Crafting illiberal Europe. Legitimation, mobilization, and mass influence in the Soviet and Nazi occupied Baltic States, 1939-53
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- From 1939 to 1953, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany took turns occupying the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This dissertation investigates how the Soviets and Nazis legitimized their rule and mobilized hundreds of thousands of ordinary Balts for their state-building and war effort. The Baltic context offers a unique setting for a comparison of the Soviet and Nazi polities at a time when both states sought to revise the interwar European order and remake the continent after their own images. Soviet and Nazi expansion to the Baltic States has usually been studied in its destructive capacities. This dissertation argues that it is equally important to explore the regimes' "constructive" facets: how the two regimes succeeded in genuinely legitimizing their rule, sealing alliances, even positing the Baltic region as a model for all of Europe. Instead of approaching the regimes as sui generis entities, the dissertation explores their entanglement with each other and the linkages they built with local societies, highlighting the agency and participation of the local population. In particular, the dissertation scrutinizes the Soviet and Nazi fixation on mass influence, the shaping and transforming of local attitudes and behavior. It contrasts the Soviet maximalist practice of "mass political upbringing" with the "looser" Nazi notions of "war propaganda." The Soviets sought not only to bombard the audiences with political propaganda but to transform them into disciplined consumers of political education. The Nazi "war propaganda, " by contrast, relied heavily on local participation, leaving local ethnic majorities vast opportunities for self-expression and nation-building, a wartime home front culture that continues to inform Baltic memory to this day.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Nurmis, Kristo |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Weiner, Amir, 1961- |
| Thesis advisor | Weiner, Amir, 1961- |
| Thesis advisor | Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 1950- |
| Thesis advisor | Naimark, Norman M |
| Thesis advisor | Press, Steven |
| Degree committee member | Kollmann, Nancy Shields, 1950- |
| Degree committee member | Naimark, Norman M |
| Degree committee member | Press, Steven |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kristo Nurmis. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jf571mx0237 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Kristo Nurmis
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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