Peasants into Soviets : Reconstructing Komsomol Identity in the Russian Countryside of the 1920s
Growing up in the village of Bogorodskoe, Penza province, Aleksei Soldatov loved school, but he had to quit when he finished grammar school to help support his family. After six years of war and revolution, Aleksei’s household was unexceptional: it had no father or older brother. The fourteen-year-old described his oppressive isolated life as that of a “monk,” filled with hard work and devoid of friends and fun. In his narrative, his dismal life took a turn for the better when, following his sister’s footsteps, he joined the local Politprosvet. At first, he couldn’t understand what they were discussing. A few weeks later, he joined a new Komsomol cell established five versts from his home. There, he began to understand the new language and rediscovered reading. Soon, he organized a village reading room and became its librarian (izbach). To his family’s dismay, throughout 1924 and 1925 he did little farming; instead, he read magazines and newspapers and familiarized himself with current events and with Party and Komsomol life in order to answer the many questions readers asked him. While continuing to work as village librarian, when a Komsomol cell was founded in his own village, he became its secretary, head of its political reading circle, and Pioneer group leader. At the ripe age of eighteen, he could say:
“Kazakhstani” Identity, Eurasian Regionalism and Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Biopolitics of Forced Migration, Modernity and Multilateralism
This paper examines a case of forced migration and its effects on the formation of national identity and the consolidation of state agencies, industries, and other formal organizations. A composite of several theories, namely “survival migration” and “biopolitical control” will be used to account for the case that features significant social transformation, conflict and even trauma. In the 1940s the population of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic underwent unprecedented migration of evacuees from the European parts of the USSR due to World War II. However in the same period the Soviet government conducted a “forced migration” policy for particular “ethnic groups” deemed politically unreliable in the context of World War II. In the 1950s-1960s, populations located in the European parts of the USSR were officially induced by the Soviet government to contribute to a massive industrialization initiative by relocating to industrializing 248 Aliya Sartbayeva Peleo Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal 1(2) ♦ 2015 regions in the Asian parts of the USSR. At around the same period, population dislocations in the People’s Republic of China caused a diaspora of Uighurs moving to the Soviet Union. The life activities of these migrants would be the basis for a new collective “Kazakhstani” identity that continues to the present day. However, this identity is distinct from, and in some cases opposed to, the historic primordial “Kazakh” identity held by the Turko-Mongol ethno-linguistic societies that inhabited Kazakhstan prior to the Soviet migrations. The government of the present-day Kazakhstan recognizes the significance of the Soviet migrations, and modulates the shift of political power towards ethnic Kazakhs. Checking the newly assertive Kazakh nationalist movement and the unresolved Uighur nationalism in Eurasia through regionalist-technocratic means may increase the viability of the more inclusive and socially constructed multicultural “Kazakhstani” and regional “Eurasian” identities and may help resolve the latent ethnocentrism in the SCO regional order.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of