Title of Research

Whose Fleet is Bigger: Military Masculinity in the Post-Soviet Crimea

Abstract

This project aims to look at the public debate over the Russian and Ukrainian military and national prestige that accompanied a political struggle for control over the Black Sea Fleet between 1991 and 1997. Based on newspaper sources and using existing studies of gender, masculinity, and military masculinity, this project will look at the use of gendered rhetoric for ideological attacks against opponents. On a broader scale, the project asks whether there were any discursive links between the debate over the future of the navy, the Russian projection of its national pride (which competed with the Ukrainian national project), and the Russian trauma of the Soviet collapse. At this time, there has been no substantial scholarly analysis of the history of the Ukrainian fleet, apart from a traditional description of political battles between the top political elites of Ukraine and Russia. This project makes a step toward the analysis of the history of people – those officers who in the 1990s faced a complicated choice of their future and who were often stigmatized for what they chose.

Biography

Maksym Sviezhentsev completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario, Canada in 1997, defending his dissertation titled "Phantom Limb: Russian Settler Colonialism in Post-Soviet Crimea (1991-1997). He completed a joint M.A. program at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine) and Warsaw University (Warsaw, Poland). Since 2012 he has been a civic activist and participated in many civic and political events in Sevastopol and Kyiv. Most recently, he has been working for the NGO "CrimeaSOS," which specializes in human rights activism and provides legal aid to the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar political prisoners, illegally detained by the Russian occupying forces in Crimea.