Bacterification In Russia

Their interrelation was overlapping rather than sequential although the whole book was written chronologically. The 1912-13 Balkan Wars challenged the imperial rule of Russia, together with other empires, by revealing diverse social dynamics there and Russian Empire’s weakness in controlling its peripheries. Therefore, the Empire applied violence to deal with its borderlands’ unrest and later with the social disorder in metropole. The year of 1917 but only witnessed the culmination of state failure culminated, but also the expanded forms and scope of the social disaster. Although the social disaster dominated the post-1917 Russian Civil War, it initiated in the pre-war period, as the reinforcement of the state rule after the 1905 Revolution showed. Moreover, nationalism did not play that much significant role in the process of decolonization, as many scholars anticipated. The long history of the Russian Empire and its long-term civic relationship with the peripheries in prewar period showed that nationalism did not dominate imperial subjects. While the subsequent fact, the trend toward “state-strengthening” rather than the collapse of the empire after the 1905-1907 crisis, further confirmed that decolonization was not necessarily caused by

Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed taking by surprise therewith not only the international community, but also its own leaders. What brought the superpower down? Its authoritarian and corrupt political system, failure of the planned economy and stagnation, or consistent celebration of national diversity throughout the whole history of the Soviet Union? If the question is why the USSR disintegrated into 15 independent states, then the answer lies in the republican lines which were drawn around ethnicity. In this essay, I argue the primacy of the ethnofederal system and Soviet nation-building policy to the fall of “the last European empire”. First, I will address the main tenets of and motifs behind the Soviet approach to the “nationality question” and how it backfired on the Communist Party and Russian democrats, who strived to preserve the union, seven decades later; then I will discuss political and economic structural flaws of the Soviet system and give reasons for why they could not solely account for the actual break up when examined from a broader perspective; lastly I will analyze mechanisms, predetermined by ethnofederal system and Soviet ethno-cultural policies, that facilitated an avalanche of secessions from the USSR, and sum up my arguments.

In this paper, I will be covering the country of Russia. During this essay, I will

Read, Christopher. From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21. London: UCL Press, 1996. pp. 6, 63.

For my book review I have evaluated and read “Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism” by Marcel H. Van Herpen, published by Rowman & Littlefield. The book consists of three parts: Part 1 “Russia and the Curse of Empire” (chapters 1-5), Part 2 “The Internal War” (chapters 6-9), and Part 3 “The Wheels of War” (chapters 10-18). In writing this review I wish to inform readers about the rise of Russia’s new imperialism. Russia’s empire had not been was not built overseas like other empires, instead it was considered contiguous and continental. The thesis of this book is that unlike in Western Europe, where the process of decolonization was not the same as Russia.

• Russification - an attempt by Alexander III’s govt to restrict the influence of national minorities within the Russian Empire. Russian was declared the official language. State interference in education, administration and religion increased. Nationalities that suffered particularly from discrimination were Ukrainians, Poles, Armenians and Finns.

Russia’s size and location have played a major role in its strategic outlook since the Middle Ages. Russia has no major natural landforms marking its borders, but it relies solely on its relatively inhospitable climate and its forests for defense,as a result, Russian history is a chronicle of periods of expansion and collapse. Traditionally these invasions have come from the steppes and beyond and from the North European Plain.

However, once Stalin took control of the Soviet Union many of these elements changed and set national policy concerning minorities in a different direction that affected policy even after Stalin’s death. In my paper, I will determine exactly how socialism and the Russian nationalism affected policy. How was language policy affected? How did the Soviet Government see its satellites and their perspective desire to communicate in their own ethnic language? How did ordinary Soviet citizens see these desires? Was Russification a policy? And if so, was it a socialist centered policy or was it nationalistic? There are many former Soviet satellites who are still affected by these past policies, it is important to determine if they inherently nationalistic

It is Russia’s belief that annexations of any kind, under any circumstances, are evil. By definition, annexation is the forcible act of retaining a weaker nation by an oppressive, stronger nation. In annexation, the will of the people in the annexed nation is wholly ignored; no free vote is used to determine whether the people wish to be part of the foreign state or not. This is a wholly undemocratic practice and is representative of capitalist greed, completely separate from the workers’ sense of justice (“Report on

Lenin wanted to “gather” the lands of Eastern Europe. His plan was to eliminate nationalism by eliminating the need for it: capitalism. All ethnic nationalism would be brushed aside in preference of class consciousness and unity against previous capitalist abusers.6 However, Lenin (who spent much of his time actually in the west) took for granted one key factor in Russia: that nationalism had actually developed in Russia prior to the revolution.7 He was wrong. So, a nation that was technically not one, was trying to overcome nationalistic feelings with ethnic groups who the majority of had not actually developed nationalism. Lacking a truly organic industrial revolution Russia was on the brink of developing nationalism when the revolution took

All in all, it can best be concluded that my job is to “satisfy the government’s demands, the demands of the writer, and the demands of my own inner feelings” (Jacobson, p. 45). Therefore, by publishing this literary piece during this flourishing age of literature, I am not only appeasing the governments wishes to halt social unrest, but I am simultaneous pleasing both the writers, their audience, and myself. I must admit that why I am not an insurgent, I do seek to develop Russia. I want to help unify the country, and by establishing a veneer of openness between the Tsar and his people is the first step to accomplishing a stable Empire. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, our last Tsar, Nicholas I was seen as a despot towards the people because he believed in the holy trinity: the autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Russianness. In these new times, it is critical for the current Tsar to avoid this

For the Ottoman to progress further it needed a new national mantra for legitimacy in order to earn the respects of its subjects, in addition the empire had to mold a new national ethos . As said before that if “the Empire was to survive in the modern world, it could no longer be a group of disparate communities held together by force and obedience to a ruling family; it needed a unity of consciousness, which would create an active moral link between rulers and the ruled” (Hourani 1991: 52). In this sense the old ways of cementing authority were no longer valid during the mid-nineteenth century. Another country that faced this dilemma was Russia, which ironically, was a longtime rival of the Ottoman Empire for influence in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, yet just like the Ottoman Empire it also faced the challenges of reconciling the increasingly outdated notion of absolute monarchy to modern civic values. For Russia its answer was to turn to an ideology that would seemingly be a unifying factor for the Slavic peoples in Europe with the Czar as its head similar to that of Pan-Islam followed by Abdul-Hamid. In the Russian case it would follow three principles: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. This notion was formulated by the late Russian education minister Sergei Uvarov who stated these principles in an 1832 report outlining the future direction of Russian education.

Before one can analyze the problems that nationalists see in Russia today, the cultivation of the Nationalists political groups during the immediate post-Soviet era must be taken into account. The most obvious contributor to the cultivation of Nationalism

The first group to move towards anything like nationalism was the Slavophile movement that grew during the nineteenth-century. Largely writers and newly graduated university elites, they developed as a reaction to the elites’ identity crisis resulting from increasing western influences in Russia.11 They elevated the peasantry and collective in an effort to bring Russia back to her true identity. What they held to be true “Russianness” was a return to rural, folk Russia of the pre-Petrine era, before Russia had been opened up to the west.12 In reality much of their beliefs about true Russianness were very esoteric.13 The psychology behind this obsession with the peasantry and rural village social structure was an identity crisis. Russian aristocracy

The slavophiles began moving Russia towards nationalism as previously stated. But by the the twentieth century they certainly were still in transit. The slavophiles were purely a movement of the elites. It had no origins or members in the lower classes and certainly not the peasants. In many ways actually the peasants were hostile to the Slavophiles. The romanticism attributed to the peasants was far from the truth. Their lives of folk simplicity and communal perfection was actually a lifee of subsistence farming and dealing with corrupt village elders.18 This only reinforces the reality that the Slavophiles were creating Russian national identity, or imagining it. Slavophiles were trying to create a form of nationalism where there was still