspective of modern historical paradigm, which was founded by the scientific school of V. P. Danilov. Examination of the Soviet historiography of collectivization in Right-Bank Moldova allows making the following conclusions: 1) the key problem of Soviet historians consisted in the limited access to archival documents; 2) the agrarian historiography of the problem is often subjective and interprets the information from available archival documents and various statistical records through the prism of generally accepted Soviet ideological attitudes; 3) same as in studying collectivization of the 1920s – 1930s, the topics associated with the violations during collectivization and “dekulakization” remained under the ideological ban; 4) the specificity of historiography of collectivization in Right-Bank Moldova was the significant attention of historians to this problem in the late 1960s – 1970s, which the author believes is associated with L. I. Brezhnev, who was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1951 –1952 and the conventional methods for organizing the collective farms in the republic.


Menotyra ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rasa Vasinauskaitė

The article analyses the institution of Lithuanian theatre criticism in the Soviet period and its connection with the ideological requirements of the time. The resolutions of the Communist Party during the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods, theatre repertoire, reviews, and the concept of social realism in the theatre are also discussed. The 1946–1948 resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that regulated the development of culture and art, as well as the doctrine of socialist realism influenced both the practice of theatre and its critics. In the 1950s and 1960s, theatre criticism became a tool of ideology and propaganda, to such an extent that it ‘itself created a socialist realist text’. It is also important that during this period, the names of interwar critics disappeared from the press; critics were represented by party functionaries, party-owned directors, actors, and writers. The ‘return’ of criticism is related with the Thaw period and a new generation of both theatre creators and critics. It can be said that the independence and autonomy of criticism started taking shape in the late 1960s, especially with the performances of director Jonas Jurašas. Writing about the Jurašas’s productions, directed between 1967 and 1972, critics came to reflect on the nature of theatre, theatrical creation or creative freedom, and the disguised and false reality. The discourse of criticism not only freed itself from previously obligatory normative criteria and depersonalised style, but also started representing the subjective gaze of the critic, who not only tried to cover the aesthetic/artistic whole of the performance, but also to establish direct contact with both creators and readers, to capture and convey the impact of the performance on the viewers of their time. In summary, despite external (censorship) and internal (self-censorship) circumstances, the discourse of theatrical criticism changed only at the end of the 1960s, and began to approach artistic discourse: the ideological criteria for understanding and evaluating a performance theatrical production were replaced by artistic and aesthetic ones.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-668
Author(s):  
Michael Nosonovsky ◽  
Dan Shapira ◽  
Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira

AbstractDaniel Chwolson (1819–1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz’s forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. Th e criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson’s scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson’s authority, who was the teacher of their teachers’ teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson’s conclusion have entered academic literature for decades.


Author(s):  
Joshua Kotin

This book is a new account of utopian writing. It examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity's two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. In this way it captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. The book contributes to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. It models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.


Author(s):  
Elena A. Kosovan ◽  

The author of the publication reviews the photobook “Palimpsests”, published in 2018 in the publishing house “Ad Marginem Press” with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The book presents photos of post-Soviet cities taken by M. Sher. Preface, the author of which is the coordinator of the “Democracy” program of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Russia N. Fatykhova, as well as articles by M. Trudolyubov and K. Bush, which accompany these photos, contain explanation of the peculiarities of urban space formation and patterns of its habitation in the Soviet Union times and in the post-Soviet period. The author of the publication highly appreciates the publication under review. Analyzing the photographic works of M. Sher and their interpretation undertaken in the articles, the author of the publication agrees with the main conclusions of N. Fatykhova, M. Trudolyubov and K. Bush with regards to the importance of the role of the state in the processes of urban development and urbanization in the Soviet and post-Soviet space, but points out that the second factor that has a key influence on these processes is ownership relations. The paper positively assesses the approach proposed by the authors of the photobook to the study of the post-Soviet city as an architectural and landscape palimpsest consisting mainly of two layers, “socialist” and “capitalist”. The author of the publication specifically emphasizes the importance of analyzing the archetypal component of this palimpsest, pointing out that the articles published in the reviewed book do not pay sufficient attention to this issue. Particular importance is attributed by the author to the issue of metageography of post-Soviet cities and meta-geographical approach to their exploration. Emphasizing that the urban palimpsest is a system of realities, each in turn including a multitude of ideas, meanings, symbols, and interpretations, the author points out that the photobook “Palimpsests” is actually an invitation to a scientific game with space, which should start a new direction in the study of post-Soviet urban space.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
S. I. Pukhnarevich ◽  

The article shows the formation of the legal basis for the formation, development and functioning of the system of training and retraining of judicial personnel in the country in the period from 1946 until the end of the USSR. The article also explores the forms and approaches to the organization of improving the quality of the staff of the judicial system. It was concluded that the Soviet Union has formed an ideologically oriented, strictly centralized Federal-Republican system of professional development of court employees.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (s1) ◽  
pp. 893-911
Author(s):  
Ilgar Seyidov

AbstractDuring the Soviet period, the media served as one of the main propagandist tools of the authoritarian regime, using a standardized and monotype media system across the Soviet Republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, 15 countries became independent. The transition from Soviet communism to capitalism has led to the reconstruction of economic, socio-cultural, and political systems. One of the most affected institutions in post-Soviet countries was the media. Media have played a supportive role during rough times, when there was, on the one hand, the struggle for liberation and sovereignty, and, on the other hand, the need for nation building. It has been almost 30 years since the Soviet Republics achieved independence, yet the media have not been freed from political control and continue to serve as ideological apparatuses of authoritarian regimes in post-Soviet countries. Freedom of speech and independent media are still under threat. The current study focuses on media use in Azerbaijan, one of the under-researched post-Soviet countries. The interviews for this study were conducted with 40 participants living in Nakhichevan and Baku. In-depth, semi-structured interview techniques were used as research method. Findings are discussed under six main themes in the conclusion.


Author(s):  
Irina V. Sabennikova ◽  

The historiography of any historically significant phenomenon goes through several stages in its development. At the beginning − it is the reaction of contemporaries to the event they experienced, which is emotional in nature and is expressed in a journalistic form. The next stage can be called a retrospective understanding of the event by its actual participants or witnesses, and only at the third stage there does appear the objective scientific research bringing value-neutral assessments of the phenomenon under study and belonging to subsequent generations of researchers. The history of The Russian Diaspora and most notably of the Russian post-revolutionary emigration passed to the full through all the stages of the issue historiography. The third stage of its studying dates from the late 1980s and is characterized by a scientific, politically unbiased study of the phenomenon of the Russian emigration community, expanding the source base and scientific research methods. During the Soviet period in Russian historiography, owing to ideological reasons, researchers ‘ access to archival documents was limited, which is why scientific study of the history of the Russian Diaspora was not possible. Western researchers also could not fully develop that issue, since they were deprived of important sources kept in Russian archives. Political changes in the perestroika years and especially in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union increased attention to the Russian Diaspora, which was facilitated by a change in scientific paradigms, methodological principles, the opening of archives and, as a result, the expansion of the source base necessary for studying that issue. The historiography of the Russian Diaspora, which has been formed for more than thirty years, needs to be understood. The article provides a brief analysis of the historiography, identifies the main directions of its development, the research problematics, and defines shortcomings and prospects.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Jakub Majkowski

This essay will firstly address the extent of Stalin’s achievements in leading the course for domestic policy of the Soviet Union and its contribution towards maintaining the country’s supremacy in the world, for example the rapid post-war recovery of industry and agriculture, and secondly, the foreign policy including ambiguous relations with Communist governments of countries forming the Eastern Bloc, upkeeping frail alliances and growing antagonism towards western powers, especially the United States of America.   The actions and influence of Stalin’s closest associates in the Communist Party and the effect of Soviet propaganda on the society are also reviewed. This investigation will cover the period from 1945 to 1953. Additionally, other factors such as the impact of post-war worldwide economic situation and attitude of the society of Soviet Union will be discussed.    


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Lovakov ◽  
Elena Agadullina

For several decades the Soviet academic psychology community was isolated from the West, yet after the collapse of the Soviet Union each of the 15 countries went their own way in economic, social, and scientific development. The paper analyses publications from post-Soviet countries in psychological journals in 1992–2017, i.e. 26 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the period in question, 15 post-Soviet countries had published 4986 papers in psychology, accounting for less than one percent of the world output in psychological journals. However, the growth of post-Soviet countries’ output in psychological journals, especially that of Russia and Estonia, is observed during this period. Over time, post-Soviet authors began to write more papers in international teams, constantly increasing the proportion of papers in which they are leaders and main contributors. Their papers are still underrepresented in the best journals as well as among the most cited papers in the field and are also cited lower than the world average. However, the impact of psychological papers from post-Soviet countries increases with time. There is a huge diversity between 15 post-Soviet countries in terms of contribution, autonomy, and impact. Regarding the number of papers in psychological journals, the leading nations are Russia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Georgia. Estonia is the leader in autonomy in publishing papers in psychological journals among post-Soviet countries. Papers from Estonia and Georgia are cited higher than the world average, whereas papers from Russia and Ukraine are cited below the world average. Estonia and Georgia also boast a high number of Highly cited papers.


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