CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Zakharova, Svetlana Sergeevna |
|---|---|
| Title | GENDERING SOVIET DISSENT: HOW AND WHY THE WOMAN QUESTION WAS EXCLUDED FROM THE AGENDA OF SOVIET DISSIDENTS (1964 - 1982) |
| Summary | This thesis is devoted to the phenomenon of Soviet dissent during the years when Leonid Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1964 – 1982). This thesis aspires to contribute to the historiography of Soviet dissent by considering it as a complex and diversified phenomenon, by analyzing the gender dimension of Soviet liberal dissent and by placing the activities of dissenters in the wider context of the Cold War competition. In this thesis I focused on Soviet liberal dissent and explored the questions why the so-called “woman question” was excluded from the agenda of Soviet dissidents, why women are excluded from the historiography of Soviet dissent and how the Cold War competition between the Soviet Union and the United States of America affected these issues. Based on research in the Open Society Archives in Budapest, I argued in my thesis that the Cold War and the situation at the international arena had and still have a profound impact on Soviet history, and particularly, on the history of Soviet oppositional movements. Moreover, I argue that the fact that almost all Soviet dissidents ignored the woman question was preconditioned by both the domestic situation in the Soviet Union and the global situation in the international arena, and that these two structural levels should be considered together. More broadly, I also tried to explore how the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union affected the ways, in which the history of the USSR and state socialism is constructed in contemporary historiography, and to challenge the approach that blurs more than seventy years of Soviet history into ahistorical sameness and replaces it with the image of Stalin’s totalitarian rule. |
| Supervisor | de Haan, Francisca; Harvey, Elizabeth |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/zakharova_svetlana.pdf |
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