I hope to explore the development of the way nuclear wastes have been produced and disposed of since the industry’s inception during the early Soviet Union.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s324/sh/4de80b0e-2365-42db-a8d7-378f71811635/2493d2ea17f870ea268fc44cf3a775d0
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s330/sh/bd1141d0-53db-4073-af93-0f43c9ba27c0/6c6fe41e20e744962e30879a7bfe1a92
My project will be focused on the the environmental fallout as a product of nuclear testing, nuclear power plants and waste disposal. In terms of sustainability, it will focus on how nuclear power should be disposed of properly as to not damage the environment. A large drawback of nuclear power, which is highly efficient, is the waste is very volatile and remains toxic for long periods of time. This project will also focus on the potential future of nuclear sustainability in terms of economy and workforce. Generally, the current situation of Russia’s nuclear program and what steps need to be taken to make it more sustainable.
This poster shows Nazi’s eugenics propaganda. When in 1933 Adolf Hitler came in power, he started to imply his own vision about race in German society. He believed in the Aryan race, which he claimed if “purified” will become the ruling race of the world.
This poster shows three handicapped children and puts the question “Who would want to be responsible for this? “ The poster was part of the sterilization campaign that was going on in Germany during the rule of Adolf Hitler. This poster tried to make the population of Nazi Germany believe that certain people should be sterilized because they might have such children, which according to Nazi Germany will not be beneficial for the state, nor for the people in it. Unfortunately, in Hitler-ruled Germany, individuals who were labeled to be unproductive for the society were exterminated.
The eugenic movement took part also in Great Britain, France, Russia, America, and others, but it was only in Germany, where mixed with the idea of the Ubermensch( the superman), created a devastating outcome- the concentration camps, in which millions of people lost their lives.
Source for picture : http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/volkundrasse1936-8.htm / poster number 5
After the First World War, empires, both big and small, were trying to rebuild themselves to become stronger. Their economies were extremely weak and their population had greatly decreased due to all of the deaths during the war. Nations wanted their economies to be stronger by increasing industrialization and in order to do this, governments focused on family planning and parenthood.
All of Europe and the Soviet Union were focused on re-boosting their populations looking closely at birth rates. In Wendy Goldman’s text, Revolution and the Family, she goes into great detail about the issues surrounding family planning and parenthood just before the Second World War, specifically in the Soviet Union. The government outlawed abortion, created incentives for child bearing, and made it extremely difficult to divorce your partner. In Russia however, women entered the work force, which increased industrialization, but decreased birth rates. Due to both women and men being outside the house working all day, children were abandoned and neglected at home and would turn to petty crimes. The government then really focused on the family life and required parents to focus more attentively on their children and their education.
The picture attached to this blog is propaganda in Russia trying to get families to have more children. Families that had a certain amount of children were given incentives by the government and the more children you had the more they would pay you. The Soviet Union ran into the issue of there not being enough space for all of the children, especially in detention centers where they were sent when they got into trouble.
Due to strong government opposition and propaganda, birth rates did increase and the Soviet Union did find a complete balance between the work force and families.
Image source: http://takimag.com/article/motherland/print#axzz2fO2NkSzJ
This photo depicts a Soviet child sleeping under a communist flag. The rough translation of the caption of this photo is “Grow, heroes! You will save the Soviet Army.” This pro-Natalist propoganda was distributed in Russia after World War II. The population of Russia had significantly declined after the war, and Russia wanted to increase their population. Although this piece of propaganda did not come about until after the Interwar Period, it connects to the thoughts of the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period.
In the reading Revolution and the Family by Wendy Goldman, there is a focus on the children, women, and the Pro-Natalist movement in the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period. The government was very concerned with the decreasing birthrates and lack of potential productive members of society. In order to attempt to increase the Soviet population, the Soviet Central Executive Committee and Sovnarkom outlawed abortion. To deter illegal abortions, there were heavy fines and prison sentences implemented.
In addition to deterring abortion, they also offered incentives to those willing to increase the population. The government would give stipends to new mothers, monetary bonuses for women with many children, and longer maternity leaves for those in the work force. In order to grow the Soviet Union, the government needed to grow their population, just as the propaganda picture above suggests.
Although the time period may change, the need for large, productive populations remains static.
http://lh5.ggpht.com/_ialE7-GoQ48/SuUueGWbE7I/AAAAAAAAAj4/2L0JFsbDJVk/s800/poster-1948.jpg
(Image courtesy of “Politicizing Pronatalism: exploring the Nazi Propaganda of Women through the Lens of Visual Propaganda”, by Katherine Rossy)
This image, taken from the Nazi party’s magazine for women, Frauen Warte, depicts a mother taking care of her baby daughter while her husband goes off to war. This particular image is from a 1937 issue, two years before World War II began. At this point in history, Germany is Nazi-occupated and Hitler’s power is rising. The picture illustrates clear gender roles that show the woman as a loving creature whose duty it is to make children just as it’s the men’s duty to fight. The Nazi Regime preached pronatalism to those “worthy” enough to reproduce, which was the Aryan race in their eyes. It was these women’s duty to make good German children. While women were getting more and more involved in the workforce, it goes to show that their first and foremost priority, at least as taught by the state, was to heighten the birthrate of the German population. Because of the alarmingly high divorce rates, and this new “modern woman, the state became highly concerned about the now declining birthrate. While this sparked Pronatalism regimes across Nazi Germany, it wasn’t an isolated situation. Several other countries across Europe began to outlaw abortion and contraception to rebuild the importance of the family unit.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s353/sh/1a4907dc-0b8f-439e-8358-228ac70d3b72/8f9eaeab56c72646ce82f8db55f9bf74
My final project will be on the Union of Composers in the Soviet Union. The project will explore the different aspects of the union including its effects on the composers’ compositions and artistic expression, as well as society. The sources provided above share some insight from many different perspectives on the subject. I hope they are of help to anyone interested in music during the Soviet Union time period.
My project is on the tuberculosis epidemic in Russian prisons that started in the early 1990s. This epidemic was recognized by the World Health Organization and prevention methods were implanted in 1993, but many prisoners in Russia still have tuberculosis because it is an airborne and overcrowding disease, which makes a cramped prison cell a perfect environment to spread it. This project will hopefully explain why this human rights issue is a relevant topic about sustainability.
In this overt example of interwar propaganda, the practice of eugenics is promoted through a poignant visual and textual analogy to agriculture. The double meaning of the key term “seed” is utilized in a comparison between spreading healthy plant seed for a bountiful harvest and spreading healthy human “seed” for the purposes of procreation, specifically the creation of a physically fit, mentally proficient, racially pure population.
The first block of text that appears at the top of the poster, “Only healthy seed must be sown!”, alludes to the exclusionist principles of eugenics. People who were deficient in physical or mental health were considered unfit to procreate. More generally, anyone incapable of making an economic contribution to the state through gainful employment were subject to the scorn of negative eugenics (Mazower, 96). Such members of the population were considered sources of “bad seeds,” so to speak, a threat to the purity and longevity of the nation in question.
The textual motif of the poster stands in contrast to the bright and optimistic image of the farmer, portrayed as a literally shining example of the robust and productive citizens that eugenicists aimed to create. As Mark Mazower states in Dark Continent, eugenicists “believed that it was indeed possible to produce ‘better’ human beings through the right kind of social policies.” (91) This logic was employed by several European nations during the interwar period, most notably Great Britain, Russia, and Germany, the latter applying the simplistically and deceptively positive term “racial hygiene” to the practice of eugenics. (Mazower, 92).
This poster is a pithy snapshot of the dangerous ideological ground being tread by interwar governments in Europe. While the calculated and “logical” attributes of eugenics (as discussed in class) held several appeals for the recovering European governments after WWI, the concomitant dehumanization of the population in the eyes of the state may have in fact planted the “seeds” of social tension and injustice that helped steer the continent toward WWII. (Mazower, 97-98)
Image Source: http://www.niea.unsw.edu.au//sites/default/files/projects/323.jpg
“Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage,” states Francis Galton in his article, Eugenics: It’s Definition, Scope, and Aims in July 1904. Eugenic ideas spread through out Europe following the First World War. While eugenics is supposed to be about race quality, it became prevalent in interwar Europe mainly due to fear, and the need to transfer blame.
In National Self-Sufficiency, John Maynard Keynes states that England’s vast trading network was “the explanation before man and the justification before Heaven of her economic supremacy.” This statement reflects the views of most European countries; their respective races were superiorto all others. After WWI, Europe began to lose control of its colonies. For example, the British were facing resistance to their rule in India. In addition to this, natives of those colonies were immigrating to the mother nations; there were Algerians in France and Chinese in England, to name a few. To nations that had been mainly of homogenous race up to this point, this immigration was a shock and an unwelcome change. Fear began to spread among whites of these people with different skin color, culture and language. Whites needed a way to establish themselves as the superior race and to keep their race pure. Thus, they turned to eugenics.
Not only was Europe physically destroyed by WWI, the global economic crisis of 1929 ruined its still weak economies. A general sense that someone needed to be blamed was felt through out the continent; who better to blame than these new races or less superior races within European nations? Especially in Germany, who shouldered the majority of the blame, according to the Treaty of Versailles, for WWI, this need was felt; the blame was placed mainly the Jews. During WWI, Jews held the majority of the seats in German parliament, and were the ones who agreed to a cease-fire. After the war, German officers came forward and said that they could have won if it weren’t for the armistice. This fueled hatred for the Jews. Eugenics became popular as a scientific way to justify this hatred. In this German eugenics propaganda poster, Germans are being told that they must take the burden for degenerates and those who are not as genetically fit. Taking these attitudes into account, it is not surprising that the Holocaust occurred.
Eugenics was a recognized science in Europe during the interwar period. Eugenists and those who supported eugenics were not extremists, but were close to mainstream thought. Eugenics was driven by fear and the search for an outlet for blame, and was itself an underlying factor in the Second World War.
source for picture: http://www.disabilityhistory.org/dd_camp2.html
