Post-revolutionary Decades Research Articles

ТИПОЛОГИЧЕСКАЯ МОДЕЛЬ ИСЛАМСКОЙ ПРЕССЫ В РОССИИ РУБЕЖА XIX–XX ВЕКОВ

The article discusses and summarizes the first movements in the formation of the Islamic press in the Russian state and the Russian Empire, as well as the first regular periodicals in the first post-revolutionary decades. Examples of the main printing characteristics, layout and thematic diversity are given. Newspapers and magazines of confessional content and orientation, published both by private individuals and organizations, and by spiritual administrations, were reviewed and analyzed. Archival data of the Institute of the Tatar Encyclopedia, which are in the public domain, were used. In the course of the study, methods of empirical research (observation and comparison) were used, as well as methods of theoretical research (analysis, synthesis, generalization, etc.) The study showed that newspapers and magazines on religious subjects largely structurally fit into the typical characteristics of socio-political and other secular publications of that period, aimed at the Muslim sections of the country’s population. Confessional and national issues were regularly raised and extensively discussed not only directly in the Islamic press. And the distribution and publication of such newspapers and magazines took place both in regions with a homogeneous and traditionally diverse national composition of the population.

Semantic changes of the word “home” in the Russian language of the first decades of the 20th century

The relevance of the study is determined by the necessity to identify semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness associated with historical, cultural, social, political and economic transformations. This authors describe and analyze the semantic changes of the word “home” in the social consciousness of the Soviet Russia and the Russian diaspora abroad in the first three decades of the 20th century. The purpose of the study is to reveal the semantics of the word “home” in the first three decades of the 20th century through the ana-lysis of fiction texts of that time. For this purpose, a complex methodology for analyzing vocabulary was used, including the descriptive method based on the analysis of dictionary definitions, linguo-stylistic analysis of fiction texts. The research material includes dictionary definitions of the word “home”, represented in the basic explanatory dictionaries of the 19-20th centuries and dictionaries of modern times, fiction and memoir texts. The novelty of the presented data lies in the fact that the analysis of the semantic changes of the word “home” is for the first time carried out in order to compare individual sections of the linguistic picture of the world of Russian speakers in Russia and in emigration against the backdrop of the revolution and in the first post-revolutionary decades. The linguistic reflection of this key concept of Russian linguistic culture at the junction of the two historical eras - pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary - is socially conditioned and presented as a turning point in fiction and memoirs of the first half of the 20th century. Further study of the semantics of the word “home” is supposed to be connected with the observation of the language of the late 20th - early 21st centuries.

ПОПЫТКИ РЕШЕНИЯ АДМИНИСТРАТИВНО-ТЕРРИТОРИАЛЬНЫХ ПРОБЛЕМ СИБИРИ БОЛЬШЕВИКАМИ 1920–1930 ГГ.

The purpose of this study is to study the organization and the main stages of the activities of the central and regional bodies of Soviet power to solve the problem of the administrative-territorial structure of Siberia in the 1920– 1930. Objectives of the study: 1. To reveal the relationship of Sibrevkom with the central and local bodies of Soviet power. 2. To investigate the project of Sibrevkom on the administrative-territorial division of Siberia. 3. To analyze the main stages of the transformation of the administrative-territorial structure of Siberia in 1920–1930. The object of the study is the administrative-territorial bodies of Soviet power on the territory of Siberia in 1020–1930. The subject of the research is the activities of the party and Soviet bodies to solve the problem of the administrative-territorial structure of Siberia in the first post-revolutionary decades of Soviet power. The article notes that the beginning of solving the problem of the administrative-territorial structure of Siberia was laid by the creation, by decision of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of August 27, 1919, of the Siberian Revolutionary Committee (Sibrevkom) as the authorized body of Soviet power to maintain revolutionary order in Siberia and lead all administrative-territorial bodies local authorities. The activities of the central bodies of the party and Soviet authorities in the search for optimal forms of government in Siberia are revealed in the main stages, determined by economic and political factors. At the first stage in 1923–1924. volosts were transformed into districts, which made it possible to bring authorities closer to the population and take into account their general economic needs. At the second stage (1924–1925) districts were created as administrative units, which included several districts each. The stage ended with the formation of the Siberian Territory, the highest administrative body of which was the Siberian Regional Executive Committee. In order to more effectively manage the territories of Siberia, at the third stage, which ended in 1930, Sibkrai was divided into the West Siberian and East Siberian territories. Taking into account the interests of Soviet, economic and public organizations, at the fourth stage in 1934, territories and regions were created, including the Krasnoyarsk Territory on December 7, 1934. Thus, the changes in the administrative-territorial structure of Siberia were based on socio-economic and national factors. The process of searching for optimal forms of governance in Siberia was completed with the formation of regions and territories, and thus an attempt was made to find the balance of power between the regions and the center necessary to solve the problems of a particular time.

«ВОСПИТАНИЕ ГОРОДОМ»: УРБАНИСТИЧЕСКОЕ ВООБРАЖЕНИЕ В ШКОЛЬНЫХ УЧЕБНИКАХ 1920-Х ГОДОВ

The first post-revolutionary decades became one of the key periods in terms of the formation of the urban imagination and urban culture. The article attempts to outline the possibilities of studying this process through the prism of school textbooks. To accomplish this task, the author turns to the reconstruction of the reform that unfolded during this period, which determined the directions and framework for the formation of the corpus of educational and methodological literature in general and the appeal to urban topics in the practice of education. The analysis of localization, complex teaching and active learning methods embodied in the practice of the labour school (trudovaya shkola), and the contribution of schools to the formation of the local history movement which flourished in the 1920s, becomes an important focus. In this context, the question arises about the role of the textbook in the educational process, on the one hand, and about the impulses for the emergence of urban issues, on the other. With this in mind, the author refers to the characteristics of the body of textbooks that were focused on the development of the theme of the city. In the final part of the articl, a comparative analysis is given of two primary schools workbooks, “On Our Own” (Svoimi silami) (1925–927) and “Our City” (Nash gorod) (1928–1930), which were the most ambitious attempts to represent the city in the educational text. This analysis reveals various approaches to the development of real and imaginary exploration of the city within the framework of the school curriculum, aimed at adapting students to the urban environment and active inclusion in urban life.

SOVIET HOUSES OF SCIENTISTS: PRACTICES OF CAPTURING THE SOVIET CULTURAL SPACE BY THE UNIVERSITY INTELLIGENTSIA OF THE 1920s–1930s

The article considers the history of the first years in organizing and functioning of cultural institutions – Houses of Scientists – as a specific form of institutionalization of Soviet cultural traditions. The Houses of scientists from the moment of their creation were designed to cultivate the Soviet way of life. Attention is focused on creating new forms of leisure activities on weekdays and holidays. The activity of the Houses of Scientists was strictly regulated. The work of special cultural commissions, organization and holding Soviet holidays within the walls of the Houses of Scientists were supposed to contribute to the erasure of old traditions and the formation of new/Soviet ones. On the basis of archival sources and memoir literature, an attempt is made to study the reflection of the intelligentsia on the actions of the authorities. The specific position of the intelligentsia on the emergence of new cultural traditions is traced. A diverse palette of moods of the university intelligentsia is shown, which is based not only on the attitude to the new government, but on socio-psychological motivation as well. Various social practices of scientists and the degree of their influence on the formation and activity of newly created cultural institutions are considered. Using the example of the work carried out in the Houses of Scientists, the process and specifics of the “transition” of the universities intelligentsia to the Soviet norms and traditions are considered. The emphasis is placed on the peculiarities of functioning of the Houses of Scientists as a new cultural space in which the “Soviet” and pre-revolutionary traditions of the life and activities of the university intelligentsia collided and intertwined in a bizarre way. The place of the Houses of Scientists in the first post-revolutionary decades (1920s–1930s) was determined, which, as a result of the scientists’ activities, became centers not only and not so much ideological, but rather cultural and educational activities. The paper traces the direct connection between the policy of the Soviet government in the field of higher education and the transformation of the socio-cultural space of the university intelligentsia as a whole. The paper emphasizes a special influence of the socio-professional and cultural space on the formation of intelligentsia’s ideological positions in the 1920s–1930s. Ultimately, fundamental questions are raised about the place and the role of the university intelligentsia in the early Soviet period.

MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY REFLECTING THE ACTIVITIES PERFORMED BY THE ADMINISTRATIVE BODIES OF PUBLIC EDUCATION OF THE CHUVASH AUTONOMY IN THE 1920s – 1930s

The article considers the content of works written by modern scientists of the Chuvash Republic from the point of view of their covering the issues related to the history of the activities performed by the Chuvash public education management bodies in the 1920s – 1930s – the Department of Public Education of the Chuvash Executive Committee of the Soviet, the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Chuvash ASSR, the departments of public education of volost, uyezd and district executive committees of the Soviets. It is concluded that the works of modern researchers provide little information about individual structural subdivisions of the regional public education department and their activities, and do not study the history of the Chuvash ASSR People’s Commissariat for Education, its successes and failures in the advancement of education. Based on the identification of the most studied aspects of the topic, the prospects for additional research in the field of the history of the activities performed by public education management bodies in the territory of Chuvashia in the first post-revolutionary decades are determined.

Odessa text and Odessa myth in the Russian prose of the 1920s-1930s

The article analyzes the Odessa text of Russian literature formed during the first post-revolutionary decades. The unfailing interest that modern literary studies show towards urban studies as well as the urban space and urban texts problems and also a substantial understudy of the Odessa urban text of the 1920s – 1930s determines the relevance of the chosen topic. The purpose of this article is to identify the main components of the Odessa urban myth and the aspects of their representation in the Odessa text of Russian literature.The analysis of the works of I. Babel, V. Zhabotinsky, I. Ilf and Y. Petrov, Y. Olesha, S. Yushkevich, K. Paustovsky, V. Kataev allows us to highlight such unique features of the Odessa text as ludic aspect (carnivalization, theatrical and musical nature, gambling); the myth of Odessa being the free city, the city of peace, and the myth of Odessa Golden age; motives of memories and nostalgia; actualization of city toponyms – Deribasovskaya street, the Duke of Richelieu monument, the Opera House, the dachas of Big Fountain, as the symbols of Odessa glitz and gloss and Moldavanka, Peresyp, and Port as symbols of freedom and adventurous spirit. Odessa myth is described as an ambivalent construct, co-opting the archetypes of the mother and the whore along with the features of the concentric and eccentric cities, a construct where transcendental “capital/province”, “friend/foe” oppositions become blurred. The motive of nostalgia realized through the idealized toponyms of Odessa, the autobiographical nature of the texts, personal memories of childhood and adolescence, focus on past events – those are the chief unitizing aspects in the prose of the selected period. The instantaneous actualization of several timelines along with the longing for a place with no time at all, for a place at the crossroads of several historical eras – those are the distinctive features of a nostalgia concept in Odessa text. At the same time, the pathos of nostalgia is associated with a time gap and with geographical distance marked as impassable. The “past / present” opposition correlate with the other oppositions: the "past" means the “south”, the "friends", the harmony of the center and the province, the truce between the mother and the whore. The “past/present” binary opposition overlapping the “south/north” dichotomy introduces not only spatial but also temporal dimension into the semantics of the “south”.

«БЫТЬ ИЛИ НЕ БЫТЬ?»: СПОРЫ О ДУШЕ В СОВЕТСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ И КРИТИКЕ 1920-1930-Х ГОДОВ

The article is devoted to the problem of transformation of the key Russian concept “Soul” in the socialist realism literature and critique of post-revolutionary decades. It is found that for the supporters of new political system this concept is mainly related to religious ideas about divine in human being. Symptomatic for 1920s attempts to discredit this concept, to exclude it from the active vocabulary as ideologically alien anachronism are described. Complex “poputchik’s” (L. Leonov’s, M. Shaginyan’s), “internal emigrant’s” (A. Platonov’s) reflection on Bolshevik spiritual experiment is shown. Soviet River by L. Leonov, Gidrocentral by M. Shaginyan, The Street Organ by A. Platonov do indicate that Soul continues to be one of the main ontological categories for these writers. It is stated that by the mid-1930s the word Soul has not disappeared from literary language, although more often than not it has been used only in structure of idioms. The texts by F. Gladkov, I. Le, V. Ketlinskaya, B. Yasensky, G. Dalny, P. Nilin, A. Zorich, A. Carcev prove that traditional views on Soul have just not been eradicated by new ideology but have been distorted and adapted to it. The difference between categories “collectivism” and “sobornost” is demonstrated.

СЮЖЕТ ПРОЗРЕНИЯ КАК ОТРАЖЕНИЕ ДУХОВНО-НРАВСТВЕННЫХ ИСКАНИЙ ЭПОХИ В ТРАГИКОМЕДИИ Г. ЧУЛКОВА «ДОН КИХОТ» (1935)

The article considers the author’s version of the classical story of Don Quixote of La Mancha represented in G. Chulkov’s tragicomedy “Don Quixote” (1935). The perception of Miguel de Cervantes’s eternal storyline in the Russian literature of the first post-revolutionary decades was conditioned by his universal ability to express conceptions for social life improvement. G. Chulkov interprets Cervantes’s story as a story of the main character’s sudden insight: in the Russian symbolist’s tragicomedy Don Quixote through the feeling to the earthly woman understands “Earthly Truth”, beauty and harmony of earthly existence. The hero’s new world vision is interpreted by the writer as “true” Christianity, which “Silver Age” philosophers considered as a basis to improve existence.

Art, Politics and Museums

A review article of Mary K Coffey's How Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State. This article is a discussion of the interaction of art and politics in Mexico in the post-revolutionary decades, focusing on the development of three museums, the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum. It considers how the works of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquieros and José Clemente Orozco are seen in the discussions of art historians Mary Coffey and David Craven.

The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union ed by Yaacov Ro'i (review)

Reviewed by: The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union ed by Yaacov Ro'i Larissa Remennick The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union. Edited by Yaacov Ro'i. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 450 pp. This edited collection, The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, includes six sections: Overview, Soviet Jewish Identity, The Political Ambience, Social Aspects, The Cultural and Spiritual Setting, The World Beyond, and an epilogue written by George P. Shultz, a prominent political scientist and US Secretary of State (1982-1989). Although Soviet Jewry's struggle for the right to emigrate has been addressed in many earlier academic and popular books, most of them have been written to present the external (mostly American) perspective on the movement's formation, heroes, and activities (Friedman and Chernin; Lazin). Yet, there was no academic work collected under a single cover focusing on the Soviet Jewish movement itself, from the inside perspective, showing the political and social context under which it took shape, how it developed its goals, tactics and leadership, its regional spread, and relations with its western and Israeli supporters. Together, these components enabled the achievement of its ultimate goal—mass Aliya of Soviet Jews to Israel and their emigration to the West. The contributions to this volume shed new light on a major wonder of state socialism in its prime years—how, despite the oppressive "national policy" with its built-in antisemitic streak, over 250,000 Soviet Jewish citizens could gain an exclusive right for emigration denied to the rest of the Soviet people. The three introductory chapters offer a broad general picture of the movement, its social basis, mode of operation, and evolution over the years since its inception in the late 1960s. They depict the political and social milieu in the years following Khrushev's Thaw, with their failed hopes for true political reformation of socialism after Soviet tanks crashed the liberalization movements in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). These [End Page 140] events formed the antecedents of the nascent movements of different kinds (religious, ethnic, nationalist), including the Jewish national movement, reinforced by the feelings of pride for Israel in the aftermath of its victory over united Arab armies in the Six Day War of 1967. The Jewish involvement in the opposition was multifaceted from the outset: while some Jewish professionals became key figures in the general political resistance to the Soviet regime (e.g., supporting Prague Spring), others chose to identify with Jewish ethnonational goals—the resuscitation of Jewish culture in the USSR or the right for Aliyah to Israel. Part 2 offers further elaboration on the matters of collective identity of Soviet Jews, their mindset, and relations with the Soviet regime, which many of them (or their parents) ardently supported in the initial postrevolutionary decades. The articles discuss the built-in contradiction of this uneasy relationship whereby Soviet Jews were strongly encouraged to assimilate and sever their ties with their religion and tradition, while at the same time the state's antisemitic policies and street-level antisemitism fostered sharp awareness of their otherness and the glass ceiling in their social mobility. This conflict was especially potent among the generation that came of age in the poststalinist 1950s and 1960s. This section also includes an excellent article on the emerging discourse of the Holocaust in the Soviet territory during World War II (carefully downplayed by the authorities throughout the Soviet period) and the role of Israel in the fortification of the Jewish identity among Soviet Jews. Part 3 reviews Soviet policies towards emigration (general and Jewish) during the Cold War and subsequent détente, in light of its negotiations with the US over trade agreements and disarmament. It highlights the role of Jewish emigration as a bargaining chip in these complex political games, as well as the place of Jewish emigration in the context of the emerging human rights movement after the USSR signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Part 4 brings to the fore the main figures of the Jewish movement and their everyday lives, especially after they joined the ranks of "refuseniks" (whose emigration petitions had been denied by the state). The loss of jobs and livelihood, social ostracism, and...

Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (review)

Reviewed by: Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America Barbara Clark Smith (bio) Keywords Early American law, 18th-century law, Intertextuality, Legalism Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America. By Steven Wilf. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 242. Cloth, $89.00. Paper, $25.99.) Steven Wilf ’s study of early American law and politics is engaging, eloquent, and essential. Historians have sometimes started with familiar nineteenth-century legal institutions, then moved backward to find comparable structures and practices to consider as the source of what came later. By contrast, Wilf seeks to rediscover eighteenth-century law on its own terms, suggesting that the law’s very boundaries and meaning may have been different in that different time and place. In aid of that rediscovery, Wilf urges us to conceive of law as something “imagined”—meaning understood, discussed, and experienced in a variety of cultural, social, and political venues, not only in legislatures and courtrooms but also in published broadsides and newspapers and in the taverns and city streets where the people gathered “out of doors.” Law was “a public sphere” (1) in the early nation, Wilf suggests, and Americans of the day read the law “intertextually” (9), which is to say they viewed pieces of legislation and cases of law in the context of other laws, other cases, and a far broader discourse surrounding affairs of the day. The book is a series of essays that do not, admittedly, add up to a single, coherent account of changes in law and politics in the early republic. Nor do the cases Wilf skillfully examines invariably support his ambitious theoretical formulations. Together, however, the essays provide striking insights and invite further exploration. Of particular value are Wilf ’s chapters on the resistance movement that preceded the American [End Page 135] Revolution. The era saw an extraordinary proliferation of “law talk,” he notes, much of it focused not on “the abstraction of constitutional principles” but on the criminal law. Many colonists organized their protests against British policies using the language of legal punishments, as in hanging, parading, and sometimes burning effigies of British officials. These occasions allowed broad participation and expressed popular ideas of fairness. In the resistance movement, Wilf writes, “Americans rallied behind a new idea of criminal law with legal transparency and participation of the common people at its core” (10). Wilf explores vernacular views in part by analyzing published narratives of crime and punishment that circulated in the 1770s. Ebenezer Richardson, a customs informer who killed a child by firing a gun into a Boston crowd, is a familiar figure to political historians; Levi Ames, a burglar in the same vicinity, might be better known to students of crime. Wilf shows that people of the day thought of these two cases in relationship to one another: Could it be justice that Ames hanged while Richardson got off ? More than merely legal cases, these were political matters. Wilf mines other intriguing criminal narratives to explore self-representation by convicted criminals in the 1780s. Another essay examines the reformers who grappled with criminal punishment in the post-Revolutionary decades. Americans imagined their own legal regime in light of republican ideals but also over and against two other systems—the “bloody code” of English law, which supposedly relied extensively on sanguinary punishments, and French Revolutionary violence of the 1790s. Equally important, Wilf notes the significant degree to which postwar Americans’ humanitarian reform of punishments involved making those punishments less participatory for the population at large. A closing essay illustrates the impact of vernacular law and popular political forms on both legislation and its enforcement, in the case of the New York Anatomy Act of 1789. Short but ambitious, Law’s Imagined Republic raises many questions: Is the metaphor of “reading” the law—intertextually or otherwise—truly apt if we are trying to recover the ideas of people who encountered (and made) law in the courtroom, in public punishments, by listening to sermons or passing on stories of crime? Wilf suggests we consider criminals who wrote popular narratives as “founders” of the American republic (3), but isn’t it more plausible...

Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (review)

Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. By Amanda Porterfield. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. 252. Cloth, $40.00.)Reviewed by Cynthia A. KiernerIn the post-Revolutionary decades, as Americans became a nation, they also became a churchgoing people. Historians have long noted the spread of religious fervor and church institutions during this period, and especially the growth of the Baptists, Methodists, and other evangelical denominations. In a landmark study, The Democratization of American Religion (1989), Nathan O. Hatch argued that the rise of as a mass movement was a direct consequence of the American Revolution. Focusing primarily on the democratizing effect of the theory and practice of popular sovereignty on American Christianity, Hatch viewed the intersection of the popular culture of religion and politics in an overwhelmingly positive light.Conversely, Amanda Porterfield's new book assesses the impact of American religion on the politics of the early republic. Although she, too, believes that religion and political culture became intertwined in the post- Revolutionary era, she sees the influence of on politics as far from salutary. While Hatch lauded the antiauthoritarian impulse of post- Revolutionary evangelicals, Porterfield contends that religion, however voluntary and individualistic its origins, stepped into a cultural vacuum to shape, and suppress, public discourse in the early American republic. Promoting the supreme authority of God's law, she writes, not only exerted moral authority as interpreters of divine governance, but also fostered distrust of secular reason and (3) and in so doing secured a privileged place for religion in American society (5).Porterfield reassesses a crucial transitional period in American religious history in light of three decades of path-breaking scholarship on the politics of the early republic. Her book is long on original thought, but less so on primary research, and - like Hatch, interestingly - she focuses mainly on elites. Porterfield begins with a fascinating assessment of the reception of Paine's Age of Reason, which, she argues, popularized and politicized (16) religious skepticism among non-elite Americans, many of whom also embraced Paine's iconoclastic distrust of government. Paine's wide appeal distressed leaders across the political spectrum, regardless of their own religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Seeing religion mainly as a system of social control, Porterfield argues that the churches restored order by convincing Americans to disavow religious skepticism and trust in God, leaving political parties to compete for the support of pious voters. Downplaying region, class, and other bases of party affiliation, Porterfield notes that Presbyterians and Congregationalists, with their civic humanist commitment to education and social improvement, tended to be Federalists. Baptists, Methodists, and others who disliked government generally and who emphatically rejected its involvement in religion (though not vice-versa) became core constituencies of the Jeffersonian Republicans.Intellectual historians may question Porterfield's tendency to conflate doubt, skepticism, and rationalism, while religious scholars may want a more precise definition of evangelicalism and wonder about the complete absence in her book of Episcopalians, Lutherans, and some other major and lesser denominations. A more general question about Porterfield's thesis, however, concerns timing. Porterfield asserts that became a dominant force after 1800, but the rise of the Baptists and Methodists antedated the Revolution in some locales, most notably in Virginia. …

Who are "The People"? Locating Popular Authority in Postrevolutionary America

Who are "The People"? Locating Popular Authority in Postrevolutionary America Johann N. Neem (bio) Jason Frank. Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. xii + 346 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). The challenge of defining "the people," political theorist Jason Frank writes, "haunts all theories of democracy and continually vivifies democratic practice." The phrase "the people" haunts because, like a specter, it claims to speak for something that never was and is always in formation. Yet it "vivifies" democratic theory because the American political tradition's legitimacy derives from popular sovereignty, and thus outsider groups can use the idea of the people to claim a role for themselves within our democracy. But who are the people? For some constitutional scholars, including political scientists and theorists, the people are the constituent sovereign who, in conventions, design their government. From this perspective, the most important outcome of the American Revolution was the convention as a mechanism to enact the social contract. But many have challenged this conclusion. As Progressive historians and their heirs remind us, the Constitution was itself contested, did not fully embody popular will, and was an elite backlash against more popular democracy. These two perspectives created a theoretical and practical problem that played out in the postrevolutionary decades. If the state authorized by "the people" cannot speak for the people, how can elected leaders represent the public will? Alternatively, if others in civil society have a stronger claim to represent the people, how can representative government be legitimate? Given this conundrum, it is no wonder that Daniel Rodgers in Contested Truths (1987) considers "the people" one of America's "contested truths," a phrase that can be used by those in power and by outsider groups—as in populist uprisings—who claim to represent better the people than elected leaders do. It is into these confusing waters that Frank wades. He hopes to contribute to democratic theory by exploring how postrevolutionary Americans struggled with this fundamental problem, which is, ultimately, one of the relationship between representative government and civil society. Frank's answer draws [End Page 267] on Jacques Derrida's famous essay on the Declaration of Independence. To Derrida, the Declaration simultaneously created "the people" and spoke in the name of a preexisting people.1 The Declaration thus enacted what it claimed already was. Frank believes the same "paradox" is true of all representative government (p. 31). All claims made on behalf of the people invoke the very thing that they, in their claims, create. Central to Frank's thesis is his idea of a democratic "constitutive surplus" (p. 3). The "surplus" derives from the fact that all claims to represent the people are partial, leaving space for others to generate claims for inclusion. These claims happen in "constituent moments" when outsiders assert a right to speak for a people that they are simultaneously invoking and creating anew each time. Frank moves beyond Bruce Ackerman's argument in We the People (1991) that certain pivotal elections are like constitutional conventions in which voters accept new ground rules to include the populist expressions of grassroots activity in civil society, namely postrevolutionary crowds and the emergence of democratic societies in the 1790s. Given that all claims made for the people are assertions, some historians have been convinced that republican government is not that different from other forms of government. To Edmund Morgan in Inventing the People (1989), popular sovereignty is a "fiction" that historically has enabled not the many to challenge the few but, instead, the few to govern the many. "Government requires make-believe," Morgan argues. Once we believed that the King was divine; now we "make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people." Anticipating Frank, Morgan concludes that the fiction remains useful and potentially redemptive if the people use it to demand a better alignment between the realities of their rule and popular sovereignty's aspirations.2 Many scholars agree with Morgan that postrevolutionary representative governments were really bodies of elite rule. Such scholars take as more authentic the proclamations made by ordinary...

The Rise and Fall of Iranian Classes in the Post-Revolutionary Decades

The Rise and Fall of Iranian Classes in the Post-Revolutionary Decades

Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger—Fürst—Nationalheld. Ein Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). [Aleksandr Nevskii: Saint—Prince—National Hero. A Figure of Commemoration in Russian Cultural Memory (1263–2000)] (review)

Reviewed by Viktor Zhivov Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures 6303 Dwinelle Hall #2979 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-2979 USA zhiv@berkeley.edu Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger—Fürst—Nationalheld. Ein Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). [Aleksandr Nevskii: Saint—Prince—National Hero. A Figure of Commemoration in Russian Cultural Memory (1263–2000)]. 548 pp. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. ISBN 3412069043. €68.90. Frithjof Schenk's book is one of the first efforts in our field of Slavic Studies to write a story of the reception and various discursive usages of one historical figure encompassing a very long period of time. The figure is Prince Aleksandr Nevskii and the span of time is over seven centuries. For studies of this type, the choice of figure is of crucial importance. Aleksandr Nevskii is, no doubt, a very good choice, because only a small number of Russian historical personages have so rich a pedigree of discursive manipulations. His image incorporated several discursive (or ideological) blocks, such as his sanctity, his role as a defender of the "Russian land," as a founder of the ruling dynasty, as a saintly warrior, as a national hero, and so on. Each of these hypostases came to the fore in different historical periods under different historical circumstances; one interpretation superceded another but did not obliterate the previous one completely so that, as a discursively constructed entity, Aleksandr Nevskii is a multilayered palimpsest. The goal of the book is to read this palimpsest one layer after another and to analyze the numerous shifts and displacements of meaning that characterized its creation. The composition of the book is neat and transparent, in perfect accordance with its scholarly purposes. The first, introductory chapter deals with theoretical issues, the structure of the book, and some technical problems. The second chapter also functions as background: it treats Aleksandr Nevskii's biography as such. After that, the chapters are ordered chronologically. The third chapter deals with the "sacralization" of Aleksandr in the 13th through 15th centuries. The fourth chapter describes the "Russification" of Aleksandr in the 15th through 17th centuries (the Moscow period). The fifth chapter analyzes the transformation of Aleksandr into an embodiment of the imperial state (Verstaatlichung) in the 18th century. The next, sixth chapter encompasses the long 19th century (up to the Revolution of 1917) and demonstrates how Aleksandr turned into a symbolic figure of Russian [End Page 661] nationalism. This prerevolutionary part takes up approximately one-half of the book. The next six chapters deal with the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. This part begins with the seventh chapter's description of the dethronement (Entthronung) of the saintly prince in the first two postrevolutionary decades (1917–37). Separate chapters are devoted to the return of Aleksandr to favor in 1937 ("Die Sowjetisierung Aleksanders: Das Jahr 1937") and to Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky (1938), proclaiming the new role of Aleksandr in the construction of Soviet patriotism ("Der Verfilmung Aleksanders"). The tenth chapter analyzes the recruitment ("Rekrutierung") of Aleksandr as part of the preparation for war and later war efforts (1939–45). Postwar developments until 1985 are concisely described in the 11th chapter under the title "Consolidation and Criticism" ("Konsolidierung und Kritik"). The last postrevolutionary chapter (the 12th) covers the years 1985–2000 and discusses the fate of the patriotic hero during the time of perestroika and post-Soviet reforms. The final chapter (the 13th) draws conclusions from the study as a whole. In the 14th section of the book, the reader finds the lists of sources and literature, the protocol of the Eisenstein film, and other documentary materials. The theoretical framework described in the first chapter is appropriate for the tasks of Schenk's study. National, regional, or confessional history constitutes a part of the collective...

Liberty is Innovation: Sources of Energy and Enterprise

American society in the decades of the early republic was dynamic, expanding in new directions, and filled with anxiety. In the post-revolutionary decades, observers from abroad as well as those within the United States remarked on the enterprising behavior of men and women from all ranks of society. Their comments were frequently derisive, casting Americans as grasping shopkeepers who originated among the middling and lower sorts, and who no longer deferred to the social and political authority of their betters. Linked with other contemporary evidence, these descriptions document the widespread transformation of behavior and attitudes toward the market—toward ways of getting a living, making goods, retailing wares, furnishing households, and consuming information and culture. This essay examines some of the diversity and breadth of changes in the early republic by focusing on innovation in the economy. It points to some of the reasons the bursts of commercial and technological activity came when they did, and how the American Revolution and the nation-building process contributed to these bursts. It examines as well some of the limitations and consequences of the “vigorous spirit of enterprise” that captured American society in the early republic (1).

«Extranjeros perniciosos». Infractores y delincuentes españoles en la ciudad de México (1910-1936)

This article studies a sector of the Spanish immigrants who lived in Mexico City during the Mexican revolution and the first two post-revolutionary decades. It focuses on every-day life through the analysis of their illegal and violent behavior within their homes, workplace and recreational spaces, as well as on the common crimes (against property, etc.) they committed. Mexican authorities labeled them as «pernicious» foreigners.

WORKERS, PEASANTS, AND PEDDLERS: A STUDY OF LABOR STRATIFICATION IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY IRAN

In the post-revolutionary decades, the Iranian economy has undergone significant transitions. This paper is a study of the changes in the pattern of occupational and labor stratification in the Iranian economy in these years. This is a sufficiently long time, permitting the identification of decisive structural shifts in the Iranian economy and its labor force. For the purpose of this study, we propose two periods in the post-revolutionary years. The first period comprises the years of fervent search for a populist Islamic utopia, which began with the 1979 revolution and came to an end by 1986, when the burden of the war with Iraq and the glut in the world oil market made the populist project practically defunct. The death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1989 marked the beginning of the second period, one that is characterized by a move toward “economic restructuring” à la the International Monetary Fund–World Bank, aiming for a general liberalization of economic activities, including foreign-exchange realignment, decontrolling of prices, reduction of subsidies, and privatization of nationalized enterprises.

The Political Character of Sympathy

The generation of scholars responsible for establishing classical republicanism as dominant paradigm for explaining Revolution premised its view on opposition of virtue and corruption in government. This has sparked many scholarly discussions over years on relative value of liberal ideas and republicanism (the relative strength of individualism versus concept of public good). But, as many have also suggested, paradigm says far too little about emotional content of actual speech, culture of speechmaking, and reading and writing in Republic more generally. This essay means to expand upon what I set out to do in writing Sentimental Democracy, to engage closely with elements missing from republicanism-liberalism formula, especially sentimental identity embraced in Revolution-era speech. The language of sentiment and sympathy held an irresistible appeal to founders while conveying republican thought beyond elite culture. It was used to describe character of Americans in very personal terms, humanizing abstract notion of the people. Yet historians have undervalued sentimental language, while literary scholars and theorists who write of sentimentalism routinely avoid trenches in which political actors operated. What is at stake here is defining what we mean by political. For reason, I wish to demonstrate political resonance of prevailing sympathetic discourse, take it in context, and give it fuller application. Nearly quarter-century after his Creation of Republic described founding with classical republican vocabulary and in constitutional terms, Gordon S. Wood made an effort to synthesize movement from republicanism to democracy-that energetic democracy to which Jackson gave his name but in fact legitimated rather than created. Wood's 1992 book, The Radicalism of Revolution, may have enjoyed mixed reception (historians have trained themselves to be skeptical of any synthetic work); yet I intend to show that his redefinition of citizenship in postrevolutionary decades, and his fairly brief but leading suggestion that sympathy and compassion held an important role in this new republicanized world, are more significant than even Wood, perhaps, would maintain. In regard, I will concentrate on chapters of his book that segue from Benevolence under republicanism to Equality under democracy. Whether Revolution was as radical as Wood's title proposes (that it contained a decidedly social message) is less important here than his understanding that powerful idiom existed whereby practice of humanity was believed by many to be glue that would unite classes and geographical sections; and that ideology we are speaking to held at least as wide an appeal as the belief in ascetic classical virtue.1 According to Wood, an emerging morality consistent with eighteenth-- century scientific investigation and Enlightenment optimism and cosmopolitanism made friendship appear to be viable political principle. I go beyond this, and state unequivocally that sentiment was critical tool (heretofore marginalized or feminized) in defining cause of Independence in opposition to political parent in 1776, and that, ever since, sentiment/sympathy has been distinguishing component of America's national self-image and at core of its foreign policy. Indeed, nothing has been more than sentimental persuasion. Let me add necessary clarification. Those with an aversion to terms such as democracy, nation, America, or American, purport that these are monolithic constructions. They are fluid terms, rather, and critics need to appreciate that America and American were readily understood by historical actors across political generations as terms by which to identify themselves, and to express an ideal of unity. Thus American sensibility or political sympathy I invoke represents widely shared assumptions acted out in political discourse. …