Late Imperial Era Research Articles

Towards Confucian communalism: a match made in heaven?

This paper discusses the efforts of Chinese rulers to create sanitized forms of Confucianism in order to bolster ideological orthodoxy, and counter-reactions within the intelligentsia and civil society to these efforts. This paper looks at the thoughts of some Chinese scholars in both the imperial and contemporary era who have opposed the kind of spiritual centralism, or orthodoxy, with which the rulers have aimed to reinforce concrete centralism. It also seeks to draw a parallel between contemporary academic discussion on some recently unearthed texts and between-the-lines criticism in one classical prose anthology during the late imperial era as forms of grass-roots level dissidence which could escape the attention of the censorship machinery. Furthermore, this paper compares the calls for localism by Confucian scholars in the imperial era with the ideas of modern promoters of communalism (also known as libertarian municipalism), which, as a theory of government, refers to a federation of autonomous units of local rule. This discussion is related to the wider debate about the relationship between Confucianism and democracy.

Imagining the borderlands: managing (to prolong) conflict in Tibet

The current phase of political conflict in Tibet began with pro‐independence protests in the late 1980s and saw a significant surge of unrest in 2008. But that unrest was not continuous and for much of the last 25 years was at a low level of intensity. Yet the Chinese authorities have categorised the situation in Tibet as a ‘life‐and‐death struggle’ against pro‐independence forces throughout this period. This paper notes earlier debates in Chinese history about political strategies for managing borderland peoples, including late imperial era attempts by Chinese officials to forcibly change Tibetan culture that provoked rather than assuaged conflict. It suggests that this happened again in the 1990s when a group of Chinese officials proposed policies that sought directly to change core cultural practices among Tibetans. These policies of selective cultural intervention, unprecedented in the post‐Mao era in Tibet, fuelled long‐term resentment, leading to the violence and unrest of 2008. The paper argues that these policies were inseparable from the institutional interests of the agency within the Chinese Communist Party, the United Front, which had promoted them, to the extent that its status and influence within the state bureaucracy depended on it preventing them from being challenged or reversed. It made cultural intervention in Tibet seem normative to the Chinese policy elite by invoking three interlocked imaginings about ways of managing borderland peoples – the perception of perpetual war, Han expertise at borderland management, and latent threat within borderland cultures. That these have led to the prolonging of conflict in Tibet for over a quarter‐century is a reminder of the importance of considering institutional dynamics in the analysis of ethnic conflict.

Feminising Empire? British Women's Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation

ABSTRACTThis article addresses female activism spanning the Empire and creating interconnected networks linking the local and global dimensions of Britain's imperial mission in an era of increasing uncertainty. The transition from empire to commonwealth and, ultimately, independence was marked by anti-colonial challenges from within Britain and in the colonies and threats to empire from international developments post-1918. This era also witnessed a more proactive role for women as both defenders and critics of empire who had an influence on shaping a new discourse of welfare and development, purportedly a ‘feminisation’ of empire. Continuities existed between female activism pre- and post-1918 but also significant differences as the late imperial era witnessed more nuanced and diverse interventions into empire affairs than the ‘maternalist imperial feminism’ of the era before the First World War.

Perlustration in Imperial Russia

V. S. Izmozik, Chernye kabinety: Istoria rossiiskoiperliustratsii, XVIII-nachalo XX veka (Black Offices: The History of Russian Perlustration, 18th-Early 20th Centuries). 693 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015. ISBN-13 978-5444802373. Vladlen Semenovich Izmozik, a professor at the Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, is incomparably the world expert on late imperial Russia's government-sponsored interception of mail (perliustratsiia), to which he has devoted over 20 years of study and some 30 publications, including this massive book. Perlustration was one of the three principal secret methods of security policing and information gathering before the rise of the electronic wizardry culminating in the exploits of the National Security Agency (and the counterexploits of Edward Snowden). (1) The other two were surveillance by plainclothes policemen and infiltration by secret informants, neither of which has received anything like the detailed and wide-ranging treatment provided by Izmozik. (2) This is somewhat surprising, because both the security police themselves and the revolutionaries they hunted and watched all considered secret informants to be the linchpin of the entire system. (3) Yet the disparity of attention probably makes sense, as Izmozik demonstrates in his book, because unlike the other two methods, which evolved late in imperial Russian history and were focused largely on a narrow group of dissidents, the interception of mail emerged early and had a broad and ever-increasing scope. In 2003, when I surveyed recent scholarship on the Russian security police for this journal, the field was just coming of age. (4) At that time, the doyenne in terms of expertise and output was Zinaida Peregudova, an archivist at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), who has helped countless researchers to find their way through the archival labyrinth. (5) Since then, many more studies have appeared, almost entirely in Russia, including many focused on localities and regions, (6) though a few monographs also came out in the West. (7) Now Vladlen Izmozik is just as prominent as Peregudova in security and especially surveillance studies of late imperial Russia. Yet his work also bridges the Great Revolutionary Divide, contributing nearly as significantly to the history of surveillance in the early Soviet as in the late imperial era. (8) His concept of political control (politicheskii kontrol'), by which he means efforts to ascertain and manage the people's 'mood,' especially their attitudes to the authorities, has been particularly influential. (9) The book under review is encyclopedic. It draws upon vast unpublished and published documentation, including materials gathered in ten archives in Russia, among them the less pregnable collections of the Federal Security Service (FSB, St. Petersburg branch), the navy, the military, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Izmozik supplies a detailed bibliography, a lengthy index of names, and six appendices. The appendices present key official documents, the revolutionary-era memoir of a leading practitioner of perlustration, prosopographical data on officials engaged in the work, and a list of the shifting locations throughout the empire where it was conducted. The author begins by distinguishing between what he calls official military censorship (voennaia tsenzurd) of the mail, as well as the judicially imposed inspection of the correspondence of convicts and individuals under police supervision (politseiskii nadzor), which were overt and regulated by laws, and perlustration as such, which was an extralegal practice. Yet the Russian Code on Punishments of 1845 (revised in 1885) stated unambiguously that a government official could not be held liable for exceeding his authority, even when he deviated from established rules, long as, in regard to this particular instance or such instances in general, he was doing so on the basis of a directive issued from a higher authority (13-14). …

Changes over Time in Qing History: The Importance of Context

Changes over Time in Qing History: The Importance of Context Paul Cohen When I received my doctorate (1961), it was not uncommon for westerners to see Qing China as sui generis, something fundamentally different from the countries of the west. China was a static, unchanging civilization. It was a strange place, hard to understand. And it existed in a state of isolation, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. China, most western students seemed to agree, would benefit greatly from becoming more like us. American interpretations of nineteenth-century China tended, in the 1950s and 1960s, to lean heavily on the concepts “western impact” and “Chinese response.” The central question, as enunciated by John Fairbank, was “Why did China not respond to foreign encroachment earlier and more vigorously?” Because this was the key question, there was a strong tendency to characterize the non-western-related aspects of nineteenth-century China (state, society, economy, thought) in terms of their “remarkable inertia” (Fairbank). An influential perspective that went hand in hand with the impact-response approach was modernization theory, in particular that aspect of the theory that emphasized the division of China’s long history into traditional and modern phases (modern generally referring to the period of significant contact with the modern west). This approach was based on the assumption that Confucianism and modernity were fundamentally incompatible and that the traditional order had to be torn down before a new modern order could be established. Around 1970, however, this pattern of thinking began to be challenged by an emerging body of scholarly opinion that, in defining the relationship between “modern” [End Page 10] and “traditional,” questioned the implication that they were dichotomous, mutually antithetical conditions. We now began to see China as having undergone mammoth changes prior to the western onslaught (Kuhn), and as the old picture of an unchanging or cyclically changing China was discarded, we started to take a much closer look at developments within China. This more China-centered approach had several identifying features: its starting point was China, not the west; it attempted to cope with the complexity of the Chinese world by breaking it down into smaller spatial units (see Skinner’s concept of macroregions); it took seriously phenomena that were taking place in the lower strata of Chinese society (making possible the study of popular history and culture); and it was highly receptive to the techniques and strategies of disciplines other than history (e.g., anthropology). The China-centered approach began to take hold around 1970. It resulted, among other things, in a very different understanding of Chinese history in the nineteenth century. The consensus of earlier American scholarship had been that the great divide between the modern period of Chinese history and the traditional period was the Opium War. A growing consensus after around 1970 shifted to the view that the true watershed event of nineteenth-century Chinese history was the Taiping Rebellion (see Kuhn and Rowe). Although there are countless issues in the late Qing for the probing of which a China-centered approach remains appropriate and desirable, there are many other issues where this is plainly not the case. Illustrations would be scholarship that poses questions of a broadly comparative nature (such as the work of Wong and Pomeranz), or that examines the behavior and thinking of non-Han ethnic groups within the Chinese realm (e.g., Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans) or the migration of Chinese to other parts of the world. Such work — and there are many other possible examples – raises questions about the boundaries of “Chinese history” in the late imperial era and, indeed, in some instances the very meaning of the word “China.” Similar questions have also been raised, explicitly or implicitly, in studies of the environment, medicine and health, gender, women, publishing, and a host of other topics, which have become increasingly prevalent in recent years. [End Page 11] A principal new context in which Qing China has come to be seen in the past few decades has been that of Eurasia as a whole (see Lieberman, Perdue). The facts relating to the Qing haven’t changed, Kent Guy reminds us. “What has changed is the context, political and...

Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens

Reviewed by: Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens Michael Burri Katherine Arens, Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. 231pp. Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna by Katherine Arens places at its center neither a group of canonical Austrian texts, nor a particular literary genre, nor a school of thought, but rather the cultural process of mythmaking in Austria as it takes place from late imperial Austria to the present day. Such mythmaking, Arens argues, is already functioning powerfully in the late imperial era, even as its purposes, contexts, and rhetorical strategies have been rendered unrecognizable by nationalist historiographies and the triumph of the nation-state. Understanding mythmaking matters because it leads to a recovery of a history and a historical sensibility, turning a little-appreciated cemetery into a beautiful necropolis. If those who trivialize Austrian mythmaking win, even the dead are not safe. Belle Necropolis stands behind its theoretical proposition with textual analysis from the outset. Indeed, it opens with a manuscript from an Austrian baroness that performs its own mythmaking on what might be reckoned to be among the most overexposed events of late imperial Austrian history—the murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolph and Mary Vetsera at the former’s hunting lodge in Mayerling. But in translating, annotating, and closely reading this manuscript “from the crypt,” which is published as a whole for the first time, Arens shows how its source, Baroness Helene Vetsera, the mother of Mary Vetsera, retells the events leading up to Mayerling in ways that mourn the dead, exonerate (some of) the living, and seek to preserve the [End Page 155] family name, which Mary’s surviving sister still carries. Thus, the Baroness’s Denkschrift is anything but trivial. Much more, given the regime’s own Mayerling disinformation campaign, it is an essential contribution to the mythma-king of the story, a story that “is central to modern memory of the Habsburgs and Austria-Hungary.” The example of Baroness Vetsera guides the approach of Belle Necropolis. That is, Austria rewrites its past not to produce a “true tale, but rather a plausible one.” Scholars of Austria, it follows, should be more attentive to the plausibility in the stories that rework the Austrian past and less obsessed with the question of their veracity. Where late imperial Austrian mythmaking is concerned, scholars have much to gain by grasping that the old Habsburg myths are not fixed but are continually being reshaped to address new Austrian realities. From the moral standpoint alone, this is a welcome perspective. After all, one hardly need to be Karl Kraus to note the bad faith of current-day, Habsburg-bashing critics who rage against contemporary presentations of imperial culture as exercises in empty nostalgia driven by the tourist industry, even as they make their careers off of denouncing such nostalgia. But Belle Necropolis validates the mythmaking approach to studying Austria suggested by the inaugural reading of the Vetsera manuscript through its five subsequent chapters, presenting case studies that range from the “Habsburg wraith” Jörg Haider to Carl Schorske’s “Modernist fin de siècle.” In chapter 3, for example, Arens reads Rebecca West classic’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as an instance of how a classic text of wartime Europe could invoke Austria’s imperial past to explain the current suffering of Yugoslavia. Like Empress Elizabeth, whose assassination West recalls from her childhood, Yugoslavia is the victim of Habsburg power and German aggression. For West, the Balkans are a mythic, not a European space, a (female) place, one shaped by (male) Austrian imperialism, a terrain upon which Europe draws its maps. Rebecca West adapted a central myth of late-imperial Austria—the life and death of Empress Elizabeth—to tell a plausible tale that helped English-speaking readers make sense of the continental wartime conflict as it played out in the Balkans. Yet in still more striking ways, post-1945 Austria itself produced a revisionist Habsburg historiography—or what is termed “nostalgia”—to recast its Habsburg past in ways that were “not necessarily a denial of the guilt of collaboration” with National Socialism but “a necessary precondition for thinking in forms...

The Female Chastity Cult in Huizhou during the Late Imperial Era: Demographics, Books, and Monuments

This essay introduces the region of Huizhou famed for its scenery, its commercial agriculture, its merchants who traded local products all over the empire, and the lineages to which these men belonged. Huizhou was also known for the high numbers of its chaste women who during the Ming dynasty came under the scrutiny of the local community. The female chastity cult in Huizhou was manifested in various ways, and the three articles in this special Nan Nü theme issue examine how demographic data based on lineage records, special Huizhou printed editions of the classic ‘Biographies of Women’, and chastity arches built during the High Qing era (1680–1830) reveal the endorsement, complexities, and contradictions of the cult in this locale. The Appendix to this issue reviews the historiography of Huizhou studies in Chinese.

The Other Jewish Century

This review essay examines works of Russian and Soviet Jewish History by Eugene Avrutin, Oleg Budnitskii, and Yaacov Ro’i that focus on the relationship between Jews and the state during the “long” Russian twentieth century. The works examine this relationship in three discrete periods: the late imperial era proceeding the revolutions of 1917; the era of the Russian Civil War; and the late Soviet era of stagnation and decline. Challenging interpretations of Soviet historiography that have emphasized the open inclusion of Jews in the Soviet project, these works collectively stress the need to reconsider the persistence of racial discourses and anti-Semitism that structured relations between Jews and the state before and after the Bolshevik revolution.

De la continuité dynamique dans l’univers confucéen: Lecture néoconfucéenne du Zhongyong (中庸): Nouvelle traduction du chinois classique et commentaire herméneutique by Diana Arghiresco (review)

Reviewed by: De la continuité dynamique dans l’univers confucéen: Lecture néoconfucéenne du Zhongyong (中庸): Nouvelle traduction du chinois classique et commentaire herméneutique by Diana Arghiresco Christian Soffel (bio) De la continuité dynamique dans l’univers confucéen: Lecture néoconfucéenne du Zhongyong (中庸): Nouvelle traduction du chinois classique et commentaire herméneutique (Of dynamic continuity in the Confucian universe: A Neo-Confucian reading of the Zhongyong: A new translation from the classical Chinese and a hermeneutical commentary). By Diana Arghiresco. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2013. Pp. 416. €35, isbn 978-2-204-10026-7. When delving into traditional Chinese philosophy, it is tempting to search for an “original meaning” of the classical scriptures. However, this is a futile task for several reasons: First, we are confronted with a complex textual history, lacking a reliable “Urtext” version; much less can we rely on sufficient contextual information. Second, modern recipients—consciously or unconsciously—are prone to be influenced by orthodox interpretations, which have been dominating the discourse for several centuries. A good way to solve this dilemma is to take a close look at the most prevalent standard commentaries from the middle and late imperial era. This way we can not only increase our awareness for developments of the classical tradition, but also unlock its full epistemological potential for contemporary philosophical discussion. In view of its reliable textual foundation and its prominent position in the living tradition in East Asia, it is striking that scholars have been hesitating so far to fully translate Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 commentary to the Four Books (Daxue 大學, Zhongyong 中庸, Lunyu 論語, and Mengzi 孟子), the basic compendium of Confucian learning, which has served as the standard for elementary education and civil service examinations since the fourteenth century. In spite of their special importance, Western scholars interested in the Four Books’ wisdom have concentrated on the classical texts and used Zhu Xi’s extensive notes mostly as a stepping stone in order to uncover the “original meaning” of the canon. The new book by Diana Arghiresco, De la continuité dynamique dans l’univers confucéen: Lecture néoconfucéenne du Zhongyong, [End Page 615] deliberately takes a more profound approach, combining a full translation of the Zhongyong and Zhu Xi’s commentary with a hermeneutic analysis of these two textual layers. Not only does her “traduction pensante” (Heidegger) encompass the quest to approach the central message of the texts, but her examination of the Zhongyong (including Zhu Xi’s commentary) serves as a foundation upon which she builds a discussion of relevant Confucian and Daoist scriptures. Additionally, the author builds a bridge from Zhu Xi to classical Greek philosophy, thus going beyond Chinese indigenous thought. By adding another rich layer of background information on Chinese philosophy, Arghiresco delivers a compendium for classical Confucian thought in the context of other schools. In particular, she quotes numerous passages from the Lunyu (including Zhu Xi’s commentary), delivers countless references to other quotes from classical texts concerning the Zhongyong’s central topics (like zhong 中 or he 和), demonstrates the coherence with the Laozi and the Yijing, introduces key personalities (e.g., Emperor Shun or Confucius’ disciples), and explicates particular concerns in Zhu Xi’s thought (e.g., his religious ideas). As the subtitle suggests, the author delivers a “Neo-Confucian reading” of the classical Zhongyong text through the eyes of Zhu Xi. Thus, it can serve as a foundation to discuss alternative points of view from the Chinese tradition itself, such as the Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 commentary from the late Han (second century a.d.). For example, while discussing the famous term “watchfulness over oneself” (shen du 慎獨) (Zhongyong chapter 1), one can show that Zheng Xuan’s stance offers an alternative, concentrating more on physical “aloneness” and deviating from Zhu Xi’s focus on self-cultivation. A more problematic instance, where the author seems to adhere strictly to Zhu Xi’s view, is the question of dating and authorship. For Arghiresco, the Zhongyong is a book from the fifth century b.c. authored by Zi Si (pp. 12, 372). Furthermore, she accepts the traditional daotong perception (p. 21). In this regard, some interaction with more critical approaches from recent secondary literature...

Courtrooms Most Russian?

Louise McReynolds, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment Late Imperial Russia. 275 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0801451454. $35.00. Every scholar of Russian history knows Raskol'nikov well, but history of crime late imperial is still a relatively uncharted territory. Dostoevskii s Crime and Punishment seduced many of us into studying Russian history. Nevertheless, we find ourselves all too often invoking Dostoevskii's fictional hero Raskol'nikov as ultimate symbol of a murderer Russian, whereas names of real murderers like Andrei Gilevich, Ol'ga Palem, or Mavra Volokhova remain obscure for many students of late 19th-century Russia. While Raskol'nikov did serve as a role model courts as well as accompanying writings of criminologists and psychologists late imperial era, names of Palem or Gilevich were no less familiar to contemporary readers. Louise McReynolds's book raises question: what is to be gained analytically when Raskol'nikov is joined by other partners crime? McReynolds concentrates exclusively on murder and follows eminent cases from 1860s through revolutionary era. By tracing sensational murder cases and their multiple dimensions, McReynolds explores how Russians engaged with modern world that they witnessed unfolding around them (3). Each of chronologically organized chapters closely examines a single case, beginning with Mavra Volokhova--accused of having murdered her husband 1868--and ending with a robbery-homicide 1913. McReynolds uses her cases to demonstrate crucial features of perceptions and notions of murder particular, crime general, judicial system, gender and, to a lesser extent, question of liberalism Russia. She by no means intends to feed narrative of doomed autocracy but rather to read each killing as a juncture in a historical road that pointed several directions (11). In a manner reminiscent of Jane Burbank's study of peasant courts and Barbara Alpern Engel's investigation of divorce, she aims to offer a kaleidoscopic view of late imperial Russia, one that stresses many options and possibilities rather than failures and dead ends. (1) Yet end, she subscribes to narrative of failure of rule of law and thus contributes to thesis of Russian Sonderweg. McReynolds attributes this failure to a mixture of distinct Russian cultural features (e.g., fatalism) and structural problems, most notably those created by autocracy. The notion that autocracy staged itself figures of state attorneys and judges is a constant undercurrent McReynolds's study. While lawyers and juries are said to represent people, juries constitute the most institution tsarist Russia (8). Thus courtroom is transformed to a site where autocracy and people meet. Yet these seemingly clear-cut notions of and democratic become blurry course of McReynolds's book. How do we deal with fact that autocracy itself introduced judicial reform of 1864, based on Western ideas of law and striving for zakonnost' (legality) as goal of judicial process? What did actually mean, considering that judges this study, too, could press for legality, as did long-time presiding judge of Moscow Circuit Court P. N. Obninskii, who argued repeatedly for better implementation of zakonnost ' and for a larger role for individual (lichnost') Russian law? (2) Obninskii was not alone among many judges and state attorneys who displayed decidedly liberal views of law and order. (3) They imagined themselves as representing rule of law, and their view, this was tantamount neither to submitting to autocratic rule nor to openly defying autocracy. No doubt, McReynolds knows immanent contradictions autocratic rule faced when introducing an independent court system. …

Verkannte Propheten? Zur 'Expertenkultur' (west-)deutscher Werbekommunikatoren bis zur Rezession 1966/67

This is less a book about the history of advertising in modern Germany, a subject which has recently garnered some attention from cultural historians and those working on the history of consumerism, but rather a collective biography of the admen who pioneered and built the country’s advertising industry. Basing his work on an impressive sample of nearly four hundred independent advertisers and advertising executives in corporations, Hirt tells the story of a somewhat unsuccessful, or at least incomplete, professionalization process between the late Imperial era and the early Federal Republic. The heart of this study, in many ways, is the admen’s complicated relationship with the National Socialist regime, with its regulatory attempts to rein in the advertising market, and with the promise of social recognition some hoped this would entail. Lacking standardized professional requirements, German advertisers, Hirt argues, continuously saw themselves on the defensive against widespread critiques of commercial advertising. In this, they were part of a broader story of Germany’s sometimes uneasy embrace of commercial consumer culture from the late nineteenth century.

Who Are the Most Beautiful Women of China? —The “One Hundred Beauties” Genre in the Qing and Early Republican Eras*

Established in the late imperial era, “one hundred beauties” (baimei) genre selected and portrayed one hundred beautiful women in Chinese history often through three cultural artifacts: woodblock print portraits, biographies, and poems. This paper takes as its focus the anthology Gujin baimei tuyong 古今百美 图咏 (Illustrated biographies of and poems on one hundred beauties of the past and the present, 1917), which has not received scholarly attention before. Bringing together collections of old and new-style beauties, the anthology is a showcase of the genre straddling two centuries. The transformation of the genre, as reflected in the Gujin baimei tuyong, complicates a simplistic distinction between tradition and modernity while enriching our understanding of the changing representations of women.

Soviet mass festivals, 1917-1991

Mass festivals were a trademark of twentieth-century authoritarianism, as seen in fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere. But nowhere was this phenomenon more prevalent than in the Soviet Union. Despite being a dominant feature of Soviet culture, these public spectacles have been largely overlooked as objects of study by historians. Originally published in German, Malte Rolf's highly acclaimed work examines the creation and perpetuation of large-scale celebrations such as May Day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, Harvest Day, and others throughout the Soviet era. He chronicles the overt political agendas, public displays of power, forced participation, and widespread use of these events in the Soviet drive to eradicate existing cultural norms and replace them with new icons of Soviet ideology. Rolf shows how the new Red Calendar became an essential tool in redefining celebrations in the Soviet Union. Rolf traces the roots of Soviet mass festivals in disparate multi-ethnic celebrations, protests, and street marches during the late imperial era. He then contrasts these with post-revolutionary events that sought to dissolve ethnic rituals and unify the masses. By the end of the civil war, the Bolsheviks had a well-defined calendar of events and began to dictate the forms of public celebration in accordance with party rhetoric. In distant regions, organisers attempted to follow the models of Moscow and Leningrad, despite budgetary constraints and local resistance. In many outlying areas a hybridisation of events developed as local customs merged with party mandates. People often made use of official holidays to adopt their own agendas, yet continued to follow the line of an official Soviet culture. Mass festivals were thus an important tool for Sovietising the cultural landscape. After the Second World War, the Soviets exported their festival culture to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, which resulted in a melding of Soviet guidelines with national cultural forms. Additionally, Rolf compares and contrasts Soviet mass spectacles with mass events in Italy, Germany, and the United States to reveal their similar influence despite divergent political, cultural, and social systems. In the Soviet Union, mass festivals continued through the time of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and up until perestroika, despite their fading political impact. Rolf finds that in the end, Soviet celebrations became effectively ingrained in Russia's post-Soviet national memory, which ironically was the intent of the original festival planners.

Knowing Russia's Convicts: The Other in Narratives of Imprisonment and Exile of the Late Imperial Era

The essay explores the significance of questions of knowledge to the depiction of prisoners in three prominent katorga narratives from the second half of the nineteenth century: Dostoevskii's Notes from the House of the Dead, Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System, and Chekhov's Sakhalin Island. Comparing the different discourses of unknowability these authors employ, it argues that the relationship of the writers or narrators to the outcast status of the convicts takes their texts beyond the immediate context, to shape views of the penal system as expressing the increasing instability of identity, social hierarchies and moral life in Russia.

Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII–nachalo XX veka) by Natal´ia Anatol´evna Ivanova and Valentina Pavlovna Zheltova (review)

Natal'ia Anatol'evna Ivanova and Valentina Pavlovna Zheltova, Soslovnoe obshchestvo Rossiiskoi imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX veka) (Soslovie Society of the Russian Empire [18th-Early 19th Centuries]). 752 pp. Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5948811031. In their exhaustively researched Soslovie Society of the Russian Empire, N. A. Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova present a chronologically broad, history of the many social established by law that governed the lives of the empire's subjects. In their introduction, the authors claim their place in the long historiography of soslovie in Russia. They list a series of major discussion questions from that historiography: whether sosloviia were general sociological categories or historically specific; exactly when sosloviia became fully established; whether they were established purely out of higher state interests or grew out of larger social-economic and political developments emanating ffom below; and how Russia's sosloviia compared to those of Western states (7-11). Ivanova and Zheltova further note that although at various times the concept of soslovie had many wider meanings, their approach is based on a more specific understanding of the concept. They state firmly that they see the word soslovie as primarily carrying a legal, juridical character (12); as a result, they draw most heavily on legal sources, particularly the various editions of the Complete Collection of the Laws (Polnoe sobranie zakonov) and the Digest of Laws (Svod zakonov) of the Russian Empire, to investigate these various questions. Above all, this book has great value as a work of reference. The authors present a full and detailed account of almost every way that soslovie identities or organizations carne under the purview of the law. Each chapter focuses on a different soslovie or group of sosloviia (nobles and townspeople warrant two chapters each, divided chronologically at the Great Reforms), starting with the imperial family (which the authors see as a soslovie unto itself), moving through the nobility, churchmen (churchwomen are not much mentioned), townspeople, Cossacks, and peasants, before finally ending with the empire's internal others (the inorodtsy, or aliens). Ivanova and Zheltova deserve particular credit for broadening their investigation of sosloviia to include non-Russians within the larger empire. They do so both in the section on churchmen, where they discuss non-Orthodox clergy, and by including the inorodtsy as more than a side group, looking for within that broad category. Most chapters begin with a review of relevant literature on the subject, focusing on the work of Russian historians but with occasional mention of foreign ones. Then, in each chapter, the authors describe how legal identities were determine& the role they played in regulating everything from the marriages individuals contracted to the work they did, the taxes or service they owed and the property they owned (or used); the way their status did (or did not) pass to their heirs; and the ways that soslovie became associated with administrative organizations. The discussion begins with the early 18th century (often with a Muscovite prelude), but the very late imperial era receives the most attention, presumably because that is where the authors' major research experience has been previously. (1) Throughout, the focus is on the laws and how they structured life in a soslovie: essentially, how the imperial state's schemes of categorizing its population involved not just labels but legally defined duties, privileges, and corporate organizations, as the authors call them--the various structures established to administer sosloviia on the local level. They successfully show how many of these rights, duties, and structures changed over time. They note, for example, that state service, which Peter the Great made a duty of the nobility, changed into a privilege of the nobility (105), and that changes in the status of the nobility by the end of the regime reflected not so much their loss of privilege as increases in the privileges accorded to other sosloviia (153). …

CATHERINE EVTUHOV. Portrait of a Russian Province: Economy, Society, and Civilization in Nineteenth-Century Nizhnii Novgorod.

This groundbreaking study is required reading for historians seeking to understand the prerevolutionary Russian Empire and, perhaps more important, to challenge historiographical consensus. With impressive research, Catherine Evtuhov's conceptually brilliant work brings prerevolutionary Nizhnii Novgorod province to life. It is, however, far more than a regional history, although as such it is a welcome addition to the field. Her portrayal of a provincial civilization digs beneath a historiographical tradition concerned with the state, the ideologies that contested its purview and power, and, in the Soviet era, universalist categories that flattened and chiseled away complexity, diversity, and regionalism. Adopting a provincial viewpoint, Evtuhov calls for a reimagining of Russian economy, society, governance, and culture. Two insights are critical to this ambitious work. First, Evtuhov delineates “the idea of the province.” It became widespread from mid-century onward once the full panoply of influences defining nineteenth-century European modernity swept across Nizhnii Novgorod. Produced by the interaction of lived experience and inhabited space, this provincial idea opened a world more varied and vital than the stereotype of backward and agrarian provincialism bequeathed to historians of the late imperial era. Second, she identifies a provincial intelligentsia distinct from the populist and Marxist writers who authored the stereotypical view of provincial Russia. Evtuhov calls the provincial intelligentsia “purveyors of the province,” nineteenth-century intellectuals “whose goal was to depict, describe, conceptualize, present and promote the province.” They “crafted their image of the province through ‘boring’ means—statistics, record keeping, detailed ethnographic studies—rather than radical ideological positions or quasi-religious calls to arms” (pp. 14–15). They also served Evtuhov as effective research assistants and translators. Through them she imagined the Russian province and attempted “quite simply to ask what was there, rather than what was not or what went wrong” (p. 22).

Liberals under autocracy: modernization and civil society in Russia, 1866-1904

With its rocky transition to democracy, post-Soviet Russia has made observers wonder whether a moderating liberalism could ever succeed in such a land of extremes. But in Liberals under Autocracy, Anton A. Fedyashin looks back at the vibrant Russian liberalism that flourished in the country's late imperial era, chronicling its contributions to the evolution of Russia's rich literary culture, socioeconomic thinking, and civil society. For five decades prior to the revolutions of 1917, The Herald of Europe was the flagship journal of Russian liberalism, garnering a large readership. The journal articulated a distinctively Russian liberal agenda, one that encouraged social and economic modernisation and civic participation through local self-government units (zemstvos) that defended individual rights and interests--especially those of the peasantry--in the face of increasing industrialisation. Through the efforts of four men who turned The Herald into a cultural nexus in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, the publication catalysed the growing influence of journal culture and its formative effects on Russian politics and society. Challenging deep-seated assumptions about Russia's intellectual history, Fedyashin's work casts the country's nascent liberalism as a distinctly Russian blend of self-governance, populism, and other national, cultural traditions. As such, the book stands as a contribution to the growing literature on imperial Russia's nonrevolutionary, intellectual movements that emphasised the role of local politics in both successful modernisation and the evolution of civil society in an extraparliamentary environment.

Review: Variety, Archaeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice

Variety, Archaeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice . University of Virginia Art Museum. 26 August–18 December 2011. This genesis of this compelling exhibition is a collection of twenty-three mid-sixteenth-century architectural prints acquired by the University of Virginia some thirty years ago. The prints are of various capitals and bases, some quite elaborate but matching none of the canonical orders with which we are most familiar. While several can be linked to known ancient monuments, others are from sources unknown, and some appear to be inventions. Their engraver is identified only by the initials G.A., with a tiny image of a caltrop (a small spiked weapon spread on the ground to inhibit the advance of mounted troops). Master G.A. may be Giovanni Agucchi, a mid-sixteenth-century Italian engraver, but the attribution remains conjectural. The prints are a reminder of how single-leaf architectural prints accelerated the spread of information on classical architecture during the formative years of the Italian Renaissance. The printed image was just then coming into its own and made knowledge of Roman antiquity widely accessible to an eager audience as never before. Moreover, the prints are evidence of how this particular master, along with numerous others, quickly absorbed and shared the richness and variety of the wealth of ancient architectural details scattered about. Using Master G.A. prints as a foundation, the …

“It Could Be A Lot Worse”: Imperial Russia’s Performing Arts Censorship in Comparative Perspective

Histories of the Russian Empire’s cultural life have long dwelled on the role of censorship in its stage culture. Long thought to be an oppressive arm of the tsarist state, its theatrical censorship usually appears as another villain in a political universe that made revolution inevitable. A careful consideration of the tsarist censorship in a comparative international context, however, reveals that it was neither meaningfully different in structure nor dramatically harsher than other theatrical censorship regimes functioning in Russia’s late imperial era and beyond. Like the other national censorships, which policed culture throughout the developed world, Russia’s censorship regime overwhelmingly approved works submitted for performance in a system of preliminary review. Unlike them, Russia’s censors had few enforcement mechanisms at their disposal and only weakly policed its own decisions. In a number of striking cases, moreover, Russian censors delivered more favorable verdicts on internationally well known but controversial works than did their Western counterparts, including even British censors and American police authorities.

Tausend Jahre epigraphische Kultur im römischen Hispanien: Inschriften, Selbstdarstellung und Sozialordnung

Tausend Jahre epigraphische Kultur im römischen Hispanien: Inschriften, Selbstdarstellung und Sozialordnung