‘Soviet Young Man:’ The Personal Diaries and Paradoxical Identities of ‘Youth’ in Provincial Soviet Ukraine during Late Socialism, 1970-1980s

Using personal interviews and six diaries of contemporary male authors representing various social groups of urban residents in Soviet Ukraine (two from the cities, and four from towns), written in Russian and Ukrainian, from 1970 to the beginning of the 1980s, this article analyses archival documents and contemporary periodicals and explores the influences of the massive exposure to audio and visual cultural products from the “capitalist West” on the self-construction of identity of Soviet youth from provincial Ukrainian towns. This article seeks to study a concrete development of cultural détente from “the bottom up” perspective, avoiding the Moscow/Leningrad “elitist/conformist” emphasis of recent scholarship

“Academic Détente”

En 1959, les programmes d’échanges universitaires soviéto‑américains ont débuté avec trois Soviétiques américanistes. Dans les années 1980, ce sont 600 experts soviétiques en études américaines qui se sont rendus régulièrement aux États‑Unis. Ces universitaires ont participé à l’instauration d’un important dialogue culturel entre les sociétés soviétique et américaine, « ouvrant » chacune d’entre elles à l’autre et élargissant leurs horizons culturels et intellectuels. Dans le même temps, l’activité des universitaires soviétiques était surveillée par les services soviétiques de renseignement et les représentants de différentes agences fédérales américaines. En exposant les deux points de vue, la comparaison des informations recueillies par les services de renseignement soviétiques et américains offre un tableau unique du dialogue culturel qui s’est établi par le biais des échanges universitaires soviéto‑américains durant cette période de l’ère brejnévienne dite de « détente académique ».L’article explore l’évolution de ce dialogue. Il s’appuie sur les documents du Bureau des échanges et de la recherche internationale (IREX) conservés à la division des manuscrits de la bibliothèque du Congrès, sur les rapports de voyage des services soviétiques de renseignement, sur des Mémoires, des journaux intimes, de la correspondance, et sur plus de 70 entretiens. Il accorde une attention toute particulière aux récits d’américanistes soviétiques, notamment celui de Nikolaj Bolhovitinov.Starting with three Soviet Americanists in 1959, the Soviet‑American academic exchange programs counted 600 Soviet experts in American studies traveling to the US on a regular basis by the 1980s. These scholars became participants in the important cultural dialogue between Soviet and American societies, “opening” both societies to each other and widening their intellectual and cultural horizons. At the same time the Soviet scholars’ moves were monitored by both Soviet intelligence and representatives of various US federal agencies. Comparison of the two different perspectives of Soviet and American intelligence information gives a unique picture of cultural dialogue during academic exchanges in the era of détente.This article explores the development of the cultural dialogue between Soviet and American scholars during the Brezhnev era, the so‑called academic détente. It draws on documents of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) housed in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Soviet intelligence travel reports, personal memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and more than 70 interviews, and concentrates on personal stories of Soviet Americanists such as Nikolai Bolkhovitinov

Consistent modified gravity: dark energy, acceleration and the absence of cosmic doomsday

We discuss the modified gravity which includes negative and positive powers of the curvature and which provides the gravitational dark energy. It is shown that in GR plus the term containing negative power of the curvature the cosmic speed-up may be achieved, while the effective phantom phase (with $w$ less than -1) follows when such term contains the fractional positive power of the curvature. The minimal coupling with matter makes the situation more interesting: even 1/R theory coupled with the usual ideal fliud may describe the (effective phantom) dark energy. The account of $R^2$ term (consistent modified gravity) may help to escape of cosmic doomsday.Comment: LaTeX file, 9 pages, based on the talk given by S.D. Odintsov (Int. Conference Mathematical Methods in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, Augest, 2004), to appear in CQG, Letter

One-loop f(R) gravity in de Sitter universe

Motivated by the dark energy issue, the one-loop quantization approach for a family of relativistic cosmological theories is discussed in some detail. Specifically, general $f(R)$ gravity at the one-loop level in a de Sitter universe is investigated, extending a similar program developed for the case of pure Einstein gravity. Using generalized zeta regularization, the one-loop effective action is explicitly obtained off-shell, what allows to study in detail the possibility of (de)stabilization of the de Sitter background by quantum effects. The one-loop effective action maybe useful also for the study of constant curvature black hole nucleation rate and it provides the plausible way of resolving the cosmological constant problem.Comment: 25 pages, Latex file. Discussion enlarged, new references added. Version accepted in JCA

Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender, authority, and dissent

At the peak of the anti-religious campaigns under Nikita Khrushchev, communist propaganda depicted women believers as either naïve dupes, tricked by the clergy, or as depraved fanatics; the Protestant “sektantka” (female sectarian) was a particularly prominent folk-devil. In fact, as this article shows, women’s position within Protestant communities was far more complex than either of these mythical figures would have one believe. The authors explore four important, but contested, female roles: women as leaders of worship, particularly in remote congregations where female believers vastly outnumbered their male counterparts; women as unofficial prophetesses, primarily within Pentecostal groups; women as mothers, replenishing congregations through high birth rates and commitment to their children’s religious upbringing; and women as political actors in the defence of religious rights. Using a wide range of sources, which include reports written by state officials, articles in the church journal, letters from church members to their ecclesiastical leaders in Moscow, samizdat texts, and oral history accounts, the authors probe women’s relationship with authority, in terms of both the authority of the (male) ministry within the church, and the authority of the Soviet state

Les évolutions de la jeunesse ukrainienne des années 1970 et 1980, d’après ses journaux intimes

Comme l’a montré Boris Czerny, l’identité nationale juive a été en grande partie effacée, y compris par ceux qui en étaient les porteurs, avant que certains d’entre eux ne se la réapproprient. L’identité nationale ukrainienne aussi a souffert de la soviétisation, mais de façon très différente et avec une autre temporalité : la « grande famine » (Holodomor) n’a pas tué que les individus. Ce sont les mutations de cette identité que suit Sergei Zhuk dans les journaux intimes qu’il étudie et qui ..

Tarik Cyril Amar. The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists

Book review of Tarik Cyril Amar. The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists. Cornell UP, 2015. xii, 356 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $35.00, cloth