scholarly journals Visual Metaphors for the People: Unpacking Sergei Eisenstein’s Pedagogy of the Russian Revolution Through Film

Elements ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Prescott Brown
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
General Line ◽  
Communist Ideology

This paper attempts to understand how the celebrated and controversial figure of Sergei Eisenstein understood and contributed to the formation of the Soviet Union through his films of the 1920s.  The lens of visual metaphors offer a specific insight into how artistic choices of the director were informed by his own pedagogy for the Russian Revolution.  The paper asks the questions: Did Eisenstein's films reflect the official party rhetoric?  How did they inform or motivate the public toward the communist ideology of the early Soviet Union?  The primary sources used in this paper are from the films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1926), October (1928), and The General Line (1929).  Eisenstein created visual metaphors through the juxtaposition of images in his films which alluded to higher concepts.  A shot of a worker followed by the shot of gears turning created the concept of industry in the minds of the audience.  Through visual metaphors, it is possible to understand the motives of Eisenstein and the Communist party.  It is also possible, with the aid of secondary sources, to see how those motives differed.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

On the Historiography of the Russian Revolution

Slavic Review ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Warth
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Party Line ◽  
The Status ◽  
Intellectual Climate

The Russian Revolution has not yet achieved the status of the French Revolution as an academic preserve for battalions of professional historians, but few are likely to deny that its impact on the twentieth century is already more profound than that of the French upheaval on the nineteenth. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is now upon us, and it is a melancholy commentary on the uncertain intellectual climate of the Soviet Union that despite lavish funds, abundant trained personnel, and access to archives and primary sources unavailable in the West, Soviet historians have failed to produce a work of permanent importance on this crucial episode of modern Russian history. Yet the stifling orthodoxy of Stalinism has given way to the uncertain but relative freedom under his successors, and the auguries point to a further mellowing of the party line as Soviet society haltingly approaches the educational and living standards of the Western world.

scholarly journals الثورة الروسية عام 1917

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (104) ◽  
pp. 1552-1590
Author(s):  
م.د. نجلاء عدنان حسين
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Slow Development ◽  
The Russian Empire

       The Russian Revolution of 1917, or the Bolshevik Revolution, was one of the most important historical events in Europe during the First World War. This revolution changed the course of Russian history. Its outbreak led to the formation of the Soviet Union, which was dismantled in the late 20th century. Because of a number of popular unrest and protests against the rule of Russian tsars and the Russian Empire, whose reign was characterized by the slow development of the country because of the existence of a political system subject to autocratic regimes and the control of nobles and landlords in all aspects of life in Russia, made the Russian society in the late century Nineteen rural people in the majority of workers and peasants, with the influence of the clergy and the imperial palace, accompanied by a primitive social structure, a backward economy and an autocratic government. Life in Russia was in the style of the Middle Ages. Russia retreated from the European industrial revolution until 1860, This led the people to wage a revolt against the Russian reactionary tsarist government in 1917. It was one of the most famous leaders of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, who was called the " Revolutionaries of this revolution the Bolsheviks name or Almnschwk means the majority.

scholarly journals Beurteilen oder Verurteilen? Vom Richten über Kunst und Künstler im sowjetischen Kunstbetrieb

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 554-575
Author(s):  
Sandra Frimmel
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
General Line ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract Using examples from the 1930s and the 1960s (the decades of show trials and the Khrushchev ‘thaw’), this article examines what ‘alternative jurisdictions’ – that is, courtroom-like debates outside the courtroom – existed in the Soviet Union, not only to debate, but also to make lasting determinations about what art is and who is empowered to judge it. Cultural and social restrictions – in the form of codes of conduct or an artistic “general line” (term after Sergei Eisenstein) – manifest themselves in these acts of judgement and condemnation. This raises the following questions, among others: What happens to the artist subject as a result of the various forms of ‘alternative jurisdictions’, and what is the task of the (artistic) collective? The investigation of typical Soviet quasi-judicial practices enables a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of contemporary Russian art trials, which attempt to silence artists who are critical of religion or society.

Progressive Educators and the Professionalization of Educational Research in the USSR, 1917-1927

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-220
Author(s):  
Randall D. Law
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
English Language ◽  
Progressive Education ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Soviet Government ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Education Community ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
And Gender

This article examines the efforts made by Soviet progressive educators to accommodate themselves to the new Soviet government and the consequences thereof. Russia’s pre-revolutionary progressive education community sought to indirectly transform state and society by encouraging the creation of “schools of citizenship” that would educate all – regardless of class, creed, and gender – for lives of “harmonious development” and active engagement. Bolshevik victory in 1917 presented progressive educators with an ironic dilemma: the party that most progressives rejected as coarse, violent, and undemocratic embraced their ideas with a passion and energy unseen from every previous government. Could progressive educators work for such a benefactor? They could and they did, in great numbers. But to distance themselves from a ruling party they disdained, progressives wrapped themselves in the language of professionalism and retreated into self-contained institutes, governmental bureaucracies, and experimental schools. These developments warped the content of Russian progressive education, distanced progressives from the schools they sought to transform, and hastened the demise of educational progressivism in the Soviet Union. This article makes extensive use of archival documents, published primary sources, and both Russian and English-language secondary sources.

Vyatka Revolutionaries in the “Government Facility”: 1905—1913

2018 ◽  
pp. 793-808
Author(s):  
Alexander S. Masyutin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Penal Institutions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Party Members ◽  
The Government

The article analyses various aspects of the life in prison of political prisoners of the Vyatka gubernia. Unpublished documents from the archives of Kirov and Moscow, on which this study is based, designate the subject of the study; that is, they allow to establish forms of resistance of political prisoners to prison regime, to identify patterns of their escapes, to trace dynamics in occupancy of political prisons in the Vyatka gubernia, to establish instances of interaction between representatives of different left parties while in penal institutions. The timeframe of the study is the period of the first Russian revolution of 1905-1908, when prisons ceased to be the tenement of few and far between ardent revolutionaries from the privileged strata of society, and swarmed with much less versed ideologically masses of the discontented. Thus, in view of a participant of the revolutionary events of 1905-1908, Socialists-Revolutionary Maximalist G. A. Nestroev, the ideological grounding of the political prisoners deteriorated significantly. The author, however, believes that this ‘diversity’ of prisoners allows to conduct a more thorough analysis of their public activity in prison and to better link the activities of prisoners with the people on whose behalf the revolutionary forces acted. The author focuses on the Socialists-Revolutionaries, as their percentage among prisoners was much higher than that of the Socialists-Democrats. Known for several high-profile assassinations, the former were considered more dangerous state criminals than the Socialists-Democrat ‘propagandists,’ and thus were subject to more severe punishments. After the October revolution 1917, the Bolsheviks created an extensive mythologized literature on fellow party members who served time in tsarist prisons but mentioned only several Socialists-Revolutionaries, and these were politically harmless, or deceased (like E. S. Sazonov), or attached to the Bolshevik party (like V. N. Rukhlyadev). Findings and conclusions of the article can be used in research of the later periods in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, particularly, for comparison of the prisoners’ struggle with the prison administration and of the forms of assistance to prisoners from the outside in tzarist Russia and later.

lmost all estimates of the figure of Alexander Solzhenitsyn are not related to literary criticism. Most studies evaluate his role, intentions and results. His figure is assessed in the context of the fate of the country, public perception and attitude to the country, which is Motherland for some, and mental and political enemy for the others. And for this purpose it is not even important who is right from the historical and political point of view. The point is who and how perceived the USSR and the entire Soviet project. Solzhenitsyn is seen as the enemy of the USSR and the Soviet project by those who popularized and helped him, and also according to his self-evaluation. Therefore, for those who identify themselves with the Soviet Union, its heritage and the entire Soviet project Solzhenitsyn represents the enemy and bearer of evil. For those who are hostile to the Soviet Union and the Soviet project, Solzhenitsyn is an ally in their struggle and bearer of good. Which of these parties is right is the issue of history and morality. 66% of Russian citizens support the first point of view, and the second point of view is supported by 25% of the population. Nowadays 88 % of Russian citizens know who Solzhenitsyn was. 31% consider him to be moral authority for them. 8% of the people believe that Solzhenitsyn presented true facts in his books.

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 260-275
Author(s):  
Victor V.  Aksyuchits
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Evaluation ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia

In the article the author studies the formation process of Russian intelligentsia analyzing its «birth marks», such as nihilism, estrangement from native soil, West orientation, infatuation with radical political ideas, Russophobia. The author examines the causes of political radicalization of Russian intelligentsia that grew swiftly at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries and played an important role in the Russian revolution of 1917.

Brazilian historiography on the participation of the USSR in the Second World War

2021 ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Boris Martynov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Correct Treatment ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
International Authority ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Second World

The article deals with the evolution of views of the Brazilian authors on the role, played by the Soviet Union in the WWII and its contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitlerian coalition. It contains a historiographical review of the works, written by the Brazilian authors on the theme, beginning from 2004. One follows the process of their growing interest towards clarifying the real contribution of the Soviet part to the common victory, along with the rise of the international authority of Brazil and strengthening of the Russo – Brazilian ties. One reveals the modern attitude of Brazilian authors towards such dubious or scarcely known themes as the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, the battles for Smolensk and Rhzev, town–bound fights in Stalingrad, liberation of the Baltic republics, the Soviet war with Japan, etc. The author comes to conclusion, that in spite of the Western efforts to infuse the people`s conscience with the elements of the “post – truth” in this respect, the correct treatment of those events acquires priority even in such a far off from Russia state, as Brazil.

The Communist Contest for Status

2019 ◽  
pp. 82-133
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson ◽  
Alexei Shevchenko
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Competition ◽  
The West ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Economic Production ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
The Us ◽  
Catch Up

This chapter argues that both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC) pursued social competition with the Western states while at the same time seeking recognition from the states they were trying to subvert. Stalin sought to increase the power and prestige of the Soviet state through coerced industrialization, and Khrushchev made an effort to “catch up and surpass” the West in economic production. The PRC sought to improve its status by allying with the Soviet Union, but the Chinese chafed under their status as “younger brothers” to their senior ally, and eventually Mao challenged the Soviets for leadership of the international communist movement. In the 1970s, China took advantage of the US need to balance Soviet military power by putting aside communist ideology to become a tacit ally of the United States, part of a “strategic triangle.”

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