Early Soviet Period Research Articles

Die Umdeutung von Razin und Pugačev in der Sowjetunion unter Lenin und Stalin

The image of Stepan Razin and Emelian Pugachev, leaders of Cossack uprisings during the 17th and 18th centuries, was positively reassessed during the early Soviet period. Numerous novels, poems, sculptures, films and musical dramas dealt with these figures. Under the old regime they had been considered enemies, at least from the perspective of state officialdom, but, in the context of Bolshevik power, they were now reinterpreted. This article investigates how Razin and Pugachev were represented during the first decades of the Soviet Union, the qualities that were ascribed to them, the social-political messages they transmitted and the ways in which meanings were ascribed to them with the aim of rendering them suitable figures that could be identified with Soviet society. The dramatic increase in interest in these figures after 1917 had precursors in the period following 1905. New guidelines were then formulated by Lenin in 1919: He interpreted Razin and Pugachev as leaders of “peasants’ wars” and inserted them in a long prehistory of the October Revolution. Nevertheless, during the 1920s the representations did not follow one common line and the variance remained remarkable. During the 1930s, in the context of the “patriotic turn”, Razin and Pugachev experienced a heroization as “folk heroes”. This required their taming and cultivation, because the pantheon of Stalinist heroes was not a place for stubborn, uncivilized illiterates.

Russian Revolutions in Print: The Fate of the Ethnic Press

On October 28, 1917, Izvestiia published V.I. Lenin's directive on printing, which articulated his vision for reshaping the printing press as the “inseparable” literary organ of the party. Although Lenin's views on printing and publishing were known to his close associates, this directive outlined a clear process upon which the party was able to base its revolutionary goal of total consolidation, thus reshaping local publishing cultures and determining the fate of the ethnic press during and after the Russian Revolution. The end goal of this process was to create an extensive publishing apparatus, which was subservient to party orthodoxy and homogeneity. This article discusses the consolidation of the ethnic press by highlighting the case of the Tatar printing press during the early Soviet period.

Drugs and the Early Soviet City: Mapping Cocaine, Opiates, and Cannabis in Petrograd/Leningrad in the 1920 s (Workshop Geschichte)

Introduction: The early Soviet period witnessed a substantial increase in the number of drug addicts and the proliferation of drugs into wider social strata. However, in contrast to popular contemporary 'black market' image of drugs, in the 1920 s cocaine and morphine were rather semi-legal ('gray market') substances, since the everyday practice of too many areas of public health greatly depended on the use of these medicines. In early Soviet Petrograd/Leningrad drugs were present on literally every corner: in most pharmacies, hospitals, dentist's rooms, maternity houses and other health care institutions. The city depended on very large amounts of cocaine and opiates, and indeed the regional office of medical supply and trade (Gubmedsnabtorg), located in the very center of Petrograd/Leningrad, accumulated tens of thousands of morphine ampules and hundredweights of opium for the needs of whole North-Western Russia.

Historiography and the politics of land, identity, and belonging in the twentieth-century North Caucasus

Intercommunal, socio-economic, and political relations in the North Caucasus have historically revolved around access to this mountain region's prized pasturage and scarce farmland. Given the centrality of the land question in the North Caucasus, it is unsurprising that historiography on land relations in the region has been highly politicized. This article examines how indigenous writing on the history of land relations in the central Caucasus – a region inhabited by today's Kabardians, Balkars, Ossetians, Ingushes, and Karachais, and dominated by the princely confederation of Kabarda before the tsarist conquest – has been subject to wide revision in response to changes in local and national political dynamics and the emergence of ethnicized identity politics. In the late-imperial and early Soviet periods, Karachai, Balkar, and Ossetian elites-cum-historians, writing for an audience of imperial policy-makers, crafted histories to influence state policies toward land reform. By the 1930s, historians from the region tailored their histories of land relations to the prerogatives of Soviet nationality policies. The ideas contained in these histories impacted the construction of national identities in the Soviet period. Post-Soviet Karachai and Balkar intellectuals, seeking to establish new post-colonial national histories for their peoples, have reinterpreted the history of land relations in order to depict their ancestors as independent of Kabarda's land-based dominance. This revisionism is part of the struggle of the Karachais and Balkars against their historiographical erasure, which was a product of the exclusion of the Karachais and Balkars from the family of Soviet nations during their deportation and exile to Central Asia from 1944 to 1957 and their subsequent political and cultural marginalization.

The Institute of Biys in the Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Period: From Reforms to Abolishment

Background/Objectives: The article presents the history of the court of biys in the Soviet period. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The authors note that after political and legal reforms of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, the court of biys was not subject to deep transformation. It continued to be a means of regulation of social relations in the Kazakh society. Also, various legal practices - adat, Sharia law, Russian law, gradual incorporation of local cultural and legal space into the Imperial. However, the state of the court of biys began to change with the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. Findings: In the beginning populist slogans of the Soviet regime about universal equality and equal rights of all the nations formerly being the part of the Russian Empire, weakness and lack of knowledge about government of nomadic peoples made the Bolsheviks to tolerate legal customary practices of local nations. In those years courts of biys continued to exist as Aqsaqal (arbitral) courts and councils. However, with the establishment of the power, the Bolsheviks headed for complete abolishment of all the traditional institutes of the Kazakh society. The government adopted several documents aimed at first at weakening and then at abolishment of legal customary culture of the nation. The measures of the Soviet government revealed persistence of the experience and knowledge in the national conscience. Applications/Improvements: Thus, during the first decade of Soviet period the government went from support of traditional Kazakh court over to gradual abolishment and interdiction of their activity in the territory of Kazakhstan.

The Ukraine crisis: a Russian–European cold war?

This article analyses the historical context of the crisis. It considers the relations in the triangle Russia– Ukraine–West against the background of the Ukrainian events during and after Maidan, as well as the reunion/annexation of Crimea with/by Russia. In Ukraine this has largely been seen as a conquest, but in Crimea itself (and Russia) significant majority regard it as a successful outcome. It analyses the major factors in this conflict, as well as offering a recommendation for its possible resolution. The “shared cradle” of Ukraine and Russia is considered, including the establishment of the Orthodox Church, whose first seat was at Kiev and whose patriarchate was eventually established at Moscow. The important role of this church — as well as that of those which have recently broken away — is also examined with respect to the conflict. The fratricidal policies of the imperial centre in the early Soviet period, the devastations of the Second World War, and the tensions of the post-Soviet period are also analysed, not least with respect to the legacy they have left. The conclusions consider what is going on in Ukraine and Crimea today and what means are being implemented by the various factions with respect to their future.

The Muslim uprising in Ajara and the Stalinist revolution in the periphery

In 1929, local officials in the mountainous region of upper Ajara in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) pursued aggressive policies to force women to remove their veils and to close religious schools, provoking the Muslim peasant population to rebellion in one of the largest and most violent of such incidents in Soviet history. The central authorities in Moscow authorized the use of Red Army troops to suppress the uprising, but they also reversed the local initiatives and offered the peasants concessions. Based on Party and secret police files from the Georgian archives in Tbilisi and Batumi, this article will explore the ways in which local cadres interpreted regime policies in this Muslim region of Georgia, and the interaction of the center and periphery in dealing with national identity, Islam, gender, and everyday life in the early Soviet period.

Давление метрополий и тихий национализм академических практик

The article reviews the recurrent cycles of wholesale modernization of Kazakh culture over the last century to argue the futility of policies based on complete eradication of the previous cultural code. Putting the main focus on the sphere of education, particularly at university level, the authors compare the situation at the turn of the twentieth century, during the Early Soviet period, and after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The ruthless criticism of the traditional cleric culture by Muslim reformers (the Jadids), the subsequent assault on them as not modern and radical enough by Soviet educators, and the dismissive attitude to Soviet cultural and educational standards by government managers in modern Kazakhstan have had profound structural parallels. Their radicalism notwithstanding, these reforms were securing Kazakhstan’s role as a periphery of some external center of “true knowledge”, and thus its essentially colonial status. The logic of modernization understood as embracing some complete cultural sphere from elsewhere made any local knowledge (including national identity) synonymous to backwardness. This started a vicious circle: any successful intellectual had to refute any national cultural legacy, thus making national culture incompatible with modernity by definition. The authors discover the persistence of cultural practices behind the fiery rhetoric of all cultural revolutions in modern Kazakh history, which they call the “quiet nationalism of academic practices”. They use the case of Soviet academy to demonstrate the effect of hybridization of the nationalist discourse within the Soviet institutions, and thus the reality of accommodating tradition within modern culture. They conclude that local culture, despite being pushed to the “backyard of modernity,” has shown a remarkable capacity to reproduce itself and influence the parameters and the direction of the modernization project at all periods. Therefore, rather than fighting the “quiet nationalism of academic practices”, a truly postcolonial modernizing project should explicitly embrace them.

Central Asian History as Soviet History

In a spring 2015 forum in this journal, a group of established scholars discussed Central Asia's place in the field of Russian and Soviet history. (1) Are scholars of Central Asia, they asked, marginalized by--or worse--marginal to the broader profession? The current collection of essays helps answer this question. Here four young historians present research on Central Asia that is not only valuable as Central Asian history but also addresses questions that are absolutely central to the history of the Soviet Union. What did it mean to be national, to be Soviet, to be both national and Soviet? How did World War II transform Soviet citizens and their relationship to one another and to the Soviet state? How did Soviet experts conceive of modernity and economic development? How did the Soviet Union represent itself at home and abroad? Each of these essays uses valuable, hitherto underutilized sources: soldiers' letters from the front, written in Uzbek and other non-Russian languages; republican archives in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; the writings of Tajik economists; a trove of photographs from the Sovinformbiuro; oral history interviews. Timothy Nunan and Artemy Kalinovsky focus on topics scarcely explored in Soviet Central Asia--visual culture and political economy. Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin approach the more established topics of ethnicity, nationality, and Soviet identity in innovative ways. All four of these essays investigate the wartime and postwar years, crucial periods in Soviet Central Asian history that have only recently become the object of sustained attention. The essays offer a wealth of material for discussion, but I focus here on three themes that make particularly significant contributions to the field of Soviet history, in my view: World War II as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia (and, by extension, the Soviet Union as a whole); the evolution of identities in Central Asia during and after the war; and the place of Central Asia in the intersection of Soviet domestic and foreign policy during the postwar era. World War II as a Turning Point The first post-Soviet generation of Western scholars in the 1990s and 2000s focused mainly on the period between the revolutions and World War II, for understandable reasons. A wealth of untouched materials and indigenous-language sources existed for the 1920s and 1930s that was richer and more diverse than that of the later Stalinist era. From a strictly practical point of view, it made sense to gain an understanding of the early Soviet period before turning to the later decades. These early post-Soviet works focused primarily on nation making, gender, and Islam--all topics that had attracted attention from scholars well before the post-1991 archival revolution. (2) Taken together, these monographs suggested that the Soviet transformation of Central Asia in the interwar period was incomplete. Indeed, in some ways it had scarcely begun. At the beginning of World War II, mass education continued to be rudimentary, and few Central Asians knew Russian. Most Central Asians remained mystified by, if not completely unfamiliar with, the main tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Efforts to transform the status of women and backward family customs had met with limited success. Historians working on the 1920s and 1930s knew--or surmised--that the war and early postwar years were crucial in making Central Asia Soviet, but we did not yet have the evidence to demonstrate this. The next wave of scholarly work turned to the wartime and postwar periods, and dissertations and books dealing with this period have begun to appear in recent years. (3) Charles Shaw and Moritz Florin emphasize the war as a turning point in the transformation of Central Asia and its integration into the Soviet imagined community. First and most obviously, the war transformed the young Central Asian men who served in the Red Army. As Shaw shows, Uzbek soldiers learned Russian, adapted to Soviet frontline culture, and learned to present themselves in new ways. …

“Cultural Branch” of Human Geography in Contemporary Russia: Genesis, Main Peculiarities, and Priorities of Development

This paper presents the overview of the historical origins, specifi c features, development trends, and key issues of development for the cultural-geographic branch of the Russian human geography. In the global academic landscape, this discipline is known as Cultural Geography. Two concepts are used on the national research scene: Geography of Culture or Cultural Geography. The impact of anthropological and cultural traditions, inherited from the pre–Soviet period of the Russian geographic science and anthropogeographic research approaches of the early Soviet period, on the development of cultural geographic research in Russia is analyzed. The consequences of the period of oblivion of the humanistic traditions in the Russian anthropogeography, which marked the cusp of the 1920s–1930s, for the development of economic geography in the USSR are investigated. The orientation of the national human geography towards the cultural geographic dimension at the end of the last century is explored. Statistical data on dissertations defended in the fi eld of geoculture between 1995 and 2012 in Russia are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the assessment of major problems and priority areas of cultural and geographical research in view of general trends and prospects for the development of modern human geography in Russia. It is concluded that the potential of cultural geography in Russia has not yet been fully tapped into. The theoretical and methodological framework of cultural geography has to be further developed. The authors point to the rise of the phenomenon of “neoculturalization” in the national geographic science based on a closer relation between cultural geography with other disciplines of human geography.

Stenography and the public sphere in modern Russia

Stenography brought about an unsung revolution in the modern world: for the first time ever, writing could keep up with speech*. In Russia, the adoption of this technology came later than in France or Britain, but it was concentrated in time and tied to a particular civilizational project: the Great Reforms launched in the 1860s, with their key values of glasnost´ and publichnost´. Over the decades that followed, stenography would play an important role in helping Russian society to imagine itself. Even if the right to publish was contested, stenography would also change the stakes and possibilities of political discourse. With the exhaustively recorded debates in the State Duma, stenography entered a Golden Age, which continued into the revolutionary and early Soviet periods. With the mushrooming of Soviet institutions and forms of assembly, the demands for stenographers’ services had never been greater. From the mid‑1920s onwards, stenography once again became contested territory, as the question of who got to control the transcript became paramount. Yet, even with the tightening of the representational system known as Socialist Realism, stenography retained—at least until the adoption of user‑friendly sound recording technology in the mid‑1940s—much of its significance as a documentary record of public speech.

Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (review)

REVIEWS 373 The reception of these myths and representations of monarchy is an area that would benefit from greater exploration. While Wortman suggests that inherent contradictions developed in the myth of monarchy, it is important to grasp the ways in which the image of the monarch were understood and interpreted by both Russia’s elites and its people more generally are important. The ‘naive monarchism’ of the Russian peasant, to use Daniel Field’s phrase, is an important component in the perception of the monarch. The politics of the Russian empire were more than just a dialogue between monarch and elites, and the broader reception of the symbolic ideas of monarchy are significant for comprehending the development and eventual collapse of the Romanov regime. This thought-provoking collection of essays reminds us of the complexity of Russian political culture: Wortman’s work on the Russian monarchy is significant and original. School of History Peter Waldron University of East Anglia Menzel, Birgit; Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer (eds). The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions. Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, 17. Otto Sagner, Munich and Berlin, 2012. 448 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. €48.00. The twenty-one essays in The New Age of Russia are the fruitful result of an international research conference on the metaphysical roots of Soviet civilization, held in Berlin in March 2007. They examine an enormous number of esoteric phenomena, including holistic medicine, ceremonial magic, UFOs and space travel, popular occultism, mystical literature, shamanism, Eastern mysticism, theosophical doctrines and parapsychology, among others. BerniceRosenthal,oneofeditors,startedthisparticularballrollinginJune1991, when she organized a conference on Russian occultism at Fordham University. The New Age of Russia appears fifteen years after Rosenthal’s path-breaking The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca, NY and London, 1997), a collection of essays by the American, European and Russian scholars who participated in the 1991 event. A comparison of the two volumes reveals how this second event evolves from the first and how the field has expanded and matured. The principal essays of The New Age of Russia are organized into three chronological sections. Each section addresses particular representations of occult thought in its time period. Not surprisingly, the essays are asymmetrical, in that some are synthetic, others analytical, while methodologies and approaches to the material vary considerably. SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 374 In the first section, which covers the pre-Revolutionary and early Soviet period, an engaging essay by Julia Mannherz introduces the contradictory nature of popular occult entertainment in the late empire. Konstantin Burmistrov’s eye-opening survey of the many occult circles and groups that existed in the 1920s and 1930s follows; his essay introduces intriguing new material from the FSB archives. Oleg Shishkin’s essay on Bolshevik occultists explores the complex topic of secret Soviet government research into the occult. Marcus Osterrieder discusses Nicholas Roerich’s ‘political occultism’ without succumbing either to politics or adulation, and Michael Hagemeister reveals the occult roots of Soviet space exploration in his discussion of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s theosophical interests. The second section, ostensibly covering the high Soviet period (1930–85), focuses on occultism in the Space Age. Birgit Menzel’s comparative essay surveys and locates Russian ‘occuculture’ in the context of its European and American counterparts of the period 1960–85, while Leonid Heller looks at occultism in literature and popular fiction. Matthias Schwartz explores the occult aspects of Soviet science fiction from the 1920s to Tarkovskii’s film, Stalker (1979), and Marlène Laruelle provides a lucid discussion of the cultish revival of Nikolai Fedorov’s Cosmism, a peculiarly Russian attempt to ‘synthesize Gnostic beliefs and scientific progress’ (p. 239). The essays of the third section explore the emergence of Russian esotericism from the occult underground in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods. This section is longer and necessarily less ‘shaped’ than the first two, since its time frame has yet to complete it historical run. Demyan Belyaev’s essay addresses popular and boulevard esotericism, occult self-help, fraudulent psychics and the role of the media in a disintegrating post-Soviet landscape. Mark Sedgwick discusses the neo-Eurasianist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, creator of...

Советский кишлак: Между колониализмом и модернизацией by С. Абашин (review)

Reviewed by: Советский кишлак: Между колониализмом и модернизацией by С. Абашин Marianne Kamp (bio) С. Абашин. Советский кишлак: Между колониализмом и модернизацией. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение, 2015. 848 с. ISBN: 978-5-4448-0219-9. Sergei Abashin’s magnum opus surely must tell the reader everything there is to know about Oshoba, Tajikistan. This volume brings together a number of previously published pieces, some of them in an expanded version, with new work, to explore a broad spectrum of themes that interest both historians and anthropologists. Abashin consciously frames his data and interpretation as a response to both late Soviet ethnography and to the whole interdisciplinary field of scholarship in Central Asian studies. While the work is so all-encompassing as to pose an enormous challenge to any reviewer, Abashin consistently analyzes his fieldwork and archival evidence through a questioning of Poliakov’s thesis on the “traditionalism” of Central Asian societies, and an interrogation of interpretations of Central Asia that emphasize colonialism as the Soviet mode of rule there. Abashin embraces Clifford Geertz’s “thick description,” making Oshoba [End Page 453] and the mundane details of ordinary people’s lives the focus of every interpretation. Local-ness is Abashin’s lens; Oshoba is “a” Soviet kishlak, and not “the” representative Soviet kishlak (Pp. 47–49). Even a quick overview of themes is daunting: Russian conquest, Russian colonial rule, taxation, the creation of new elites, continuities from the Russian into early Soviet periods, basmachis/kurbashis and their local ties, the early kolkhozes, local power brokers (little Stalins), marriage, local understandings Islam, the image of rural isolation versus realities of multifaceted connections to center and state, medical care, agricultural development, the mahalla as concept and as social network, and so on. The scope of inquiry, drawing on archival sources, published statistical collections, scholarly work, local memoirs, interviews, and participant observation, runs from the 1870s until 2010. A close and detailed focus on just one village, and Abashin’s embrace of Foucault’s anti-essentialism, lead the author to conclude, regularly, that people in Oshoba hold multiple views on every possible aspect of life, present and past, and that they do not conform either to Poliakov’s “traditionalism” or to James Scott’s interpretation of peasants as resisting domination using the “weapons of the weak.” “Soviet power and the Soviet system as a whole present a complex balance among various interests and forces, institutions and symbols,” writes Abashin, and in Oshoba, “the distribution of positions of power and of resources was connected with local relationships and in general with local politics” (P. 311). In the dance between Soviet centers of power that attempted to bring a Soviet order to every village, and the interests of local actors, Abashin sees an interactive relationship, in which many people in Oshoba worked to achieve their own goals, which usually centered around improving their material conditions, status, and local networks. Almost every chapter begins with a theoretical question about colonialism or about social scientists’ uses of terms like tradition and modernity, and Abashin reviews key theoretical works and Central Asia–focused studies related to his topic before initiating his thick description. A chapter on the Russian conquest of Asht region demonstrates the author’s commitment to postulates of postcolonial and subaltern studies, as he decenters the conquerors’ voices, reads Russian accounts “against the grain,” seeks out local narratives, and offers several possible readings. “I try to separate myself both from the imperial narrative and from the nationalist one, for which I use, along with traditional documents (written accounts by contemporary eyewitnesses) local oral remembrances, and with their help constructing at [End Page 454] least one additional side or view on the past” (P. 114). Thus, a study of a series of stories about Russia’s violent conquest leads Abashin into narrative analysis, and the somewhat predictable conclusion that truths about the past are multiple and that stories told about the past carry with them ideologies; but Abashin provides no conclusions at all that are substantively about the conquest. This is somewhat to be expected, due to the fact that Abashin’s starting and ending points are both local, and he is not asking why this conquest mattered beyond what it meant to the people of the region. But to the historian who reads all the evidence...

“Cultural branch” of human geography in contemporary Russia: Genesis, main peculiarities, and priorities of development

This paper presents an overview of the historical origins, specific features, development trends, and key issues, as well as priority areas and prospects for development, of the cultural and geographic branch of Russian human geography. In the global academic landscape, this discipline is known as cultural geography. Two concepts are used on the national research scene: geography of culture or cultural geography. The relationship between these two concepts is discussed. The paper analyzes how anthropological and cultural traditions inherited from the pre-Soviet period of Russian geographic science and the research approaches of anthropogeography of the early Soviet period have influenced the field of cultural geographic research in Russia. The consequences of the period of oblivion of humanistic traditions in Russian anthropogeography, which marked the end of the 1920s-beginning of the 1930s, for the development of economic geography in the USSR are investigated. The orientation of national human geography toward the cultural geographic dimension at the end of the last century is explored. Key features and development trends that were characteristic of Russian geography of culture or cultural geography over the past quarter-century are discussed. Statistical data on dissertations in the field of geoculture between 1995 and 2012 in Russia are aggregated and analyzed. Special attention is paid to the assessment of major problems and priority areas of cultural and geographic research in view of general trends and prospects for the development of modern human geography in Russia. It is concluded that the potential of cultural geography in Russia has not yet been fully tapped into. The theoretical and methodological framework of cultural geography should be developed further. In addition, research in this area is highly fragmented and suffers from a lack of coordination and dissociation with other areas of human geography. The authors point to the rise of “neoculturalization” in national geographic science, which is based on a closer relationship of geography of culture and cultural geography with other disciplines of human geography.

Thinking Orthodox in modern Russia: culture, history, context

Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia illuminates the significant role of Russian Orthodox thought in shaping the discourse of educated society during the imperial and early Soviet periods. Bringing together an array of scholars, this book demonstrates that Orthodox reflections on spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic issues of the day informed much of Russia's intellectual and cultural climate. Volume editors Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt provide a historical overview of Russian Orthodox thought and a critical essay on the current state of scholarship about religious thought in modern Russia. The contributors explore a wide range of topics, including Orthodox claims to a unique religious Enlightenment, contests over authority within the Russian Church, tensions between faith and reason in academic Orthodoxy, the relationship between sacraments and the self, the religious foundations of philosophical and legal categories, and the effect of Orthodox categories in the formation of Russian literature.

Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods

Vera Tolz, <i>Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods</i>

Did He Really Do It? Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, Party Disloyalty, and the 1923 Affair

The article uses a variety of documents, published and unpublished, to explore the 1923 arrest, interrogation and ‘trial’ of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, often considered the Bolsheviks' leading expert on Muslim affairs in the early Soviet period. Contrary to the historiography on this crucial moment in the development of Soviet nationality policy, I argue that Sultan-Galiev was not Stalin's ‘first victim’. Rather, responding to the vagaries of Soviet nationality policy, he did indeed violate party discipline in a number of ways, and was engaged in developing conspiratorial ties outside of the party. In fact, the party leaders, and Stalin in particular, treated him less severely than they could have.

Belief and Unbelief in Russia

Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. xiv + 300 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0299284442. $26.95. Avril Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia's Unknown da Vinci, xxiv + 304 pp. New York: Continuum, 2010. ISBN-13 978-1441187000. $29.95. Much 20th-century history writing was shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by the thesis, which maintains that religious beliefs and religious institutions are doomed by the advance of modernity to continuous and irreversible decline in their intellectual and social influence. Over the past 30 years, events have rendered this thesis distinctly less compelling than it once was, even to observers with no particular sympathy for religion. In many parts of the globe--including the former Eastern Bloc--ancient religious traditions have offered us vivid demonstrations of their adaptability and staying power. As secularization loses credibility as conceptual framework within which to understand the history of religion in the modern era, historians have begun to articulate alternative frameworks. (1) Historians who abandon the assumption that the waning of religious belief in modern societies is the ineluctable consequence of modernity itself are immediately presented with an array of exciting intellectual challenges. The phenomenon of religious unbelief in these societies can no longer be taken for granted; it must become the object of careful historical research and analysis. Some recent books in the field of modern Russian history have taken up these challenges in self-conscious and sophisticated way. One example is William Husband's Godless Communists, a study of the antireligious policies of the Soviet state in its early years and of the Russian masses' response to them. (2) Husband called attention to the complexity and ambiguities of ordinary people's attitudes toward religion and the church in the late tsarist period, then went on to argue that that such ambivalence persisted under Bolshevik rule. Without denying that religious observance declined in the early Soviet period, he argued that the Party's failure to understand the strength of the masses' traditional beliefs greatly limited the efficacy of its measures to promote atheism. A newer study, focusing on the elite rather than the masses, is Victoria Frede's Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. Frede's book is an important contribution to scholarship on 19th-century intellectual history. It examines how and why religious doubt, and later atheism, became genuine intellectual options for members of the Russian intelligentsia between the 1820s and the 1860s. Some of the figures upon whom her narrative concentrates play prominent role in every study of the intelligentsia: Herzen and Ogarev, Chernyshevskii, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev. About all of these she has remarkably interesting and illuminating things to say. But the book also includes chapters on obscure radicals of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s whose intellectual adventures she regards as no less worthy of the historian's attention that those of the familiar heroes of the saga of Russian radicalism. Indeed, one of Frede's more piquant claims is that the first full-blown atheists in Russia were none of these mighty names, but three young men of the merchant class who hung out together at the end of the 1840s in the tobacco store which one of them owned in Petersburg (92). Frede's point of departure is the bold assertion that, at the beginning of the 19th century, atheism, in the strict sense, was position that was neither thinkable nor speakable by educated Russians (11). The notion that there have been cultural contexts in which it was impossible to be an atheist is, of course, not new. Those familiar with Lucien Febvre's famous book on Rabelais (translated into English as The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century) will hear an echo of Febvre's argument that 16th-century European intellectuals simply lacked the necessary materials--from an adequate philosophical vocabulary to modern concept of the impossible--with which to construct an atheistic worldview that could present itself as serious alternative to the Christian one. …

Delad läsekrets och dubbelt seende

Divided Audience and Double Vision. The Aesopian Depths of Osip Mandelstam’s Two Tramcars&#x0D; Though a belief that children’s literature served only as a form of reluctant outlet for writers in the early Soviet period has predetermined a view of these books as mere byproducts of authorial necessity and restrictive censorship, this article argues that such books represent no mere refuge, but rather serve as a site for sophisticated subterfuge. Drawing on Lev Losev’s work On the Beneficence of Censorship, the author claims that children’s literature offered an alternative expressive outlet which Russian writers could use to encode their messages. To illustrate this point, this article exposes what sophisticated Aesopian levels coexist in a little-known artifact of this period – the renowned poet Osip Mandelstam’s picturebook Два Трамвая. Клик и Трам (Two Tramcars. Klik and Tram) (1925). Addressing multiple audiences at once, including censor, child, and adult, this book reveals ambivalence, fissures, and ruptures in its tone, which hint at its Aesopian depths and reveal a more tragic trajectory, one that the political environment and censorship precluded from being openly expressed. Ultimately, this article claims that, through its use of Aesopian language, this unique picturebook offers contextual, intertextual, and subtextual depths that tremendously enrich its system of signification and add adult sophistication beneath the apparently simple surface of a picturebook for children. Thus, the author and adult reader trained to read an Aesopian text accomplish their own communication around darker political and psychological themes as they shelter behind a falsified construction of the child.

Imperiale Projektionen und kaukasische Wirklichkeiten: Banditenwesen und das Phänomen Zelimchan im spätzaristischen Russland

Imperial Projections and Caucasian Realities. Banditry and the Zelimkhan Phenomenon in Late Imperial Russia This article sheds light on the situation of the Northern Caucasus in late imperial Russia by portraying the life and deeds of one of the most notorious bandits of the time: the Chechen „abrek“ Zelimkhan Gushmazukaev. Together with his small group of followers, Zelimkhan for more than a decade roamed this mountainous region, raiding Cossack farms, robbing banks, trains and post offices, and murdering local representatives of the Tsarist government. He was killed in September 1913. He gained legendary status during his lifetime, and became a frequent topic of debate in the Russian press as well as the ruling political and military circles. Social-democrats tended to portray this figure as a symbol of the oppressed people and a fighter for social justice. For conservatives, Zelimkhan was the living proof that the modernizing project in what was considered the most backward part of the Russian Empire had gone terribly awry. Drawing on newspaper articles and book publications from the late Tsarist and early Soviet period, as well as recently published police and other reports from the imperial Russian archives, this article explains the myth behind the legend and seeks to gain insight into the complex social realities in this volatile region of the Russian Empire.