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Prof. Dr.
Olena Palko
Department of History
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Red Tower of Babel: Soviet minorities experiment in interwar Ukraine
Research Project  | 3 Project Members
This project aims to examine a unique minorities experiment as implemented by the Soviet government during the 1920s. It was designed to propagate national differences and provide each ethnic group with equal access to state and party institutions, judicial defence, and education in native languages. By employing this strategy, Soviet leadership aimed to secure the loyalty of its ethnically diverse population, and engage them in its socialist project. But those policies had the opposite effect. In less than a decade Soviet authorities reversed their policies and respond with violence, subjecting its minority populations to Russification and assimilation, ethnic terror, and deportations. The proposed project builds upon the existing scholarship to provide a unique account of the Soviet minority experiment as designed and implemented during the 1920s-early 1930s within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Ukraine served as a trendsetting laboratory for Soviet minorities policy Union-wide. While few existing studies look at certain minority groups, this research aims to provide a first-of-its-kind comprehensive study of the Soviet minority regime based on a variety of primary sources both from central and local archives. The Soviet minorities policies are set against the contemporary international attempts to provide protection and guarantee the legal and cultural status of national minorities under the Versailles system and the League of Nations. Unlike most studies on the Soviet nationality policy, this project makes Soviet ethnic minorities its primary focus, scrutinising the Soviet minority experiment at various levels of power, from top to bottom. At the top level, it looks at the state strategies to organise the society along ethnic lines; at the middle local level, it studies how local party officials and minority specialists translated the state-imposed vision of ethnic proliferation to the local conditions. Lastly, at the bottom level, it looks at the way education and cultural workers adapted and carried out those programmes on the ground and investigates how people digested the new ethnic regime and adapted (if at all) their everyday life to the new expectations. The study is centred around the examination of three main strategies of the Soviet government that concerned national minorities (the strategy of a Soviet 'civilising mission', the strategy of ethnic proliferation, and the strategy of ethnic equalisation). The primary material gathered by the project, combined with its theoretical framing and comprehensive perspective, will form a significant and original contribution to the historiography of the Soviet and Eastern European interwar-period studies.
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Images of Intelligentsia in Soviet Visual Culture
PhD Project  | 2 Project Members
My dissertational research covers the images of the entire Soviet intelligentsia, precisely - the European part of the Soviet Union in the period from 1922 to 1991: the Byelorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Estonian SSR. A caricature is a rather complex construct that, by ridiculing certain shortcomings, creates a special reality. Its main goal is to broadcast a certain idea, and not to display the existing reality. Therefore, in this sense, we can call a caricature a simulacrum. Based on this idea, the "special" world of caricature requires a special "reading". The uniqueness of the pictorial language of caricature is due to the close combination of iconic elements (signs-images) with phraseological units. The latter are based on the deep cultural codes of a particular society. That is, the graphic and verbal components of cartoons are closely related to socio-cultural, ideological and other codes, which include iconic, conventional, "mimic-graphic" signs (marked gestures and movements of the character). Since a caricature is an image of ideas, there are special channels for transmitting information that broadcast certain figurative, subject and spatio-temporal situational contexts. These contexts or "worlds" form as a result an idea that is read by the recipient and perceived as something integral. "The world of the image/work" is a multidimensional, artistically reproduced reality. The most significant elements of this world are characters, which, in combination with situational contexts, form plots and/or images. The macrocosm includes what is called the "components of representation (artistic objectivity)": "the world of ideas", "the world of things", "artistic space", "portrait of characters". An artist-cartoonist can either use both one channel of information or combine them with each other. Despite the fact that the intelligentsia, according to the well-known formula "2+1", was not attributed to a separate class of Soviet society, however, in the cartoons we can talk about the allocatåion of a special place for this "stratum", where those who worked in intellectual professions are opposed to workers and peasants. During the period under study, caricature art was aimed at creating the image of a single Soviet people without national, and in some periods, class differences (an attempt to blur the boundaries between workers, peasants and intelligentsia). Despite the above-mentioned dominant accents of the Soviet metanarrative, we can detect many cultural and value differences in various images of the Soviet intelligentsia.