Olga Bertelsen | Tiffin University (original) (raw)
Papers by Olga Bertelsen
Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia, 2023
This article examines the activities of two Russian front organizations targeting Western academi... more This article examines the activities of two Russian front
organizations targeting Western academia and broader international
audiences. These activities are part of contemporary Russian information
warfare and are fundamentally entrenched in Soviet intelligence traditions,
aiming to reinforce Russian official historical narratives and propaganda.
The objectives of these organizations include undermining Western scholars’ critical perspectives and shaping public opinion favorable to the Russian Federation’s foreign policy and its methods of governing. Backed by the Russian secret services and the presidential administration, these
organizations engage in using and coopting academics who help them
disseminate Russian historical myths and propaganda that demonize the
West in general and Ukraine in particular. An analysis of selected cases of
Russian influence on Western academia and public opinion present a sample of the wide range of Russian intelligence practices symptomatic of the Russian anti-Western information campaign.
Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia, 2023
Bertelsen's Response to Kasianov's Letter to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of ... more Bertelsen's Response to Kasianov's Letter to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
(re: my article "Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia," https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2022.2147807)
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 2022
Abstract This archival study focuses on secrecy, Soviet disinformation campaigns, and active meas... more Abstract This archival study focuses on secrecy, Soviet disinformation campaigns, and active measures designed to divert the attention of the international community from the 1986 Chernobyl accident, and to conceal state mismanagement, violence, and inefficiencies of the Soviet Union nuclear industry. More specifically, it illuminates the implications of the Soviet cover-up operation and its ultimate failure, particularly due to the efforts of the American intelligence community, including the CIA. American technological progress and intelligence were instrumental to the CIA’s understandings of the damage caused by Chernobyl, the dynamics of decontamination and its ethnic discriminatory practices, as well as the extent of the Soviet disinformation campaign. Importantly, Soviet active measures designed to obscure the scale and the consequences of the disaster had the opposite effect from what was expected, helping the American intelligence community accurately predict the potential political crisis in the USSR exacerbated by the Soviet cover-up operations and state violence. American analysts argued that popular concerns about the violent nature of the Soviet regime and discriminatory draft and decontamination policies would persist, amplifying ethnic tensions in Soviet republics. In hindsight, their analysis had profound predictive value.
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, 2014
This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nation... more This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nationalists who constituted approximately one-tenth of those who fell victim to political psychiatry. More specifically, through the spatial examination of two Ukrainian psychiatric clinics' practices and the individual history of the Ukrainian dissident Victor Borovsky, this study analyses the effectiveness of silence that surrounded the cases of "psychiatric patients" in the context of increasing discontent in the republic and the national liberation movement. The medicalization of social control, psychiatric abuses, state violence and brutality exacerbated non-violent popular resistance in Ukraine, which culminated in political activism of Ukrainian patriots in the late 1980s, contributing greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Ukraine. Despite these ultimate outcomes, forced silence through psychiatric terror was an effective tool in the Soviet arsenal of suppression.
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence
Nationalities Papers
This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in th... more This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in the 1970s, a Soviet institution that functioned as an ideological organ fighting against Ukrainian nationalists domestically and abroad. The central figure of this article is Heorhii Shevel who governed the Ministry from 1970 to 1980 and whose tactics, strategies, and practices reveal the existence of a distinct phenomenon in the Soviet Union—the nationally conscious political elite with double loyalties who, by action or inaction, expanded the space of nationalism in Ukraine. This research illuminates a paradox of pervasive Soviet power, which produced an institution that supported and reinforced Soviet “anti-nationalist” ideology, simultaneously creating an environment where heterodox views or sentiments were stimulated and nurtured.
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal
This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a reg... more This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a regimented area around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine) established in 1986, where the largest recorded nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The mass pilgrimage movement transformed the place into an open air museum, a space that preserves the remnants of Soviet culture, revealing human tragedies of displacement and deaths, and the nature of state nuclear power. This study examines the impact of the site on its visitors and the motivations for their persistence and activities in the Zone, and argues that through photography, cartography, exploration, and discovery, the pilgrims attempt to decode the historical and ideological meaning of Chornobyl and its significance for future generations. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political space of the Zone helps them establish a conceptual and mnemonic connection between the Soviet past and Ukraine's present and future. Their practices, in turn, help maintain the Zone's spatial and epistemological continuity. Importantly, Chornobyl seems to be polysemic in nature, inviting interpretations and shaping people's national and intellectual identities.
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2013
ABSTRACT
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2013
In 1936, Mykhailo Proskuriakov, the interrogator assigned to the Ukrainian artists known as the B... more In 1936, Mykhailo Proskuriakov, the interrogator assigned to the Ukrainian artists known as the Boichukists, said of Ivan Lipkovs'kyi, an artist and professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, that his guilt resided in "drinking his tea somewhere where he should not have. " 1 Th e "somewhere" in question was the home of Mykhailo Boichuk, Lipkovs'kyi's teacher. Boichuk once stated that a great wall, similar to the Great Wall of China ("a barrier even for birds"), should be erected between Russia and Ukraine so that Ukrainian culture had an opportunity to develop. When this statement reached the NKVD, 2 friends, colleagues, and guests of the world-famous artist began to disappear one by one. Ivan Padalka and Vasyl' Sedliar, both of whome were friends with Boichuk, were arrested by the NKVD at that same time. Th ey happened to live in an equally dangerous place: Budynok Slovo (the House of Writers). 3 In the early 1930s, having tea in potentially dangerous places like Boichuk's residence was considered a conspiratorial act; the Soviet secret police characterized such gathering places as "nationalist nests" to be eradicated. In the 1920s, Ukraine constituted a broad and largely indeterminate battleground in terms of geography, culture, and intellect, but the 1930s fl attened the social landscape and marked the triumph of Stalinist values. Subsequently, political and cultural discourses adhered to the most recent Party resolutions. State violence swept away thousands of people in Ukraine. 4 Precisely during this decade, the fate of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and Ukrainian identity was ultimately forged for generations to come. Th is temporal context (the 1930s) is as important as the spatial one (the Budynok Slovo). A close and thorough examination of places of state violence-where the creation of the new Soviet intelligentsia and destruction of the national intelligentsia occurred-provides us with a nuanced understanding of various human experiences under Stalinism. Space and place are reasonably new concepts in contemporary historical analysis. However, historians employ them more and more frequently as metaphorical and methodological tools to investigate various topics ranging from state violence and nationalism to festivals and food studies. Soviet studies, especially, has benefi ted from a spatial approach, as it has helped scholars analyze the complexity of the Soviet Union/region/city as a geographical place and, most importantly, as a cultural phenomenon. 5 Th is approach proves to be particularly useful in the Ukrainian context because it reveals the specifi city of the place and the interplay of regions/borders/cities/places, people's borderland experiences, ethnicity, fl uid identity, and local politics.
Europe-Asia Studies, 2013
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2016
This study examines Soviet nationalities policies and the elimination of Ukrainian intellectuals ... more This study examines Soviet nationalities policies and the elimination of Ukrainian intellectuals during the Great Terror in Ukraine by exploring the individual history of the Ukrainian literary figure Mykhailo Bykovets', one of the founders of the literary association "Pluh" (Plough) and one of the initiators of the Literary Discussion that emerged in the mid-twenties. The research explores the modus operandi of a key Soviet institution, the GPU/NKVD, and its proactive methods of the de-nationalization of Ukrainian society. Bykovets's criminal case seems to be axiomatic of the Great Terror, exhibiting common patterns of the secret organs' procedural and investigative tactics. Through an analysis of Bykovets's archival file, and the themes and questions that were central to the investigation of Bykovets's "crimes," the study illuminates the persistent national vector of repression against the representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the Great Terror.
Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repressio... more Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repression. This article demonstrates how the party and the Soviet secret police discredited and eliminated this intelligentsia. Leading party officials perceived Galicians as possessing a strong sense of national identity and internal unity, and therefore an obstacle to plans for homogenizing Soviet Ukraine. The research draws on Ukrainian periodicals published in the early 1930s, on files relating to two major group criminal cases that were conducted in the early 1930s and that are now available to scholars in the Security Service archives of Ukraine (the former Soviet secret police archives), and on recent scholarship in the field. The archival evidence demonstrates that the cases were fabricated and the charges against Galicians were constructed as part of a planned "anti-nationalist" campaign.
This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin's collectivization campaign in t... more This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin's collectivization campaign in the context of peasant resistance, state violence, and the famine in 1928–1929, and illuminates the primary function of strategic silence—an information blockade which creates a space for violence and human suffering. Only in silence does the landscape of violence emerge and its spiral dynamics consume everyone, assailants and victims, proceeding swiftly to the eventual destruction of this landscape. In Ukraine, strategic silence and the relatively hermetic information blockade highlights the intentional nature of state violence: it produced a ghetto of exclusion that helped crush peasant resistance to collectivization and prevented Ukraine's potential secession from the Union. More profoundly, the politics of silence is analyzed as ''cultural'' violence and one of the most important building blocks in the foundation of genocide that routinely provokes and escalates direct violence, a phenomenon which culminates in massacres, repressions, and famines, as happened in the Ukrainian case.
This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s,... more This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, and considers the formation of an efficient synergetic structure of Soviet secret organs in Moscow and Ukraine. The narrative identifies participants from central and regional secret departments who engaged in systematic mass operations against Zionists, and reveals that despite Moscow's initial vacillation between tolerance and persecution of Zionist parties, the Soviet secret police exhibited a continual escalation of repressions against Zionists. The policies of the secret police in Ukraine illuminate their personal adaptation to the coercive Soviet system of centralisation and ideological exclusion.
This study explores contemporary Russian memory politics, and analyzes the ideological underpinni... more This study explores contemporary Russian memory politics, and analyzes the ideological underpinnings of the 2011 Moscow court verdict that criminalized a Ukrainian scholarly publication, accusing it of inciting ethnic, racial, national, social, and religious hatred. This accusation is examined in the context of Russia’s attempts to control the official historical narrative. Special attention is paid to the role of Russian cultural and democratic civic institutions, such as the Moscow library of Ukrainian literature and Memorial, in the micro-history of this publication. Deconstructing the judicial reaction of Russian lawmakers toward the Ukrainian publication, the study analyzes the Russian political elite’s attitudes toward the “Ukrainian” historical interpretations of Stalin’s terror and other aspects of common Soviet history, and demonstrates the interconnectedness of the preceding Soviet and modern Russian methods of control over education, history, and culture. Language and legislation play an important role in Russian memory politics that shape the popular historical imagination and camouflage the authoritarian methods of governing in Russia. The case of the Ukrainian publication is contextualized by examining the cult of chekism and the discursive significance of anti-Ukrainianism, salient elements in Russian memory politics that have transcended national borders.
This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nation... more This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nationalists who constituted approximately one-tenth of those who fell victim to political psychiatry. More specifically, through the spatial examination of two Ukrainian psychiatric clinics’ practices and the individual history of the Ukrainian dissident Victor Borovsky, this study analyzes the effectiveness of silence that surrounded the cases of “psychiatric patients” in the context of increasing discontent in the republic and the national liberation movement. The medicalization of social control, psychiatric abuses, state violence and brutality exacerbated non-violent popular resistance in Ukraine, which culminated in political activism of Ukrainian patriots in the late 1980s, contributing greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Ukraine. Despite these ultimate outcomes, forced silence through psychiatric terror was an effective tool in the Soviet arsenal of suppression.
This article focuses on the formation of an imperial and colonial consciousness in Joseph Brodsky... more This article focuses on the formation of an imperial and colonial consciousness in Joseph Brodsky, one of the most outstanding Russian poets. Conceptually, this study should be placed at the intersection of postcolonial studies, social history and cultural history. More specifically, through the lens of Brodsky’s individual history and the political and cultural landscape of the last century in Soviet space, it explores his convictions and mental cultural geographies, and offers explanations of Brodsky’s attitudes towards the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian/Soviet empires and his anti-Ukrainian stance. This paper argues that the term ideological “evolution” is not applicable in Brodsky’s case, and illustrates that his philosophy or worldview was rather stiff and inflexible. Brodsky was very much a product of Russian literature and its two-century imperial literary tradition, and less influenced by the Soviet system which he largely despised and ignored. This tradition helped shape Brodsky’s subconscious mental map of Russia and its language, the geographical borders of which were rather rigid.
Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia, 2023
This article examines the activities of two Russian front organizations targeting Western academi... more This article examines the activities of two Russian front
organizations targeting Western academia and broader international
audiences. These activities are part of contemporary Russian information
warfare and are fundamentally entrenched in Soviet intelligence traditions,
aiming to reinforce Russian official historical narratives and propaganda.
The objectives of these organizations include undermining Western scholars’ critical perspectives and shaping public opinion favorable to the Russian Federation’s foreign policy and its methods of governing. Backed by the Russian secret services and the presidential administration, these
organizations engage in using and coopting academics who help them
disseminate Russian historical myths and propaganda that demonize the
West in general and Ukraine in particular. An analysis of selected cases of
Russian influence on Western academia and public opinion present a sample of the wide range of Russian intelligence practices symptomatic of the Russian anti-Western information campaign.
Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia, 2023
Bertelsen's Response to Kasianov's Letter to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of ... more Bertelsen's Response to Kasianov's Letter to the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence
(re: my article "Russian Front Organizations and Western Academia," https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2022.2147807)
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 2022
Abstract This archival study focuses on secrecy, Soviet disinformation campaigns, and active meas... more Abstract This archival study focuses on secrecy, Soviet disinformation campaigns, and active measures designed to divert the attention of the international community from the 1986 Chernobyl accident, and to conceal state mismanagement, violence, and inefficiencies of the Soviet Union nuclear industry. More specifically, it illuminates the implications of the Soviet cover-up operation and its ultimate failure, particularly due to the efforts of the American intelligence community, including the CIA. American technological progress and intelligence were instrumental to the CIA’s understandings of the damage caused by Chernobyl, the dynamics of decontamination and its ethnic discriminatory practices, as well as the extent of the Soviet disinformation campaign. Importantly, Soviet active measures designed to obscure the scale and the consequences of the disaster had the opposite effect from what was expected, helping the American intelligence community accurately predict the potential political crisis in the USSR exacerbated by the Soviet cover-up operations and state violence. American analysts argued that popular concerns about the violent nature of the Soviet regime and discriminatory draft and decontamination policies would persist, amplifying ethnic tensions in Soviet republics. In hindsight, their analysis had profound predictive value.
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, 2014
This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nation... more This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nationalists who constituted approximately one-tenth of those who fell victim to political psychiatry. More specifically, through the spatial examination of two Ukrainian psychiatric clinics' practices and the individual history of the Ukrainian dissident Victor Borovsky, this study analyses the effectiveness of silence that surrounded the cases of "psychiatric patients" in the context of increasing discontent in the republic and the national liberation movement. The medicalization of social control, psychiatric abuses, state violence and brutality exacerbated non-violent popular resistance in Ukraine, which culminated in political activism of Ukrainian patriots in the late 1980s, contributing greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Ukraine. Despite these ultimate outcomes, forced silence through psychiatric terror was an effective tool in the Soviet arsenal of suppression.
International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence
Nationalities Papers
This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in th... more This article examines the goals and practices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine in the 1970s, a Soviet institution that functioned as an ideological organ fighting against Ukrainian nationalists domestically and abroad. The central figure of this article is Heorhii Shevel who governed the Ministry from 1970 to 1980 and whose tactics, strategies, and practices reveal the existence of a distinct phenomenon in the Soviet Union—the nationally conscious political elite with double loyalties who, by action or inaction, expanded the space of nationalism in Ukraine. This research illuminates a paradox of pervasive Soviet power, which produced an institution that supported and reinforced Soviet “anti-nationalist” ideology, simultaneously creating an environment where heterodox views or sentiments were stimulated and nurtured.
Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal
This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a reg... more This study focuses on nuclear tourism, which flourished a decade ago in the Exclusion Zone, a regimented area around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Ukraine) established in 1986, where the largest recorded nuclear explosion in human history occurred. The mass pilgrimage movement transformed the place into an open air museum, a space that preserves the remnants of Soviet culture, revealing human tragedies of displacement and deaths, and the nature of state nuclear power. This study examines the impact of the site on its visitors and the motivations for their persistence and activities in the Zone, and argues that through photography, cartography, exploration, and discovery, the pilgrims attempt to decode the historical and ideological meaning of Chornobyl and its significance for future generations. Ultimately, the aesthetic and political space of the Zone helps them establish a conceptual and mnemonic connection between the Soviet past and Ukraine's present and future. Their practices, in turn, help maintain the Zone's spatial and epistemological continuity. Importantly, Chornobyl seems to be polysemic in nature, inviting interpretations and shaping people's national and intellectual identities.
Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2013
ABSTRACT
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, 2013
In 1936, Mykhailo Proskuriakov, the interrogator assigned to the Ukrainian artists known as the B... more In 1936, Mykhailo Proskuriakov, the interrogator assigned to the Ukrainian artists known as the Boichukists, said of Ivan Lipkovs'kyi, an artist and professor at the Kyiv Art Institute, that his guilt resided in "drinking his tea somewhere where he should not have. " 1 Th e "somewhere" in question was the home of Mykhailo Boichuk, Lipkovs'kyi's teacher. Boichuk once stated that a great wall, similar to the Great Wall of China ("a barrier even for birds"), should be erected between Russia and Ukraine so that Ukrainian culture had an opportunity to develop. When this statement reached the NKVD, 2 friends, colleagues, and guests of the world-famous artist began to disappear one by one. Ivan Padalka and Vasyl' Sedliar, both of whome were friends with Boichuk, were arrested by the NKVD at that same time. Th ey happened to live in an equally dangerous place: Budynok Slovo (the House of Writers). 3 In the early 1930s, having tea in potentially dangerous places like Boichuk's residence was considered a conspiratorial act; the Soviet secret police characterized such gathering places as "nationalist nests" to be eradicated. In the 1920s, Ukraine constituted a broad and largely indeterminate battleground in terms of geography, culture, and intellect, but the 1930s fl attened the social landscape and marked the triumph of Stalinist values. Subsequently, political and cultural discourses adhered to the most recent Party resolutions. State violence swept away thousands of people in Ukraine. 4 Precisely during this decade, the fate of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and Ukrainian identity was ultimately forged for generations to come. Th is temporal context (the 1930s) is as important as the spatial one (the Budynok Slovo). A close and thorough examination of places of state violence-where the creation of the new Soviet intelligentsia and destruction of the national intelligentsia occurred-provides us with a nuanced understanding of various human experiences under Stalinism. Space and place are reasonably new concepts in contemporary historical analysis. However, historians employ them more and more frequently as metaphorical and methodological tools to investigate various topics ranging from state violence and nationalism to festivals and food studies. Soviet studies, especially, has benefi ted from a spatial approach, as it has helped scholars analyze the complexity of the Soviet Union/region/city as a geographical place and, most importantly, as a cultural phenomenon. 5 Th is approach proves to be particularly useful in the Ukrainian context because it reveals the specifi city of the place and the interplay of regions/borders/cities/places, people's borderland experiences, ethnicity, fl uid identity, and local politics.
Europe-Asia Studies, 2013
East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 2016
This study examines Soviet nationalities policies and the elimination of Ukrainian intellectuals ... more This study examines Soviet nationalities policies and the elimination of Ukrainian intellectuals during the Great Terror in Ukraine by exploring the individual history of the Ukrainian literary figure Mykhailo Bykovets', one of the founders of the literary association "Pluh" (Plough) and one of the initiators of the Literary Discussion that emerged in the mid-twenties. The research explores the modus operandi of a key Soviet institution, the GPU/NKVD, and its proactive methods of the de-nationalization of Ukrainian society. Bykovets's criminal case seems to be axiomatic of the Great Terror, exhibiting common patterns of the secret organs' procedural and investigative tactics. Through an analysis of Bykovets's archival file, and the themes and questions that were central to the investigation of Bykovets's "crimes," the study illuminates the persistent national vector of repression against the representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia during the Great Terror.
Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repressio... more Galician intellectuals who emigrated to Soviet Ukraine from abroad were subject to mass repression. This article demonstrates how the party and the Soviet secret police discredited and eliminated this intelligentsia. Leading party officials perceived Galicians as possessing a strong sense of national identity and internal unity, and therefore an obstacle to plans for homogenizing Soviet Ukraine. The research draws on Ukrainian periodicals published in the early 1930s, on files relating to two major group criminal cases that were conducted in the early 1930s and that are now available to scholars in the Security Service archives of Ukraine (the former Soviet secret police archives), and on recent scholarship in the field. The archival evidence demonstrates that the cases were fabricated and the charges against Galicians were constructed as part of a planned "anti-nationalist" campaign.
This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin's collectivization campaign in t... more This study analyzes the Soviet politics of silence during Stalin's collectivization campaign in the context of peasant resistance, state violence, and the famine in 1928–1929, and illuminates the primary function of strategic silence—an information blockade which creates a space for violence and human suffering. Only in silence does the landscape of violence emerge and its spiral dynamics consume everyone, assailants and victims, proceeding swiftly to the eventual destruction of this landscape. In Ukraine, strategic silence and the relatively hermetic information blockade highlights the intentional nature of state violence: it produced a ghetto of exclusion that helped crush peasant resistance to collectivization and prevented Ukraine's potential secession from the Union. More profoundly, the politics of silence is analyzed as ''cultural'' violence and one of the most important building blocks in the foundation of genocide that routinely provokes and escalates direct violence, a phenomenon which culminates in massacres, repressions, and famines, as happened in the Ukrainian case.
This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s,... more This essay explores repressions against Zionist political parties in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s, and considers the formation of an efficient synergetic structure of Soviet secret organs in Moscow and Ukraine. The narrative identifies participants from central and regional secret departments who engaged in systematic mass operations against Zionists, and reveals that despite Moscow's initial vacillation between tolerance and persecution of Zionist parties, the Soviet secret police exhibited a continual escalation of repressions against Zionists. The policies of the secret police in Ukraine illuminate their personal adaptation to the coercive Soviet system of centralisation and ideological exclusion.
This study explores contemporary Russian memory politics, and analyzes the ideological underpinni... more This study explores contemporary Russian memory politics, and analyzes the ideological underpinnings of the 2011 Moscow court verdict that criminalized a Ukrainian scholarly publication, accusing it of inciting ethnic, racial, national, social, and religious hatred. This accusation is examined in the context of Russia’s attempts to control the official historical narrative. Special attention is paid to the role of Russian cultural and democratic civic institutions, such as the Moscow library of Ukrainian literature and Memorial, in the micro-history of this publication. Deconstructing the judicial reaction of Russian lawmakers toward the Ukrainian publication, the study analyzes the Russian political elite’s attitudes toward the “Ukrainian” historical interpretations of Stalin’s terror and other aspects of common Soviet history, and demonstrates the interconnectedness of the preceding Soviet and modern Russian methods of control over education, history, and culture. Language and legislation play an important role in Russian memory politics that shape the popular historical imagination and camouflage the authoritarian methods of governing in Russia. The case of the Ukrainian publication is contextualized by examining the cult of chekism and the discursive significance of anti-Ukrainianism, salient elements in Russian memory politics that have transcended national borders.
This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nation... more This study focuses on psychiatric terror in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1980s applied to nationalists who constituted approximately one-tenth of those who fell victim to political psychiatry. More specifically, through the spatial examination of two Ukrainian psychiatric clinics’ practices and the individual history of the Ukrainian dissident Victor Borovsky, this study analyzes the effectiveness of silence that surrounded the cases of “psychiatric patients” in the context of increasing discontent in the republic and the national liberation movement. The medicalization of social control, psychiatric abuses, state violence and brutality exacerbated non-violent popular resistance in Ukraine, which culminated in political activism of Ukrainian patriots in the late 1980s, contributing greatly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Ukraine. Despite these ultimate outcomes, forced silence through psychiatric terror was an effective tool in the Soviet arsenal of suppression.
This article focuses on the formation of an imperial and colonial consciousness in Joseph Brodsky... more This article focuses on the formation of an imperial and colonial consciousness in Joseph Brodsky, one of the most outstanding Russian poets. Conceptually, this study should be placed at the intersection of postcolonial studies, social history and cultural history. More specifically, through the lens of Brodsky’s individual history and the political and cultural landscape of the last century in Soviet space, it explores his convictions and mental cultural geographies, and offers explanations of Brodsky’s attitudes towards the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian/Soviet empires and his anti-Ukrainian stance. This paper argues that the term ideological “evolution” is not applicable in Brodsky’s case, and illustrates that his philosophy or worldview was rather stiff and inflexible. Brodsky was very much a product of Russian literature and its two-century imperial literary tradition, and less influenced by the Soviet system which he largely despised and ignored. This tradition helped shape Brodsky’s subconscious mental map of Russia and its language, the geographical borders of which were rather rigid.