scholarly journals The Stalin Cult as Political Religion

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1112
Author(s):  
Graeme Gill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Transcendental Leadership

Political religion is a concept that gained prominence around the middle of the twentieth century, being associated for many with the idea of a totalitarian regime. Political religion was seen as a secular ideology whose followers took it up with the enthusiasm and commitment normally associated with adherence to religion. Comprising liturgy, ritual and the sacralization of politics, it created a community of believers, and usually had a transcendental leadership and a millennial vision of a promised future. This paper will explore the utility of this concept for understanding leader cults in authoritarian regimes. Such cults have been prominent features of authoritarian regimes but there is little agreement at the conceptual level about how they should be understood. One of the most powerful of such cults was that of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1953. This paper analyses this cult in terms of liturgy and ritual and concludes that despite some aspects that are common between the cult and religion, most ritualistic aspects of religion find no direct counterpart in the cult.

Century of Ukraine's diplomatic service

2017 ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Yuriy Makar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
State Committee ◽  
The West ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
National University ◽  
Central Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

On December 22, 2017 the Ukrainian Diplomatic Service marked the 100thanniversary of its establishment and development. In dedication to such a momentous event, the Department of International Relations of Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University has published a book of IR Dept’s ardent activity since its establishment. It includes information both in Ukrainian and English on the backbone of the collective and their versatile activities, achievements and prospects for the future. The author delves into retracing the course of the history of Ukrainian Diplomacy formation and development. The author highlights the roots of its formation, reconsidering a long way of its development that coincided with the formation of basic elements of Ukrainian statehood that came into existence as a result of the war of national liberation – the Ukrainian Central Rada (the Central Council of Ukraine). Later, the Ukrainian or so-called State the Hetmanate was under study. The Directorat (Directory) of Ukraine, being a provisional collegiate revolutionary state committee of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, was given a thorough study. Of particular interest for the research are diplomatic activities of the West Ukrainian People`s Republic. Noteworthy, the author emphasizes on the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic’s foreign policy, forced by the Bolshevist Russia. A further important implication is both the challenges of the Ukrainian statehood establishing and Ukraine’s functioning as a state, first and foremost, stemmed from the immaturity and conscience-unawareness of the Ukrainian society, that, ultimately, has led to the fact, that throughout the twentieth century Ukraine as a statehood, being incorporated into the Soviet Union, could hardly be recognized as a sovereign state. Our research suggests that since the beginning of the Ukrainian Diplomacy establishment and its further evolution, it used to be unprecedentedly fabricated and forged. On a wider level, the research is devoted to centennial fight of Ukraine against Russian violence and aggression since the WWI, when in 1917 the Russian Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, started real Russian war against Ukraine. Apropos, in the about-a-year-negotiation run, Ukraine, eventually, failed to become sovereign. Remarkably, Ukraine finally gained its independence just in late twentieth century. Nowadays, Russia still regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit,waging out a carrot-and-stick battle. Keywords: The Ukrainian People’s Republic, the State of Ukraine, the Hetmanate, the Direcorat (Directory) of Ukraine, the West Ukrainian People`s Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, Ukraine, the Bolshevist Russia, the Russian Federation, Ukrainian diplomacy

On the origins of the concept of ‘latent schizophrenia’ in Russian psychiatry

2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110353
Author(s):  
Birk Engmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Eugen Bleuler ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Psychiatry ◽  
Soviet Research

In the mid-twentieth century in the Soviet Union, latent schizophrenia became an important concept and a matter of research and also of punitive psychiatry. This article investigates precursor concepts in early Russian psychiatry of the nineteenth century, and examines whether – as claimed in recent literature – Russian and Soviet research on latent schizophrenia was mainly influenced by the work of Eugen Bleuler.

scholarly journals Diseases of the Indigenous Peoples of Yakutia in Photo Projects of the Late XIX ‒ First Third of the XX Centuries

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-119
Author(s):  
Stepanova Lena B. ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Socialist Republic ◽  
Foreign Population ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Medical Photography

Disease theme of indigenous population of the Northern national outskirts of Russia, as well as the study of special knowledge in the field of traditional medicine and healing practices, for a long time belonged to the taboo part of knowledge. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a turning point in the visual culture of region, when the picture of diseases was expressed through the camera and became public. There are works of photographers documenting the course of the most dangerous diseases, such as leprosy and external manifestations of mental disorders. The aim of this study is to study external factors that influenced the genesis of the “medical” series of visual images of the population of Northeast Asia. The research methodology is based on a cultural and historical analysis of the events that preceded its appearance and subsequent application in medical practice in order to document the course of diseases in the Soviet period. This article presents the results of a brief review of the prehistory of the “medical” direction in ethnographic photography of the Yakut region. The circle of photographers of the Yakut region is defined, where stories illustrating the diseases that the local population suffered from are reflected. At the beginning of the twentieth century, footage of medical practices and shamanistic rituals for healing were presented in the photo projects by I. V. Popov and A. P. Kurochkin. In the 1920s-1930s. the genre of “medical photography” is represented by the works of the doctor-epidemiologist T. A. Kolpakova, military surgeon E. A. Dubrovin, unknown with the initial “D”, who worked in the medical detachment of the Commission for the Study the Productive Forces of the Yakut Republic (CYR) The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the People’s Committee the Health of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The experience of studying this topic serves as a clear illustration of the specifics of the region and in some way confirms the conclusions made by the participants of numerous expeditions that studied the foreign population of the Yakut region and predicted the inevitable extinction in the future. Keywords: medical anthropology, anthropology of disease, visual research, indigenous people, visual text, visual sources

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.

Naming the Dead, Writing the Individual: Classical Traditions and Commemorative Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
GRAHAM OLIVER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Classical Traditions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
First World

The chapter focuses on the commemoration of the individual in ancient and modern cultures. It argues that the attitude to individual commemoration adopted by the War Graves Commission in the First World War in Britain can be linked to the commemorative practices of ancient Greece, emphasising the importance of the part played by Sir Frederic Kenyon. The chapter draws on examples of commemoration from classical Athens, twentieth-century Britain and the Soviet Union in order to explore the different roles that the commemoration of the individual has played in ancient and modern forms of war commemoration.

Relational Rules and Communist Single-Party Regimes

2021 ◽  
pp. 90-142
Author(s):  
Graeme Gill
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Symbolic Function ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Relational Rules ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

Relational rules structure the relationship between the oligarchs and the elite, and the oligarchs and the institutions of the regime. The chapter analyses how the 11 relational rules functioned in the Soviet Union and China over the life of the respective regimes. It explains how the oligarchs sought to insulate themselves from below and, in looking at the role of political institutions, tackles the idea that institutions serve little more than a symbolic function in authoritarian regimes. A major focus is also the power of the individual leader, its nature and bases and how this related to those institutions.

Agwan Dorjiev’s Questions about the Past and Future of Mongolian Buddhism

2020 ◽  
pp. 416-437
Author(s):  
Matthew W. King
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
British Raj ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
Letter Exchange

This chapter translates a 1924 letter exchange between two luminaries of the final years of prepurge Buddhism in Mongol and Buryat lands: the Khalkha polymath Zava Damdin Luvsandamdin (1867–1937) and the diplomat, reformer, and abbot Agvan Dorjiev (1854–1938). Both figures were deeply engaged with revolutionary intellectual currents circulating between China, the British Raj, Russia, Siberia, Tibet, Japan, and Mongolia in the early decades of the twentieth century. Both sought an advantage for Buddhist monastic life in competing models of revolutionary development and emancipation being debated in the Soviet Union and Mongolian People’s Republic. In the exchange translated here, these two tragic figures debate topics as diverse as the prehistory of the Mongolian community, the whereabouts of the fabled “land of Li,” and how best to counter the threat of scientific empiricism.

Ivanov, Viacheslav Ivanovich (1866–1949)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bird
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Aleksandr Blok

Viacheslav Ivanov was a leading theoretician of the symbolist literary movement and a prominent figure in the renaissance of religious thought in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. A classical scholar by training, and erudite poet by vocation, Ivanov became known as an acolyte of Nietzsche. Later, along with the other ‘younger’ symbolists Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi, Ivanov presented himself as a disciple of Vladimir Solov’ëv’s idealistic metaphysics and theurgic aesthetics. In the 1910s Ivanov achieved a proto-hermeneutic conception of art, which was the basis of his groundbreaking writings on Dostoevskii. After emigrating from the Soviet Union in 1924 Ivanov became a Roman Catholic and achieved some notoriety in Catholic intellectual circles between the wars. His powerful influence is evident in many contemporary and later thinkers in fields ranging from aesthetics and literary theory to philosophy and theology.

Bely, Andrei (БЕЛЫЙ, АНДРЕЙ) (1880–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick H. White
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Symbolism ◽  
Second Wave

Andrei Bely (1880–1934) was a writer of prose, poetry, literary criticism and memoirs, as well as a leading theorist and representative of the ‘second wave’ of Russian Symbolism. Music and philosophy first interested Bely as is evident in his four prose Symphonies (1902–1908) and a collection of poetry, Gold in Azure (1904). Following the failed 1905 Revolution, Bely’s poetry became more pessimistic. The mystical enthusiasm of his early poetry was replaced by images of disillusionment in two later collections: Ashes and The Urn (both 1909). In 1910, Bely published his first novel, The Silver Dove, yet it was his second, Petersburg (1916), which is considered to be among the finest novels of the twentieth century. Bely’s remaining prose works were much less successful. At the end of his life, Bely was under increasing pressure by Soviet officials to re-remember elements of the modernist movement. As a result, Bely’s memoirs are highly unreliable, but fascinating as examples of cultural coercion in the Soviet Union. Today, Bely is remembered as one of the principal voices of Russian Symbolism at its inception—and then one of its main apologists, after the movement fell out of fashion in the Soviet Union.

scholarly journals An Analysis of why Stalin is to Blame for the German Invasion

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Burden
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
The Soviet Union

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 has long been attributed to errors by Joseph Stalin, yet a revisionist position known as the Icebreaker hypothesis has also emerged alleging that Stalin is not to blame. This essay examines why the Icebreaker theory is erroneous based on its lack of concrete facts. The reasons why Operation Barbarossa was so effective are also examined, leading to the conclusion that Stalin should still shoulder most of the blame for Soviet disorganization prior to the invasion.

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