Early Soviet Period Research Articles

A Dagestiani woman in the system of physical culture and sport in 1930s: a historical aspect of the gender stereotypes transformation

The relevance of the study is determined by the scientific and practical interest in the history of national physical culture and sports, the state policy in this area, including in the national regions of the country in the early Soviet period, as well as the discussions that have unfolded in the world community today about the fate of women's sports. For the first time, the article analyzes the transformations that took place in the 1930s on the basis of reliable factual materials, taking into account modern historiographic generalizations in the structure of women's gender role on the example of participation in the physical culture movement and sports of women of multinational Dagestan, which became more and more noticeable, despite the preservation of the significant influence of Islam and traditional ideas about the place of women in the system of social relations and the family. The research carried out within the framework of socio-cultural, gender history, the history of everyday life on the basis of the principles of historicism and objectivity with the use of comparative-historical, problem-chronological, descriptive methods and taking into account the main provisions of the modernization concept, led to the conclusion that in the 1930s ... the leadership of the republic and the region began to give priority attention to the involvement of mountain girls in the physical culture and military-sports movement, which became one of the components of the program for solving the "women's issue", the implementation of which made it possible to more and more actively attract Dagestani women to participate in the socio-political and cultural life of the republic, edges, countries.

The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival by Maria Taroutina

Reviewed by: The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival by Maria Taroutina Sarah Warren The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival. Maria Taroutina. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. $89.95 (cloth). Maria Taroutina's The Icon and the Square: Russian Modernism and the Russo-Byzantine Revival is a sorely needed addition to the current scholarship on Russian art. It also offers a broader contribution to our understanding of the role of revival movements within modernism. Opening with the Enlightenment scorn for Byzantium in the eighteenth century, Taroutina offers a nuanced account of how the perception and valuation of Russia's affinities with Byzantine culture developed, often in relation to other intellectual and aesthetic movements. Certainly, the underlying premise of this book—that medieval Russian and Byzantine cultural traditions were important to the development of modernism in Russia—has been explored by several other [End Page 385] art historians, notably Wendy Salmond and Oleg Tarasov. The Icon and the Square, however, more fully excavates the texts that formed these notions of the Russo-Byzantine, explaining how the concept changed with new scholarly and cultural developments, and also how these new understandings were embodied in scholarly, pedagogical, and religious institutions. The author examines a number of scholarly and critical voices who shaped this literature, ranging from the art historian and archaeologist Nikodim Kondakov, to the religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, and even the revolutionary critics Pavel Florensky, Nikolai Punin, and Nikolai Tarabukin, who called for a rethinking of the role of art in the early Soviet period. As Taroutina explains, a kind of "Byzantine Revival" occurred throughout nineteenth-century Europe, but by juxtaposing Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant's The Empress Theodora at the Coliseum (1889) and Vasilii Smirnov's The Morning Visit of a Byzantine Empress to the Graves of Her Ancestors (1889), she deftly illustrates the gulf between Western and Russian perceptions of the Byzantine. Whereas Benjamin-Constant presented his Byzantine Empress as the apex of corruption, decadence, and sensual excess, Smirnov's Theodora is a model of enduring faith, humility, and tradition. This contrast is consistent with the particular uses to which the image of Byzantium was put in the later Russian Empire. An emphasis on the Byzantine roots of the Russian state was an important component of a broader critique of the Europeanization of Russia under Peter the Great and his eighteenth-century successors. Again, this is not a new argument, but what Taroutina provides is an exhaustive account of how the scholarly enthusiasm for the Russo-Byzantine period grew into a sophisticated historical literature on and aesthetic appreciation of icons. The Icon and the Square also demonstrates the concrete continuities between the philosophical and aesthetic understanding of Russo-Byzantine icons before and after the October Revolution. While Taroutina resists claims that the icon was a universally accepted model for the fundamental challenges posed by the early Soviet avant-garde, she describes this spiritual framework as a point of tension between the different avant-garde positions adopted in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, tensions that were constitutive of the differences between, for example, Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists. The structure of the book mostly serves this argument; chapter one builds the foundation of the intellectual history, with detailed descriptions of the historical narratives of the Russo-Byzantine by the scholars and critics noted above, among others. The second chapter surveys the history of collecting, preserving, and exhibiting medieval icons in imperial Russia. The last three chapters explore the uses of the icon by a number of important Russian modernists, with chapters devoted to Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, and the last to the related but contrasting approaches of both Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. The chapter on Vrubel is an important addition to the scholarship on an artist whose work is underexamined in English. Contrasting Vrubel's work with his more conventional contemporaries, such as Victor Vasnetsov, Taroutina argues that Vrubel was a sophisticated interpreter of Byzantine notions of pictorial space. She also persuasively posits that Vrubel's signature block-like brushstrokes—which earlier critics likened to Cézanne—were developed out of his work restoring...

Vasily Vassilievich Struve and the Egyptian collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, in the early 1920s

The article publishes a document from the Archives of the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg (fund 1, dossier 17, unit 6/9, pp. 1–6), a memorandum presenting arguments to transfer to the Hermitage the famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, which was gathered by Vladimir Golenischeff and placed upon its purchase by the state in 1909 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The handwriting in the manuscript makes it possible to identify the compiler of the document as Vasily Struve (1889–1965), a prominent researcher of the ancient Orient in the early Soviet period and the keeper of the Hermitage Egyptian collection since the mid-1910s. A comparison with a document from the archives of the A. S. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, which mentions and quotes the memorandum, allows dating it to the middle of 1923. The context of Struve’s initiative was the mobility of academic and cultural institutions in the post-revolutionary years and, probably, more specifically, the attempts to reorganize the collections of Egyptian antiquities in Moscow (to centralize them in the so-called Museum-Institute of the Classical Orient launched by Vladimir Vikentiev). As expected, this initiative was met with harsh objections from the Museum of Fine Arts, most likely backed by Tatiana Borozdina-Kozmina who was Boris Turaev’s successor as the keeper of the museum’s Egyptian collection. In the end, this initiative was never implemented. The episode reflected in this document is an interesting illustration of the degree of mobility even in the life of the leading and best-established museum collections in post-revolutionary Russia.

"Not Just Tea Drinking": The Red Teahouse and the Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan

"Not Just Tea Drinking"The Red Teahouse and the Soviet State Public in Interwar Uzbekistan Claire Roosien (bio) In April 1928, speaking at the Third Convention of Uzbekistan's Communist Youth League (Komsomol), a young activist registered a serious critique of the Red Teahouse. Red Teahouses were the foremost institution for Marxist-Leninist instruction in Uzbekistan.1 By all accounts, Red Teahouses enjoyed a great deal of popularity, in part because ordinary, "black" teahouses had already been a fixture of Central Asian social life for centuries. But the activist complained that in some Red Teahouses, Uzbekistan's youth were not studying the books that had been sent to them for political education. Instead, the books had been hung from the ceiling with ropes—dusty, torn, and unread.2 To be sure, he added, some Komsomol activists had managed to attract popular participation through other entertainments: he specifically mentioned donkey races and competitions among players of the dutar, a local stringed [End Page 479] instrument. But if teahouses were to become properly Soviet, they needed both to remain popular and to align themselves with party agendas. There is no way of knowing why those communist books ended up on ropes rather than on shelves—or, even better, in the hands of readers. Perhaps teahouse administrators felt the books would be better appreciated as decorations than as reading material. Perhaps, as Komsomol activists complained elsewhere, the books' pages were being used as wrappings for food, and hanging them from the ceiling kept the pages close at hand for patrons in need of a napkin.3 Whatever the reason, the dangling Marxist-Leninist tracts represent the central problem the Bolsheviks faced in creating state-sponsored mass institutions in Uzbekistan. On the one hand, the institutions functioned to assert state control: to promulgate Marxism-Leninism and, more importantly, to mobilize Uzbekistan's masses for collectivization and the cotton monoculture. On the other hand, mobilizing the masses required creating an institution that was truly popular: one that would get Central Asians in the door voluntarily and facilitate enthusiastic participation in state projects. The challenge facing Central Asian activists was to take advantage of the teahouse's popularity while also making the teahouse Red. In this article, I examine the institution of the Red Teahouse in the early Soviet period. Red Teahouses mushroomed in Uzbekistan's countryside especially during the years of the first two five-year plans, totaling more than 3,000 by 1934.4 I take seriously Soviet activists' claim that the Red Teahouse existed [End Page 480] to promote mass participation even as they sought to exert state control. I term this space for popular participation the "state public," foregrounding at once its comparability to the public spheres of interwar Western Europe in an age of mass politics, and the Soviet state's unprecedented aspirations to control. But by promoting participation, the Red Teahouse created the conditions of possibility for forms of public life that the state could neither predict nor control. In particular, the Red Teahouse provided harbor for modes of teahouse sociability that had roots in pre-Soviet practices. Sometimes, these off-label uses of the Red Teahouse supported state agendas; other times, they undermined those agendas. To make this dynamic clear, I begin with a discussion of teahouse culture before the Soviet period. I then proceed to examine the adoption of the Red Teahouse model in the Soviet period, the changing expectations for how Red Teahouses would function during the five-year plans, and the ways that popular participation both facilitated and undermined those expectations. In the conclusion, I pan out to a broadly comparative view, suggesting that the Red Teahouse should be considered neither a communist nor a Central Asian aberration but rather a case study of the tensions inherent in modern projects of mass publicity around the world.5 In examining the Red Teahouse as a Soviet institution, I draw on two main source bases. First, reports housed in the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI) and the Uzbekistan National State Archive (O'zMDA) offer the perspective of the primarily Russian-speaking administrators who supervised the construction and functioning of Red Teahouses. Archival sources provide indispensable statistical...

Источники по проблематике поземельных конфликтов в черноземной деревне. 1917-1920-е гг.

The article analyses historical sources on land conflict in the Black Earth village of the early Soviet period. Since the dynamics of land conflicts, their diversity, and ratios characterize the dominants of behavioral pattern acceptable in the agricultural environment, land conflict is considered an indicator of peasant identity; its study actualizes the need to identify sources that most fully reveal the features of social behavior through the analysis of causality, content, and consequences of land conflict. The research methodology has determined a comprehensive analysis of sources, including materials of the All-Russian Agricultural Census of 1917 (settlement and communal forms); documents of volost, uezd, and gubernia land and conflict commissions that were to eliminate contradictions between peasant societies in the process of land redistribution; statistical materials on land conflicts in the RSFSR in the early 1920s. Integrated approach to sources has resulted in microhistorical analysis of specific land conflicts within individual volosts and uezds of the Black Earth gubernias and in formation of concept and classification of land conflicts. The problem of narrowness of the source base, containing quantitative data on land conflicts, has determined the use of alternative sources and methodological ways to overcome it. Thus, retro-expert method of studying sources has permitted to identify and analyze production (land shortage, configuration, location of a land plot, labor costs) and non-production (justice, administrative resource) markers of land conflicts. The sources analysis suggests that functional significance of the peasant identity in the Black Earth region in 1917–20 consisted in the fact that, having retained in its algorithm for survival while minimizing needs, the Black Earth peasantry was able to survive as an independent social stratum physically, economically, and spiritually. This, in turn, determined the subsequent contradictions in the agrarian and political development of the country.

Public Library - Center of Historical Science of the Early Soviet period

Public Library - Center of Historical Science of the Early Soviet period

Рассекреченные документы ГПУ-ОГПУ 1920-х гг. как исторический источник

The article analyzes a documents complex of the GPU-OGPU deposited in the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of Russia (TsA FSB Rossii) that have been recently declassified. Selected materials from the Eastern Department of the GPU-OGPU relate to the early Soviet period of the 1920s and the events that took place in Siberia and the Far East. The goals and objectives of the study include, first of all, assessment of the significance of the source material chosen by the authors for enriching our knowledge of the historical phenomena and processes that took place in the emerging Soviet state. In addition, the authors identify the mechanisms of creating “Surveys of the situation on the eastern outskirts of the USSR and in the neighboring countries,” which characterize the cause-and-effect relationships in the development of events in Siberia and the Far East. The materials of the sources demonstrate the level of knowledge about the ethno-confessional specifics of the aborigines and about the replenishment of the population in the region with new ethnic groups as a result of the change of government and the Civil War. The novelty of the research lies in identifying criteria for assessing the population groups of the region, primarily from the point of view of their possible actions against the Soviet regime. Integrated approach to assessing the source material of special services allows a comprehensive approach to their activities and rejects the stereotype persisting since the 1990s that everything done by the GPU-OGPU was aimed at terror against local residents. Since the article also deals with the factor of external influence (USA, Japan, France) on the mood of the aborigines, it can be argued that information about anti-Soviet efforts of other states, as analyzed by intelligence analysts, justifies in the eyes of modern reader the GPU-OGPU activities in order to stabilize the situation in Soviet Russia and the USSR beyond the Urals. The authors come to the conclusion that materials of the Eastern Department of the GPU-OGPU are a valuable source of information on the role of the Russian special services in ensuring stability in the Far East and Siberia in the first half of the 1920s. The point is that this information not only complements the available information on what was happening in the region, but also confirms the importance of collecting and analyzing data for making more effective decisions by the Soviet political elite.

Problems of Enclaves from the Perspective of Interethnic and Interstate Relations in the Ferghana Valley

The Ferghana Valley is the most densely populated part of Central Asia. The borders of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan intersect across the Valley. The state lines of these three post-Soviet states were determined during the national-territorial land division in the 1920s. Borders of these three post-Soviet states were drawn during the 1920s, which was a period of territorial land divisions in the early Soviet period. The boundaries drawn at that time have not been universally accepted by these modern post-Soviet states, and have thus become the subject of fierce debate since the time of their independence. This region has a high population density and a high growth rate. These facts, along with the water policies and the objectives of each state, has caused the Ferghana Valley to become a geographical focus of regional conflicts. Enclave problems appear as one of the factors leading to local conflicts at the interstate level. The purpose of this article is to classify Ferghana enclaves in accordance with international scientific definitions and to assess their impact in the context of relations between the kin- and surrounding states. This problem will be discussed from the perspective of interethnic and interstate relations in the Valley. The article shows the evolution of enclaves in Ferghana, their problems, the history of interstate relations in the post-Soviet period, the position and role of the Ferghana states in resolving disputes about the state borders.

M.K. Ammosov: A Prominent National Leaderof the Early Soviet Period

The article is devoted to the activities of the prominent Soviet politician and statesman M.K. Ammosov (1897-1938), who devoted his life to revolutionary transformations and the formation of a socialist economy in the Yakut Republic, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The article considers the ideas of M.K. Ammosov concerning the socialist reconstruction of the national regions, and in particular of the households of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. Practical work to boost regional economies occupied a central place in M.K. Ammosov’s activities and was based on a comprehensive scientifi c study of productive forces and human resources. His goal was the organic integration of the economy of the perphery into the Soviet national economic system. Thanks to the eff orts of M.K. Ammosov, the economic development of the national republics accelerated, in accordance with the centuries-old aspirations of the peoples to overcome poverty and misery. M.K. Ammosov is analyzed here for the fi rst time from the point of view of his contribution to the economy of the USSR’s national periphery, and to its gradual inclusion into the processes of socialist construction. The development of the economy of the national regions in the early Soviet period largely depended on the organizational qualities and human principles of regional leaders and their selfl ess and honest service to the interests of the Soviet state. Accordingly, considerable attention is paid to M.K. Ammosov’s work among the people. When making decisions on governmental level he proceeded according to the interests and needs of society. Precisely such leadership qualities as someone who knows how to organically combine state and public interests elevated M.K. Ammosov to the highest political Olymp; at the same time these qualities exposed him to political repression. The article concludes that M.K. Ammosov’s thoughts and deeds to benefi t the working people went far beyond the framework of central planning and entered into an insurmountable confl ict with the then accepted practices of administrative management.

Ethnopolitical Discrimination in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods

Ethnopolitical Discrimination in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods

‘Building the Internationalist City from Below’: The Role of the Czechoslovak Industrial Cooperative “Interhelpo” in Forging Urbanity in early-Soviet Bishkek

AbstractThe paper explores the historical trajectory of Interhelpo, an industrial cooperative from Czechoslovakia, and its role in forging urbanization “from below” in early-Soviet town of Pishpek (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). In light of scarce literature available on the success and failures of Western internationalist communes in the early Soviet period, this paper draws from intensive field work in Kyrgyzstan and understudied sources in Czech, Kyrgyz, Slovak and Russian to offer a novel, bottom-up narrative on the socialist city in Central Asia.Founded 1914 by Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, German internationalists and Ido-learners around the mountaineer and Bolshevik Rudolf Pavlovič Mareček in the Czechoslovakian town Žilina, the cooperative actively shaped urbanization in what would be become known as the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan. From 1925 until its liquidation during WWII, the cooperative built from scratch a whole district including the first electric power station of the city, textile and furniture factories, workshops for tailors, shoemakers and joiners, a school, a kindergarten, a tannery, a brewery as well as unique residential district. In the process, the cooperative forged an organic patchwork language referred to as spontánne esperanto to secure translocal collaboration between internationalists from Central Europe, on the one hand, and a heterogeneous mix of workers including Armenians, Kyrgyz, Dungans, Uygurs, Uzbeks, Russians and Ukrainians, on the other.Transcending a purely historical analysis, the paper ultimately turns to the urban landscape of present-day Bishkek. There it argues that while the district built by Interhelpo corresponds today to an exiled site dislocated by the hegemonic ethno-national memory regime, its materiality harbors relicts of another future capable of mobilizing alternative narratives on the city and her socialist and multi-ethnic past.

A Broken Screw in the Soviet System. The Life and Fate of Leonid Nikolaev

The tectonic change of 1917 not only disrupted the country but also placed, for a brief moment, a “little man” at the centre of “big story.” Nikolaev was a typical representative of ordinary people being pushed into a corner by circumstances and deceived in their expectations by a pseudo-socialist state. The high expectations of ordinary people, who were involved by the Bolsheviks in their politics, naturally crashed into the harsh realities of the construction of socialism.Brought to political life from social non-existence, this ordinary man soon became unnecessary to the new political regime’s needs and was subject to manipulation and mobilization by the party. This is how he ended up being merged with the human mass, which was faceless to the party nomenclature. However, this ordinary man was opposed to the latter and thus became the cause of large-scale social cataclysms. He got a weapon and killed Kirov; the personification of the political power against which Nikolaev’s act was directed.In the early Soviet period, many representatives of this social stratum raised their voices in protest, even if not in a terrorist form. Many of them were physically eliminated, the rest were brought to submission. This was a demonstration of the toughness of the Bolshevik regime, which transformed into the regime of Stalin’s personal power in the 1930s, involving terrorist forms of governing.

The Architect and the Revolution: Architectural Life in Russia in Times of Change

When describing the history of twentieth-century Russian architecture, it is common to separate (and even oppose) the pre-revolutionary decades and the early Soviet period of the 1920s. Thus, the revolutionary months of 1917 proper have been completely overlooked by researchers as unworthy and capable of shaking the existing historiographical model. Such an approach, dictated by ideological considerations, is no longer justified today and requires revision. The study of periodicals of the second half of the 1910s and archival materials, a great number of which have not been introduced into academic circulation, convince us that the years of the First World War and the revolution were marked by significant changes in the minds of architects. Many things which had previously seemed fundamental for the collective identity of architects became subject to problematisation, and aesthetic categories were replaced by political criteria in the professional press. The architectural process started to be described by its participants in terms of struggle, while the self-identification of members of the architectural corporation lay between the search for survival tactics and taking part in the transformation of the country’s inner life. The novelty of the data presented in this article is due to the virtual absence of special studies devoted to this extremely important period in twentieth-century Russian architectural history.

Санитарное состояние и благоустройство города Череповца в 1920-е годы

We pay attention to the relevant and poorly studied topic of sanitary condition and improvement problems of the small Russian city in the first decade of Soviet regime. The aim of the study is to identify the changes that have occurred in the sanitary condition of the provincial city under the influence of modernization processes. In this case, the sanitary condition is considered as a set of indicators characterizing technologies and practices of water supply and waste disposal, condition and pollution of city streets, squares, yards and reservoirs. The analysis of the sanitary state and the degree of well-being of the dynamically developing governorate city with a population of just over 18 thousand people allowed filling the gap of the urban environment daily history of the early Soviet period and identifying the key factors of exacerbation of sanitary problems. As a result, it was found that Cherepovets, as well as more large Soviet cities were characterized by pollution problems of the urban area and water basins, which had a significant impact on the sanitary situation. The deterioration of housing conditions and reduced material well-being compared to the previous period also had a negative impact on the sanitary situation in the city. We should note the efforts of the city authorities and a number of representatives of the city community aimed at health education of the population and addressing issues related to the urban environment improvement.

In search of ethnographical reality (regarding the peculiarities of the traditions of the Russian school of Indology in St. Petersburg)

The ethnographic focus of the Russian Indological school was mainly developed in St. Petersburg and, above all, in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAE). The author identifies five main stages of its development. Thus, the purpose of the article is to determine the time frame, the main life circumstances of a particular stage, the main actors, the tools and tasks of scientific activity, key scientific activities and the main result/product of labor. The first period refers to the last third of the XIX century and is associated with the name of Ivan Minaev (1840–1890), founder of the Russian Indological School. The next stage is connected with the names of the director of the MAE Vasily Radlov and the Indologists Alexander and Lyudmila Mervart, who carried out a special ethnographic expedition to Ceylon and India in 1914–1918, for the reorganization of the scientific and educational activities of the museum. The early Soviet period (from 1917 to the middle of the 20th century) was connected with the separation of MAE from world science and other restrictions, but Indologists (Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Valery Krasnodembsky, etc.) at that time found ways to acquire new ethnographic knowledge, the directions of scientific research were partly expanded. The revival of all areas of MAE Indological activity occurred after the liberation of the countries of South Africa from colonial dependence. The current state of affairs in the MAE inspires a certain optimism. There is a well-prepared team of Indologists and the most important traditions have been preserved.

The Immortal Host of Prince Igor

The attention of the author of this paper is focused on “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (Slovo o polku Igoreve), a famous work of Russian literature. Before the revolution the text was included in the school curriculum, and within the period of 1850–1917 its separate editions exceeded 150. The early Soviet period was marked by a brief decline of the popularity of the “Tale”, but since mid-1930s, the number of its separate editions started to grow, and the negative or indifferent comments on Prince Igor Sviatoslavich in Soviet encyclopedias were replaced by the favorable ones. The heroization of its characters during the Great Patriotic War also contributed to the popularity of the “Tale”. After the war, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” was effectively used again as a symbol of the unity of three brotherly nations — Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. The celebrations of different anniversaries, such as the 750th anniversary of the “Tale” and 150th anniversary of its first publication were also typical of the Soviet era. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “Tale” has become an object of rivalry between Russia and Ukraine. Each country claims to be the only true heir of the “Tale”, actively contributing to its popularization via publications, the organization of commemorative events and the introduction of its text into school curriculums. However, further prospects of the “Tale” commemoration-wise are quite obscure — the article argues that the “Tale” (as well as many other literary works) does not constitute an effective tool for building of national past.

СТАНОВЛЕНИЕ И РАЗВИТИЕ ПЕДАГОГИЧЕСКИХ КУРСОВ В РОССИИ ВО ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЕ XIX – НАЧАЛЕ XX в.

The article discusses the genesis of pedagogical courses in the history of Russian education, from the mid-1860s, when they were created, to 1917. The acute shortage of teaching staff in some periods of Russian history dictated the need to find innovative solutions for teacher training. The historical realities of the post-reform 1860s–1870s, when the number of educational institutions in Russia increased significantly, led to the birth of pedagogical courses. Teacher training courses also contributed to the eradication of illiteracy in the early Soviet period. Since the second half of the twentieth century up to the present day courses as a form of training and retraining of teachers remain in the system of additional professional education. The aim of the study was to identify and substantiate the reasons that contributed to the formation and development of pedagogical courses in the system of pedagogical education in Russia. This article uses a set of historical-pedagogical research methods: historical and genetic method, source and historiography analysis, comparative pedagogical method, content analysis. As a result of the use of the causal method of research, the following reasons were identified. Firstly, the development of primary and secondary education in the country required the replenishment of the teacher corps. Secondly, the Russian education system oriented to the best foreign experience, primarily European, in which, by the middle of the 19th century, pedagogical courses took shape as an element of the system of professional training of teachers. Thirdly, the liberal nature of the post-reform policies contributed to the expansion of the rights to teacher education. Fourthly, the public and private initiative developed. Fifthly, the state supported the idea of pedagogical courses, fixed them in legislation and partially funded them. Sixthly, low-cost courses compared to other forms of professional training of teachers. The spread of pedagogical courses in the second half of the 19th century is due to the fact that zemstvos did not have sufficient funds to open teacher seminaries, so they opened short-term permanent courses for the training of teachers of public schools. Until 1917, there were both public and private pedagogical courses in Russia. They were financed mainly by zemstvos, but were under the control of state governing bodies. The courses played an important role in the training of teachers for primary and secondary education. They became a real phenomenon in the life of the Russian school of the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. The spread of pedagogical courses was due to the fact that they made it possible to train teachers in a short time at low cost. It is no coincidence that, as a form of professional training, pedagogical courses were in demand by the Soviet school and are still an important component of the system of continuous pedagogical education.

Late Soviet Memoirs

Late Soviet Memoirs Courtney Doucette Marianna Tax Choldin, Garden of Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia. 204 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. ISBN-13 978-1618115010. $69.00. Ellendea Proffer Teasley, Brodsky among Us: A Memoir. 166 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017. ISBN-13 978-1618115782. $48.00. In 1932, the recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate John Scott set off to the Soviet Union in search of work and the opportunity to contribute to something bigger—opportunities he felt were unavailable in the Depression-era United States. Fortified with newly acquired welding skills, he set off to a Soviet Union that, in the midst of the First Five-Year Plan, defied global economic trends. Scott was welcomed as a foreign specialist and assigned to help build the steel works in Magnitogorsk. He described his contributions to this iconic Soviet project in his memoirs Behind the Urals. Scott's early experiences reflect a kind of optimism with the Soviet project that became unimaginable after the early Soviet period—even by the 1940s when Scott penned his memoir and became increasingly critical of the USSR.1 For others, the relationship to the Soviet Union most often cultivated in the West became increasingly negative after World War II as the Cold War progressed, Warsaw Pact countries invaded Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the details of the 1930s Terror became better known. A recent wave of memoirs by North American specialists cast this point in sharp relief, while poignantly illuminating their engagement of the Soviet project in the 1970s–80s.2 As one might expect, recent Western memoirists [End Page 218] who describe their travels to the Soviet Union during the Cold War went to the USSR not with industrial skills but with or in search of PhDs. They traveled not on work visas but on diplomatic passports or through Intourist and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). These changes are telling of how Soviets and Americans came into contact and the progression of Soviet-American relations during the Cold War. The author of Brodsky among Us, Ellendea Proffer Teasley, was trained as a Bulgakov scholar at Indiana University in the late 1960s. Together with her husband Carl Proffer, she launched Ardis Publishing House in Ann Arbor to publish Russian and Soviet authors in Russian and English. These two figures played an exceptional role in the life, immigration, and work of the Soviet poet Joseph Brodsky, by which they heightened awareness of Soviet poetry in the United States during the Cold War. Marianna Tax Choldin, the author of Garden of Broken Statues, began her career as a professor of library administration in 1969 at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she became an internationally renowned expert on Russian and Soviet censorship and the founder of the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs, which she directed from 1991 to 2002. Russian and East Europeanists might know her best for the annual Summer Research Lab, which she launched in 1973 to welcome scholars from around the world to the outstanding library collections at the University of Illinois for several months each summer. _______ Brodsky among Us is a carefully composed literary portrait of Joseph Brodsky (Iosif Brodskii), who was best known as a Soviet dissident poet exiled to the United States in 1972. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1987 and became the first (and only, to date) Russian to become US Poet Laureate in 1991.3 Carl and Ellendea Proffer met Brodsky through Nadezhda Mandel´stam on their first trip to the Soviet Union in 1969. At the time, he was a notorious (to many) Leningrad poet still living in his parents' room in a communal [End Page 219] apartment. Though he had gained the favor of the Silver Age poet Anna Akhmatova, he had already run afoul of the Soviet government, receiving a five-year sentence to hard labor that was commuted to exile for a year and a half to a farm in the Arkhangel´sk region of northern Russia. Even in their first meetings, Proffer Teasley recognized Brodsky's contradictions. "He talks we are nothing in the face of death," she writes, "but he...

Разрешение трудовых конфликтов в расценочно-конфликтных комиссиях в раннесоветском периоде

We analyze the historical regulatory framework of the activity of pricing and conflict commissions of the early Soviet period, which existed during the period of the new economic policy. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the quasi-judicial activity of pricing and conflict commissions is poorly studied, in this regard, the study of the quasi-judicial functions of pricing and conflict commissions is of historical importance, and also has parallels with the practice of modern labor dispute commissions. The aim of the work is to study the activity of pricing and conflict commissions during the period of the new economic policy with the study of the first Soviet regulatory documents, as well as the reconstruction of their history on archival materials of the Tambov Governorate. The research methods were the formal legal analysis of historical and legal acts of the Soviet era: a comparative analysis of the powers and activities of quasi-judicial bodies and people’s courts. Conclusions are drawn about the full formal conformity of the judicial process in modern world courts and historical quasi-judicial bodies that resolved labor disputes in the 1920s, the hierarchy of these bodies and the regulatory legal framework of their activities, as well as their integration into the system of Soviet public authorities, were reconstructed. We analyze the principles of the judicial process implemented in the activities of the commissions, such as the principles of openness, transparency, equality of parties.

Peasant women in agricultural communes of Soviet Russia in 1917 - early 1930s

This article based on the large body of archival materials and considers the gender aspect in the activities of agricultural communes of the period of the early Soviet society. Created almost exclusively by men (as part of a team), they most often had about half or slightly less able-bodied members from among the women. This significantly influenced the psychological climate in the commune and its economic indicators. The absence of special works on this issue actualizes an appeal to the problem of the ratio of male / female in the agricultural team of the period under study and its significance for quantitative and qualitative indicators of production. It is also of interest that the agricultural labor commune was the site of a socialist social experiment to create a “new” Soviet person, a “new” Soviet woman. Traditionally, the woman determined the psychological and emotional readiness of the family to perceive the “new”, which the Soviet authorities actively used to strengthen their ideological influence in the village. Within the framework of the Bolshevik project “commune”, the tasks were set to raise the social status of women in society through wide access to education, occupying production, state and party leadership positions. New opportunities, in turn, expanded the space for women’s self-realization beyond their usual roles in the patriarchal structure. The study of the dynamics of the development of these processes in the early Soviet period makes it possible to identify natural boundaries in the implementation of the “new Soviet woman” concept, to establish the results of social planning in this area. The study proved that when joining the team, women pursued primarily pragmatic goals. The author of the article found that, despite the support by the state and the party in the process of raising the status of a peasant woman, society retained the traditional idea of its place and role in the family and social life. As a result, the involvement of women in managerial functions was carried out slowly, however, increased the possibility of their self-realization.