Browsing by master's degree program "Venäjän, Euraasian ja itäisen Euroopan tutkimuksen maisteriohjelma"

This thesis explores the public response to Natalya Baranskaya’s novella "A Week Like Any Other", which was first published in 1969. The novella raised the question of the persistence of gender inequality in Soviet society, embodied in women’s ‘double burden’. By analysing unpublished readers’ letters, this thesis provides a detailed discussion of the attitudes toward gender roles and femininity in the Brezhnev period. The research is multidisciplinary; it spans social and cultural history, gender studies, and literary studies. The thesis synthesises the concepts of gender contract, subjectivity, and emotional communities, thereby contributing significantly to our understanding of how late Soviet society functioned. The study applies the inductive thematic analysis of women’s letters. The analysis reveals the centrality of literature for female readers. They perceived it as a means to influence political decisions, viewing writers and editors as mediators between citizens and power. The study finds that while women expressed dissatisfaction with their ‘double burden,’ they were not willing to give up paid work or motherhood. They also recognised the injustice in the gender division of labour but did not see the opportunity to negotiate it with their male partners. In their view, the issue of gender inequality could only be resolved from above, or it was considered insurmountable. The thesis underscores that work and belonging to a collective were essential for Soviet female subjectivity. The study also shows that female readers strongly identified with other women, creating a sense of emotional community.

Through use of the concept of deterrence, deterrence theory, and strategic culture theory, this thesis will seek to assess how Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in tandem with its broader strategic behaviour, align with the greater principles of deterrence and Russia’s orientation within the discipline. The lens of this concept and these theories will be applied to various aspects of Russian foreign policy in action, as fundamentally it relates to decision-making based on perceptions of credibility and capability of self and adversary. This framework provides structure when analysing how Russia acts out its deterrence, and what drives it. As deterrence theory emphasises credibility as an essential criterion for effective deterrence, this thesis will use this theory and understanding of concept to analyse to what extent Russia’s leadership and capabilities are credible, and therefore able to coerce adversaries against taking action that threatens or is detrimental to Russia, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine. It also helps underpin ideas about why deterrence fails and explains unintended consequences. Lastly, the integration of nuclear weapons into deterrence will be analysed with the aim of establishing what role these weapons play within Russia’s coercive deterrence posture when engaged in a regional conflict such as the Russo-Ukrainian War.

In 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine passed the country’s first set of decommunization laws, which aimed to promote a policy of historical justice and abolition of the Soviet visual culture and history. Central to this legislation were two provisions seemingly at odds with each other: one that criminalized the use of communist and fascist symbols and propaganda and another that set out to ban “mockery” of the Ukrainian independence fighters of the twentieth century. Ukraine’s independence movement is clouded by a complicated history as it relates to the persecution of the nation’s historical minorities, including Ukrainian Poles, Jews, and Roma. Furthermore, many groups mobilized in the service of liberating Ukraine during the Second World War from both Nazi and Soviet occupation often collaborated with the former and inflicted great atrocities on local civilian populations. As Ukraine enters its third year of the Russian-Ukrainian War, it is more important than ever to settle the legacies of the nation’s valorized independence fighters, most of whom have complicated, controversial pasts. Consequently, if an original intention of the 2015 decommunization laws was to detotalitarianize Ukraine’s past by prosecuting the historical records of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes, a true detotalitarianization of Ukrainian history includes coming to terms with the ethnonationalist and fascistic views and politics of the nation’s independence movements, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Melnyk Faction (OUN-m), Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera Faction (OUN-b), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Critically, the differences between the OUN-m and OUN-b revolved around each faction’s origins: the latter was primarily made up of Galician youth who were shut out of the original leadership bodies of the OUN, whereas the former consisted more of the original founders and officers. For this, a deep examination of the nation’s historical artifacts and visual art (including statues, plaques, memorials, and museums), and nation-building efforts in the form of national decrees passed by elected officials is in order, particularly as it relates to how the memories of individuals representing Ukrainian independence movements have been preserved in various parts of the country. As such, this thesis sets out to document the local and state efforts to preserve the memory of twentieth-century Ukrainian independence fighters and movements. This documentation and analysis of contemporary Ukrainian memory politics will be used to settle the contradiction in Ukraine’s decommunization laws: how to fully detotalitarianize history and public space to create a truly democratic, pluralist, and inclusive model of history. To summarize, this thesis centers on events unfolding shortly after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the Maidan Uprising in 2013–2014, particularly after the passage of the 2015 decommunization legislation. The immediate post-Soviet period will be analyzed since the Ukrainian state’s decommunization efforts began almost immediately after the Soviet collapse, whereas the passage of the 2015 decommunization legislation merely formalized them. Through the instrumentalization of the memory of the OUN, the Ukrainian state has rehabilitated the organization’s leaders, contributing to an already problematic historical culture that has given way to apologism, revisionism, and ethnocentrism. Conversely, the Ukrainian state has also empowered a civic national identity which has been critical in building the foundation for a Ukrainian national historiography. The objects of my analysis include pieces of visual culture such as statues, plaques, stamps, coinage, monuments, and street names. Sources include a variety of periodicals, most of which are local Ukrainian magazines and journals written in Ukrainian or Russian, in addition to foreign-based, English-language Jewish publications. Furthermore, because the documentation of Ukrainian decommunization efforts is widespread and easily accessible, many academic works will be employed to draw on existing and ongoing discussions centering on its lasting effects on Ukrainian visual culture.