I will be researching the disappearing cultures of the native tribes of the Krasnodar Krai region of northern Siberia. Their traditional livelihood of reindeer herding was severely disrupted with the industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 20th Century, and the changes in Soviet government and social structures have also effected them profoundly. Follow the link to below to view my initial bibliography.
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.
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
Though the poet Aleksei Gastev was killed during Stalin’s Great Purges, he had been a Communist supporter for much of his life. Though he was distanced from the Party in 1907, when he was in his late twenties, after a disagreement on how to combat the spread of capitalism, he still supported the proletariat in a variety of ways. Gastev’s intention in “We Grow out of Iron” can be better understood if we consider his strong belief in unions, which was the basis of his break from the Party.
The use of strong “pro-labor” phrasing in this piece could be easily interpreted as contributing to an early piece in the Socialist-realism movement, not fully popular until the 1930s. The way he glorifies progress also seems to allude to his socialist tendencies.
Of particular interest in this piece is Gastev’s use of personal pronouns. The poem separates the narrator form other characters in the piece through its use of “I’ and “They”. One of the conflicts in this poem comes from the narrators interaction with the building, with the “they”. This “iron structure” (ln. 6) is given qualities associated with the early Soviet movement in the USSR– “They are bold, they are strong./ They demand yet greater strength.” (Ln. 7-8). This piece is Gastev’s argument for the future of the Communist state. He believes that through unionization of the proletariat they can organize labor for themselves better than a distanced administration. The unions, Gastev assrets, can “[force] the rafters, the upper beams, the roof…higher.” (ln. 14-19), that they could have propelled the Soviet Union forward. But, the labor would have had to be organized by the workers, by these groups grown out of the population. This is most evidenced by the Gastev’s opening line, “I stand among workbenches, hammers, furnaces, forges, and among a hundred comrades.”
Aleksel Gastev, Vladimir Kirillov, and Mikhail Geraismov all wrote their poetry about the machine’s growing importance and the growth of industry in Russia. All three were proletarians and believed that the revolution and change Russia needed was to be found on factory floors. Gastev’s “We Grow Out of Iron” compares the newly built iron factory to his own new importance and strength. The strength of iron is reflected in the boldness of the revolutionaries and Gastev considers himself one of them. In Kirillov’s “The Iron Messiah”, he describes the changes to Russian society such as mass production as a messiah destroying the prisons of the past and helping Russia progress into modern labor. Gerasimov’s “We” exalts the varied creations of the collective revolutionaries, from artwork to architecture.
Dmitry Furmanov wrote Chapaev in 1923 to recount his own experiences as the political commissioner of the Chapaev division in the Urals during the Civil War and described the political tension, power struggles, and discipline issues within the troop of mostly peasant soldiers and their charismatic leader. Furmanov ruminates on why it is that most of the heroes in war are peasants, concluding that their rage at their poor quality of life is what leads them to succeed at protests and wars. At the end of the excerpt, Furmanov insists that not only boldness but also knowledge are needed to win a war.
Fyodor Alexeyev, born in 1753 in the city of St. Petersburg, Russia. He was renown for his paintings of landscapes. Alexeyev was a student at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. He later studied under revered Italian artists such as Guiseppi Moretti and Pietro Gaspari. His work became so popular that Emperor Paul of Russia and Catherine the Great requested paintings from him. He was described as a “master of the cityscape, one of the founders of the genre of landscape in Russian art.” (Artoftherussias.com) His paintings offer a rare window to the sight of what Moscow used to look like. Alexeyev passed away on November 23rd, 1824in St. Petersburg.
