Volume Fourteen, 2021-2022
The UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies
Volume Fourteen, 2020–2021
Editor-in-Chief
Roman Koropeckyj (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Managing Editor
Lydia Roberts (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Editorial Assistants
Manon Snyder (Political Science and Environmental Science, UCLA)
Grace Vertanessian (French, UCLA)
Online Editor
Susan Bauckus (Center for World Languages, UCLA)
Undergraduate Advisor
Yelena Furman (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Editorial Board
Ashley Blum (Political Science, UCLA)
Kevin M. Gatter (Political Science, UCLA)
Natalia Kuvelas (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Michael Lavery (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Cooper Lynn (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Elena Makarova (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
David Miller (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Polina Varfolomeeva (Slavic, East European, and Eurasian
Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
Andrei Tarkovsky's Linguistic Subversion of the Abrahamic Knight of Faith
Aurora Amidon, Bard College
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This essay examines the language that Andrei Tarkovsky used to interpret the Binding of Isaac in his final film, The Sacrifice (1986). Employing semantics and scripture, Tarkovsky demonstrates the inherent border between faith and the subject who questions it in the character of Alexander, a middle-aged man struggling with his relationship to God in the midst of an impending nuclear Holocaust. Tarkovsky’s film intertextually highlights source material that addresses the Binding of Isaac and other interpretations of Abrahamic figures, namely Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601). Both Alexander and the titular hero of Hamlet are bound by their duty to family ties and torn by their increasing distance from reality—impossible situations that leave them with no option but to keep babbling “words, words, words!” until they finally decide to act, with tragic results. In contrast, Abraham demonstrates faith when he raises a hand to sacrifice his son and is stopped by God. In his analysis of Abraham’s speech, Kierkegaard characterizes him as an emigrant from the ethical sphere, stating that he has entered the absurd (the realm of faith) the moment he agrees to bring his son to Mt. Moriah. This paper challenges Kierkegaard’s view, however, and posits that language, rather than action, moves Abraham from one realm to the other. Based on analysis of Kierkegaard, Genesis 22, and Hamlet, this paper explicates how Tarkovsky develops the concepts of language, communication, faith, and silence in his film.
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Irina Odoevtseva's Isolde: Subverting the Archetypical Russian Heroine through Émigré Women's Literature
Alexandra Ivanova, University of California, Los Angeles
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Irina Odoevtseva’s Isolde (1929) is a key piece of first-wave émigré literature that depicts the unique experience of childhood in exile. The protagonist, Liza, faces the instability of both an absent mother and physical detachment from her homeland. Struggling to establish her own identity, Liza’s tumultuous path to adulthood is marked by alienation, longing, and senseless tragedy. This unique account of life in emigration parallels the same diasporic longing for Russia depicted by Odoevtseva’s male contemporaries, but as a female coming-of-age story—a new iteration of the heroine in the Russian novel. After addressing the context of the novel’s publication in the culturally conservative Russian emigre community, this paper outlines the treatment of female heroines in Russian literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing on feminist scholarship to highlight the gender imbalances of Odoevtseva’s own literary milieu. Examining Isolde and its literary context, this paper argues that scholarly revival of the novel, which gives narrative priority to an adolescent heroine, helps to bring a new type of heroine, one largely unwritten and unnoticed in Russian and Russian émigré literature, to the forefront.
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“The Power of Innocence, Honesty, and Purity”: George Sand's Edmée Character in Dostoevsky's Novels
Sarah Kirker Wappel, University of British Columbia
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Scholars often cite George Sand as one of Dostoevsky’s major influences. The specificities of this influence are, however, rarely explored. Dostoevsky uses the character Edmée from George Sand’s Mauprat (1837) as a model for many of the female characters in his novels, including Katerina Ivanovna (The Brothers Karamazov 1880), Dunya Raskolnikova, and Sonya Marmeladova (Crime and Punishment 1866). Like their prototype, they are all self-sacrificing, honest, innocent, and proud. This paper examines the ways in which Dostoevsky varies the features of this female character type and how he places her in different situations in order to explore her capacity for good as well as her reactions, motivations, and especially her relationships. This reveals how the capacity of women to exercise agency establishes them as equals to their male counterparts, resulting in a better relationship between the two as well as with those who surround them.
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What Is to Be Done? and the Novel as a Means of Political Agitation
Shuyan Liu, Vanderbilt University
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Considered by Joseph Frank to be “the nineteenth-century Russian novel that has had the greatest influence on Russian society,” Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? is a radical experiment with a novel’s form and content that puts into play the connection between literature and reality. Written by Chernyshevsky while incarcerated as a political prisoner, the 1863 novel had a profound influence on its contemporary public and on the shaping of the Russian Revolution. This article aims to explore the relationship between the novel’s agitational effect and its formal elements. After considering the definition of the novel genre in both the Western and Russian tradition, the article will then analyze Chernyshevsky’s creation of a complex normative universe that encodes the revolutionary ideals he envisions for his public. Focusing specifically on the development of character and authorial voice in the novel as well as the role of censorship, this article aims to establish how the formal features that are susceptible to criticism are integral to the novel’s aesthetic, affective, and revolutionary power to mobilize and transform its audience.
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Between Russia and Sredniaia Aziia: Kazakh Alterity in Historical Context
James Nee, University of California, Los Angeles
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This paper traces the historical development of Kazakh alterity under Russian hegemony, comparing the Kazakh case to the contemporaneous development of Uzbek and Kyrgyz alterities. Following Zygmunt Bauman and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this paper delineates Russia's colonizing influence over Central Asian societies between cannibalizing (“anthropophagic”) and isolating (“anthropoemic”) impulses, arguing that Russian strategy among the Kazakhs relied more on the “anthropophagic” (suspension of “Otherness”) than on the “anthropoemic” (rejection and alienation of “Otherness”). The Kazakhs’ traditionally nomadic culture and geographical proximity to Russia were key factors in the development and implementation of Russian state policy in Central Asia. Although the nomadic Kazakhs were considered more “primitive” than the agriculturally oriented Uzbeks, in late Imperial times the Kazakh intelligentsia was more closely tied to the Russian nobility and its cultural sphere. After 1917, Soviet leadership enforced collectivization particularly harshly among the Kazakhs; the population was routed by famine and then forced into smaller and smaller areas of land as East Slavic peasants were resettled en masse into the Kazakhs' former herding grounds. Although the region became a sovereign nation-state in 1936, Soviet leadership never allowed the Kazakhs ideological independence, a phenomenon exemplified in top-down messaging during the Second World War; while Uzbeks received propaganda that spoke to their unique priorities and the Kyrgyz were allowed a high degree of autonomy in their propaganda production, materials distributed to the Kazakhs were overwhelmingly Russocentric.
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The Motherland Calls: War, Victory, and Motherhood in Soviet Culture from 1946 to 1970
Anastasia M. Heaton, Westmont College
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This paper traces the evolution of depictions of Mother Russia and its repercussions on Soviet historical memory leading to the war memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad, “The Motherland Calls!” It seeks to distinguish between the post-war gendering of the “Great Patriotic War” as inherently masculine and the subsequently feminine understanding of victory within Soviet memory politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Using the evolving imagery of Mother Russia throughout this period, but focusing on the memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad, the paper posits both a sociopolitical and art historical framework in order to understand the role of gender in Soviet memory politics in the mid-twentieth century.
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Selective Memory: How Khrushchev Used the Cult of Dzerzhinsky to Avoid Addressing the Great Terror
Kathryn McConaughy, Willamette University
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Following Nikita Khrushchev’s destalinization speech in 1956, the state security organs were rehabilitated, and the figure of Felix Dzerzhinsky loomed large once again in Soviet society, despite the recent Great Terror (1936–1938) and the pivotal role the security organs had played in it. The NKVD of the Terror, so the narrative went, had deviated from the ideals and principles of Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka but those principles had now been restored, heralding a return to the principled, gentlemanly, humane secret policing of the early 1920s. This narrative was based on a distorted, sanitized view of the Cheka and ignored the fact that the mindset and methods of the Great Terror had already developed in the earliest days of the Soviet secret police. This dark truth was obscured by the cult of Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka, which cast them as moral exemplars, protector saints, and paragons of military humanism. Khrushchev used this cult to rehabilitate the Cheka and bypass any conversation about the Great Terror and the regime’s culpability for it. This is an ongoing issue in Russian society because the cult of state security has never wholly disappeared and lives on in the Cheka’s modern successor organization, the FSB. Indeed, the trauma of the Great Terror has never been seriously addressed within Russian society, in part because of the persistence of this cult. Understanding the ways in which the cult of the Cheka has censored Soviet history will be an important component of that process.
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Gorbachev and GRIT: The End of the Cold War and the Fall of the Soviet Union
Joseph Matveyenko, University of California, Los Angeles
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This paper examines Mikhail Gorbachev’s use of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT) to initiate arms control with the US and end the Cold War. Gorbachev transcended Soviet ideology, making unilateral concessions to the West, including an end to external expansion and a refusal to use force to prop up the Eastern bloc, a moratorium on nuclear testing, and unprecedented support for the United Nations. Although the US did not reciprocate many of Gorbachev’s initiatives, his concessions and public announcement of cooperative intent helped restore interbloc dialogue and create a climate conducive to nuclear disarmament. However, Gorbachev’s “new thinking” went beyond foreign policy and was also tightly connected to his domestic political and economic reform in an attempt to rescue a stagnating Soviet economy. The failures of his economic restructuring and Gorbachev’s inability to receive Western support for a democratic transition combined with growing internal dissatisfaction with the Soviet leadership largely contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. These failures highlight the shortcomings of the GRIT approach and its potentially destabilizing domestic effects.
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Centralized Power and the Demise of Community-Based Healthcare in Kazakhstan
Tyler Le, University of California, Los Angeles
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This paper examines the political and historical factors behind Kazakhstan’s failure to achieve universal, community-based primary health care as outlined in the Declaration of Alma-Ata of 1978. The Soviet health system that preceded the Kazakh health system was characterized by increasing centralization in the early twentieth century. Issues arising from the centralization of health care, such as the deprofessionalization of health care workers, bribery, inadequate primary health care, and the ultimate failure to prevent disease carried over into the health system of the newly formed Republic of Kazakhstan in 1991. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan attempted significant healthcare reforms. However, poor funding and resource allocation, lack of transparency, and an overabundance of narrowly-specialized health facilities continue to plague the country’s health system. The paper argues that the Kazakh government should increase healthcare spending and reallocate funds towards preventing disease and increasing healthcare workers’ salaries to address these failures. It concludes by analyzing Kazakhstan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting that, although the Kazakh government has taken measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, a lack of governmental transparency makes it difficult to evaluate the success of those policies.
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Media Influence in International Conflict: A Case Study of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War
Tamari Dzotsenidze, University of California, Santa Barbara
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This paper examines the media response to the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, examining Georgian, Russian, and international media coverage. Though tensions in the region had been building for decades, the international community turned a blind eye to the conflict until war broke out in 2008, catapulting Georgia onto the international stage. This was a battle of two militaries, but also of two competing media strategies: the well-documented Russian propaganda machine versus Georgia’s comprehensive public relations framework. Despite the immediate success of their Western-focused messaging during the war, the Georgian communications response has been understudied in comparison to that of Russia. In the years following the 2008 war, examination of the conflict by international governing bodies and scholars in Georgia, Russia, and the West have largely agreed on a version of events that validates the Russian claim that Georgia initiated the conflict, although other controversies remain. The media strategies that arose during the conflict have continued influence, particularly in the Russian case, where official and unofficial strategies to spread disinformation and influence media coverage can, in hindsight, be linked to the conflict in Ukraine that began shortly after the Georgian war. In this paper, I take a critical look at both sides of the conflict, examining the impacts and outcomes of the two media strategies and framing them within the larger study of international relations and war.
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Perceptions and Expressions of Yugonostalgia in the ex-Yugoslav Region
Mina Cvjetinović and Sedina Velić, University of California, Los Angeles
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Following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1992, the nations of former Yugoslavia dealt with “Yugonostalgia”, or how they looked back on their time as part of the republic. This paper delves into how each nation remembers Yugoslavia, using Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia as a framework for understanding which type of nostalgia these memories correspond to. The experiences of different ethnic groups were shaped by economic, cultural, and sociopolitical factors, which determine whether a nation’s nostalgia can be categorized as restorative, reflexive, passive, or emancipative.
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