Late Tsarist Research Articles

Quoi qu’il en coûte : prêts alimentaires et aide aux victimes de la famine dans l’Empire russe tardif

Late Tsarist Russia commanded a unique system of famine relief that provided food aid on credit. No other state operationalized debts this copiously in order to prevent its populace from starving. The article analyses the hunger relief operation between 1891 and 1893, examining why the Russian Empire resorted to food loans as the major tool to counter the threat of famine. It shows how it worked and to what extent it actually provided relief. It demonstrates how the Russian government was structurally and culturally dependent on this cost ineffective and provisional relief system that neither by design nor by name was supposed to be humanitarian but in essence saved millions of lives. It shows how on the one hand cultural fears of peasant indebtedness and unproductiveness stalled relief efforts while on the other hand these very fears prompted the state to turn loans into donations. The autocracy systematically addressed social needs – by balancing humanitarianism and financial accountability.

:The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia

Previous article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia. By Stefan B. Kirmse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+342. $99.00 (cloth); $80.00 (Adobe eBook Reader).Robert GeraciRobert GeraciUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 95, Number 1March 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723331 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia

Liberalism and the Law in Late Imperial Russia Daniel Beer David Feest, Ordnung schaffen: Bäuerliche Selbstverwaltung und Obrigkeit im ausgehenden Zarenreich (1834–1889) (Making Order: Peasant Self-Administration and the Authorities in Late Tsarist Russia). 358 pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2018. ISBN-13 978-3447107228. €49.90. Stefan B. Kirmse, The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia. 341 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108499439. $105.00. Vanessa Rampton, Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia: From Catherine the Great to the Russian Revolution. 229 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1108483735. $105.00. No less than by revolution, Russian history is haunted by the specter of roads not taken. Historians of late imperial Russia might seek to avoid teleological shadows cast by 1917, but the denouement of revolutionary collapse and violent civil war inevitably looms on the horizon of all attempts to explain what became of the Great Reforms. Why did the 1860s apparently fail to deliver the promise, cherished by Russian liberals, of a law-bound, constitutional order underpinned by individual rights and representative government, which would integrate the peasantry and the non-Russians into a cohesive and stable society and withstand the dislocations of rapid modernization and ultimately of World War I? And what did liberals themselves make of the opportunities afforded to them during the turbulent decades before 1917? Were they the hapless victims of historical forces beyond their control or the authors of their own political failure? Taken together, David Feest's Ordnung schaffen, Stefan B. Kirmse's [End Page 412] The Lawful Empire, and Vanessa Rampton's Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia offer a series of fresh yet interlocking perspectives on the prospects for social and political stability and constitutionalism in late imperial Russia. ________ Feest's Ordnung schaffen traces the impact of attempts by governmental and landowning elites to modernize the Russian countryside by removing practices they saw as "contradictory and irrational" (2). Central to this endeavor was the production of new forms of knowledge about peasant society that would facilitate the integration of the peasantry into the wider administration and economy of the empire. Feest scrutinizes the interplay among peasants, landowners, and state officials in Riazan Province from the 1830s to the 1890s. Tapping an impressive range of regional archives, legal publications, and administrative reports, he paints a somber picture of how the bid to break down intermediary barriers between the peasantry and the state, and to rationalize rural life, failed in the decades that spanned the emancipation of the serfs. At the heart of Feest's account lies the ambiguous nature of the peasant commune itself: part institution of self-governance; part adjunct of state power. While some historians have argued that the village communes remained fundamentally autonomous and resistant to state-led change, others have emphasized that they did acquire the characteristics of state institutions, not least in the ways they were recognized as legal bodies.1 Ordnung schaffen challenges the implied binary posited by these views of the commune and argues for the need to acknowledge that both characteristics and roles of the village commune "existed in parallel, competing with each other or assuming different forms of symbiosis" (34). The result was that the commune in both the pre- and (especially) post-emancipation era was a highly ambiguous institution into which different actors—state officials, landowners, and the peasantry themselves—all inscribed their [End Page 413] own agendas. These agendas conflicted because they were premised on incommensurate ideas of rationality; reformers strove for universal standards and a statistical "capture" of information that would facilitate policy-making. The peasantry, by contrast, prized local knowledge and was wary of emissaries from the central government instructing them how to manage their affairs—and with good reason. Feest argues that elite visions of the peasantry were shot through with fixed assumptions about the peasant commune that paid scant regard to the highly diverse manifestations of the institution. Even within Riazan Province, which Feest takes as a case study broadly representative of European Russia, the communes differed enormously, from the heavily forested regions to the north of the River Oka in which the peasants lived...

Religion and Revolution in a Sectarian Family of Late Tsarist Russia

Abstract In 1965, after decades of ethnographic research in primary sources first collected by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Soviet historian Alexander I. Klibanov concluded that despite its origins in peasant social protest, Russian sectarianism had failed to advance the goals of the Bolshevik revolution. “Darkened” by religion and under the influence of their “bourgeois leaders” and “reactionary” Tolstoyan activists, religious dissidents were content to serve the political and economic interests of the ruling classes. Klibanov’s sweeping pronouncement ran counter to previous, western scholarship, which generally viewed the religious sect as precursor of the political party, and it was specifically rebutted in 1967 by Ethel Dunn, who argued that Klibanov had not proved his conclusion that sectarians were satisfied with tsarism and opposed to revolution. Sergei I. Zhuk further pressed the case against Klibanov’s thesis in his 2004 study of the oppositional discourse of the peasant evangelical movement in southern Russia and the revolutionary activity of proletarian peasants against Ukrainian plantation owners. Soviet ideologists had disowned their “cultural predecessors,” Zhuk claimed. The case study of an exiled sectarian family that we present in this article follows in the footsteps of Dunn, Zhuk, and others to show how the anti-clerical activism of a Bessarabian Stundist, Eremei Cheban (1858–c.1930), fueled the political dissidence of his son, Khariton (1886–1962), who participated in violent anti-tsarist rebellion in the Caucasus during the 1905 Revolution.

''Trialling… and erring'': a historical overview of housing in Petrograd, Leningrad, and Saint Petersburg

This article provides a historical overview of housing in Saint Petersburg from the late Tsarist Empire, to the Soviet Union, and the successor Russian Federation. It is divided into five parts: an introduction, three sections that treat the distinct housing models enacted by the three political entities which have handled the city of Petrograd, then Leningrad, and lastly, Saint Petersburg, and a conclusion. These three entities are, respectively, the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation. In this manner, the first part gives insight into Petrograd’s housing before the First World War and throughout the 1917 and 1918 Revolutions and the Russian Civil War, treating the deterioration of the housing stock. The second section looks at the housing situation in more generally the Soviet Union but also Leningrad, examining the housing policies carried out in times of Josef Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The third one assesses the process of housing privatisation in the Russian Federation, dissecting the reasons for its imperfect development. Finally, the conclusion suggests that none of the tree housing models mentioned above has been able to successfully cope with the housing shortage and points out Nikita Khrushchev as the leader who did the most to relieve the housing shortage.

Curating Russia: The Shchukin Collection, Nationalism, and Border Crossing from Lenin to Putin

Russia’s relationship with nation is marred by contradictions that stem from its place in comparison to the West. Cultural nationalism in artistic production originated with the arrival of the Peredvizhniki [Wanderers] in the 1870s. Moscow merchant Pavel Tretyakov, in collecting Russian and European art, openly embraced a nation that encompassed Western ideas in conjunction with distinctly Russian themes. The unparalleled collecting of French modern art by Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in the early 20th century continued this embrace. The nature of their collected paintings produced shockwaves in late tsarist and Soviet society and politics before being inculcated into Russian national identity in the 21st century. This article explores the life of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1909), commissioned by Sergei Shchukin. It follows the work across time and regimes as it assumes pride of place in not only Russia’s national collections but also within its identity. Through a focus on the 2008 exhibition From Russia at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, this article examines Russia’s relations and protection of this work to understand, why even as the country seeks to define itself once more actively through its opposition to the West, their cultural diplomacy speaks to an openness built on a transnational history of the most prized works in their national collections.

From 'Mercy' to 'Banner of Labour': the Bukharan Jewish press in late Tsarist and early Soviet Central Asia

ABSTRACT This paper presents the development and transformations of Bukharan Jewish newspapers and periodicals (1910–38) and situates them in the broader Central Asian mediascape. Over a period of 30 years, the Bukharan Jewish press was transformed from a pioneering privately owned enterprise that served the needs of the Jewish communities throughout Central Asia to one owned and regulated by the Soviet state, serving as a tool to transmit propaganda and to shape and educate a predefined ‘national minority group’. The paper argues that the introduction of a Bukharan Jewish press in 1910 was intended to create a modernized language and ethnic awareness among the Jews of Central Asia. In the 1930s, Bukharan Jewish newspapers and journals were radically Sovietized and finally shut down by the state. From then until the collapse of the Soviet Union, no Bukharan Jewish publications appeared in the bloc and the existence of a distinct Central Asian Jewish identity was largely ignored. This case study sheds light on Tsarist and Soviet minorities’ policies and helps us to better understand the various changes experienced and the cultural adaptations made by many ‘minorities’ of Central Asia in the Age of Colonialism.

The Meaning of Memory in Bunin and Hippius

This paper illustrates the meaning of memory by the fate and change in spiritual orientation of Ivan Bunin and Zinaida Hippius, two prominent literary figures of the late tsarist Russia and interbellum émigré Paris. Most importantly, it examines the post-revolutionary transformation of values and reconciliation with external circumstances and internal afflictions of these two writers. The significance of memory becomes prominent in Bunin after his realization of the tragic and frightening consequences of the revolution, which results in his turn to the past as the source of tranquility and comfort. Hippius’s diaries and poetry, especially after her husband’s death, also show her turn toward eternal values and away from the hitherto paramount terrestrial, fleeting aspirations. The oeuvres of both writers are placed in the context of pre-revolutionary orientation towards the past that is contrary to the modernist shift to the future, which announced and precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Business representation in an autocratic regime: Tariff policy and exchange committees in late Tsarist Russia

AbstractStudies on the role of interest groups in the formation of public policy are generally focused on those in democratic countries. However, the emerging literature on interest groups in autocratic regimes suggests that business in such states is actively involved in policy formation. On the basis of the first dataset on the 1891 tariff reform in the Russian Empire, this study carries out an empirical examination of the role of business in policymaking in one of the most autocratic states in history. Dominance analysis is used to estimate the contribution of participants to tariff reform. The results show that while the state had an overriding influence on tariff formation, the contribution of business representatives is noteworthy. The addition of business associations to the model explaining tariff changes leads to an increase in the explained variance of the model by about seven percentage points. Additional regression analysis confirms that the success of lobbying depended on the homogeneity of the proposals presented by regional business associations.

Women Workers in Late Imperial Russian Industry: Hiring Policy and Employer Attitudes on the Railways to 1914

By defining ‘worker’ to include low-paid white-collar as well as blue-collar staff, and taking a broad definition of industry, this article reveals whereas factory managers increasingly hired blue-collar women during roughly 1895–1914, the situation with women's employment in the railway industry was very different. Railway policy was to restrict numbers tightly and prioritise literate women in certain low-paid mostly white-collar jobs for which men were hard to recruit. Railway policy-makers were influenced by not just enduring patriarchal attitudes, but also military demands together with financial concerns associated with pension rights and retrospective wage increases. At the same time, local labour shortages increasingly forced managers to seek exemptions to the hiring policy or even ignore the restrictions, especially in regions like Central Asia where qualified people of both genders were relatively scarce. The article concludes with some general questions. How typical by that time were the MPS as an employing ministry and state-owned railways as industrial employers? Did hiring policy in state-owned industrial enterprises differ significantly from the private industrial sector? What ishould be understood by the term ‘skilled worker’? And how important are white-collar workers as a category for analysing women's employment in late Tsarist Russia’s industrial economy?

The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia, by Stefan B. Kirmse

The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia, by Stefan B. Kirmse

The Siberian Land Survey and the Politics of Spatial Approximation

Empire building in Asiatic Russia in the late tsarist empire encompassed a complex set of measures. Yet its most fundamental component was about surveying and allotting land to both native residents and incoming settlers, a procedure called zemleustroistvo, or “land organization.” An 1896 law regulated this procedure in the four Siberian governorates. It was the Russian counterpart of a process common to other settler societies. Despite its technicalities, land surveying can be regarded as a point of intersection between political/intellectual and social history, the locus where political design met complicated social realities and tried to transform them, most often with mixed results. Rules about tracing spatial boundaries reflected ideas about the rational use of resources or about justice, as well as social and cultural hierarchies to be implemented. This essay examines what Siberian land organization was supposed to accomplish and why it was conceived in its particular form. Questions about legal title, survey scale, and allotment standards are discussed to attain a better understanding of the logic of imperial rule. Tsarist decision makers constructed a procedural framework marked by information deficiency, quantitative approximation, and administrative ambiguity. This approach was intentional and produced a fluid, semi-authoritarian, semi-negotiated dialectic of petitions and administrative responses. By 1905, however, the politics of spatial approximation showed its limits and gave way to perceptions of an increasing administrative impotence in managing population and resources. This helps explain the urgency of the mobilizing, technocratic effort that marked the final years before the First World War.

‘Ali al-Ghumuqi (Kayaev) as the Historian of Caucasus’ Muslim Peoples

The paper is an attempt at writing of the new conceptual biography of a renowned Muslim reformist leader in late tsarist and early Soviet Caucasus. After ‘Ali al- Ghumuqi more known under the name of Kayaev (1878–1943) from the Dagestani village of Ghumuq fell the victim of the Stalinist political repressions and then was gradually rehabilitated, historians often presented him a leftist journalist and politician close to the Bolsheviks, sometimes also a bibliophile who collected one of the largest private libraries of Muslim Oriental manuscripts and documents. Seriously revising this not very correct image the authors of this article investigate rather his academic research activities that allow rethinking Kayaev as a Muslim historian revisionist. The focus is made on his Oriental source studies that traced the future development of the famous Dagestani school of academic Oriental studies in the twentieth century, as well as on Kayaev’s original treatment of Muslim historiography he considered through the lenses of Muslim peoples’ development as principal historical actors.

Kirmse , Stefan B. The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia (review)

REVIEWS 777 Despite this, Ammon’s account of the historical facts and events of Georgian history is generally accurate, and is supported by rich and diverse bibliographic material. The multiple sources in four different languages Ammon has drawn upon in his research include more than 200 books and magazine articles, as well as dozens of dictionaries, encyclopaedias, websites and other reference works in a wide range of areas directly or indirectly connected with the subject of his book. One of the main advantages of Philipp Ammon’s book is that it not only describes the important historical events but also examines the significant processes that have fuelled the political, cultural and military clashes between Russia and Georgia. This makes it an asset for a wide-ranging readership, from students of Georgian history to diplomats and politicians who seek a balanced perspective and objective information on the background to the long-lasting conflict in one of the most sensitive regions of the world. The significance of Ammon’s book is further magnified by the fact that the history of Georgia still remains an under-studied and under-researched field, as there is still not enough scholarly literature on this subject available in the West in general and even less so in German-speaking countries. University of Calgary Andrew Andersen Kirmse, Stefan B. The Lawful Empire: Legal Change and Cultural Diversity in Late Tsarist Russia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2019. xiii + 341 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£75.00. Drawing on exhaustive research, Stefan B. Kirmse develops case studies on late-tsarist judicial reform’s implementation in Kazan´ and the Crimea. His focus is ‘the ways in which ethnic and religious minorities interacted with the courts and related institutions’ and how they related to their Russian neighbours (p. 31). Chapter one provides context. Jurists in the new courts were sticklers for procedure. Individual legal responsibility and the presumption of innocence were paramount concepts. Legal authorities encouraged jurors to judge based on conscience. Thus, even confessed criminals could be seen as ‘not guilty’. This approach won popular support but also led to high acquittal rates — higher in urban than rural areas. Social, economic and cultural background on the Crimea and Kazan´ is given in chapter two. Infrastructure and cultural institutions were much less developed in the Crimea (though things started to change after the imperial family bought a palace outside Yalta in 1860). In chapter three, Kirmse argues that the judicial reform created a tension between zealous, procedurally meticulous jurists and administrative officials SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 778 who persisted in the belief that their word should be law. This attitude was well captured in the bewildered ejaculation of the governor of Kazan´ province, Nikolai Skariatin: ‘I should work for Mr. Prosecutor? What sort of head of the province can I be after this?’ (p. 128). Yet even vehement administrative resistance could not undermine the reform’s success, though fiscal constraints were another matter. Despite claims of earlier scholars, only a minority of jurors were peasants and peasant jurors tended toward greater harshness than did urban dwellers. The following chapter focuses on the pageantry of the court. Unlike in the pre-reform era, the government spared little expense on court houses, so as to inspire reverence. Portraits of the emperor and religious symbols were held crucial. Religious authorities — mostly Russian Orthodox, even in majority Muslim areas — heightened the sanctity of the proceedings. Nevertheless, many Muslims participated as informal legal practitioners, jurors, defendants and plaintiffs. Moreover, ordinary people gained status, as even nobles had to rise when jurors entered the courtroom. The remainder of the book deals with interactions of Muslims in the Crimea and Kazan´ with the new court system. Although they ‘did not necessarily hold the imperial state and its local representatives in high esteem’ (p. 210), they made extensive use of the court system, primarily when informal and local means of adjudication seemed unlikely to yield desired results. As the state grew more concerned with registering and controlling persons and property, people’s interactions with the state grew more frequent. Kirmse concludes that negotiation and persuasion were the main approaches the authorities took. ‘Violence did occur...

State Patriotism and Jewish Nationalism in the Late Russian Empire: The Case of Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Journalist Writing on The Russo–Japanese War, 1904–1905

AbstractIn his autobiographical writings, the Russian-Jewish author and the founder of Zionist Revisionism Vladimir Jabotinsky constructed a retrospective self-image, according to which ever since becoming a Zionist early in the 20th century he exclusively clung to a Jewish national identity. This one-dimensional image was adopted by the early historiography of the Revisionist movement in Zionism. Contrary to this trend, much of the recent historiography on Jabotinsky has taken a different direction, describing him, particularly as a young man during the period of his early Zionism in Tsarist Russia, as a Russian-European cosmopolitan intellectual. Both these polarized positions are somewhat unbalanced and simplistic, whereas the figure of Jabotinsky and his worldview that emerge from reading his rich publicist writing in late Tsarist Russia present a far more complex picture of interplay between his deep ethnic-national primordial Jewish affinity, on the one hand, and an array of his different attachments to his non-Jewish surroundings including local, cultural, and civil identities, on the other. Focusing on Jabotinsky’s unexplored journalist writings that address the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, the article discovers a previously unknown identity pattern of the young Jabotinsky—his Russian state patriotism—and traces its relationship to his Jewish nationalism.

The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State by Mills Richard (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 574 particular interest is Sweden’s role in the regional development of eugenics. The establishment of the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology in 1922 provided eugenicists in Austria, Hungary and Romania with a desirable model to institutionalize eugenics in their own country. In Latvia, it was a Swedish anatomist and eugenicist, Gaston Backman, who first attempted to prove the Nordic racial belonging of the Latvians. In turn, his tutelage inspired a new generation of Latvian racial anthropologists and eugenicists. In Estonia, eugenicists were heavily influenced by Swedish and Finnish methodologies in their study of race. Also, local institutions could exert intra-regional influences, as the example of the University of Tartu testified. Tartu cultivated a cohort of renowned Estonian and Latvian eugenicists, and its rich legacies of medical and racial research in the late tsarist era provided further inspirations for local and foreign studies on the racial questions in the East Baltic region. Further comparative research in the history of eugenics could benefit from these signs of regional and transnational interconnectedness. While Central and Eastern European eugenicists’ views on intra-European racial hierarchy are well explored in these two volumes, less clear are their responses to the colonial anxiety about the supposedly inferior racial qualities of Asians and Africans in Anglo-American and German eugenic literature. How are we to understand, for example, the Czech eugenicist Jan Bělehrádek’s exhortation to disassociate racism from eugenics, even as he believed that racial mixing with non-White, non-European ‘distant races’ could produce eugenically inferior offspring? Future studies on the relationship between intra-European and colonial racial studies and their influences on eugenic ideology would help us explain this paradox better. These ambitious titles make a convincing case for the importance of Central and Eastern Europe, a region which has received limited scholarly attention for their relative linguistic inaccessibility, in eugenic studies. With rich materials and insights, these two books would certain help further the agenda of future comparative studies in the pursuit of a global history of eugenics. UCL SSEES Paris Pin-Yu Chen Mills, Richard. The Politics of Football in Yugoslavia: Sport, Nationalism and the State. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2018. xxv + 390 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £75.00: $125.00. Richard Mills’s study appears at an opportune moment to consider the politics of football in the former Yugoslavia. The success of the Croatian national team in reaching the final of last summer’s World Cup in Russia REVIEWS 575 ignited wild scenes of celebration at home, but the decision of some fans not to watch, in protest at revelations of corruption in the national federation, recalled tensions between competing supporter factions in Yugoslav times. Earlier in the tournament meanwhile, Switzerland’s Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri were fined by FIFA for celebrating goals during a 2-1 win over Serbia by putting their hands together to mimic the double-headed eagle found on the Albanian flag: both players are of Kosovar Albanian heritage. These recent events showed that football remains politically significant within and between the former Yugoslav republics. This engrossing socio-cultural history covers three quarters of a century, from the foundation of the interwar kingdom after the First World War to the bloody dissolution of the socialist federal republic in the 1990s. Throughout Mills demonstrates that football, as a ‘powerful and unpredictable commodity’ (p. 311), both reflected and shaped Yugoslavia’s progress and collapse, most significantly in its revolutionary role in the establishment of the Communist state after the Second World War. Repressed and proscribed in the interwar kingdom, Communists had found that workers’ football clubs, such as Mladi Radnik of Kragujevac, Građanski of Užice or Metalac of Zagreb, offered a means to organize and continue to reach their proletarian constituency, and after the Axis invasion of spring 1940 many players and functionaries of such clubs joined the partisan movement. Towards the end of the war the partisans skilfully exploited the propaganda possibilities presented by football: a fascinating section of the chapter, ‘Liberation Football’, describes the summer 1944 Mediterranean tour by Hajduk Split, over the course of which they comprehensively outplayed a...

The dark side of connectedness: forced migrations and mass violence between the late Tsarist and Ottoman empires (1853–1920)

The dark side of connectedness: forced migrations and mass violence between the late Tsarist and Ottoman empires (1853–1920)

Lechebnaia pedagogika: The Concept and Practice of Therapy in Russian Defectology, c.1880-1936.

Therapy is not simply a domain or form of medical practice, but also a metaphor for and a performance of medicine, of its functions and status, of its distinctive mode of action upon the world. This article examines medical treatment or therapy (in Russian lechenie), as concept and practice, in what came to be known in Russia as defectology (defektologiia) – the discipline and occupation concerned with the study and care of children with developmental pathologies, disabilities and special needs. Defectology formed an impure, occupationally ambiguous, therapeutic field, which emerged between different types of expertise in the niche populated by children considered ‘difficult to cure’, ‘difficult to teach’, and ‘difficult to discipline’. The article follows the multiple genealogy of defectological therapeutics in the medical, pedagogical and juridical domains, across the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It argues that the distinctiveness of defectological therapeutics emerged from the tensions between its biomedical, sociopedagogical and moral-juridical framings, resulting in ambiguous hybrid forms, in which medical treatment strategically interlaced with education or upbringing, on the one hand, and moral correction, on the other.

Fedorovism in Early Post-Soviet Russia: The Collapse of the Meta-imperial Project

ABSTRACTNikolai Fedorov, the obscure librarian in late tsarist Russia, had created a grand theory. According to it, the humanities should be united under the aegis of the Tsar to engage in the complete mastery over nature, spreading all over the universe and the resurrection of the dead. This totalitarian and messianic aspect of fedorovism could be well incorporated into totalitarian messianism, the belief in the omnipotence of science and exploration of space – all the key elements of Soviet ideology. Consequently, the regime became ‘Fedorovian’ without cognizing it. While Gorbachev’s reforms made it possible for many Soviet intellectuals to be acquainted with Fedorov, the collapse of the regime and the country had led to profound implications for these Soviet intellectuals’ perception of Fedorov’s teachings and related theories. For some, it led to embracing the peculiar cocktail of mysticism and the occult. For others, the end of the USSR implied that Fedorov’s dream – humanity’s mastery over nature – would never be accomplished. It also implied that humanity is not very different from the other species and would disappear in the future.

The imperfect child in early twentieth-century Russia

The article discusses the role that conceptualisations of child ‘imperfection’ played in the rise and fall of Russian ‘child study’ between the 1900s and the 1930s. Drawing on Georges Canguilhem’s ideas on ‘the normal’ and ‘the pathological’, the article analyses practices centred on diagnosing subnormality and pathology in the Russian child population in the late tsarist and early Soviet eras. It first examines mutually competing normative regimes that framed categorisations of ‘imperfection’ among Russia’s children in the context of the empire’s accelerated, yet ambivalent modernisation during the 1900s–1910s. It then charts the expansion of this diagnostics in the first decade or so of the Soviet regime, following its shift in focus from the early-1920s’ ‘delinquent child’ to the late-1920s’ ‘mass child’. The article concludes with a discussion of the emergence, over this same period, of the Russian field of medicalised special education known as ‘defectology’. It argues that defectology’s disciplinary specificity crystallised in 1936 around a purposely restrictive concept of ‘imperfection’, understood as individualised and clinically established pathological ‘impairment’. The latter conceptualisation became fixed at the height of Stalinism as a strategic counter to the expansive flux in which the diagnostics and conceptualisation of child ‘imperfection’ had otherwise been over the first three decades of the twentieth century in the context of the remarkable rise of child study during this period.