The Hungry Steppe

Author(s):  
Sarah Cameron

This book examines the Kazakh famine of 1930-33, one of the most heinous and poorly understood crimes of the Stalinist regime. As part of a radical social engineering scheme, Josef Stalin sought to settle the Kazakh nomads and force them into collective farms. More than 1.5 million people perished as a result, a quarter of Soviet Kazakhstan’s population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in Russian and in Kazakh, the book brings this largely unknown story to light, revealing its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. It finds that through the most violent means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan and forged a new Kazakh national identity. But the nature of this transformation was uneven. Neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves became integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. Seen from the angle of the Soviet east, a region that has not received as much scholarly attention as the Soviet Union’s west, the Stalinist regime and the disastrous results of its policies appear in a new light.

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-464
Author(s):  
Alevtina Vasilevna Kamitova ◽  
Tatyana Ivanovna Zaitseva

The paper reflects the specificity of the fundamental ideas of the artistic world of M. G. Atamanov, which includes a wide range of literary facts from the content level of the text of the works to their poetics. A particularly important role in the works of M. G. Atamanov is played by cross-cutting themes and images that reflect the author's individual style and his idea of national-ethnic identity. The subject of the research is the book of essays “Mon - Udmurt. Maly mynym vös’?” (“I am Udmurt. Why does it hurt?”), which most vividly reflected the main spiritual and artistic searches of M. G. Atamanov, associated with his ideas about the Udmurt people. The main motives and plots of the works included in the book under consideration are accumulated around the concept of “Udmurtness”. The comprehension of “Udmurtness” is modeled in his essays through specific leit themes: native language, Udmurt people, national culture, mentality, geographic and topographic features of the Udmurt people’ places of residence, the Orthodox idea. The “Udmurt theme” is recognized and comprehended by the writer through the prism of national identity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 209-223

During the university course the future legal psychologists have to master a wide range of professional competencies, among them are those that can be classified as management, with an emphasis on project making competencies and their relationship with the project making professional culture. The article presents the results of students' self-evaluation competencies. This research was a part of the monitoring of learning outcomes in a number of disciplines in the Faculty of Legal Psychology, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education. The author raises the problem of defining the concepts of "project culture" and "psychological culture of project making", which still do not have a clear definition inspite of the intensive development of the socio-cultural, innovative and other forms of project making. For legal psychologists project making culture involves the acquisition of psychologically correct approaches to the development, evaluation, promotion and institutionalization of the ideas, so they can provide the solution of professional problems.


Author(s):  
Vladimir B. Bezgin

We examine the state of communes and farms, the attitude of the rural population to their organization and activities, as well as the state of collective farms on the eve and during the Tambov rebellion of 1920–1921. The relevance of the topic is determined by the need for a scien-tific understanding of the problem of insurrection in the Civil War and its manifestation in the form of a peasant rebellion led by A.S. Antonov. The purpose of the study is to establish the fate of collective farms during the armed protest of the Tambov peasants. The work was carried out on the basis of a wide range of archival sources, some of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The analysis of the problem is carried out taking into account the achievements of modern historiography of the issue and the use of scientific tools of advanced methodological approaches. We apply the entire arsenal of methods of historical research based on the principles of historicism, objectivity and consistency. It is established that the armed raids of rebel detachments on agricultural communes, Soviet farms were due to the need of the partisans for food, horses, forage, and the active participation of the local population in them stemmed from their view of the land and property of collective farms as rightfully belonging to them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 931 ◽  
pp. 705-710 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenia M. Kishkinova

In European architecture the Neo-Grec style, based on a revival of Greek principles and motifs, is an independent stage in rediscovering of classical antique heritage. It is one of the “new styles” of a historicist phase in architecture that claimed to find national identity in the architecture of independent Greece. In Russian architecture of the mid-19th – early 20th centuries this style is represented in a wide range of monuments that are mostly located in the South of Russia. However insufficient knowledge and research on the monuments of this style create difficulties for their maintenance and restoration. The purpose of the paper is to identify distinctive features of neo-grec in the region. The main task is to determine the reasons for a turn to neo-grec in the South of Russia, to identify and analyze neo-grec buildings in the cities of Rostov-on-Don and Yessentuki, to examine their composition and décor, to identify their ancient prototypes, to differentiate constant and variable elements in the architecture of the Neo-Grec.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Adams

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-194
Author(s):  
Marc van Zoggel

Abstract Historically, the glorification of the past and the eulogizing of national heroes in art and literature have been constructive elements in the process of nation building. In the postmodern era, however, a cultivation of national history and its great men and women is often regarded outdated or even suspect and regressive. The ‘nine eleven’ terrorist attacks in the United States and the rise and assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn intensified an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the meaning and value of a shared ‘Dutch national identity’ in a multicultural, diversified society. In this article, I argue that several novels and poems about Dutch naval hero Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676), published in or in the wake of the ‘De Ruyter year 2007’, both reproduce and challenge a wide range of voices, viewpoints and sentiments within the hot topic of national identity in the twenty-first century.


Legal Studies ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. I. Ogus

Regulation as a legal form of social engineering has been subjected to much analysis in the last decade or so. The importance of the topic to contemporary law cannot be overstated: on the one hand, it has been the avowed aim of government to ‘deregulate’ industry; on the other hand, and paradoxically, both the concomitant policy of privatisation and the evolution towards a Single European Market have increased the need for regulation in appropriate areas. The efforts to explore the strengths and weaknesses of different regulatory forms have brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Administrative lawyers have been concerned with how the power of decision-making is allocated between institutions and the general problems of accountability and control of discretion to which this gives rise. Socio-legal researchers have critically examined the practices of regulatory agencies as regards rule formulation and enforcement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Katz

Marion Katz reflects on major developments in Islamic legal studies since the 1990’s, the decade that saw – as noted in the introduction to this Roundtable– expanded and diversified scholarly attention to Islamic legal studies. For her, it is puzzling then that outdated frameworks continue to percolate in the field, such as the crude “premodern / modern binary” and the continued neglect of what she calls fiqh studies. Katz urges scholars to pursue more nuanced approaches to deal with the sheer volume of the textual corpus and to fill in chasmic history of substantive law, namely: (1) the study of “core samples,” that is, the diachronic investigation of individual concepts and doctrines to document inflection points, and (2) the study of “transverse slices,” that is, the synchronic study of a wide range of material from a specific historical context that helps expose underlying and pervasive assumptions behind a broad area of law. 


Author(s):  
Edward Denison

Chinoiserie’s stylistic repertoire in Britain over recent centuries has encompassed a wide range of art practices, but it has remained conspicuously absent from one art form in particular: architecture – the slow art. Despite a promising, prominent and pioneering entrance onto Chinoiserie’s stage in the mid-eighteenth century, most notably through the work of Sir William Chambers, reverence for China in the field of architecture has been negligible when compared with decorative, visual and literary art forms. While acknowledging this relative obscurity, this chapter examines the long and complex architectural relations between Britain and China up to the mid-twentieth century, a seminal epoch in which Chinoiserie was gaining approbation in other art practices, architectural Modernism was at its height internationally, British architects were travelling to or being raised in China in greater numbers than at any time in history, and the first Chinese architects were returning from an education in various foreign countries, including Britain. These myriad architectural interrelations have received relatively little scholarly attention as a collective group in comparison to other art practices while the individual architects, Chinese (such as Luke Him Sau) and British, and their work remain underexplored.


Author(s):  
Leonid Berlyavskiy

The article, based on a wide range of sources, the central elements of which are archival materials, analyzes one of the problems that are not sufficiently covered in the scholarly literature, namely the emergence and functioning of immigrant collective farms in important agricultural regions of the RSFSR (USSR) during the 1920s–1930s. The article substantiates the position that the young Soviet state was interested in placing on its territory the maximum possible number of supporters of the communist doctrine who arrived from abroad and were eager to contribute to the construction of socialism in the RSFSR in every possible way, in particular, by creating collective farms, strengthening them and thereby promoting socialist ideas in the countryside. Therefore, the Soviet legislation adopted and applied the most-favoured-nation regime to foreigners or re-emigrants who expressed a desire to work on collective farms. It is demonstrated that the immigrant farms had significant technical and human resources, as well as ideological and political motivation to make a tangible contribution to overcoming the difficulties experienced by Soviet Russia and to promote the socialist modernization of agriculture. Yet, along with successful immigrant collective farms (communes), which achieved noticeable results in their economic and propaganda activities, several such collective farms failed to gain a footing on Russian soil, among which not the least was the suspicious and distrustful attitude towards foreigners on the part of Soviet party-officials. In the 1930s, the leading trend was a reduction in the influx of foreign volunteers to collective farms since the espionage, suspicion, and intolerance towards foreigners characteristic of Soviet reality turned immigrants into undesirable persons in the USSR.


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