Dissertation Project

Between Revolution and Red Scare: Russian-Language Periodicals in the United States, 1917 – 1941 (working title)

The dissertation project focuses on the Russian-language press published in the United States in the period between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the US entry into the Second World War in 1941. On one hand, it deals with the newspapers and magazines as media organizations within the migrant society, on the other hand with the discourses that were conducted in them and thus created their own migrant media reality.

So-called Russian Americans and their Russian-language press in the USA often lived an ideological balancing act between their old and new homeland. On the one hand, in view of the standardization of the Soviet press in the 1930s, the Russian-American press offers an insight into the actual diversity of political views of the society outside the Russian borders that considered itself part of the Russian nation. On the other hand, against the background of the ethnic diversity of US society, the Russian-American press also shows a new perspective on the USA beyond the American mainstream media. In view of the so-called Red Scare, which led to surveillance and raids on Russian organizations in the United States and to the deportation of Russian-speaking people to the Soviet Union from 1919 onwards, the perspective on Russian-language media in the USA at that time seems particularly worthwhile.

Therefore, by examining migrant and exile media, the dissertation project aims to broaden the view of both Russian and US-American history and thus contribute to the current reevaluation of the East-West conflict in academic discourse and make a decisive contribution to historical migration and exile research.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Heike Bungert