scholarly journals Journey of the USA Citizen Frank Whitson Fetter to the USSR: History of the Foreign Photographic Collection in the Duke University Library (1930)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1184-1200
Author(s):  
Ramina O. Abilova ◽  
◽  
Tatiana P. Krasheninnikova ◽  

The article presents the results of studying the Whitson Fetter (1899-1991) photo collection on Fetter’s visit to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1930. He spent six days in Moscow and six weeks in Kazan, then took a trip down the Volga River and the Caspian Sea. In his journey, Frank W. Fetter took about 330 photographs, which are currently stored in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University (Durham, North Carolina, USA). The article reconstructs the origin of the photographic collection (USSR, June-August 1930) and its life in the family archive of Frank W. Fetter (USA, 1930-1991). In 1992, according to his will, the entire archive, including photographs, was transferred to the library of the Duke University. Thus, the attention is focused on the library activities in acquisition, storage, accounting, and usage of Frank W. Fetter’s photographs (1992 - present). In this context, 2008 is of particular importance: it is then that the photographs were scanned and published on the website. The study is based on content and discourse analysis of the photographs; it uses comparative method for studying Frank W. Fetter paper collection at the Duke University library and materials from Russian archives, interviews of participants in the documents transfer to archival storage and photographs digitization. Thus, in a first time case-study of a single photograph collection, the authors trace the route of photographs from their creator to their researchers. Using photographs taken in the USSR, but stored outside Russia, is to supplement the historiography with valuable information on the history of photograph collections and to consider photographic documents on the history of Soviet Russia as an item of storage in foreign archives. The article may be of interest to historians, archivists, museum specialists, curators, and all researchers studying photo documents as objects of storage.

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.


Author(s):  
Ardak Kapyshev

At  the  present  stage  one  of  the  unsolved   problems in  interstate relations of  Caspian bordering countries is defining international­legal status of the Caspian Sea. It is noted in the article that this problem is not a new one at all. The history of “division” of the Caspian Sea begins in the ancient age, namely in VIII century. It is underlined that the basic stumbling block  is the position of Iran on the right to use the Caspian Sea, and also occurrence of extra regional players, such as  the USA, China, etc. First of  all, it is connected with rich oil fields and other minerals, and also with convenient geopolitical and geostrategic position. The only way to worry out the international­legal delimitation of the Caspian Sea problem is a negotiating process. By now, despite of  certain disagreements on  legal status of  the Caspian Sea, five Caspian bordering countries managed to achieve certain progress, admitting the possibility of applying the principle of sectorial sectioning on the Caspian Sea.  Clear proof  of  it is the agreements on  division of ground on the northern part of Caspian Sea signed between Kazakhstan, Russia and Azerbaijan. It is important that Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan clearly stated their positions and agreed to make a compromise in their official statements. More than likely, in the near future Iran will soften its position, considering its present  situation and   strained relations with the USA. It has been alleged that the constructive  dialog  already  started; everything depends on  the mobility,  concurrency and rationality of actions of all Caspian bordering countries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-182
Author(s):  
Alexander Ivanovich Repinetskiy

The paper is devoted to history of childrens home 25 established in 1946 on the territory of the Kuibyshev Region. Children of Russian emigrants living in Austria were accommodated there. These children were transferred to representatives of the Soviet authorities by the American administration. Under the terms of the agreements between the USSR, the USA and Great Britain signed at the Yalta conference (1945) people with the Soviet nationality were transferred to the Soviet Union. Children of Russian emigrants born in Austria didnt belong to this category but despite it they were transferred to the Soviet Union. Local authorities didnt know what to do with repatriated children. That is why the childrens home was established in a remote rural area; life and material conditions of its inhabitants were heavy: there was no necessary furniture or school supplies. Its tutors and staff were in a more difficult situation. Some of them lost their jobs. Some children were returned to parents. Unfortunately, available documents do not allow tracking the future of the children from this childrens home.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Antoshin ◽  
Dmitry L. Strovsky

The article analyzes the features of Soviet emigration and repatriation in the second half of the 1960s through the early 1970s, when for the first time after a long period of time, and as a result of political agreements between the USSR and the USA, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union for good and settle in the United States and Israel. Our attention is focused not only on the history of this issue and the overall political situation of that time, but mainly on the peculiarities of this issue coverage by the leading American printed media. The reference to the media as the main empirical source of this study allows not only perceiving the topic of emigration and repatriation in more detail, but also seeing the regularities of the political ‘face’ of the American press of that time. This study enables us to expand the usual framework of knowledge of emigration against the background of its historical and cultural development in the 20th century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter H. Solomon

The Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia alike have had extremely low rates of acquittal in criminal cases, which conventional wisdom associates with an accusatorial bias. But other countries like Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and France also have low rates of acquittal without the perception of bias. This article argues that the key difference lies in the presence or absence of pretrial screening—through the withdrawal of charges, diversion, and/or dispositions imposed by prosecutors. After a brief history of the low acquittal rate in Russia, the article documents the use of prosecutorial discretion to screen cases before trial in those four Western countries, especially through the exercise by prosecutors of quasi-judicial functions. The article goes on to demonstrate the absence of significant pretrial filtering of cases in Russia and to explore the implications for understanding the rate of acquittal.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Marianna Shakhnovich

By the end of the 1920s, more than 100 anti-religious museums had been opened in the Soviet Union. In addition, anti-religious departments appeared in the exhibitions of many local historical museums. In Moscow, the Central Anti-Religious Museum was opened in the Cathedral of the Strastnoi Monastery. At that time, the first museum promoting a comparative and historical approach to the study and presentation of religious artifacts was opened in Petrograd in 1922. The formation of Museum of Comparative Religion was based on the conjunction of the activities of the Petrograd Excursion Institute, the Academy of Sciences, and the Ethnographic department of Petrograd University. In this paper, based on archival materials, we analyze the methodological principles of the formation of the exhibitions at the newly founded museum, along with its themes, structure, and selection of exhibits. The Museum of Comparative Religion had a very short life before it was transformed into the Leningrad anti-religious museum, but its principles were inherited by the Museum of the History of Religion, which was opened in 1932.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Boldyrev ◽  
Martin Kragh

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also on that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR as well as the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars, and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system, due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 575-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Ciscel

The politics of language identity have figured heavily in the history of the people of the Republic of Moldova. Indeed the region's status as a province of Russia, Romania, and then the Soviet Union over the past 200 years has consistently been justified and, at least partially, manipulated on the basis of language issues. At the center of these struggles over language and power has been the linguistic and cultural identity of the region's autochthonous ethnicity and current demographic majority, the Moldovans. In dispute is the degree to which these Moldovans are culturally, historically, and linguistically related to the other Moldovans and Romanians across the Prut River in Romania. Under imperial Russia from 1812 to 1918 and Soviet Russia from 1944 to 1991, a proto-Moldovan identity that eschewed connections to Romania and emphasized contact with Slavic peoples was promoted in the region. Meanwhile, experts from Romania and the West have regularly argued that the eastern Moldovans are indistinguishable, historically, culturally, and linguistically, from their Romanian cousins.


Open Theology ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanislav Panin

AbstractThe article concentrates on the history of Astral Karate, its doctrine and sources. Astral Karate was a late-Soviet eclectic spiritual movement based on esoteric interpretations of martial arts and yoga. The term “Astral Karate” had spread in the 1980s thanks to spiritual leader and underground esoteric author Valery Averianov who called himself Guru Var Avera. On one hand, the movement reflected global tendencies, such as growing interest in Eastern cultures and spirituality, that characterized esoteric groups in the USSR as well as in the USA and Europe during this period. On the other hand, esoteric groups in the Soviet Union developed in isolation from European and American esoteric currents and under unique ideological and legal pressures. The combination of these factors contributed to the originality of late-Soviet esoteric currents and therefore makes Astral Karate an important object of academic inquiry, which helps us to understand the specifics of Soviet spirituality and its further developments in post- Soviet states


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