Following the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church has canonized a great number of Russian saints. Whereas in the first millennium of Russian Christianity (988-1988) the Church recognized merely 300 Russian saints, the number had grown to more than 2,000 by 2006. This book explores the remarkable phenomenon of new Russian martyrdom. It outlines the process of canonization, examines how saints are venerated, and relates all this to the ways in which the Russian state and its people have chosen to remember the Soviet Union and commemorate the victims of its purges. The book includes in-depth case studies of particular saints and examines the diverse ways in which they are venerated.
Examines the ideology of sacrifice in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, analyzing a range of fictional and real-life figures who became part of a pantheon of heroes primarily because of their victimhood.
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent is the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image. In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith. Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent argues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.
In examining the re-emergence of Russia's White Movement, Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War gets to the heart of the rich 20th-century memory debates going on in Putin's Russia today. The Kremlin has been giving preference to a Soviet-lite nostalgia that denounces the 1917 Bolshevik revolution but celebrates the birth of a powerful Soviet Union able to bring the country to the forefront of the international scene after the victory in World War II. Yet in parallel, another historical narrative has gradually consolidated on the Russian public scene, one that favours the opposite camp, namely the White movement and the pro-tsarist groups defeated in the early 1920s. This book offers the first comprehensive exploration of this 'White Revenge', looking at the different actors who promote a White and pro-Romanov rehabilitation agenda in the political, ideological and cultural arenas and what this historical agenda might mean for Russia, both today and tomorrow.
The key question asked in this book is, how did Stalinist war cinema present Soviet women's resistance against the Nazi forces during World War II? This book challenges those scholarly works which support the idea of the compatibility of femininity and combat under Stalinism. Despite the Soviet regime’s claim of being opposed to any religious heritage, this book reveals how Stalinist cinema drew on Russian religious tradition and culture in the creation of cinematic representations of Soviet women during WWII. Further, the book shows how the adoption of Russian cultural and religious heritage in Soviet war cinema served Stalinist collective identity-construction policies and state-citizen relations. In so doing, this study contributes to a range of fields within Russian and Soviet studies, including gender studies, cinema studies, Soviet modernity, and the study of identity-construction and state-nation relations. Whilst this book is aimed at researchers and academics, it provides a supplementary source for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Soviet/Russian studies.
The Networks and Systems in Cybernetics section continues to be a highly relevant and rapidly evolving area of research, encompassing modern advancements in informatics and cybernetics within network and system contexts. This field is at the forefront of developing cutting-edge technologies that can tackle complex challenges and improve various aspects of our lives. The latest research in this field is featured in this book, which provides a comprehensive overview of recent methods, algorithms, and designs. The book comprises the refereed proceedings of the Cybernetics Perspectives in Systems session of the 12th Computer Science Online Conference 2023 (CSOC 2023), which was held online in April 2023. The book offers a unique opportunity to explore the latest advances in cybernetics and informatics and their applications in a range of domains. It brings together experts from various disciplines to share their insights and collaborate on research that can shape the future of our world. One of the key themes of this section is the application of cybernetics in intelligent systems. This area has significant potential to revolutionize a range of industries. Researchers are exploring how cybernetic principles can be used to create intelligent systems that can learn, adapt, and optimize their performance over time.
Why did the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia include more financiers than medical doctors? Rather than caring for the victims of war and revolution, its members seemed more intent on negotiating contracts with the Kerensky government, and subsequently the Bolshevik regime. In a courageous investigation, Antony Sutton establishes tangible historical links between US capitalists and Russian communists. Drawing on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories, Sutton reveals: The role of Morgan banking executives in funnelling illegal Bolshevik gold into the US; the co-option of the American Red Cross by powerful Wall Street forces; the intervention by Wall Street sources to free the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose aim was to topple the Russian government; the deals made by major corporations to capture the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime; the secret sponsoring of Communism by leading businessmen, who publicly championed free enterprise. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution traces the foundations of Western funding of the Soviet Union. Dispassionately, and with overwhelming documentation, the author details a crucial phase in the establishment of Communist Russia. This classic study - first published in 1974 and part of a key trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series include Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler and a study of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 Presidential election in the United States.)
From the end of the Mongol Empire to today, Russian history is a tale of cultural, political, economic and military interaction with Western powers. The depth of this relationship has created a geopolitical dilemma: Russia has persistently been both attracted to and at odds with Western ideas and technological development, which have tended to threaten Russia's sense of identity and create destabilizing divisions within society. Simultaneously, deepening involvement in Western international affairs brought meddling in Russian domestic politics and military invasion. This book examines how the centuries-old Western threat has shaped Russia's political and strategic structures, creating a culture of security rooted in vigilance against Western influence and interference.
Though the institution of the Gulag was nominally closed over half a decade ago, it lives on as an often hotly contested site of memory in the post-socialist era. This ethnographic study takes a holistic, comprehensive approach to understanding memories of the Gulag, and particularly the language of commemoration that surrounds it in present-day Russian society. It focuses on four regions of particular historical significance—the Solovetsky Islands, the Komi Republic, the Perm region, and Kolyma—to carefully explore how memories become a social phenomenon, how objects become heritage, and how the human need to create sites of memory has preserved the Gulag in specific ways today.
The book argues that religion is a system of significant meanings that have an impact on other systems and spheres of social life, including cultural memory. The editors call for a postsecular turn in memory studies which would provide a more reflective and meaningful approach to the constant interplay between the religious and the secular. This opens up new perspectives on the intersection of memory and religion and helps memory scholars become more aware of the religious roots of the language they are using in their studies of memory. By drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the contributors to this volume explain how the interactions between the religious and the secular produce new memory forms and content in the heterogenous societies of the present-day world. These analyzed cases demonstrate that religion has a significant impact on cultural memory, family memory and the contemporary politics of history in secularized societies. At the same time, politics, grassroots movements and different secular agents and processes have so much influence on the formation of memory by religious actors that even religious, ecclesiastic and confessional memories are affected by the secular. This volume is ideal for students and scholars of memory studies, religious studies and history.
