Ambivalent Reflections— Obshchestvo in the Time of Terrorism

Reviewed by: The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia, and: Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism, and: Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov': Sovremennoe sostoianie i aktual'nye problemy [The Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Current Problems] Irina Papkova Wallace L. Daniel , The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia. 251 pp. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. ISBN 1585445231. $29.95. Zoe Knox , Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism. 257 pp. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. ISBN 0415320534. $170.00. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin , Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov': Sovremennoe sostoianie i aktual'nye problemy [The Russian Orthodox Church: Contemporary Condition and Current Problems]. 648 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004. ISBN 5867933245. Post-Soviet Russia has been characterized by a visible resurgence of the country's arguably most important cultural institution, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). After seven decades of alternating persecution and soft repression by the atheistic Soviet state, the Church has experienced a remarkable renaissance, both in terms of recovered physical infrastructure and in social status.1 Visitors to today's Russian Federation will observe the ongoing renovation and reconstruction of church buildings, the proliferation of kiosks selling religious materials on many city streets, the ubiquitous Orthodox clerics offering commentary to the mainstream television stations, and other daily manifestations of Orthodoxy's pervasive public presence. President V. V. Putin is, according to reliable accounts, a practicing Orthodox Christian, as are an increasing number of officials in the government apparatus.2 Accordingly, scholars have begun to explore both the extent [End Page 481] and the implications of this phenomenon. Broadly, analysts have looked at the following issues: the degree to which Russian society can really be called Orthodox; the relationship between the Church and the political regime, specifically Orthodoxy's role in democratization; the position of the Russian Orthodox Church within civil society; and the contribution of Orthodoxy to the creation and maintenance of a cohesive post-Soviet Russian identity.3 The deepening of the research agenda can be easily traced: if at first scholarship on post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy found expression exclusively in academic articles or conference anthologies, since 2004 several serious monographs on the subject have been published both in Russia and in the West, three of which are reviewed here. The disciplinary background of scholars currently working on today's Russian Orthodoxy is quite varied; it includes sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and, less frequently, historians. The methodological difficulty historians experience in tackling a modern-day subject hardly needs to be stated; at the same time, two of the three authors reviewed here—Nikolai Aleksandrovich Mitrokhin and Wallace L. Daniel—are historians by training, suggesting the timeliness of an assessment of the ways that history is employed in the scholarly analysis of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church. This review, then, focuses not just on how the three monographs treat the subject of their inquiry but also on aspects of these works that should be of particular interest to Kritika's audience. Specifically, the review stresses the pitfalls inherent in the (unavoidable, to be sure) interpretation of a contemporary phenomenon through a particular reading of history; it also brings attention to the need for a critical reassessment of the way in which scholars (historians or otherwise) in general treat fundamental assumptions regarding the historical pattern of church–state relations in Russia. All three books are welcome contributions to our understanding of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. In terms of institutional analysis, Nikolai Mitrokhin's 650-page volume is the most impressive. Based on eight years of research in over 40 dioceses, the book devotes attention to almost [End Page 482] every imaginable aspect of the ROC's activities. Mitrokhin begins by dissecting the membership of the Church, critically assessing the actual number of active Orthodox believers in Russia and their socioeconomic backgrounds and analyzing the inner workings of parish communities (35–75). He then looks at the organizational administration of the Moscow Patriarchate, its economic activities, and the internal divisions among various Orthodox factions vying for control over the Church's spiritual and political agenda (76–234). The second part of the book analyzes such related issues as the...

Nonviolence and Terror: Introduction of the Problem for Tolstoi Given Tolstoi's firm reputation as a radical thinker, the scarcity of literature treating his involvement with radical ideologies other than his own, and with terrorism in particular, is striking and yet inevitable to a degree. Tolstoi never developed in the corpus of his works a strict theory of terrorism as distinct from the problems of historical and social violence. Clarification of interrelationships among these furies in Tolstoi's thought is overdue. (1) The burden of this article is to trace the development of Tolstoi's views on the problem of political violence and terrorism, including his literary representations of terrorism and terrorists and his rhetorical strategies. The closing section historicizes Tolstoi's views on terror in order to situate his position relative to those of his contemporaries and to more recent theories. Due to its constant shifts between the tactics of retaliation and deterrence, which adjust endlessly to current political realities, the very possibility of a single exhaustive definition of terror remains a moot point, so where is Tolstoi's place in it? (2) Present-day interpreters argue that, since the sources of terrorism are political and involve holding, seizing, or destroying power, the classic cases of terror involve premeditated destruction of individuals, governments, or whole nations within the sphere of power through various forms of coercive intimidation. (3) Therefore, there are two primary varieties of terror: state (legitimate or top-down) terror and illegitimate or bottom-up terror directed against the state. (4) At the end of the 19th century, Russian dictionaries were possibly the first to define terror in its two major forms. Florentii Pavlenkov's Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Encyclopedic Dictionary, 1899) achieved a debatable notoriety thanks to its recognition of terror as an inalienable part of Russian history since 1878, when Vera Zasulich attempted to kill St. Petersburg mayor Fedor Trepov in January and Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii assassinated the head of Russia's secret police, Nikolai Mezentsev. Pavlenkov defined terrorists as those who the murder of government officials to be a means of political struggle. (5) In his article on the French revolutionary terror of 1793, written for the Brokgauz and Efron encyclopedic dictionary in 1901, the conservative historian Vladimir Ger'e did not acknowledge the Russian link to terror and stressed the panic of those engaged in its daily routines, panic about being a possible instrument of extreme violence (its subject and object). (6) The contradictory definitions only attracted Tolstoi as a thinker and artist. A month and a half in the year prior to his death, from January through February 1909, illustrates Tolstoi's profound intellectual and artistic involvement in the problem of radical politics. In that period, the authorities sent a warning deputation of officials and clerics to his estate after banning his essays against the government and revolutionary violence and in response to his endless intercessions on behalf of court-martialed revolutionaries. (7) At the end of January, Tolstoi read the novel Andrei Kozhukhav by the late writer-terrorist Stepniak-Kravchinskii and the serialized Letters from the Schlisselburg Fortress by Nikolai Morozov, the author of the seminal brochure Terroristicheskaia bor'ba (The Terrorist Struggle, 1880), who had been Tolstoi's acquaintance since 1908. (8) In February, Tolstoi read old issues of the banned revolutionary periodical Byloe, the first of its kind in Russia devoted to the study of revolutionary movements from the Decembrists to the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) (57: 274). Even more eloquent than the busy calendar above are drafts of Tolstoi's last two fictional plots (1909), both exploring revolutionary terrorism and left unrealized at Tolstoi's death. …

As part of my ongoing study of the political life and mythology of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) terrorist and Left SR party leader Mariya Spiridonova, in this article I examine the context within which she launched her revolutionary career: the terrorist fringe of the radical subculture known to its denizens as Underground Russia. Specifically, I focus on the other five women who with Spiridonova formed the <italic>shesterka</italic> of terrorists venerated in SR martyrology for their roles in the revolution of 1905‒07. Although Riva Fialka, Lidiya Ezerskaya, Anastasiya Bitsenko, Manya Shkol’nik and Aleksandra Izmaylovich, unlike Mariya Spiridonova, were very little known or not known at all to the Russian public in 1905‒06, they too were participants in the revolutionary underground, their behavior as much guided by its ethics and mythology. The stories of these five female SR terrorists, juxtaposed with Spiridonova’s, demonstrate how women radicals of the reluctantly modernizing Russian empire sought in the underground socialist community the autonomy and equality denied them by Russia’s entrenched patriarchal culture. In Underground Russia, women found fulfillment not only in principled activism against the autocratic regime but also in the empathetic support of like-minded comrades. Most significantly, the collective revolutionary experiences of the <italic>shesterka</italic> underline the emotional as well as the ideological bonds that deepened women’s involvement in SR terrorist activities. According to prosopographical studies of female Russian revolutionaries by Barbara Alpern Engel, Beate Fieseler and Barbara Evans Clements, the bonds of romantic love, friendship and family featured prominently in women’s radicalization. In the story of each of these six SR heroines can be found a confluence of similar motivations for taking up revolutionary terrorism. All of the women experienced some form of personal loss or frustration concerning their family situations and career opportunities. Education or training as a means of achieving autonomy played a role in radicalizing each of them, while gender, class or ethnic disadvantages gave them a powerful empathy for, and even identification with, the least fortunate classes and groups in Russian society. Family, friends and lovers drew them into the revolutionary movement and toward terrorism as a political tactic. Finally, each of these women sought moral, intellectual and emotional fulfillment by participating in the radical subculture known as Underground Russia.

This article examines the relationship between the problem of Russian society's attitude to revolutionary terrorism in the early 20th century and the transformation of religious thinking under the influence of modernization processes. When writing the paper, the methods of content analysis, retrospective, ideographic, and statistical were used. The manifestations of anti- and quasi-religiosity in the actions of those whose destinies included revolutionary terror and received approval are investigated. Moreover, such ideas originated in those familiar with the philosophy of F. Nietzsche's intellectual circles were also included in the thoughts of the people, which was facilitated by the spread of literacy, strengthening the connection between the city and the countryside. The article examines the poetics of the organizers, perpetrators of terrorist attacks and those who sympathized with them in order to circumvent the commandments of the Christian faith. The leitmotif in it was the desire to adapt religious truths to solve worldly problems. It is noteworthy that the figures who remained faithful to canonical values, nevertheless, also contributed to the inclusion of the population in the revolutionary terrorist struggle. The paradox is caused by the described «symptoms» of the crisis of the Church and its perception by society as a bureaucratic unit. The results obtained can serve as a basis for further study by historians of the nature and motives of the participation of various social forces in the revolutionary events.

Imperial Entanglements: Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands G. M. Hamburg (bio) Robert D. Crews , For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. viii + 463 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674021649. $29.95. Mikhail Dmitrievich Dolbilov and Aleksei Il´ich Miller, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii [The Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire]. 608 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. ISBN 586793425X. These days, one of the most active research fields in modern Russian history is borderlands history: that is, the history of non-Russian peoples living on the empire's peripheries, understood either in isolation from the Great Russian heartland or in dynamic relationship to it.1 Because this subject encompasses a central dimension of Eurasian history—Russia's status as a multinational, multi-confessional polity—the intellectual attractiveness of studying it is self-evident. Since as little as 20 years ago one could not confidently have predicted that scholarship would move so vigorously in this direction, we should ask why so many scholars both in post-Soviet Russia and the West have now opted to write on the borderlands. In the Soviet Union, of course, writing the history of non-Russian peoples was a serious enterprise from the very beginning of Soviet power, but much of the scholarship that appeared in the early Soviet period was attuned to party doctrine and thus not inclined to investigate important questions such [End Page 407] as the place of religious affiliation in nationality politics.2 Moreover, certain issues like Russian–Jewish relations were so sensitive that, at times, they were virtually off-limits to scholars.3 In addition, borderlands scholarship occasionally became the virtual preserve of academics who either belonged to one of the non-Russian nationalities or lived in one of the non-Russian republics; meanwhile, the "commanding heights" of the historical profession were occupied by historians who wrote the history of the heartland.4 This professional constellation began to disintegrate in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet periods, but its breakdown did not immediately lead to a concentration on borderlands history. Indeed, if we imagine scholarship proceeding in waves, the [End Page 408] first wave, lasting from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, issued from a fascination with liberalism and reform in imperial Russia; the second wave, beginning in the early 1990s and still continuing at present, arose from a revival in Russian conservatism and a concomitant interest in the relative durability of the Russian empire compared with the Soviet Union. Borderlands history is the third wave of scholarship since the late 1980s. Its numerous sources include: the shattering of old taboos that hindered research on the subject; the realization that the Russian empire managed its national minorities for 300 years without experiencing the kind of "meltdown" that occurred in the last years of Soviet power; the knowledge that post-Soviet Russia, being a "post-imperial empire," must also attend to nationality problems of various kinds, many of them inherited from the Soviet system or from the Russian empire; the opening of archives in former borderlands regions that were once difficult to access, even for Russians; Western scholarly research in borderlands history that reinforces Russian interest in the subject; and the revival of certain classical problems in international relations—namely, tensions between Poland and Russia over the Western border zone, and tensions between Russia and Islamic states over the Caucasus and Central Asia. Western scholarly interest in the imperial borderlands developed in a slightly different fashion. In Britain, for example, historians have long paid attention to the non-Russians along the southern rim of the Russian empire, probably because these peoples have been near neighbors of Britain's own empire.5 Moreover, the desire to compare the operation of competing empires has animated many British scholars, from imperial taxonomists like Arnold Toynbee and Niall Ferguson to Russian specialists like Dominic Lieven.6 In France, which has had its own empire located partly in Muslim societies, there has been a long-standing fascination with Russia's Islamic subjects in the Caucasus, in Tatar regions, and in Central Asia.7 Moreover, French [End Page 409] scholarship on the multinational composition of...

Special Settlements in Soviet Russia in the 1930s–50s Reviewed by Oxana Klimkova Translated by Boris Gorshkov Viktor Arkad´evich Berdinskikh, Spetsposelentsy:Politicheskaia ssylka narodov Sovetskoi Rossii [Special Settlers: Political Exile of the Peoples of Soviet Russia]. 527 pp. Kirov: KOGUP, 2003. ISBN 5881864891. Reissued under the same title: 765 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005. ISBN 5867933571. T. V. Starevskaia Diakina, ed., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR [Special Settlers in the USSR]. 824 pp. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004. ISBN 5824306085. Vol. 5 of Iu. N. Afanas´ev et al., eds., Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga: Konets 1920kh–pervaia polovina 1950kh godov. Sobranie dokumentov, 7 vols. [History of the Stalinist Gulag: The End of the 1920s to the First Half of the 1950s. A Collection of Documents]. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004–5. ISBN 5824306044 (set). Viktor Nikolaevich Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR, 1930–1960 [Special Settlers in the USSR, 1930–60]. 304 pp. Moscow: Nauka, 2003. ISBN 5020103152. Contemporary Russian and Western scholarship has shown steadily increasing interest in uncovering the history of special settlements for deported population groups in the Soviet Union, sometimes termed "Soviet internal exile." Soviet authorities began to transfer problematic segments of the population to "special settlements" in distant and inaccessible regions as a repressive measure at the beginning of the 1920s and continued to employ this technique through the early 1950s. Deportations and the system of special settlements were primarily precautionary measures aimed at preventing anti-state demonstrations by certain "risk groups" that might have significant consequences. In their appearance, these places of special exile (often called spetsposelki) usually did not differ [End Page 105] from ordinary rural settlements.1 Their inhabitants, however, had significant limitations on their civil rights: they were subject to severe restrictions on freedom of movement and found themselves under the constant control of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). Local administrative organs or so-called "special commands" (spetskomendatura) fulfilled this oversight function. In some cases "elders," who were elected by the deported individuals, answered to district officials (upolnomochennye) who regularly visited the settlements to check on the number of special settlers and the state of affairs in the settlements. The principle of collective responsibility (krugovaiaporuka) ensured the reliability of data submitted in this manner, for under this system the elders answered for any problems in the settlements or any falsifications in the reports.2 This particular regime envisioned the residence of special settlers together with their families within the limits of a region determined by the NKVD (later Ministry of Internal Affairs [MVD]). This system also encompassed compulsory labor by the special settlers in branches of the economy determined by the security organs as well as the absence of any clearly defined term of exile for the inhabitants. The existing historical literature traditionally presents 1930 as the watershed year in the history of the special settlements system. This year witnessed mass deportations of the dekulakized peasants to the country's distant regions, a development that gave rise to a peculiar social category, so-called spetsposelentsy (special settlers).3 Throughout the period from the 1930s to [End Page 106] the 1950s, this category encompassed hundreds of thousands of families. Areas of special settlement were most often located in the northern and eastern regions of the USSR. The largest regions of exile were Kazakhstan, western Siberia, the Urals, the northern stretches of European Russia, and Central Asia. The initial waves of deportees were directed to the North, the Urals, and western Siberia, but with time the focus broadened to include Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Oftentimes, the state employed forced deportation to further its goals of colonizing the country's uninhabited and inaccessible regions. In October 1940, the Gulag system comprised 1,645 special settlements, overseen by 160 regional and 741 district administrations. A total of 258,448 families—959,472 individuals—lived in these settlements.4 By 1 January 1953, the number of special settlers had grown to 2,753,356 (Zemskov, 205). The various...

Emotions, Trust, and Loyalty The Fabric and Expression of Immaterial Relationships in History Alain Blum (bio) Translated by Madeleine Grieve Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev, Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party. 210 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0300164367. $40.00. Geoffrey Hosking, ed., “Trust and Distrust in the USSR.”154 pp. Special issue of Slavonic and East European Review91, 1(2013). Ian Plamper, Shamma Shakhadat, and Mark Eli, eds., Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstv: Podkhody k kul´turnoi istorii emotsii(Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat, and Marc Elie, eds., The Russian Empire of Feelings: Approaches to the Cultural History of Emotions). 512 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5867937850. Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe. 304 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0875806532. $38.00. It may seem strange to decide to review together four publications with titles as dissimilar as Rossiiskaia imperiia chuvstvand Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and “Trust and Distrust in the USSR” and Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party, on the other. Yet emotion, trust, and loyalty are three concepts that historians have increasingly investigated in recent years, attempting to define them and construct a history of them from conventional sources, which usually [End Page 853]do not discuss them directly. The equally interesting Loyalties, Solidarities, and Identities in Russian Society, History, and Culture, might also have been included in this already long list, and I will refer to it in this review. 1In that volume, the concepts of loyalties, solidarities, and identities bring political and social historians into contact with historians of literature and art, who have long been exploring these concepts and analyzing emotions or feelings. Reviewing these publications together is justified because emotions, trust, and loyalty (as well as, incidentally, solidarities and identities) all historicize an immaterial relationship between an individual and a context—which may be an institution, a system, or an event external to that person. By considering these books and articles together, we can observe a variety of uses of essentially relational terms, a multitude of sources and approaches that are rarely presented in the same context. This survey is an opportunity to show how large the divergences can be, but also to reveal the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary approaches. The editors and authors of the volumes reviewed here ask us to think of emotions or feelings as operative concepts that transcend time and space while being expressed in well-defined historical, social, and cultural contexts. Here I analyze whether their efforts have been successful, and whether these concepts provide an effective means to unify within a single approach a set of immaterial relations between individuals and communities, between individuals and situations. In particular, I examine how the term “emotions,” which groups into a single unit a set of terms to qualify (name) these relations, conveys a sense of robustness, thereby prompting unexpected connections. The purpose of such books, and of the authors and editors who write them, is to provide us, at the end of our journey through the gamut of emotions, with a consistent conceptual framework. One of the aims of this review is to examine the culmination of this process, beyond the rich insights of the works brought together here. The contrast among the articles in the four publications is large but also revealing. Geoffrey Hosking seeks to construct the concept of trust within a precise, highly evocative, political and cultural timeframe. Similarly, Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev seek to materialize loyalty, or the production of loyalty, as far as possible by examining financial transfers and opportunities for promotion within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); they focus on the inner workings of an institution over the period of its [End Page 854]existence. By contrast, the editors Jan Plamper, Schamma Schahadat, and Marc Elie, on the one hand, and Mark Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, on the other, have constructed their problems around themes that take place between the late 18th century and the late 20th century; their discussions revolve around community of feeling, education of taste...

A Socialist Revolutionary (SR) terrorist revered as a heroine and martyr across Russian society in 1906, Mariia Spiridonova became as well a dangerous ‘hysteric’ to her political opponents in 1917–18, whether liberal, moderate socialist or Bolshevik. This article argues that Spiridonova as a controversial historical figure must be examined in the context of the turbulent events and highly polarized politics of revolutionary Russia, where political freedoms were new to men and women alike, and few female socialists ventured to take a public role in party and government affairs.

Private AffairsHistories of the Russian Age of Sensibility Luba Golburt (bio) Andreas Schönle, Andrei Zorin, and Alexei Evstratov, eds., The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825: Public Role and Subjective Self. 420 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-0875807478. $45.00. Alina Shokareva, Dvorianskaia semía: Kul´tura obshcheniia. Russkoe stolichnoe dvorianstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka (The Noble Family: A Culture of Contacts. The Russian Nobility of the Capital in the First Half of the 19th Century). 304 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5444805992. Andrei Zorin, Poiavlenie geroia: Iz istorii russkoi emotsional´noi kul´tury kontsa XVIII–nachala XIX veka (The Appearance of the Hero: From the History of Russian Emotional Culture at the End of the 18th and Beginning of the 19th Centuries). 568 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. ISBN-13 978-544480582. The golden age of Russian nobility—the period from 1762, when Peter III’s decree emancipated noblemen from obligatory state service, until 1825, when the crushed Decembrist Uprising disabused them of aspirations toward a liberal alliance with the state—is also a veritable golden age for the history of Russian mentalities, private lives, and, most recently, emotions. In part, this is only to be expected of a period that saw the ascendancy, across Europe, of sentimentalist and romantic cultural paradigms. The sentimentalist “inward turn” and the proliferation of written material to document it—from fiction to various forms of self-writing—validated private lives as bearers of historical [End Page 121] meaning. To a greater or lesser degree, the pan-European Age of Sensibility serves as the backdrop for the lives of the Russian elite, variously delimited and defined in the three books under review. As the editors of The Europeanized Elite in Russia, 1762–1825 argue, this period in Russian history is marked, moreover, by an “interiorization” of Western cultural practices, initially mandated by Peter I and requiring enforcement, but under Catherine II “begin[ning] to affect the mental world of the elite” (5). This narrative echoes the famous assessment by Catherine’s own contemporaries: “Peter gave us being, Catherine soul” (unknown author, “Ko statue Gosudaria Petra Velikogo,” 1769).1 As a matter for historical analysis, this declaration poses an interesting and diverse scholarly agenda: how can matters of the “soul” be historicized? Where can these processes of interiorization be located, and how traced? How do phenomena detected on the microscale of private sensibility illustrate or amend the macronarratives of Russian history of the period? To what extent is one justified in linking “interiorization”—a process no doubt characteristic of most cultural dynamics—to a specific period? And how can the narrative of modernization, which has for so long been the guiding thread for the history of this period, be recomposed from the stories of individual lives whose modernizing trajectories are often less than obvious? Andrei Zorin’s much-awaited study of Andrei Turgenev’s (1781–1803) diary and turn-of-the-century Russian emotional culture in Poiavlenie geroia is perhaps most explicit in its pursuit of a methodological framework capable of meaningfully accommodating both the idiosyncratic emotional paths taken by particular individuals and their corresponding collective psychological tendencies, in Zorin’s case imagined primarily along generational lines. The book’s introduction provides a useful survey of the development and key concepts of the history of emotions as a scholarly field. While some parts here retrace the narrative offered in Jan Plamper’s thorough introduction to the field in the Oxford Emotions in History series,2 what is particularly valuable about Zorin’s overview is the way it works through the legacies of important Russian thinkers—from Lev Vygotskii, Gustav Shpet, and Grigorii Vinokur to Lydia Ginzburg and Iurii Lotman—and highlights their potential to enrich the field’s conceptual repertoire. [End Page 122] Also noteworthy are Zorin’s reflections on the phenomenological category of Erlebnis (lived experience) as one that can productively unlock (auto) biographical documentary material for historical analysis (18–28). The emphasis on Erlebnis and interiority more generally allows Zorin to propose a productive adjustment to Lotman’s influential theatricality model, which foregrounds role play and the disjuncture between emotional experience...

Where Did All the Normal People Go?Another Look at the Soviet 1970s Juliane Fürst (bio) Vasilii Boiarintsev , My—Khippi: Sbornik rasskazov (We Are Hippies: A Collection of Stories). 158 pp. Moscow-San Franscisco: Lulu, 2004. No ISBN. Il´ia Kabakov , 60-70e... Zapiski o neofitsial´noi zhizni v Moskve (The 1960s and 1970s: Notes on Unofficial Life in Moscow). 368 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5867936419. Georgii Kizeval´ter , ed., Eti strannye semidesiatye, ili poteria nevinnosti: Esse, interv´iu, vospominaniia (These Strange 1970s, or the Loss of Innocence: Essays, Interviews, Memoirs). 418 pp., illus. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5867937737. Donald Raleigh , Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia's Cold War Generation. xi + 420 pp., illus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0199744343. $34.95. Christopher Ward , Brezhnev's Folly: The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism. x + 218 pp., illus., maps. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0822943723. $50.00. [End Page 621] Sergei Zhuk , Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985. xvii + 440 pp., illus. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. ISBN-13 978-0801895500. $65.00. Once upon a time Soviet cinemas were full of almost superhuman heroes—men and women who conquered the Arctic, survived against all odds in brutal battles, and overcame insurmountable handicaps in their service to society.1 The world off-screen was more mundane: people trying their best to survive, live, and participate in the Soviet project. The extraordinary illusory world on screen offered guidance, escape, and inspiration, not a mirror of their ordinary lives. Then came the 1970s and the new Soviet realism. The film of the decade, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, owed much of its success to the fact that people could find themselves in its flawed heroes. They recognized the brownish color of the wallpaper, the standard issue furniture, the layout of the apartment, and even the crockery used in the kitchen. Ordinary lives had, at least to a certain extent, made it onto the screen. Had Soviet cinema really converged with Soviet society? If we look closely at some of the texts that have recently appeared on life in the Soviet 1970s, one has to wonder how much "ordinary life" remained in the real world as opposed to "on screen." Over the last two years, the early messengers of what promises to be an avalanche of Soviet 1970s studies and memoirs have appeared in print, giving a tantalizing glimpse of a period full of contradictions and sketching a picture of late socialist Soviet life that oscillates between mind-numbing boredom, frantic activity, and unintended hilarity. Rather than examining these works individually, it might be worthwhile to look at their common themes, assumptions, and conclusions. It will become apparent that it is in the sum of their parts rather than separately that they have most to offer for our understanding of late Soviet society and life. While taking different viewpoints and representing different genres, Il´ia Kabakov, Vasilii Boiarintsev, Sergei Zhuk, Chris Ward, and the contributors to the volume Eti strannye semidesiatye seem to agree on one thing: ordinary life was on the retreat. Indeed, ordinariness appears only as the "other" in these studies. The protagonists of these stories all have some kind of extraordinary racket going on, in one way or another. They are underground artists, [End Page 622] dissident writers, adherents of pop culture, Ukrainian nationalists, dealers in deficit goods, perpetrators of more or less serious crime, fanatical bitlomany, self-proclaimed hippies, or engaged in some other kind of pursuit that clearly deviated from Soviet norms—norms that, despite widespread infractions even in earlier years, had hitherto served to signal what was "normal" and "ordinary." That leaves Don Raleigh's account of the Soviet Baby Boomers as the exception to the rule. His generation, whose early adulthood coincides with the years of so-called stagnation, live in ordinary Moscow and Saratov apartments, work in ordinary, well-regarded jobs, and have normal ambitions and leisure pursuits. Yet they all went to an elite...

I44 SEER, 85, I, 2007 thisreviewer.Others - particularlythose loyal to one of the many established 'religious' interpretations of Dostoevskii will find the thesis too radical. Jones's scholarship justifiably retains a central place in English-language Dostoevskii studies. But this book ought also to affect the critical and sometimes not too critical work being done on Dostoevskii in his own country. School of Slavonic andEastEuropean Studies DEREK BROWER UniversivCollege London Shruba, Manfred. Literaturnye ob"edineniia Moskvyi Peterburga I890-I9I7 godov. Slovar'. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2004. 440 pp. Illustrations.Appendix. Indexes. Price unknown. THE last quarter of the nineteenth century and the years up to the October Revolution witnessed an extraordinarydevelopment of the salon culture in Moscow and St Petersburg. At various epochs in their history, London, Edinburghand Parisalso displayedsimilarsocial scenes, but in the number of groups involved and the intensity of their activities they were surpassedby the two Russian capital cities. Particularlystrikingwas the heterogeneity of the Russian assemblies, which spanned the gamut from academic seminars, focusedround a core of inspirationalprofessors,to what amounted to drinking sodalities. In-between came all manner of organizations, some purely social, others philanthropic, literary, theatrical, artisticor political, the last catering for monarchistsat one extreme and Marxistson the other. To most of these groups the events of I9I7 brought a sudden end: the few which managed to adapt to the changed conditions survivedonly into the early I930s. On its title-page, Manfred Shruba's work is termed a 'dictionary', a descriptionwhich can be justified on the formal ground that it consistsof the names of the individualgroups listed alphabetically.But it is more than that. Depending on the information available, each entry gives the dates during which each group existed, its founder/host and his or her successors, the locations of its meetings, the days and times at which it met, its membership and the nature of its functions. Some were no more than unregulated conversaziones, but others adhered to a programme of papers and discussions. Practicallyall includedrefreshments,which were so generousand reliablethat an impecuniousyoung writercould count on a free meal each day of the week by going from one jour-fixe to another. The entries incorporateextractsfrom memoirs and diaries which describe the proceedings of the groups and those who participated in them. Almost every entry is concluded by a full bibliography. The dictionary prints the details about rather more than 350 groups in Moscow and St Petersburg. Since 2004 information about a further thirty groups has come to light. The author has published this supplement in the journal JNovoe literaturnoe obozrenie(77, Moscow, 2006, pp. 493-509). The dictionary itself (pp. i5-274) forms the bulk of the work. Then comes an extensive appendixwhich prints,first,two collectionsof reminiscences,one REVIEWS I45 by A. E. Kaufman and the other by N. V. Drizen (pp. 277-88) and, second, the manifestos of the major literary movements (pp. 288-374). An index (pp. 375-433) gives the names of the figuresmentioned in the dictionary,their dates of birth and death and a brief specificationof their interests.Finally, a systematic index (pp. 434-38) arrangesthe groups according to their literary schools, the particular spheres of their intellectual activity, their political outlook, their sociological character,and the forms which their organizations took, e.g., whether they were private circles, public societies, dining clubs or unions of professionalwriters. A special feature of this work are the illustrationswhich total more than a hundred. Some reproduce the title-pages of literary works composed by members of the groups; others portray individual members; but the most interestingof them all are the groupphotographs.As one looks along the rows of serious,bearded faces, one wonders how many of their possessorsrealized that their world was soon to be swept away. Dr Shruba has brought together a treasure-house of primary sources sufficient to create several works of narrative and analysis. Those who will write them will owe him a profound debt of gratitude. Imperial College London C. L. DRAGE Langen, Timothy. TheStony Dance:Unit andGesture inAndrey Bely's'Petersburg'. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2005. xiv + I9I pages. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $75.95. How might Belyi's Petersburg be categorized?Tragicomedy, thriller,novel of ideas...

The Alienated Russian Nobility? Alexander M. Martin (bio) Rodolphe Baudin and Wladimir Berelowitch, eds., Histoire de Russie avec sa partie politique, par Mr. Koch, Professeur à Strasbourg, suivie de la Constitution de l'empire de Russie (History of Russia with Its Political Part, by Mr. Koch, Professor at Strasbourg, Followed by the Constitution of the Empire of Russia). 322 pp. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2018. ISBN-13 978-2868205391. €22.00. Bella Grigoryan, Noble Subjects: The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861. 189 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-0875807744. $39.00. Elena Marasinova, "Zakon" i "grazhdanin" v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka: Ocherki istorii obshchestvennogo soznaniia ("Law" and "Citizen" in Russia in the Second Half of the 18th Century: Essays in the History of Public Consciousness). 508 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5444806968. Derek Offord, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History. 699 pp. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ISBN-13 978-9462982727. €45.00. Much writing about the pre-reform nobility is a search for solid ground. Russian nobles, it seems, somehow lacked substance. As Petr Chaadaev put it in 1829–30, they were "nomads" in their own country.1 To generations [End Page 861] of Russians and Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were lackeys of despotism and imitators of foreign cultures.2 This conception shaped much of the scholarship of the second half of the 20th century. Marc Raeff wrote of the Westernized nobility's "rootlessness" and "lack of contact with both the Russian tradition and the Russian people."3 Iurii Lotman argued that "the Russian nobleman was like a foreigner in his own country": "To behave properly," he explained, "was to behave like a foreigner," hence "playacting at everyday life, the feeling of being forever on the stage, is extremely characteristic of Russian gentry life."4 The past three decades have seen a reaction against this gloomy assessment. Microhistorical studies have concluded that nobles were not culturally rootless or psychologically alienated.5 Historians have found, somewhat like the revisionists in Soviet historiography, that the autocratic regime did not unilaterally dictate its will but instead sought consensus with wider elite strata.6 Cultural approaches have relativized the nobility's lack of a formal political role by highlighting culture and sociability as arenas where power was negotiated.7 [End Page 862] The four books under review here make significant contributions to this debate. Written by specialists in history, literature, and sociolinguistics, they also convey its disciplinary breadth. Rulers and Subjects Elena Marasinova's "Zakon" i "grazhdanin" v Rossii is a study of the 18thcentury elite's ideas of rulership and subjecthood. This is basically a Begriff-sgeschichte, a history of political concepts (law, citizen, subject, and others) that were new in the 18th century and whose meaning was in flux, but it is Begriffsgeschichte bolstered by political and social history. In almost Annales School fashion, Marasinova shows how the evolution of concepts was governed at once by their own logic, by the choices of concrete historical actors, and by the longue durée of a vast, poor agrarian country where serfdom and autocracy were immutable facts of life. In keeping with the complexity of her subject matter, her sources and topics are eclectic. She draws on legal texts, political treatises, private letters, memoirs, dictionaries, and belles-lettres. She gives us intellectual portraits of monarchs, etymologies of words, and histories of church rituals, criminal cases, and penal colonies. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of Russian life under Elizabeth and Catherine II. By its end, we see the emergence of the familiar constellation of Russia in the early 19th century: an autocratic state; a population excluded from political life; and an elite that desired legal rights and the ability to participate in government, but mostly sought autonomy and fulfillment in nonpolitical spaces beyond the state's reach. The book is constructed as an exploration of three themes. The first is the relationship between God and the state as sources of law. Marasinova opens with Empress Elizabeth's moratorium on the death penalty. Elizabeth was pious...

Recent Russian Historiography on the DecembristsFrom “Liberation Movement” to “Public Opinion” Patrick O’Meara (bio) Tat′iana Vasil′evna Andreeva, Tainye obshchestva v Rossii v pervoi treti XIX v.: Pravitel′stvennaia politika i obshchestvennoe mnenie (Secret Societies in Russia in the First Third of the 19th Century: Government Policy and Public Opinion). 911pp. St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5874173258. Ol′ga Valerianovna Edel′man, Sledstvie po delu dekabristov (Investigating the Case of the Decembrists). 354pp. Moscow: Modest Kolerov, 2010. ISBN-13 978-5918870013. Ol′ga Valerianovna Edel′man and Sergei Vladimirovich Mironenko, eds., Vosstanie dekabristov: Dokumenty (The Decembrist Uprising: Documents), vol. 21. 559pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2008. ISBN-13 978-58244310337. Oksana Ivanovna Kiianskaia, Ocherki iz istorii obshchestvennogo dvizheniia v Rossii v pravlenie Aleksandra I (Essays on the History of the Social Movement in Russia under Alexander I). 301pp. St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5981873232. Oksana Ivanovna Kiianskaia, ed., Dekabristy: Aktual′nye problemy i novye podkhody (The Decembrists: Topical Problems and New Approaches). 721pp. Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5728109457. After a marked decline in Russian historians’ interest in the “Decembrist era” during the first post-Soviet decade, the last ten years have seen a resurgence of [End Page 805] focus and publication as indicated by the recent appearance of the five volumes discussed here. A new generation of Decembrist scholars (dekabristovedy) has widened the research agenda for early 19th-century Russian opposition by moving it away from the narrow Marxist-Leninist confines of the “liberation movement” (osvoboditel′noe dvizhenie). Instead, they have sought to place it in the broader context of what A. N. Pypin as long ago as 1870 referred to as the “social movement” (obshchestvennoe dvizhenie). In her exhaustive study of the topic, Tat′iana Andreeva favors the modern (if optimistic) term “public opinion” (obshchestvennoe mnenie). Given the difficulty of identifying common ground among the various categories of opinion makers who contributed to the flourishing (though censored) periodical press, or were members of Masonic lodges and informal study circles (kruzhki) or of Decembrist secret societies, it would seem challenging to refer with confidence to a unified “public opinion” and therefore to generalize meaningfully about it. Nevertheless, her introduction of the term is one of the many indications of the extent to which today’s specialists have moved away from their Soviet predecessors, while continuing to explore essentially the same historical phenomena—problems of politics and reform in Alexander I’s reign, and the Decembrists’ political culture and secret societies. The differences will be highlighted further below. They are also resurrecting names lost to Russian historiography for much of the 20th century such as Pypin, V. O. Kliuchevskii, and M. N. Pokrovskii, endorsing their rediscovered predecessors’ views. Unquestionably, the most original and important of the works reviewed here is Andreeva’s monumental study of secret societies, government policy, and public opinion in the first three decades of the 19th century. As ambitious as it is voluminous, it starts from the debatable proposition that this period of Russian political history ranks alongside the Great Reforms in its attempts, official and unofficial, to modernize Russia (3). In particular, Andreeva stresses its importance in the formation of the nobility’s political role and its relationship with the throne. The place in this process of “public opinion,” as reflected mainly in the recorded views of the various strata of the nobility, while crucial, has, in Andreeva’s view, been insufficiently explored. Her purpose, therefore, is to redress this lack (10). Her monograph starts with a thoroughgoing 117-page survey of the literature and sources, indicative of the massive scale of the ensuing volume. Those seeking a crash course in the Russian historiography of the period should start here. The turning point in post-Soviet Decembrist studies, which receive their fullest discussion yet, Andreeva dates from the late 1990s with the publication of the first issue of the serial 14 dekabria 1825 goda: Istochniki, issledovaniia, istoriografiia, [End Page 806] bibliografiia (14 December 1825: Sources, Research, Historiography, Bibliography), which she describes as refreshingly “unencumbered by ideological bias,” and as marking a new departure for innovative research and interpretation (61).1 It was in the...

On the Path to Russian Modernity Olga Malinova-Tziafeta Translated by William Tyson Sadleir Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne: Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Russia’s Ride to Modernity: Mobility and Social Space in the Railway Age). 456 pp. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2014. ISBN-13 978-3515107365. €68.00. Translated into Russian as Frit´of Ben´iamin Shenk, Poezd v sovremennost´: Mobil´nost´ i sotsial´noe prostranstvo Rossii v vek zheleznykh dorog. 584 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2016. ISBN-13 978-5444805930. Large-scale construction of the railroad in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century coincided with extensive developments in Russian social, economic, and cultural life. Contemporaries noted with interest and apprehension the rapid and comprehensive transformation of Russian society, with increased mobility greatly altering the old Russian modes of life. For example, the railroad greatly affected the practices and traditions of the aristocracy, already well established at the time of Catherine the Great (for instance, wintering at their palace in the city and summering at the country estate with a select circle of friends and acquaintances). Count Vladimir Sologub complained that the life of his relatives “is no longer rooted to the soil but sniffs like an angry woman from corner to corner. Families are fractured and roam from inn to inn.”1 Writers intentionally set their scenes in train cars because they brought representatives from all social classes face to face. It was here that the fateful acquaintance between Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin took place in Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Idiot. New high-speed transport influenced passengers’ feelings and emotions to a large degree. The protagonist in Lev Tolstoi’s short story “The Kreutzer Sonata” acknowledged that railway travel put him in the most aggressive and callous mood: he killed his wife out of (baseless) jealousy just after arriving home from the train station. In [End Page 861] discussing Russia’s “entry” into modernity, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk systematically analyzes these infrastructural developments in great detail. In his Habilitation, published in German (2014) and in Russian (2017), Schenk explores the cultural history of the railroad in imperial Russia from the second half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. Through the lens of rail transport and its role in creating (new) social spaces across the empire, Schenk investigates large-scale transformation in Russia and the empire’s entrance into modernity. In his work, he focuses on the interaction between space and society, drawing on the theoretical work of sociologists. This approach charts a new and productive course for empirical studies of the railroad. Following Dieter Läpple, Schenk devotes his attention to four areas in the study of social spaces: the material substratum (in particular, the history of the creation of the railroad’s “machine ensemble”); rules and regulations; public practices; and symbolic coding and the perception of space through imaginative geography and mental maps.2 Such a thematic focus is new for the study of the railroad. For the first time, the history of the railroad in Russia is analyzed in the context of cultural history on a large scale. Previous literature (including Soviet literature) generally focused on the economic and political significance of rail transport in the prerevolutionary period. To an extent, Schenk’s book is a complement to two other German-language studies on communication routes by Roland Cvetkovski and Walter Sperling. Cvetkovski develops themes of time, space, and mobility through an analysis of the railroad as well as other infrastructures functioning in Russia in the same period, such as the post office and commercial waterways.3 Sperling directs his attention to regional history and questions about the development of transport in Central Russia (Saratov and Iaroslavl´ gubernias).4 Schenk, however, focuses on the railroad throughout Russia. He pays close attention to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Central Russia but also to several crucial regions with unique local features, such as the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia. In chapter 1, “Representations of Space in Russian Discourse on the Railroad,” Schenk discusses representations of imperial space in the design phase of railroad construction. Thanks to the speed and regularity of communication, many remote regions...

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