Antisemitism in Late Imperial Russia and Eastern Europe through 1920

581 Ab Imperio, 2/2003 Christian NOACK Thomas Sanders (Ed.), Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State (Armonk N.Y, London: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). 536 pp. Bibliographical notes, index . $39.95. ISBN 1-56324-685-6 (Paperback) Given that available surveys both in the Russian and Western languages are outdated and inadequate , a comprehensive account on Russian historiography has been a desideratum until recently. Thomas Sanders’ efforts to reintroduce the “rarely seen cross-country cousins” [like Solov’ev or Kizevetter] to the students of Imperial Russia can only be warmly welcomed. On some 500 pages “Historiography of Imperial Russia” presents the main evolutions in historical interpretation within the empire from the age of the Enlightenment into the first decades of the Soviet rule, as far as individual fate of the presented scholars inside and outside the USSR are concerned. Some of the material presented was printed before, a larger portion was originally written for this volume. There is no introduction explaining the principles of construction properly speaking, but the presentation is rather self evident: Part 1 covers the general trends in the development of historical consciousness and practice, with a strong emphasis on the academic background. Part 2 introduces individual “pillars” of Imperial Russian and emergent Ukrainian historiography . Part 3 generalises selected nonRussian historical visions – Jewish, Muslim, and, again, Ukrainian. Part 4 returns to the present state of art in studies of the history of Imperial Russia. Thomas Sanders’ very short introductory remarks “A Most Narrow Present” refrain to a brief explication of the historical conditions under which Russian historiography evolved. The essential notions is “maturation”, read: growing profes- 582 Рецензии/Reviews sionalism, resulting in “alienation”, that is the isolation of the intellectual discourse and mass consciousness. Given the historical-political background , the lack of vertical and horizontal integration of the elites and the society as a whole in late Imperial Russia, the missing of a “comprehensive, inclusive national narrative satisfying to the majority of the empire’s inhabitants” (p. 6-9) seems quite understandable, and the lack of a comprehensive overview of competing Imperial and national narratives is certainly deplorable. The inclusion of Ukrainian, Jewish and Muslim (Central Asian modernist) historiography is a first step to fill the gap, others have followed. (cf. Natsional’nye istorii v sovetskom i postsovetskikh gosudarstvakh. Moscow, 1999) The majority of essays in the first part of the volume reflect a considerable interest of Western scholars in the development of the academic milieu against the background of discussions on the possible emergence of Civil (if local) society and publicity in late Imperial Russia. Allison Katsev’s contribution on “M. T. Kachanovskii and Professional Autonomy in Pre-Reform Russia” is a case in point. Exploring the Moscow professor’s habit in public disputes during the 1820’s and 1830’s, he concludes that the quest for independent and critical academic standards under the roof of professional autonomy and the dependence on the State to bolster them were not (yet) the contradictory forces. This clue, however, is hardly surprising in an article following Cynthia Hyla Whittakers systematic inquiry on “The Idea of Autocracy Among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians.” Whittaker very convincingly shows that precisely the enlightened critical attitude of historians towards autocracy led them to understand this form of government as serving the country’s interests best. As the most effective tool of modernisation and westernisation the idea of autocracy was transformed into a dynamic concept, inspiring subsequent generations of state sponsored reformers well into the 19th century. Thomas Sanders’ “The Third Opponent: Dissertation Defences and the Public Profile of Academic History in Late Imperial Russia” is very closely connected to the mentioned civil society discussions , too. He identifies the public zashchita at least for some periods as the major link between the academic inner circles and what was understood as “society” in the major university cities . Even when access was limited, the admitted public developed “in conjunction to the professoriate an elaborate body of etiquette and expectations concerning disputes.” While socialising effects on the local obshchestva cannot be doubted, Sanders unfortunately 583 Ab Imperio, 2/2003 seems less interested in interpreting these rituals as “ceremonial ordinations of new...

582 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 1670 is a paean to a London risen from the ashes of theGreat Fire.With the prelate Isaac Basire's recommendation he tried his luck at Oxford, where he was financially aided byMerton College and stayed for two terms,bidding the university farewell in 1671 inLatin verse. Here G?m?ri helpfully refersback to one of numerous earlier papers ('Erd?lyi k?lto a XVII. sz?zadbeli Londonban' in his Angol-magyarkapcsolatokaXVI-XVIL sz?zadban, Budapest, 1989), though, again, itwould not have costmuch to add that thispoem is just thirty-three lines long.And Pal J?szber?nyi actually founded a language school inLondon around 1662: evidence of how well Hungarians knew their Latin (which remained the official language ofHungary well into the nineteenth century) and how quickly English students lost theirs after the rupturewith Rome. As these highlights and the numbers indicate, the results of the author's labours are often invaluable and well worth publicizing. Indeed, what is needed now isan interpretation ofwhat thisflow of peregrinators contributed to thewhole range of British-Hungarian contacts and relations in the quarter of a millennium that is covered. Some notes towards this are given in the Introduction, which mentions, for example, James Jakab) Bogdanyi, Queen Anne's court painter, some of whose paintings can be seen at Hampton Court; but there is, apparendy, no room here to refer to our main source for the latter, an article by L?szl? Orsz?gh. Those who came to Britain but not as students are specifically excluded from the scope of the book (perforce by the series inwhich itappears), and are not very accurately recalled by the author: for example, Hungarians who reached the British Isles in the course of their attempt to collect money (quite a story: theTurks held their families ransom) are, in at least six cases, known by name, because they applied for begging permits from the Privy Council. Their total number, however, is given here variously as 'thirteen' (on p. 15) and 'about 10' (on p. 17). In fact, theremust have been a score or more of such Hungarian visitors. The full story of British-Hungarian contacts over these years is a fascinating tale which, as suggested by this scrupulous but perhaps overly terse Hungarian-language summary of an important part of it, well deserves a wider, English-reading audience. School ofSlavonic andEast European Studies Peter Sherwood University CollegeLondon Thatcher, Ian D. (ed.). Late ImperialRussia: Problems and Prospects.Essays in Honour ofR. B. McKean. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005. viii + 208 pp. Notes. Index. ?50.00; ?14.99. In view of the fact thatBob McKean has written not only a massive work of fundamental research (StPetersburg BetweenRevolutions: Workers andRevolutionaries, June igoy-February igiy, New Haven, CT and London, 1990) but also more than one brief teaching aid (e.g. Between theRevolutions:Russia igoj to igiy, London, 1998), he deserved a festschriftwhich has things to say to both specialists and generalists. The contributors to Late ImperialRussia have risen to this challenge by taking the opportunity, where they can, to relate their specialist knowledge to that 'optimist/pessimist' debate about late imperial REVIEWS 583 Russia which loomed large in the early part ofMcKean's career and has enjoyed something of a revival since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If the FirstWorld War had not supervened, could the tsarist regime have met the challenges itfaced? Ian Thatcher points out inhis editorial introduction to the book that the point ofmuch ofMcKean's work has been to challenge Leopold Haimson's famously negative answer to thisquestion. Dr Thatcher's later discussion of 'Late imperial urban workers', however ? the subject to which both Haimson and McKean have devoted such a largemeasure of their scholarly attention ? eventually comes down on the side of the elements inMcKean's approach to the subject which imply that, ultimately, the Romanovs' prospects were not very good. Iain Lauchlan might be said to be on the other side of the fence, for he concludes a wide-ranging discussion of 'The Okhrana: security policing in late imperial Russia' by saying that the tsar's police 'won the battle of wits against the revolutionary underground' and that...

Books reviewed in this issueLiterature and Fine ArtsVinitsky, Ilya. Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia.Khagi, Sofya. Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry.Bagby, Lewis. First Words: On Dostoevsky's Introductions.Harrison, Lonny. Archetypes from Underground: Notes on the Dostoevskian Self.Wyman, Alina. The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky.Berman, Anna A. Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood.Tolstaya, Katya. Kaleidoscope: F. M. Dostoevsky and the Early Dialectical Theology.Howell, Yvonne, ed. Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction.Huseynova, Aida. Music of Azerbaijan: From Mugham to Opera.Chuchvaha, Hanna. Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898–1917).Fitzsimmons, Lorna, and Michael A. Denner, eds. Tolstoy on Screen.Landa, Marianna S. Maximilian Voloshin's Poetic Legacy and the Post‐Soviet Russian Identity.Carr, Maureen. After the Rite: Stravinsky's Path to Neoclassicism (1914–25).Cross, Jonathan. Igor Stravinsky.Khan‐Magomedov, Selim Omarovich. Georgii Krutikov: The Flying City and Beyond.Levitina, Marina. “Russian Americans” in Soviet Film: Cinematic Dialogues between the US and the USSR.Sherry, Samantha. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev Era Soviet Union.Kind‐Kovács, Friederike. Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain.Burry, Alexander, and Frederick H. White, eds. Border Crossing: Russian Literature into Film.Sedakova, Olga. In Praise of Poetry.Vashchenko, Alexander, and Claude Clayton Smith, eds. Meditations after the Bear Feast: The Poetic Dialogues of N. Scott Momaday and Yuri Vaella.HistoryMagocsi, Paul Robert. With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho‐Rusyns.Caridi, Cathy. Making Martyrs East and West: Canonization in the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches.Hamburg, Gary M. Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500–1801.Steinwedel, Charles. Threads of Empire: Loyalty and Tsarist Authority in Bashkiria, 1552–1917.Offord, Derek, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, eds. French and Russian in Imperial Russia, vol. 1: Language Use among the Russian Elite.Offord, Derek, Lara Ryazanova‐Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, eds. French and Russian in Imperial Russia, vol. 2: Language Attitudes and Identity.Davies, Brian L. The Russo‐Turkish War, 1768–1774: Catherine II and the Ottoman Empire.Staliūnas, Darius. Enemies for a Day: Antisemitism and Anti‐Jewish Violence in Lithuania under the Tsars.Kane, Eileen. Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca.Dahlmann, Dittmar, Klaus Heller, and Iurii A. Petrov, eds. Protestanten und Altgläubige – Juden und Muslime. Die ethno‐konfessional Struktur der russländischen Unternehmerschaft vor 1914.Dale, Robert. Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad: Soldiers to Civilians.Danilevskii, Nikolai Iakovlevich. Woe to the Victors! The Russo‐Turkish War, the Congress of Berlin, and the Future of Slavdom.Matsui, Yasuhiro, ed. Obshchestvennost' and Civic Agency in Late Imperial Russia: Interface between State and Society.Allen, Barbara C. Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885–1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik.Milne, Lesley. Laughter and War: Humorous‐Satirical Magazines in Britain, France, Germany and Russia: 1914–1918.Makuch, Andrij, and Frank E. Sysyn, eds. Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies.Mick, Christoph. Lemberg, Lwów, L'viv, 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City.Amar, Tarik Cyril. The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.Rotfeld, Adam Daniel, and Anatoly V. Torkunov, eds. White Spots – Black Spots: Difficult Matters in Polish‐Russian Relations 1918–2008.Casteel, James E. Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions & Utopian Desires 1905–1941.David‐Fox, Michael. Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union.Kilcher, Andreas, and Gabriella Safran, eds. Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography.Harris, James. The Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s.Harrison, Mark. One Day We Will Live without Fear: Everyday Lives under the Soviet Police State.Walke, Anika. Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia.Tsipursky, Gleb. Socialist Fun: Youth, Consumption, & State Sponsored Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1945–1970.Blauvelt, Timothy K., and Jeremy Smith, eds. Georgia after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power.Baldwin, Kate A. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol'niki Park to Chicago's South Side.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherGilbert, George. The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland?Laruelle, Marlene, and Johan Engvall, eds. Kyrgyzstan beyond “Democracy Island” and “Failing State.”Satter, David. The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia's Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin.Zygar, Mikhail. Vsia kremlevskaia rat’: Kratkaia istoriia sovremennoi Rossii.Gill, Graeme. Building an Authoritarian Polity: Russia in Post‐Soviet Times.Suslov, Mikhail, and Mark Bassin, eds. Eurasia 2.0: Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Media.Verkhovskii, Aleksandr. Ugolovnoe pravo stran OBSE protiv prestuplenii nenavisti, vozbuzhdeniia nenavisti i iazyka vrazhdy.Østbø, Jardar. The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth.

Folk art revivals were incubators for modernist movements in painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts, and performing arts. The upsurge of national sentiment in late Imperial Russia and official economic support of handicraft industries (known as kustar’) promoted the marketing of wood crafts and textiles made at Abramtsevo, Talashkino, and other centers in western Russia and Ukraine. Parallel developments drew upon both folk traditions and patriotic ideals in the central and eastern European countries that had suffered territorial encroachments by Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Artists’ groups and art colonies showed special respect for regional landscapes, peasant communities, and local artistic traditions. Their activities reflected nationalist ideologies, as well as practical, economic, and philanthropic concerns. The variety of circumstances and motivations sheds light on the phenomena of art colonies, new valuations of applied art forms, and the enduring importance of education in traditional crafts

Reviewed by: Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 by Vassili Schedrin Victoria Khiterer Jewish Souls, Bureaucratic Minds: Jewish Bureaucracy and Policymaking in Late Imperial Russia, 1850–1917 By Vassili Schedrin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016. xii + 292 pp. After the fall of communism and the opening of the Russian archives, many books and articles devoted to the Jews of imperial Russia were published. However, the book of Vassili Schedrin brings to light the semiforgotten and little researched topic of the work of the Russian Jewish bureaucrats "known as uchenye evrei (learned Jews or expert Jews)." The monograph is based on rich documentary materials from the Russian archives and incorporates all available scholarship and memoirs. Schedrin shows that the attitude toward expert Jews in traditional Jewish society was quite negative, because they were perceived as the agents of the government. But, according to the author, expert Jews were motivated by the [End Page 142] ideals of Jewish Enlightenment and, like the Russian authorities, believed in the necessity of the modernization of traditional Jewish life. Schedrin writes that the imperial Russian policy toward Jews was "motivated by raison d'état rather than by the personal Judeophobia of the tsar and the bureaucracy." The Russian government was motivated by raison d'état (with some exceptions) at the time of the Great Reforms in Russia (the 1860s–1881). But with assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the establishment of state anti-Semitism under Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the policy toward Jews drastically changed from rapprochement of Jews with the gentile population to their isolation and intensified discrimination. The position of expert Jew was established in 1850 and functioned until the February 1917 Revolution. Each governor-general was supposed to appoint two or three expert Jews. Expert Jews were appointed to the seventeen Russian provinces of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, the two city administrations of Odessa and Nikolaev, and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "Within seven decades, a total forty-eight expert Jews were appointed to these twenty bureaucratic offices." The expert Jews had "a broad social mission of cultivating loyalty among the Jews and eradicating Jewish fanaticism by applying their moral influence." The Russian authorities considered that the majority of Russian Jewry—Orthodox Jews were religious fanatics and believed that their way of life should be modernized through military service and education. The major function of expert Jews was implementation of the government policy on Jewish questions. They advised the governors-general on religious affairs and translated Jewish texts, documents, and correspondence from Hebrew and Yiddish to Russian. Expert Jews often were used "to perform a variety of police functions aimed at the prevention of subversive political activity." They worked as translators for interrogation and courts. Sometimes, expert Jews worked also as censors of Jewish books and press. By the order of the Russian authorities, expert Jews also traveled on inspection tours of the various cities and towns of the Pale of Jewish Settlement, and reported about Jewish economic, social, and religious life. To efficiently perform all these varied functions, Jewish bureaucrats needed special preparation and education. The first generation of Jewish bureaucrats had a traditional Jewish education. But later, expert Jews typically got their education either at the Vilna or Zhitomir rabbinical seminaries or at Russian or foreign universities. The work of Jewish bureaucrats was very well [End Page 143] paid. Schedrin writes that "the compensation of expert Jews became comparable to salaries of Russian bureaucrats in the rank of the IX class." They were also often awarded medals, orders, and other signs of honor. Many expert Jews worked at their positions for 20–30 years. They believed that they "toiled both for the sake of the government and for the sake of the Jews." However, while implementing the policy of the Russian government, expert Jews often undermined and harmed traditional Orthodox Jewish society. For example, when the expert Jew German Barats traveled to the southwestern region of Russia (Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces) to popularize "the enrollment of Jewish children into government-sponsored Jewish schools" the Hasidic Jews of Kamenets-Podol'sk threw stones at him. The purpose of...

When Culture Became the New Torah: Late Imperial Russia and the Discovery of Jewish Culture Nathaniel Deutsch Brian Horowitz. Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia. A Samuel and Althea Stroum book. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 342. James Loeffler. The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 274. Kenneth B. Moss. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 384. Jeffrey Veidlinger. Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire. The Modern Jewish Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 382. It was a time when approximately 40 percent of the world’s Jews lived in a great empire in decline, where the shifting meaning of Jewish identity in the modern world, the role of Zionism, and the very future of Judaism, itself were all hotly debated in publications, conferences, and other venues. A time when wealthy Jewish patrons, troubled by a sense of unfolding crisis, funded surveys of the Jewish community and helped to establish a wide range of educational and philanthropic initiatives, often collaborating with scholars, who were themselves creating a veritable renaissance of what we would today call Jewish studies. A time when Jewish writers, artists, and musicians were producing a host of new works inspired by the coming together of Jewish tradition and contemporary [End Page 455] intellectual and artistic sensibilities. In short, it was—in these important respects, at least—a lot like now. Despite the many profound differences between the Jews of late imperial Russia and those of the contemporary United States, both groups share a common feature that makes this comparison possible: the critical role of culture as a—and for many Jews, the—defining category of Jewish experience and identity. Today, we are used to employing the phrase “Jewish culture” as if its existence were self-evident. But like so many phenomena that seem natural, the concept of Jewish culture actually possesses a long and frequently contentious history of its own, one in which the period leading up to the Russian Revolution served as an important watershed and, in a genealogical sense, as an ancestor to the present-day valorization of Jewish culture. In his recent study of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia (Obshchestva dlia Rasprostraneniia Prosveshcheniia Mezhdu Evreiami v Rossii), or OPE, Brian Horowitz has explored the ways in which liberal Jewish philanthropists and those whom they supported (as opposed to radical Jewish political parties) sought to promote their own unifying vision of Jewish culture during the late imperial period. He has argued that the questions they struggled with are just as relevant today: “It is my conviction that the ideas about Jewish modernity under consideration here resonate in our own time. In contemporary America, Jews debate issues of synthesis between traditional and modern, collective and private life. They discuss the elements in a Jewish education and the role of Jewish culture in the formation of identity. This study offers a model of individuals and institutions struggling with the concern so central to contemporary Jews in America and around the world: how to foster the development of the Jewish nation while fully integrating into modern society.”1 In this essay, I will explore the nexus between two interrelated “discoveries” of Jewish culture. The first took place in the final decades of the Russian Empire and, as Kenneth Moss has recently argued in his book Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution, continued during the 1917 Revolution. Like many discoveries, this one owed at least as much to changing perceptions and definitions as it did to an encounter with the new. In other words, Russian Jews discovered what had, to some extent, always been right under their noses. The initial shift, then, was partly epistemological and taxonomic: to what conceptual category did Jewish values, [End Page 456] music, tales, sayings, customs—and, in the case of Yiddish, language itself—belong? Once these phenomena were viewed as constitutive elements of a distinctly Jewish culture (a process which, as we will see, was intimately connected to political developments), then they could be...

On Faith and FanaticismConverts from Judaism and the Limits of Toleration in Late Imperial Russia Ellie R. Schainker (bio) She was a convert from Judaism in the imperial Russian provinces assailed by her family and friends for communal betrayal. Brought to life in the Ukrainian artist Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko’s painting Zhertva fanatizma (Victim of Fanaticism; 1899), this converted Jewess was inspired by an actual female convert in a shtetl (Yiddish: small town) in the Pale of Jewish Settlement in late imperial Russia who converted to marry her Christian lover and was then tormented by her former coreligionists. Although contemporary Jews decried Pimonenko’s art as antisemitic for casting the former Jewess as an innocent victim of Jewish wrath and aggression, they also appropriated the sketch and another like it for circulation on postcards with the accompanying Hebrew words ha-meshumedet (the Apostate) and ha-bogedet (the Traitoress), thus renarrating the events to cast moral blame on the neophyte and legitimize the collective ire of the Jewish community.1 More than a controversial episode in the artistic representation of Jews, Pimonenko’s illustration is the product of a long history of storytelling about conversion as a conflictual boundary crossing. It gives figural rendering to a wide-ranging conversation over the course of the 19th century about Jewish violence in the face of conversion. The popular press and jurists alike mediated this conversation in the late imperial period to mark Jews as both religious and social “fanatics,” whose violent intolerance toward apostate kin rendered them undeserving of imperial toleration. In particular, conservative voices in the late imperial press linked stories of conversion-inspired violence to the medieval ritual murder accusation to generate a new blood libel myth in which Jews ritually sacrificed their converted family members. [End Page 753] Click for larger view View full resolution Postcard of Nikolai Kornilovich Pimonenko’s 1899 painting Victim of Fanaticism, printed by a Jewish publisher active in Berlin and retitled in Hebrew ha-meshumedet (The Apostate). Similarly, the German title reads Baptized Jewess in Native Village. Credit: Collection of Prof. Shalom Sabar, Jerusalem. Violence as a concept long framed the relation of the state and imperial subjects to conversion as a boundary crossing during the long 19th century. Many Jews narrated conversion as Christian violence against vulnerable Jewish children; and conversions for many converts and their clerical and administrative allies were often understood as endangered by the violence of Jewish families and communities who sought to physically repress deviant behavior. Violence in these stories not only consisted in the infliction of physical pain but also inhered in the language of dispute over the violation of confessional and communal boundaries. Claims of physical harm referred either to direct or to structural violence—at times religious coercion and at times perceived assaults on religious truth, thus causing despair and humiliation.2 The stories of aggression told about Jews expanded the scope of violence in the Russian Empire to everyday forms of conflict, suggesting that minority groups like the Jews were usurping the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Beginning in the mid-1860s and the era of reform, conservative voices in the Russian press, in line with some jurists, harnessed these stories of violence to create a narrative of gendered violence in which Jews were designated as [End Page 754] inherently fanatical. This discrediting discourse came on the heels of the 1863 Polish insurrection and ensuing Russification campaigns in the northwestern region. In addition, the 1864 judicial reforms provided public, civil channels for cantonist converts from Judaism to challenge their coerced baptisms in the pre-reform army and for prosecutors to indict relapsed converts and their alleged Jewish enablers on charges of leading neophytes astray or of “seduction” (sovrashchenie).3 In this late imperial discourse of Jewish violence, the female convert as victim was used to construct an ethnoconfessional political order that set “fanatical” minorities apart from the rational, tolerant, and civilized imperial order. The female victim symbolized the vulnerability of religious truth to heterodoxy, especially because women were identified as vessels of religion across faith communities. In addition, exclusion and humiliation often breed intimate and domestic violence. Thus gendered violence served...

Folk art revivals were incubators for modernist movements in painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts, and performing arts. The upsurge of national sentiment in late Imperial Russia and official economic support of handicraft industries (known as kustar’) promoted the marketing of wood crafts and textiles made at Abramtsevo, Talashkino, and other centers in western Russia and Ukraine. Parallel developments drew upon both folk traditions and patriotic ideals in the central and eastern European countries that had suffered territorial encroachments by Russia, Prussia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Artists’ groups and art colonies showed special respect for regional landscapes, peasant communities, and local artistic traditions. Their activities reflected nationalist ideologies, as well as practical, economic, and philanthropic concerns. The variety of circumstances and motivations sheds light on the phenomena of art colonies, new valuations of applied art forms, and the enduring importance of education in traditional crafts.

406 Рецензии/Reviews Malte ROLF Jörg Gebhard, Lublin: Eine polnische Stadt im Hinterhof der Moderne (1815–1914) (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2006). 394 S. ISBN: 978-341-207-606-1. In recent years a large number of histories of cities in Eastern Europe has been produced. Karl Schlögel’s often-cited dictum of a “renaissance of the city” has in fact come true.1 Riga, Odessa, Moscow, or St. Petersburg , Budapest, Lvov, Kraków, or Prague – all of these place have stimulated recent research on reconsidering the interdependency of modern times and the metropolis in the context of the multiethnic empires of Eastern Europe.2 Jörg Gebhard’s study is of a different kind as it focuses on a still rather neglected site of (urban) history , Lublin, a city in the “backyard of modernity,” as the author puts it. Gebhard tells the story of a smallersized city that was touched by industrial and technical modernization relatively late and that witnessed only retarded and always fragile social and cultural change. Lublin was not a showcase of modern urbanity, but remained a provincial town that never developed into anything more than a regional center of southeastern Poland. By depicting the slower, fragmented path of change of a city such as Lublin, Gebhard opens a perspective on the “normality of the periphery,” where slowness was much more the typical mode of life and change than the hectic urbanity of the large modern metropolis. It is exactly this focus that makes Gebhard’s book fascinating reading since it sheds light on the somewhat weaker and always ambivalent forces of modernization of one of the many smaller city in one of the many inner peripheries of the East European empires. Gebhard presents a stimulating, multifaceted, and lively 1 Karl Schlögel. Das Wunder von Nishnij oder die Rückkehr der Städte. Frankfurt/a. M., 1991. 2 To name only a few: Julie A. Buckler. Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape. Princeton, 2005; Michael F. Hamm (Ed.). The City in Late Imperial Russia. Bloomington, 1986; Guido Hausmann. Universität und städtische Gesellschaft in Odessa, 1865–1917. Stuttgart, 1998; Ulrike von Hirschhausen. Die Grenzen der Gemeinsamkeit. Deutsche, Letten, Russen und Juden in Riga 1860–1914. Göttingen, 2006; Karl Schlögel et al. (Hgs.). Sankt Petersburg: Schauplätze einer Stadtgeschichte. Frankfurt/a. M., 2007; Roshanna P. Sylvester. Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves. DeKalb, 2005; Anna Veronika Wendland. Urbane Identität und nationale Integration in zwei Grenzland-Metropolen: Lemberg und Wina, 1900–1930er Jahre // Hans-Werner Rautenberg (Hg.). Wanderungen und Kulturaustausch im östlichen Mitteleuropa. Forschungen zum ausgehenden Mittelalter und zur jüngeren Neuzeit. München, 2006. S. 145-162. 407 Ab Imperio, 1/2009 3 This long shadow of Warsaw overshadowed Kraków as the self-proclaimed cultural capital of Poland. See: Hanna Kozińska-Witt. Krakau in Warschaus langem Schatten: Konkurrenzkämpfe in der polnischen Städtelandschaft 1900–1939. Stuttgart, 2008. picture of this town in “the backyard of modernity.” The book has much to offer for anyone interested in the contorted ways of the nonlinear, retarded, and fractured processes of modernization in this historical context. At the same time, Gebhard touches upon important issues of the history of partitioned Poland and of Russian rule in the “Vistula lands.” Finally, he tells the fascinating story of a bi-confessional town with a Jewish population of almost 50% and gives a nuanced account of the troubled relations between the Polish and Jewish parts of urban society. Corresponding to this variety of themes, Gebhard chooses a multilayered approach to his research object. He opens with a chapter on the historical site and the development of Lublin as a town during the 19th century, and then focuses on the Jewish population in the following chapter. Chapter 4 deals with the conflict-ridden relationship between the local Polish society and the Russian administration, while Chapter 5 tells the story of accelerated change under the growing influence of modernization during the last decades of the 19th century. The concluding chapters deal with the rise of Polish nationalism in Lublin and the role anti-Semitism played in the formation of a...

REVIEWS 567 amongstothers.Thebookwillbeofgreatinteresttoabroadspectrumofreaders from Russian intellectual, cultural, legal and scientific historical backgrounds, and rewards thorough and careful reading. UCL SSEES Jennifer Keating Weinberg, Robert. Blood Libel in Late Imperial Russia: The Ritual Murder Trial of Mendel Beilis. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2014. xii + 188 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.00 (paperback). In this examination of the Beilis Affair, Robert Weinberg reconstructs one of the most notorious — and publicized — trials in history, a story that gripped contemporary Russia and attracted global interest. Its basis was the accusation that the killing of Andrei Iushinskii in Kiev was a ritual murder committed by a Jewish manager from a nearby brick factory, Mendel Beilis. What followed was a trial that became an international cause, with a variety of right-wing groups and nationalists supporting the assertions of blood libel and many others in society opposing them as entirely fictitious, and the promulgation of the case as representing a travesty of justice. This work, which will contribute particularly to our understanding of antisemitism in late imperial Russia, is split into two parts. The first is a balanced, measured and fair-minded reconstruction of the events surrounding the ritual murder claim, particularly focusing on the trial held in Kiev in 1913. The second part consists of a series of sixty-four documents, many of which have been culled from the official records of the trial, and also a variety of newspaper reports and memoirs. Weinberg’s detailed account adds new material to a story that has already been retold in some detail; here, one thinks of Maurice Samuel’s Blood Accusation (New York, 1966), or Aleksandr Tager’s Tsarskaia Rossiia i delo Beilisa. K istorii antisemitizma (Tsarist Russia and the Beilis Affair: Towards a History of Antisemitism, Moscow, 1995), both of which Weinberg credits in the introduction. In addition to these sources, Weinberg makes considerable use of primary documents in constructing his own interpretation — particularly, the court records of the trial. Though the retelling of the narrative of the trial is interesting, even gripping, the most valuable contribution of the work is how it skillfully places the trial in its wider social and political context whilst making a thorough and detailed use of key primary sources. Kiev had a history of antisemitism long before this period, and after 1905 the rise of mass politics combined with an illiberal SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 568 agenda served to increase long-standing tensions between Jews and non-Jews (p. 19). As the author notes, it is only in a society where deep social and political tensions existed that such a trial could be constructed and widely supported, particularly given that it was an obvious fabrication even to those who backed it at key stages (p. 35). However, the significance of the trial goes beyond personal agendas and even animosity in wider society. Figures such as the Minister of Justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, brought the ritual murder claim to prominence and then supported it not merely because they believed it expressed civic and political tensions that they could exploit for their own self-interest, but because ‘it would aid the survival of autocratic Russia’ (p. 37). As the author demonstrates, there is an interesting comparative angle to these events. Though the Beilis trial has been explored before in comparison with the Dreyfus and the Leo Frank Affairs, Weinberg claims the Beilis Affair has a wider significance given the recurring use of ritual murder imagery and myth throughout history. This is particularly obvious from the wide-ranging introduction, assessing the use of the ritual murder myth throughout Europe, and how such incidences compare with the Beilis Affair in late imperial Russia. As Weinberg notes, the trial ultimately proved counter-productive to those who pushed it the most, including both the radical right and sympathizers within the imperial regime. It caused tensions amongst Russian nationalists, with Vasili Shul´gin being one particularly prominent critic, and also attracted international attention and criticism (pp. 61–62). However the open-ended nature of the verdict, which acquitted Beilis but confirmed that a ritual murder had taken place, led to many supporters...

Reviewed by: Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia, and: Prostitutsiia v Rossii s XVII veka do 1917 goda (Prostitution in Russia from the 17th Century to 1917), and: Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1930 Barbara Evans Clements Barbara Alpern Engel , Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia. xi+282 pp., illus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0804149512. $39.95. A. A. Il´iukhov , Prostitutsiia v Rossii s XVII veka do 1917 goda (Prostitution in Russia from the 17th Century to 1917). 558 pp., tables. Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2008. ISBN-13 978-5948810492. Sharon A. Kowalsky , Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880-1930. 330 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0875804064. $42.00. These books cast light on the workings of Russian bureaucracy in its imperial and Soviet incarnations, on the views of the intelligentsia regarding female criminality, and on the consciousness of women who did not live within the rules. A. A. Il´iukhov considers the imperial government's regulation of prostitution. Sharon Kowalsky studies ideas about female crime held by criminologists in the 1920s. Barbara Engel analyzes petitions for marital separation considered by the Imperial Chancellery for Receipt of Petitions from the 1880s to 1914. The three historians find that officials were more sympathetic to the difficulties in women's lives than one might have expected, and that therefore some of the women who came under scrutiny because they were lawbreakers or were seeking to end unbearable marriages were able to work the system to their benefit. Documented as well are the ways in which long-standing gender values affected interactions among authorities, intellectuals, and ordinary folk. Il´iukhov and Engel trace change in those values in the late 19th century. Il´iukhov was inspired to write his book by the visibility of prostitution in the post-Soviet period. He does not break with the Soviet analysis of the subject: that is, he sees prostitution as caused by women's subordination and fueled by capitalism, which generates the urban poverty that drives women into selling their bodies. Unlike some Western historians, Il´iukhov is forthright in his condemnation of the sex trade. He argues that, always and [End Page 1006] everywhere, it victimizes women, subjecting them to abuse and exploitation by brothel owners and pimps, clients, and police. He would probably find morally reprehensible the argument that prostitution, despite its horrors, enabled its most successful practitioners to achieve income and independence in societies that provided few other avenues to those benefits.1 The study concentrates on the history of the mess that was tsarist policy toward the sex trade. The government never repealed its laws prohibiting prostitution. Instead it sought to control the spread of venereal diseases by licensing brothels and requiring their residents to have regular medical examinations. Police were responsible for maintaining order in the environs of the brothels and arresting prostitutes who worked the streets, taverns, and flop houses. Committees of doctors and police were charged with implementing the medical provisions. The stupidity of this endeavor exasperates Il´iukhov. Most prostitutes were not in brothels, many of those who were avoided the examinations, and it was impossible to identify, let alone treat, the customers, had effective treatments been available. Il´iukhov discusses the well-meaning attempts of social reformers, many of them physicians, to wrest regulatory control from the police, and he accepts their judgment that the police were often abusive and corrupt. He analyzes as well the reformers' notions about prostitutes, which combined sympathy for the poor with the belief that some women had a natural inclination to depravity. He does not study the efforts of charity groups to reform prostitutes. Il´iukhov's findings duplicate those of Laurie Bernstein.2 He does not cite her work, but he is familiar with the history of prostitution elsewhere in Europe. He spends more time than Bernstein on the government's recurring efforts to improve enforcement by tweaking the regulations. He also examines in greater detail the functioning of the enforcement system outside the capitals...

Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial Russia, by Simon Rabinovitch. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2014. xiii, 374 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). This engaging book sheds new light on the origins of Jewish nationalism and party politics in late imperial Russia. Much like the neighbouring Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, and other groups who began to define themselves as nations in the late nineteenth century, Jews in the Russian Empire formed a huge variety of political and cultural movements, all with a goal to revoke discriminatory legislation against Jews and to secure civil and national rights. Both the socialist and Zionist movements realized their goals to an extent in 1917 and 1948, respectively, and have received much scholarly attention for that reason. Simon Rabinovitch's focus here is among the lesser known, but arguably most influential, of Jewish national ideologies of this period: Autonomism, or Diaspora Nationalism--a movement built from the idea that despite their status as a non-territorial nation, Jews were entitled to rights of national within a modem constitutional framework. The book begins with a discussion of the origins of autonomist ideology, a brainchild of the prolific and brilliant Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnov (1860-1941). Later chapters chronicle the influence of autonomist ideas on the rise of Jewish party politics during Russia's 1905 Revolution; Dubnov's formation in St. Petersburg of an autonomist political party (the Jewish People's Party, or Folkspartey); and his leadership of the party from 1907 to its demise, shortly after the 1917 Revolution. This study's novelty is its detailed reconstruction of Dubnov's ideas and their impact on Jewish national politics during the decade that preceded the collapse of Russia's autocracy. While Dubnov's writings as a nationalist historian are well known, Rabinovitch reveals here how Dubnov moved from the realm of ideas to that of practical politics. The main argument of the book is that Dubnov's influence extended far beyond that of his own party, which remained relatively small and never gained widespread support on the Jewish street; rather, his doctrine of autonomism offered a common language of national rights and autonomy (p. 118) that most of Russia's Jewish political parties, including socialist, Zionist, and liberal variants, adopted as part of their respective platforms. A first chapter explains Dubnov's belief, expounded in a series of political treatises between 1897 and 1907, that national rights constituted at once a defense against (what he regarded as) the pernicious effects of assimilation, and a positive means to preserve Jews as a distinct spiritual and cultural nation (his terms) of people with full civil equality. …

This book provides a systematic study of civil law in late Imperial Russia. It shows that efforts to adjust family, property, and inheritance law to changing social and economic conditions often became intertwined with attempts to shape society in accordance with competing ideological ideals. Through a restructuring of the family's legal basis, members of the growing educated and professional strata of society in particular endeavoured to promote conflicting conceptions of authority, individuality, gender, and law. Legal reform also served for members of the emerging legal and medical professions as a way to establish their authority, often at the expense of the state administration and the Orthodox Church. Civil law in late Imperial Russia therefore constituted both an important medium for ideological redefinition and a field of battle for those seeking to reform, to overthrow, or to defend the ancient regime. Because this battle extended into the state bureaucracy, legislative change proved extremely difficult. Newly empowered by the 1864 judicial reform, the judiciary responded to legislative inaction by not merely adapting the law, but also by promoting an ideal of the family whose values and principles challenged those underlying the autocracy.

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 750 probably have been interested in hearing more about the way in which Thomas (probably) fabricated some of the material in his second book on Travels in the Regions of the Upper and Lower Amoor (1860). It would also have been useful for specialists to know more about the light cast on Thomas and Lucy’s travels by the archival material in the Royal Geographic Society. Readers with a more casual interest in the subject will certainly appreciate the high production qualities of South to the Great Steppe. They may, though, find themselves confused by Fielding’s failure to provide his readers with the kind of clear historical framework needed to allow them to put the Atkinsons’ experiences in context. The book contains a foreword by Rupert Goodman, Chairman of the BritishKazakh Society, complete with a paean of praise to President Nazarbayev — and a note that the National Welfare Fund of Kazakhstan helped to fund production of the book. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘The Travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan, 1847–1852’ (a striking use of language, presumably designed to emphasize the contemporary resonance of a nineteenth-century cultural encounter, for the term Kazakhstan would have meant nothing to the Atkinsons who thought instead of ‘Central Asia’ and ‘The Kirghis Steppe’). There is of course nothing necessarily wrong in this. The development of better relations between countries can certainly be helped by building greater understanding of their past cultural connections. There is nevertheless a sense when finishing this book of not being sure exactly what it is designed to achieve. The story of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson is, though, a fascinating one that deserves to be known better. Fielding’s obvious enthusiasm for his subjects may help make that possible, despite the oddities of the book, and it certainly reminded this reviewer of the adventures of an unlikely couple and their baby son. Lancaster University Michael Hughes Gilbert, George. The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland? BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies, 104. Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2016. xxiii + 258 pp. Map. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £100.00. The Russian political right was a sort of anomaly. It consisted mostly of actors who disliked — or at least professed to dislike — politics and who became active in support of a regime whose official defenders were often wary of autonomous political forces. In recent years, especially in Russia, scholars have devoted considerable attention to rightist activists and organizations, yet REVIEWS 751 our understanding of them, as opposed to their leftist counterparts, remains woefully underdeveloped. For this reason alone, the volume under review is most welcome. Yet The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia has other virtues. It draws upon extensive research in the periodical press, a valuable yet perenniallyneglectedsource.Itengageswellwithmuchrelevanthistoriography. Gilbert has delved deeply into archival material, especially police reports, but also personal collections of rightist activists. He places the Russian right in European comparative perspective, and he pays close attention to regional developments, including case studies on Odessa, Kiev and Astrakhan´. The author combines a chronological and a thematic approach. Following an overview of nineteenth-century conservative thought, he focuses on an early nationalistic cultural organization, the Russian Assembly. Founded in 1901, it soon had branches in numerous provincial capitals. Its members celebrated ‘the greatness of Russian culture’ (p. 30) and disparaged non-Russians, especially Jews. Most government officials, who were often personally antipathetic toward Jews, worried about such attitudes inflaming ethnic tensions. Many activists of the incipient right, for their part, regretted what they considered the weakness of senior officials and even the tsar himself. The Revolution of 1905 energized right-wing activists and brought to life a constellation of rightist groups, like the Union of Russian Men and the Union of Russian People, which in two years had hundreds of branches across the empire. For the most part they opposed constitutionalism, limits on the monarchy, and the government’s agrarian reform; were suspicious of capitalism and vowed to protect the interests of peasants and workers, yet exhibited a lack of faith in the Russian people. Resort to...

This book provides a systematic study of civil law in late Imperial Russia. It shows that efforts to adjust family, property, and inheritance law to changing social and economic conditions often became intertwined with attempts to shape society in accordance with competing ideological ideals. Through a restructuring of the family's legal basis, members of the growing educated and professional strata of society in particular endeavoured to promote conflicting conceptions of authority, individuality, gender, and law. Legal reform also served for members of the emerging legal and medical professions as a way to establish their authority, often at the expense of the state administration and the Orthodox Church. Civil law in late Imperial Russia therefore constituted both an important medium for ideological redefinition and a field of battle for those seeking to reform, to overthrow, or to defend the ancient regime. Because this battle extended into the state bureaucracy, legislative change proved extremely difficult. Newly empowered by the 1864 judicial reform, the judiciary responded to legislative inaction by not merely adapting the law, but also by promoting an ideal of the family whose values and principles challenged those underlying the autocracy.