Magazines were one of the Soviet Union's cultural bastions, playing a large role in influencing the public's taste in music, film, and literature while shaping their views of western life and other borderline taboo subjects. There was a magazine for nearly every interest; they even had magazines for people that wanted to learn about life in England or America, since traveling to those countries was prohibited. Another fascinating example is the magazine Кругозор (Krugozor), which included vinyls of music and "podcasts" in each issue. In this project, I would like to analyze how one of these publications evolved over time, focusing on the transition from Soviet ideology-driven content to integration of many cultural developments from the West. I am most interested in film, music, or geography, although I am also open to other topics.
A good list of potential magazines is available here, although I have not had the chance to check the copyright for each publication and many have not been digitized. For instance, Кругозор seems to be publicly available here with no apparent restrictions, but there is/was a copyright holder (Московская школа прав человека, 1999-2014). That being said, the film magazine Искусство кино (Iskusstvo Kino) is publicly available for certain: Pitt's library system has a link to a database containing a digitized version of each issue of this magazine from 1936-2015. Each issue is available for download as an HTML document; the amount of text in this database is enormous, so we would need to select a small subset for markup and analysis. For instance, we could choose a sample of the transition years from The Stagnation to Perestroika (roughly 1984-1991); we could then mark up the reviews based on film country of origin and film setting, the attitude expressed in the reviews, film genre, the presence of violence/sex in the films, and further thematic film analysis. Similar analysis could be done for a music magazine, a magazine about a foreign country, or a literature magazine, as long as there are no copyright restrictions.
Magazines were one of the Soviet Union's cultural bastions, playing a large role in influencing the public's taste in music, film, and literature while shaping their views of western life and other borderline taboo subjects. There was a magazine for nearly every interest; they even had magazines for people that wanted to learn about life in England or America, since traveling to those countries was prohibited. Another fascinating example is the magazine Кругозор (Krugozor), which included vinyls of music and "podcasts" in each issue. In this project, I would like to analyze how one of these publications evolved over time, focusing on the transition from Soviet ideology-driven content to integration of many cultural developments from the West. I am most interested in film, music, or geography, although I am also open to other topics.
A good list of potential magazines is available here, although I have not had the chance to check the copyright for each publication and many have not been digitized. For instance, Кругозор seems to be publicly available here with no apparent restrictions, but there is/was a copyright holder (Московская школа прав человека, 1999-2014). That being said, the film magazine Искусство кино (Iskusstvo Kino) is publicly available for certain: Pitt's library system has a link to a database containing a digitized version of each issue of this magazine from 1936-2015. Each issue is available for download as an HTML document; the amount of text in this database is enormous, so we would need to select a small subset for markup and analysis. For instance, we could choose a sample of the transition years from The Stagnation to Perestroika (roughly 1984-1991); we could then mark up the reviews based on film country of origin and film setting, the attitude expressed in the reviews, film genre, the presence of violence/sex in the films, and further thematic film analysis. Similar analysis could be done for a music magazine, a magazine about a foreign country, or a literature magazine, as long as there are no copyright restrictions.