Matsui, Yasuhiro (ed) Obshchestvennost′ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia: Interface between State and Society (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 377 will surely take its well-deserved place in the canon of legal theory, philosophy and socio-legal thought, and be finally recognized for its significant and lasting contribution to international jurisprudence. Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki P. Sean Morris Matsui,Yasuhiro(ed).Obshchestvennost´ and Civic Agency in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia: Interface between State and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2015. xi + 234 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. £63.00. This book is a collection of essays by Japanese scholars that examine Russian and Soviet society through the prism of obshchestvennost´. This term is used by Matsui to define both socially-active groups of people and the wider concept of the social and public identity that was connected with social activities and voluntary organizations. This dual understanding of the term — as both a concrete group of individuals and an intangible identity — gives the authors of this collection of essays considerable scope in their discussion of Russian and Soviet society. Three essays deal with tsarist society: Vladimir Stasov’s role as critic is discussed by Yukiko Tatsumi, while workers’ relationship to the civic public sphere is analysed by Yoshifuru Tsuchiya, and the nature of obshchestvennost´ during the First World War is considered by Yoshiro Ikeda. There has been extensive discussion about the nature of Russian society in the years before 1917 and these essays deal with more familiar ideas about civic agency, showing the ambivalent nature of late tsarist Russian society. Obshchestvennost´ has been much less commonly used as an analytical tool in the analysis of Soviet society but the six essays that address themes in the post-1917 period suggest that the concept can also usefully be employed to discuss the Soviet Union. Zenji Asaoka argues in his chapter that Bukharin’s attempt to organize the rabsel´kor movement in the Soviet press — ordinary people contributing to newspapers, along the lines of Pravda’s 1918 ‘worker’s life’ column — represented a very different view of Soviet society from that espoused by Stalin. This approach to social development was extended by the types of community activity encouraged through housing cooperatives in the 1930s, and Yasuhiro Matsui discusses this potential alternative to official discourse in an interesting essay on Moscow housing. The interplay between central direction and local initiative is also discussed in Mie Nakachi’s piece on the post-war Soviet medical profession. She suggests that obshchestvennost´ survived under Stalin, albeit in a form that was different from its nineteenthcentury manifestation. Voluntary activism could support the work and ethos of the state or equally it could serve to frustrate and counter the regime’s SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 378 work: Nakachi uses the example of how doctors approached the very difficult issue of abortion surveillance to indicate the complexity of the relationship between state and society that developed after 1945. Two essays discuss the Khrushchev period: Kiyohiro Matsudo looks at the people’s vigilante brigades (druzhiny) while Kazuko Kawamoto analyses the comrades’ courts. In both cases, the regime sought to enlist the public to maintain law and order but popular enthusiasm for the two initiatives remained lukewarm. The final essay in the collection is by Yasuhiro Matsui, who discusses how Soviet dissidents attempted to disseminate their views abroad and thus extend the sphere in which their ideas were heard. The book shows some of the very different ways in which state and society interacted in late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union and is successful in drawing useful parallels between the two states. Authoritarian regimes face particular challenges in engaging with social groups: their desire to control every aspect of public activity is tempered by a desire to appear to have popular support. As these essays demonstrate, both the tsarist and Soviet regimes wanted to mobilize society but the results of these attempts could never be predicted. As Ikeda’s essay shows, the mobilization of society during the First World War in support of the war effort also had the result of sharpening social autonomy and encouraging opposition to the regime. The Soviet doctors in Nakachi’s chapter demonstrated an ambivalence to the state’s demands that showed how the regime was unable to rely on absolute conformity...