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This thesis analyzes the use of film in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as extensions of propaganda and sociopolitical indoctrination within both regimes. Moreover, this thesis analyzes the ways in which each respective nation's concept of homeland ('Heimat' in German, 'Rodina' in Russian) coincided with political thought. Through this, both regimes utilized cinema as a platform for propagating ideas of homeland via the portrayal of the perfect citizen of their regime. This study demonstrates this through the analysis of Nazi German and Soviet Russian films of similar content, themes, and production dates. This study thus argues that a homeland, as demonstrated through select films produced by each regime between the years of 1933-1945, is comprised of its people, whom each State attempted to mold into perfect citizens. Although ideas of what defined the perfect citizen varied between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, many similarities between them are to be drawn. Dissecting these similarities allows for greater academic understanding of the atrocities and events that occurred throughout the twentieth century in the name of both schools of thought.

Abstract: This thesis explores the evolution of Soviet diplomatic policies with respect to the disputed ownership of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and the responses of the three Chinese political authorities in Beijing, Guangzhou and Fengtian from 1917 to 1925. It restructures the analysis of available sources through horizontal analysis and comparison, in order to unveil a “parallel diplomacy” on the Soviet part, and the roles the three Chinese authorities played in this grand diplomatic game. From the Revolution in 1917 until the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925, Moscow’s contacts with all three authorities were initiated almost simultaneously with three different purposes, political legitimacy, justification of ideology, and practical leverage respectively. In response, the Beijing government took a relatively active approach toward reclaiming the ownership of the Railway, whereas Sun in Guangzhou was somewhat passive in dealing with Soviet claims. Fengtian warlord Zhang Zuolin’s approaches were quite ambiguous, as he had to balance the Japanese force in Manchuria as well. In general, the thesis reveals a balance between propaganda and national interests in Soviet diplomatic policy-making, and evaluates the effectiveness of Chinese politicians’ responses to Soviet Russia.

Taking as its theme the unsayable and the unsaid in post-Stalin Russia, this interdisciplinary dissertation pushes scholars to see more of the Soviet experience than the usual `totalitarianism' lens would allow. Its six chapters apply pressure to the cold war repressive hypothesis that casts the whispering citizens of Stalin's Russia as restored to speech during Khrushchev's cultural thaw only to be muted once more in the late sixties by political stagnation. The prevalence of this view in Russian cultural studies and national collective memory has rendered it rather difficult to write about late socialism until recently, when scholars started to take a multisensory approach to the Soviet past--not only listening to the verbal narratives of the era (whether official or dissenting), but also looking at the dynamic tensions between socialist speech and the socialist body. To counter the commonplace of Soviet history that makes quiet consonant with submission or complicity, this study attends instead to the manners in which Soviet subjects opted for silence to speak truth to power, as with the Aesopian gestural language of avant-garde pantomimists. It also pursues the wily ways that subjects presumed or produced as unspeaking or unspeakable--including the deaf-mute, the racial primitive, the sexual deviant, and the illiterate criminal--performed the silences imputed to them to say something else and, so doing, improvised interesting and unexpected scripts for late socialism.

2999-01-01