This thesis argues that physical landscapes, from intentional sites of memory to average public spaces, play a foundational role in the formation and continuation of the official politics of memory that underpins Serbian cultural memory and collective identity. Thus, in order to understand the complexities of the Serbian collective identity, the landscapes that underpin such an identity must first be understood. Building off prior findings, the three landscapes to be considered relate to three pivotal moments in Serbian nation-building and identity formation: the end of the Ottoman presence, World War II and Yugoslavia, and the wars of the 1990s. This thesis put surveys of Serbian landscapes, which map both sites of remembrance and sites left to be forgotten in Belgrade, as well as oral histories with local young-adult Serbians in conversation in order to elucidate the extent to which individual conceptions of the past and of the Serbian identity correlate to the official politics of memory in Serbia. Young-adult Serbians have been selected, as their only personal experience with each moment of history under consideration is generational memory and state narratives of the past. Ultimately, this study seeks to expand and verify the themes of remembrance found in Serbia as well as understand how the reconstruction of the past, starting from the end of the Ottoman presence to the 1990s war, has figured into the various nation-building projects in Serbia. Building on Halbwachs and Nora, this study understands culture memory as dependent on objectivized culture, like buildings, which naturally challenges the traditional separation of memory and history. Though it does not represent the full Serbian public, this study demonstrates the limited role the physical landscape has in shaping the understanding of the past held by the Serbians interviewees.

This dissertation discusses children and childhood in Soviet Kazakhstan from 1928 to 1953. By exploring images of, and for, children, and by focusing on children’s fates during and after the famine of 1930-33, I argue that the regime’s success in making children socialist subjects and creating the new Soviet person was questionable throughout the 1930s. The reach of Soviet ideological and cultural policies was limited in a decade defined by all kinds of shortcomings in the periphery which was accompanied by massive violence and destruction. World War 2 mobilized Central Asians and integrated the masses into the Soviet social and political body. The war transformed state-society relations and the meaning of being Soviet fundamentally changed. In this way, larger segments of society embraced the framework for Soviet citizenship and Soviet patriotism largely thanks to the war experience. This approach invites us to reconsider the nature of Sovietization in Central Asia by questioning the central role of ideology and cultural revolution in the formation of Soviet identities. My dissertation brings together images of childhood, everyday experiences of children and memory of childhood. On the one hand, the focus on children provides me an opportunity to discuss Sovietization in Central Asia. On the other hand, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of Soviet childhood: it is the first comprehensive study of Soviet children in the periphery in English. It shows how images and discourses, which were produced in the Soviet center, were translated into the local context and emphasizes the multiplicity of children’s experiences across the Soviet Union. Local conditions defined the meaning of childhood in Kazakhstan as much as central visions. Studying children in a non-Russian republic allows me to discuss questions of ideology, cultural revolution and the nationalities question. A main goal of the dissertation is to shift the focus of Sovietization from the cultural and intellectual elite to ordinary people. Secondly, by studying the impact of the famine and the Great Patriotic War, I try to understand the dynamics of the Soviet regime and the changing conceptions of culture and identity in Soviet Kazakhstan.

This dissertation presents a multifaceted examination of the complex sociopolitical contexts of contemporary popular and classical music in Russia. By attending to the competing expectations of Russian creators, government officials, impresarios, critics, and listeners, it examines how contemporary musical artists have navigated the shifting nationalistic and popular moods of the past two decades.

I argue that popular music artists Olga Kormukhina and Polina Gagarina, composer Rodion Shchedrin, and the Mariinsky Theater have transformed the works of past artists, including Viktor Tsoi and Nikolai Leskov, updating them according to a popular demand for patriotic works that the Russian state has cultivated through its media outlets and official pronouncements on cultural policy. Other rock musicians (Konstantin Kinchev and the band Bi-2) have also transformed their political identities to match the present-day demands and expectations of either Russian officialdom or their particular Russian audiences. With the exception of Bi-2 (an ambiguous counterexample), all of these transformations have led to greater associations with nationalistic sentiments or fervent support for state agendas in the contemporary geopolitical arena.

Exploring the wide variety of styles and genres in this dissertation required a methodological versatility involving archival research, reception history, the analysis of musical scores and sound recordings, an examination of prose and poetic texts, and close study of visual imagery in music videos and onstage. The approach to reception history is the most groundbreaking, for it considers a wide range of digital sources, including blogs and social media comment threads, and makes use of language partner apps to augment the pool of informants, allowing conversation with Russians living outside the limited geographical range (St. Petersburg and Moscow) considered by previous studies. This holistic approach to contemporary reception history helps us to better understand how Russian audiences from diverse regions perceive these ongoing transformations.

This dissertation explores the roles of ethnic minority cultural elites in the development of socialist culture in the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s through the late 1960s. Although Marxist ideology predicted the fading away of national allegiances under communism, Soviet authorities embraced a variety of administrative and educational policies dedicated to the political, economic, and cultural modernization of the country’s non-Russian populations. I analyze the nature and implementation of these policies from the perspective of ethnic Tatars, a Muslim Turkic group and contemporary Russia’s largest minority. Tatar cultural elites utilized Soviet-approved cultural forms and filled them with Tatar cultural content from both the pre-Revolutionary past and the socialist present, creating art and literature that they saw as contributing to both the Tatar nation and to Soviet socialism. I argue that these Tatar cultural elites believed in the emancipatory potential of Soviet socialism and that they felt that national liberation and national development were intrinsic parts of the Soviet experiment. Such idealism remained present in elite discourses through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s, but after Stalin’s death it was joined by open disillusionment with what some Tatars identified as a nascent Russocentrism in Soviet culture. The coexistence of these two strands of thought among Tatar cultural elites suggests that the integration of Tatar national culture into the broad, internationalist culture envisioned by Soviet authorities in Moscow was a complex and disputed process which produced a variety of outcomes that continue to characterize Tatar culture in the post-Soviet period.

This dissertation is based on significant archival research and utilizes various state and Communist Party documents, as well as memoirs, letters, and other personal sources in both Russian and Tatar. It challenges traditional periodization by bridging the Stalin and post-Stalin eras and emphasizes on-the-ground developments rather than official state policy. Finally, it offers insight into the relationship between communism and ethnic difference and presents a nuanced vision of Soviet power that helps to explain the continuing role of nationalism in the contemporary Russian Federation and other post-communist states.

This dissertation explores how rank-and-file political prisoners navigated life after release and how they translated their experiences in the Gulag and after into memoirs, letters, and art. I argue that these autobiographical narratives formed the basis of an alternate history of the Soviet Union. This alternate history informed the cultural memory of the Gulag in the Komi Republic, which coalesced over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s into an infrastructure of memory. This alternate history was mobilized by the formation of the Soviet Union’s first civic organizations, such as the Memorial Society, that emerged in the late 1980s. However, Gulag returnees not only joined post-Soviet civil society, they also formed a nascent civil society after their release in the 1950s. The social networks and informal associations that Gulag returnees relied upon to reintegrate back into Soviet society after release, also played an essential role in the memory project of coming to terms with the Stalinist past after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As one of the first and most populous epicenters of the Gulag archipelago located in the Far North, from 1929-1958 Komi saw hundreds of thousands of prisoners, in addition to hundreds of thousands more who were exiled to the region from all over the Soviet Union. While some left the region after they were released, many were not able to leave or chose not to when given the choice. Regardless of where they lived when the Soviet Union collapsed, many former prisoners sent their autobiographies to branches of the Memorial Society and local history museums in Komi. For many, this was the very first time they had shared their stories with anyone. While Komi is unique in many ways, it is emblematic of processes that unfolded throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the Twentieth Century. This project expands our understanding of how civil societies form under conditions of authoritarian rule and illuminates the ways in which survivors and societies come to terms with difficult pasts.

Between 1941 and 1953, thousands of Lithuanians were deported by the Soviet Union as far from their homeland as the northern reaches of Siberia. While many perished as they contended with hunger, thirst, illness, harsh weather, ill-suited clothing, and poor housing, several survived, returned, and recounted their experiences. Returned adult deportees often recall solidarity among Lithuanians, interactions with locals and authorities, and efforts to maintain agency and continue cultural traditions. Children remember going to school, relying on their parents, and returning to Lithuania. Deportees and others involved in recording their memoirs wrote them in Lithuanian or translated them into English for different purposes and with different intended audiences. The ways in which deportees describe their experiences and what they omit from their stories have shaped Lithuania’s national identity when it reemerged as the Soviet Union fell following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Lithuania redeclared its independence in 1990. The years in which memoirs were published also likely influence their contents. Despite the horrors of deportation, returnees describe positive aspects of the experience. Many deportees portray themselves as struggling for survival, but not as helpless victims. Relatively rare mention of conflict among Lithuanian deportees and identification of non-Lithuanian deportees’ ethnicities suggest the importance of Lithuanians striving together for a common goal: survival and return to Lithuania. The creation of museums focused on deportation, incorporation of memoirs in school curricula, observation of a Day of Mourning and Hope, and portrayal of deportations in works of literature and film demonstrate their lasting impact and significance.

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.

The Soviet Union suffered immensely as a result of World War II. When the dust settled and Soviet citizens began to rebuild their lives, the memory of the social, economic, and human costs of the war still remained. The Soviet state sought to frame the conflict in a way that provided meaning to the chaos that so drastically shaped the lives of its citizens. Film was one such way. Film, heavily censored until the Gorbachev period, provided the state with an easily malleable and distributable means of sharing official history and official memory. However, as time went on, film began to blur the lines between official memory and real history, providing opportunities for directors to create stories that challenged the regime's official war mythology. This project examines seven Soviet war films (The Fall of Berlin (1949), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), Ivan's Childhood (1962), Liberation (1970-1971), The Ascent (1977), and Come and See (1985)) in the context of the regimes under which they were released. I examine the themes present within these films, comparing and contrasting them across multiple generations of Soviet post-war memory.

This thesis is based on the responses of Soviet Displaced Persons collected by the Harvard Study on the Soviet Social System (HPSSS), an oral history conducted in Munich and New York from 1950 to 1951 in which former Soviet citizens were interviewed. They were primarily interviewed about daily life within the Soviet Union. A total of 331 displaced persons were interviewed over the course of the study, with most individuals receiving multiple interview sessions. These sessions were divided broadly as A and B sections. The A-section, which the majority of interviewees received and was viewed by the compilers as a broad sociological inquiry, was divided into subsections focusing on Soviet work, government, family, education, communication, philosophy of life, and ideology. The B-sections were used for deeper anthropological inquiries and are potentially more controversial due to the use of Rorschach tests and situational responses. Fewer respondents were continued on to the B interviews which contained a variety of subsections, though most respondents were only asked questions from one or two sections of the greater whole. A portion of the B section interviews do provide valuable insight to my thesis for their focus on the Displaced Person status of the interviewees. The project consisted of 764 separate interviews of the 331 respondents. The interviewers for the HPSSS were primarily graduate students, ranging from history, sociology, psychology and economics departments, with varying degrees of fluency in Russian and Ukrainian. Some of the interviewers went on to become leading experts in Soviet Studies in the years to follow. Others stopped publishing, following the major publication of the HPSSS in the late 1950s, which may indicate a move to the private sector or employment within the federal government rather than academics. While not possible to include within my analysis, the major publications of the study also included the insights garnered from nearly ten thousand written questionnaires of DPs that were tabulated and discarded prior to publication.

This dissertation describes the public sphere that coalesced in the Soviet jazz scene during Josef Stalin’s reign. Scholars debate the extent to which Soviet citizens, especially under Stalin, were coerced into cooperating with the regime through terror; willingly cooperated with the regime out of self-interest; or re-aligned their speech, behavior, and thoughts to conform to Bolshevik ideology and discourse. In all cases, citizens were generally unable to openly express their own opinions on what Soviet society should look like. In this dissertation, I attempt to bridge this gap by analyzing the diverse reactions to jazz music in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. I argue that audience engagement with jazz and discussions about the genre in the Soviet press and elsewhere were attempts to grapple with bigger questions of public concern about leisure, morality, ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and patriotism in a socialist society. This jazz public sphere was suppressed in the late 1940s and early 1950s because of Cold War paranoia and fears of foreign influences in Soviet life. In its place, a counterpublic sphere formed, in which jazz enthusiasts expressed views on socialism that were more open and contradictory to official norms. This counterpublic sphere foreshadowed aspects of post-Stalinist Soviet culture. To support my arguments, I employ archival documents such as fan mail and censorship records, periodicals, memoirs, and Stalin-era jazz recordings to determine the themes present in jazz music, how audiences reacted to them, and how these popular reactions overlapped with those of journalists, musicologists, bureaucrats, and composers. This project expands our understanding of when and where public spheres can form, challenges top-down interpretations of Soviet cultural policy, and illuminates the Soviet Union and Russia’s ambivalent relationship with the West and its culture.