Archival Revolution Research Articles

Islam and the Russian Empire. Reform and Revolution in Central Asia By HELENE CARRERE D'ENCAUSSE

In any field of history, a book needs to be something quite special to justify an unaltered reprinting forty years after its original publication. For the history of the Russian Empire this is even more true, thanks to the archival revolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which finally allowed Western scholars to use long-inaccessible collections of documents. A book which, as in this case, concentrates on the Islamic, non-Russian peoples of the Empire, whose history more than any other has been revolutionized since the early 1990s, would need to be a masterpiece. Unfortunately Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s Reforme et Révolution chez les Musulmans de l’Empire Russe was a flawed book even on its original publication in 1966, and was already beginning to look rather tired and dusty when this English translation was first published in 1988 without any updating (the timing was unfortunate). I.B. Tauris’s decision to re-publish it without so much as a new critical introduction is baffling, an insult to the intelligence of those who are familiar with the field, and a shameless attempt to cash in on the ignorance of those who are not.

Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i musul'mane Rossiiskoi imperii (The First Russian Revolution and Muslims of the Russian Empire) , and: Islamskie instituty v Rossiiskoi imperii: Mecheti v evropeiskoi chasti Rossii i Sibiri (Islamic Institutions in the Russian Empire:Mosques in European Russia and Siberia) (review)

Reviewed by: Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i musul'mane Rossiiskoi imperii (The First Russian Revolution and Muslims of the Russian Empire), and: Islamskie instituty v Rossiiskoi imperii: Mecheti v evropeiskoi chasti Rossii i Sibiri (Islamic Institutions in the Russian Empire:Mosques in European Russia and Siberia) Norihiro Naganawa Salavat Midkhatovich Iskhakov , Pervaia russkaia revoliutsiia i musul'mane Rossiiskoi imperii (The First Russian Revolution and Muslims of the Russian Empire). 400 pp. Moscow: Sotsial'no-politicheskaia mysl', 2007. ISBN 978-5915790017. Il'dus Kotdusovich Zagidullin , Islamskie instituty v Rossiiskoi imperii: Mecheti v evropeiskoi chasti Rossii i Sibiri (Islamic Institutions in the Russian Empire: Mosques in European Russia and Siberia). 416 pp. Kazan': Tatarskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 2007. ISBN-13 978-5298015349. The "archival revolution" has opened the way for Western students of the Russian Empire to vividly document interactions between the state and multiethnic society in regional contexts.1 These scholars have revealed an oscillation between ideological and practical thinking and behavior among central and local officials. They have addressed the unexpected consequences caused by various actors appropriating imperial rulings and institutions to serve their own interests. Comparison among regions enables them to discover certain patterns of imperial administration. In short, their focus has been on ways in which the state machinery functioned in practice. They have largely freed themselves from a historical narrative inevitably heading toward revolution, the teleological goal of the demise of the empire. Giving an overview of new developments in the 1905 revolution and after, Robert Crews concludes that Muslims continued to fall back on the state as a potential ally in the imposition of Islamic orthodoxy and disciplining of the community: "The varied Muslim communities of the empire remained embedded in, and helped to sustain, an empire founded on religious discipline for all the tsar's children."2 Denunciation of the Russian Empire as a "prison of peoples" is now out of fashion in Russia, too. Some historians from its national regions are even inclined to idealize the imperial past, while those based in Moscow, especially, [End Page 682] tend to defend imperial rule as a progressive phenomenon.3 The trajectory of Russia's regional historiography reflects political developments in the regions. In Kazan', for instance, the study of reformist movements (Dzhadidizm) was a booming industry in the 1990s, given the rise of a national movement and the obsession with proving the Tatars' entitlement to elements of independent statehood (gosudarstvennost'). But the very act of framing the question in terms of the "Tatar nation" revealed a profound Soviet imprint. In contrast, at the beginning of the 21st century, Kazan' scholars are increasingly addressing the Muslims' interrelations with the state. The growing role of Muslim Spiritual Boards (Dukhovnye upravleniia musul'man) in Russia's Muslim communities leads scholars to cull historical experience from imperial archives. They are disposed to demonstrate that their "traditional Islam" has served both Tatar identity and Russia's unity.4 Western and Russian scholarship both serve as an antidote to the agendas of national movements and as a reminder of the durability of the empire. It is rare, however, for either to ask how one should measure and evaluate the impact of late imperial revolutions and social change on Muslim communities. The two books under review provide us with contrasting views concerning the relations between the Muslim communities and the state: whereas Il'dus Zagidullin focuses on a longer period of time and is thus inclined to illustrate the stability of the empire's confessional administration, Salavat Iskhakov's subject is the political ferment triggered by the 1905 revolution in Muslim communities and their attempts to forge new relations with the state. By examining each book's merits and limitations, this review proposes a research agenda that may enhance our ability to interpret the response of Muslim society to political and social changes in late imperial Russia. The picture that historians now have of the role that the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly played in the Muslim community in the Volga-Urals region is clearer than that of its three counterparts (one in Simferopol' and one each for Sunnis and Shiites in Tiflis). The Kazan' historian Il'dus Zagidullin has published a series of works that...

Soviet mass violence in Estonia revisited

Soviet mass violence in the annexed Baltic republics was first researched by émigré historians, who could not use archives. Due to the “archival revolution” we possess today a more variegated picture of the scale and nature of Soviet repression. Approximately 12–14 percent of the population became victims of Soviet persecution and 4 percent died. Single cases of mass killings and 3,000 death penalties are documented, but the majority of deaths stemmed from criminal neglect. While émigré historians often used the term “genocide,” the authors believe that speaking of “different waves of cleansing” better grasps the nature of Soviet violence in Estonia and the diversity of its victims, means and targets. Mass violence did not only occur in the name of “cleansing.” In the struggle with armed resistance and in forced collectivization it also played an essential, if more instrumental role. While the Kremlin initiated the vast majority of repression in a top-down approach using bureaucratic methods, there is evidence too of “spontaneous” violence conducted by local authorities. There is also proof of a compromise policy, such as several amnesties aimed at people in the underground. The enormous population losses of one quarter of the population due to war and terror cannot be denied, but the term “genocide” as applied to the Estonian context is appropriate only for the Holocaust and the killing of the Gypsy population during the Nazi occupation. Nevertheless, Stalinism resulted in five times more casualties among the Estonian population than Nazi rule.

»Im allgemeinen Meer der Stimmen soll auch meine Stimme erklingen ...«

According to often-quoted statements, Soviet elections were hardly worth mentioning before the »archival revolution« of the 1990s. They were »elections without choice«, non-competitive elections with only one candidate per constituency and almost 100 per cent of approval. Accordingly, the elections were held to demonstrate power via the stabilizing effect mass mobilization of the party public had on the system. This analysis is an attempt to show that such elections also had different meanings and that forms of dissent were possible. Its epistemological interest is in spheres of societies of the Soviet type in which nonconformity and resistance were articulated. Such behaviour was the flipside of the real purpose of elections in socialist states: the regime's self-assurance of the population's loyalty. Comments on voting slips, up until now an unknown archival source, are used to analyse both variants of socialist elections.

The political economy of Stalinism in the light of the archival revolution

One of the many favourable aspects of the collapse of the USSR was the vastly increased access to the archives of Soviet institutions by historians, economists and other specialists that resulted. This led to an intense study, by specialists from the successor states of the USSR, mainly Russia (which inherited the archives of all the central Soviet institutions), and by foreign academics, of the huge mass of documents on the Soviet period accumulated in what became the archives of the successor states. One major result of this study was the publication of a large mass of archival documents. By now, not only individual volumes, but a number of series of volumes, containing original documents in a wide variety of fields, have been published. In addition, numerous articles and books utilizing archival sources have been published. Furthermore, some archival documents containing previously unknown information are now available on the web. For example, Ukrainian archivists have placed on the web numerous documents relating to the 1933 famine in their country. This new approach to the study of the USSR, and the additional knowledge resulting from it, is known as the archival revolution in the analysis of the Soviet system. Overviews of the new insights thus obtained about Stalinism have recently been published both by historians (Khlevnyuk, 2001; Litvin and Keep, 2005) and economists (Gregory, 2004; Gregory and Harrison, 2005), two journals/annuals have published special issues on the archival revolution, and there is a website devoted to political economy research in Soviet archives (http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/persa). The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the new knowledge which is shorter than Gregory and Harrison's survey article, links the new knowledge to what was previously known, discusses some issues excluded from previous surveys, and considers questions likely to be of particular interest to JOIE readers.

Российские мусульмане после архивной революции: Взгляд с Кавказа и из Болгарии

SUMMARY: The article is based on the author’s research in different archival collections containing documents in Russian and various Oriental languages relating to North Caucasian Muslims. The paper presents an attempt to critically rethink the advantages and disadvantages of the so-called Archival Revolution in the post-Communist period. More than fifteen years have passed since the opening of the archives of the post-Soviet space, yet these years did not produce a serious shift in understanding of Islam and Muslim communities under Russian rule. This situation points to a methodological crisis in Russian Islamic Studies. This crisis arises from the continued domination of misleading approaches of the Cold War period. Most scholars still concentrate on official Russian-language sources featuring a hostile attitude toward Islam and viewing Muslims as eternal enemies of the Russian state. The voices of Russia’s Muslims are fundamentally neglected or misunderstood by contemporary historians, who rely on sources produced by tsarist and Soviet officials. In order to capture these voices scholars should turn to Arabic sources and evidence emanating from local Muslim communities in imperial and early Soviet Russia. These sources may be found in central state and private archival collections. They comprise a vast body of official documents and narrative materials that shed light on the inner life of Muslim communities and their relationship with the state. In view of these variegated archival collections, it appears that the history of Islam and Muslim communities in Russia should be represented through the model of entangled history. Knowledge of written Islamic sources in the Arabic language or script is essential to this entangled history. Yet, Arabic was just one medium in an intricate and constantly changing hierarchy of oral and written languages used by Muslim subjects in the Caucasian borderland of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Various types of first-hand sources present conflicting stories, yet also complement each other. Their comparative synchronic analysis allows for a more complicated, more credible and more dynamic picture of Muslim life at a local or micro-historical level. Bobrovnikov also points out that the archival sources dealing with nineteenth and twentieth century Russian Muslims of the Caucasus borderland are scattered all over the world. This article presents archival findings from the collections of Dagestan and Bulgaria. In Sofia there is a rich collection of Ottoman legal records and financial documents many of which pertain to the history of the nineteenth century Muslim emigration ( muhajirun ) from the Caucasus and other regions the Russian Empire. Drawing on these sources, Bobrovnikov shows the importance of further studies on a variety of themes: the conceptual languages of state documentation of Islam; the construction and/or perversion of social and political meaning in the process of translating official documents pertaining to Islam in a multilingual milieu; authors and actors of Islamic discourse and activism in the Russian Caucasus; the criteria and underlying ideological messages of statistics; and the role of oral histories in local Muslim discourse concerning Islam and the Empire.

From the Editors: Premodern Lessons for Modern Historians

From the EditorsPremodern Lessons for Modern Historians It is no secret that most Western historians of Russia study the period after 1700, indeed after the Great Reforms. Only a brave and resourceful minority focuses on the Muscovite era, and those who venture even farther back are truly few and far between. This is not healthy for our profession. The modernist bias harms efforts to conceptualize the wider sweep of Russian history in both teaching and research by granting unnaturally long life to questionable myths about the medieval and Muscovite legacy—hence, for example, the tendency to overrate the import of the idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It also hurts our students by leaving them, and us, at the mercy of antiquated scholarship. Before Chester S. L. Dunning's recent book,1 the standard text on the Time of Troubles was Platonov's, first published in 1923.2 Who today would teach the history of, say, the English Civil War from textbooks more than 80 years old? Some of the contributors to the present issue of Kritika show the modernists among us a further important reason why we would benefit from looking outside our own chronological bailiwick: the problem of what to do with sources. While source criticism has been with us at least since Ranke's day, several more recent developments have increased its significance: the broader definition of what constitutes a source that accompanied the emergence of social and cultural history; the closer attention to "texts" that followed the rise of "theory"; the Internet; and, in our field, the post-communist "archival revolution." The challenge many of us face in studying the more modern periods is how to sift through, and make sense of, an ever-expanding mass of [End Page 711] evidentiary material. Nor does it make life easier when editors (including this very column a few months ago) ask authors to provide more details about their archival sources even while publishers insist on tighter word limits for manuscripts.3 On the bright side, of course, the embarrassment of riches is such that well-crafted research projects are rarely threatened by a lack of sources; the challenge is instead to design projects that are broad enough to command interest but do not trigger a tsunami of unmanageable documentation. This rapport with the sources shapes our own perception of how we in the present relate to the past, and it is what we communicate to our readers and students as well. By contrast, as the contributors to this issue remind us, scholars of pre-Petrine Russia face a rather different situation. Edward L. Keenan and Norman Ingham offer conflicting reviews of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin's book disputing the authenticity of Slovo o Polku Igoreve [the Igor´ Tale], regarded by many as a foundational text of medieval Russian literature. Keenan, of course, has made something of a career out of challenging key pre-Petrine Russian sources with his own books on the Slovo and on the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Prince Andrei Kurbskii.4 The deeper Keenan and Ingham (and Zimin) burrow into the complexities and ambiguities of the Slovo's obscure history, the more they leave the non-medievalist reader with an uncomfortable sense of doubt about whether we can know much of anything at all about Kievan Rus´. Nor are things much better as late as the 16th century. In a review essay last year, Carolyn Pouncy noted that historians writing broad, synthetic texts about Ivan the Terrible and his era continue to read key sources as having unambiguous meanings that were first attributed to them in the 19th century, even though more recent studies have raised considerable doubts about the dating, authorship, and other essential aspects of these same texts. From this, she concluded, "As historians, we need to recognize that much of the received wisdom regarding pre-Petrine history is no more than someone's speculation, repeated until it has acquired the aura of truth."5 This phenomenon rarely occurs in the work of modernists, whom the abundance of documentation has accustomed to expecting that disputes about sources—for example, about the authenticity of Peter the Great's alleged testament—can...

Die volkseigenen Akten – materielle und diskursive ›Spuren‹ staatlicher Archive der DDR

The article presents an interpretation of material and discourse traces of the national archives in the GDR. The historical importance of archives and their crucial role in providing material for the representation of the past was clearly seen by the ruling elites of the GDR. According to the official archive policy, particular files were renamed, particular materials edited and other files, considered to be less, important destroyed. What is more, the central archive administration embarked on socialistic archival revolution in order to destroy the traditional historical order of files and adjust it to the state’s official ideology. This dream of socialist archives points to the outstanding significance attributed to the traces of the past and its institutions. The national archives of the GDR were based on ideological plan due to the Cold War and the contentious competition against its neighbouring German state, the FRG. However, as I am able to show, the archival policy underwent a crucial change in the 1970s since the revolutionary measures faced severe practical difficulties. The revolutionary dream gave way to a programme which, less politically loaded, aimed for more efficient control and standardization of the archivist’s practice.

Stalinism and the Stalin Period after the “Archival Revolution”

Stalinism and the Stalin Period after the “Archival Revolution” Oleg Khlevniuk (bio) The latest general work on Stalinism illustrates an important trend of the past few years: historians to a greater extent than ever before have begun to study the phenomenon of Stalinism as an historical problem.1 In the past, arguments were waged over political-theoretical constructions, during the course of which some researchers attempted to set forth the rather meager amount of empirical evidence that existed about Stalinism, while others declined to do so. Now, comparative analyses of the Nazi and Stalinist dictatorships are based to a greater degree on genuine insight into the mechanisms by which power was exercised in both regimes.2 Numerous "sensations," such as the claim that Stalin was almost uninvolved with the system that bore his name, remain, one can only hope, a thing of the past. The main factor that allows us to call the past decade a distinctive period in the study of the history of Stalinism (as is the case, to be sure, in other areas of Soviet history as well) is the partial opening of the archives, a process that has become known as the "archival revolution." For the time being, the Stalin period is the latest era in Soviet history that can really be studied on the basis of archival materials. The results of archival investigations carried out in the last ten years make quite an impression. Such a large flood of information has appeared that even specialists cannot completely keep track of it. Preoccupied with their searches and discoveries, driven by (as a rule) friendly competition, historians, it appears, are not inclined to stop and ask basic questions. What have we gained from the archives? Where has the "revolution" led us, and do we need to change course? The decade-long "archival period" of work on Soviet history, which has affected the study of Stalinism first and foremost, has fully reconfirmed the significance and potential of archives and their place in the hierarchy of research priorities. Historians have overcome the syndrome of "archival over-expectation," and generally have come to understand what one can and cannot expect from the [End Page 319] archives.3 They have almost learned to use them in the same way as they used previously accessible sources before. This has to be considered one of the most important results of the decade. Comparisons between "pre-archival" and contemporary developments in the historiography reveal a closer connection between the scholarship of both periods than had been expected at the outset, when the archives had only begun to open. For this reason the most sophisticated research is being conducted in areas that had been at the forefront in the period before the opening of the archives. This continuity is demonstrated by the fundamental works of historians who already possessed a great deal of experience in their own fields and who actively took part in incorporating the archives into their work: R. W. Davies and Mark Harrison on economic history, Peter H. Solomon on the Stalinist legal system, and Sheila Fitzpatrick on social history.4 In Russia the work of agrarian historians such as Viktor Petrovich Danilov, Il'ia Evgenevich Zelenin, and N. A. Ivnitskii can serve as examples of such historiographical continuities. The most productive scholars of the previous period, these scholars together with Western colleagues (Roberta Manning, Lynne Viola, Robert Johnson, R. W. Davies, and S. G. Wheatcroft) focused their energies on publishing and annotating a large complex of documents pertaining to the history of the Soviet countryside, collectivization, and dekulakization.5 Our current knowledge of the archives suggests that many scholarly works could have been written even without archival materials and that those materials, like the sources that were available earlier, do not hold the answers to many questions. It is true, however, that the new materials have substantively enriched such research and have in a number of cases clarified previously disputed issues. Archival materials assume more significance in works that could not have been written earlier, given the absence of crucial information in the extant sources. For example, Lynne Viola's works on peasant uprisings during collectivization and OGPU operations against the...

History between Politics and Public: Historiography, Collective Memory, and the “Archival Revolution” in Russia

History between Politics and Public: Historiography, Collective Memory, and the “Archival Revolution” in Russia