Revolutionary Ideology Research Articles

Red commanders: a social history of the Soviet Army officer corps, 1918-1991

One of the largest and most feared military forces in the world, the Army was a key player in advancing the cause of Soviet socialism. Rising out of revolutionary-era citizen militias, it aspired to the greatness needed to confront its Cold War adversaries but was woefully unprepared to change with the times. In this first comprehensive study of the Soviet officer corps, Roger Reese traces the history of the Army from Civil War triumph through near-decimation in World War II and demoralizing quagmire in Afghanistan to the close scrutiny it came under during Gorbachev's reform era. Reese takes readers inside the Army to reconstruct the social and institutional dynamics that shaped its leadership and effectiveness over seventy-three years. He depicts the lives of these officers by revealing their class origins, life experiences, party loyalty, and attitudes toward professionalism. He tells how these men were shaped by Russian culture and Soviet politics - and how the Communist Party dominated every aspect of their careers but never allowed them the autonomy they needed to cultivate a high level of military effectiveness. Despite its struggle to develop and maintain professionalism, the officer corps was often hampered by factors inextricably intertwined with the Soviet state: Marxist theory, revolutionary ideology, friction between party and non-party members, and the influence of the army's political administration organs. Reese shows that by rejecting the Western bourgeois model of military professionalism the state greatly limited its officer corps' ability to develop a more effective military. While a sense of group identity emerged among officers after World War II, it quickly lost relevance in the face of postwar challenges, especially the war in Afghanistan, which underscored fatal flaws in command leadership. Red Commanders offers new insight into the workings of a military giant and also restores Leon Trotsky to his rightful place in Soviet military history by featuring his ideas on building a new army from the ground up. It is an important look behind the scenes at a military establishment that continues to face leadership challenges in Russia today.

Toward a Carribean cultural political economy

[First paragraph]The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism and Cultural Hybridity. Shalini Puri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ix + 300 pp. (Paper US$ 24.95)Miraculous Weapons: Revolutionary Ideology in Caribbean Culture. Joy A.I. Mahabir. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ix + 167 pp. (Cloth US$ 58.95)The relation between cultural production and political struggle, and between the aesthetic and the material as expressions of social relations, are absolutely central themes within Caribbean studies in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary guises. A key question for the field as a whole is what role it might play in generating new approaches to “cultural political economy,” which is emerging as an effective bridging concept at the intersections of anthropology, sociology, economics, political theory, and literary and cultural studies.

Republicanismo y neo-republicanismo

At the end of the twentieth century american historiography coined the term republicanism to define the ideology underlying american revolution. A few years later, the concept was normatively apropiated by political philosophy in order to present an alternative to the dominance of liberalism. In the former case the continuity between the republican tradition and the revolutionary ideology was stressed. In the latter, there was an intent of republican topics revival in order to create a new ideology. I will term this project neo-republicanism and I will highlight sorne of the difficulties it faces.

Transnational revolutionary ideologies

The definitive version of this document can be found here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/b0qvjvke6428b5dr/ This document was created using OCR technology, and may contain minor discrepancies from the published document.

Introduction

Introduction

The Babi and Baha'i community of Iran: A case of “suspended genocide”?

The Baha'i community of Iran has its origins in the Babi movement, a religion which began in Iran in 1844. Its founder, Sayyid ‘Ali Muhammad Shirazi, who took the title the Bab (1819–1850), was exe...

The effects of status on women’s autonomy in Bolivia, Peru,and Nicaragua

A recent ideological revolution promoting women’s status has raised questions concerning determinants of autonomy and their implications for policy formation. This study seeks to identify objective indicators determinant of autonomy, and then examine their relationship in light of women’s subjective experiences of autonomy. Potential determinants include education, literacy, household size, age at marriage, employment, and socioeconomic status. Analyses are based on these data sets: the 2000 Bolivia Family Interaction and Children’s Well-Being (FICW) Survey, the 2000 Peru Demographic Health Survey and the 1997/1998 Nicaraguan Demographic and Health Survey. Our findings indicate that autonomy is multidimensional. Utilizing Structural equation modeling, we identify two major domains autonomy: decision-making autonomy and personal autonomy in Bolivia, and family autonomy and public autonomy in Nicaragua and Peru. This study shows that each of our specified determinants has some influence on autonomy, with education and socioeconomic status being the most important. We conclude that policies designed to change educational, economic, and familial characteristics of women will only have a modest impact on women’s overall sense of autonomy.

POST-ISLAMISM AND THE RELIGIOUS DISCOURSE OF ABD AL-SALAM YASIN

For more than a decade, post-Islamism has been at the center of a major debate in French academia regarding the historical evolution of Islamism. The concept was put forth in the early 1990s as an attempt to apprehend the apparent crisis within many Islamic movements of the Middle East. In Iran, the increasingly authoritarian character of the Islamic republic, as well as the predominance of the mullahs' discretionary powers, seemed to undermine the credibility of the Islamist alternative. Elsewhere, as in Egypt and Algeria, the advent of an Islamic order never came to pass and appeared illusory. Islamists were unable to cope with the repression and the containment policies of secular states. Therefore, a number of French scholars argued that Islamism—that is, the holistic, populist, and often revolutionary ideology whose goal is the establishment of an Islamic state and the governance of all aspects of society according to Islamic principles—had reached a dead end. Ruhollah Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi were passe. An era of post-Islamism was dawning.

Concepts of Fascism in Contemporary Russia and the West

During the 1990s, Western comparative fascist studies underwent a process of consolidation. A growing number of scholars agreed to and now use various forms of a more or less consensual definition of fascism as an extremely nationalistic and revolutionary ideology. In contrast, the conceptualisations and applications of ‘fascism’ in post-Soviet Russia are contradictory continuing Soviet misuse of the term. Increasing anti-democratic tendencies in Russian politics and society suggest closer attention by Western scholars to putative post-Soviet fascisms.

Preparing God's Harvest: Maksim Zalesskii, Millenarianism, and the Wanderers in Soviet Russia

In the 1960s the Library of the Academy of Science in Leningrad received a generous donation of papers and manuscripts describing the history of an obscure Russian sect, the Wanderers (stranniki or beguny), a radical offshoot of priestless Old Believers. The donor, Maksim Zalesskii (1894-1976) from a remote village in Kargopol' region, belonged to the sect from the age of 17. During the collectivization campaign in 1930, Zalesskii was arrested and compelled to collaborate with the Arkhangel'sk secret police. As a person thoroughly familiar with the sectarian underground, he assisted the OGPU-NKVD in the 1930s-1950s in investigating the activities of various religious groups in the region and in consulting the organs about the ideological content and political implications of their diverse religious teaching. Zalesskii calls our attention to an insufficiently understood phenomenon, the relationship between popular religious dissent and revolutionary ideology. The recent interest in marginal religious histories in Imperial and Soviet Russia has helped to reestablish sectarianism as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry. These studies have focused on the representation of sects by the intelligentsia, on the mutation and adaptability

Peculiarities of Turkish Revolutionary Ideology in the 1930s: The Ülkü Version of Kemalism, 1933–1936

Kemalism is a topic as relevant and controversial as political Islam, and often the two are depicted as alternatives for the future of Middle Eastern politics.1 Like political Islam, the definition...

The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern Linda Lierheimer The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. By Carla Hesse. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. 233 pp. $47.50 (cloth), $22.95 (paper). Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment challenges the idea of a monolithic "Enlightenment" as created by the great male philosophessuch asVoltaire and Rousseau. Taking as her starting point the contradiction between the notion of an "other Enlightenment" and a traditional definition of "the Enlightenment" as a universal concept, Hesse follows in the footsteps of historians such as Robert Darnton who in the 1980s transformed our understanding of the Enlightenment with his study of "Grub Street" writers. Darnton, along with Roger Chartier and others, presented the Enlightenment in social and cultural, rather than purely intellectual, terms and made us aware that there were many "enlightenments." The story of women, and particularly of the women writers who are the subject of Hesse's book, is surely one of these many enlightenments, one that has been sorely neglected by historians until very recently. The title of the book is also a reference to Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 feminist manifesto, The Second Sex, which told us that women were viewed as "other" in a male-defined world. Hesse's "other Enlightenment" is an intellectual history that connects women who pursued "the public exercise of female reason" (p. 55) from the Old Regime to Beauvoir. While Hesse focuses on France, her work should inspire historians of other regions to explore the important, though often unacknowledged, contributions women have made to the history of ideas and to the creation of a modern sensibility. [End Page 258] The first part of the book examines women's relationship to literacy, publishing, and authorship in the Old Regime. Hesse opens with the story of a servant woman, Jeanne-Catherine Clere, who was executed during the French Revolution for seditious speech. Hesse argues that the seriousness with which her drunken royalist rantings were treated is evidence of an oral culture in which women, from fishwives to salonnières, had a privileged relationship to speech. The gradual displacement of the spoken by the written word in public life, finalized during the Revolution, led to a decline in women's influence over language, particularly since many women were illiterate. Still, as Hesse shows in chapter 2, after 1789 the number of women writers grew steadily. As much as revolutionary ideology tended to relegate women to the private sphere and despite increasing restrictions on women's publishing during the nineteenth century (married women in France were not free to publish and profit from their writing independently of their husbands until 1965), a growing literary marketplace led to the increasing participation of women in the public sphere. Part 2 offers case studies of a number of prominent women writers to show how fiction served as a feminine vehicle for philosophical inquiry. Before the French Revolution, Louise de Kéralio-Robert made her reputation as an historian, most notably as author of a history of Elizabeth I of England. Attacked during the Revolution as a "literary amazon," Kéralio-Robert turned to fiction. Hesse sees this transition as evidence not of the restrictions imposed on literary women after 1789 but as a positive choice of a genre that allowed Kéralio-Robert to rebel against "the masculinist postrevolutionary ideology of separate spheres" (p. 101) and construct a new kind of republican and women's history. Similarly, Hesse reads Isabelle de Charrière's novel Trois Femmes [Three women] as a critique of Kantian moral theory, which denied women moral autonomy. Charrière's very choice of genre, in addition to the content of her novel, challenged the dominant philosophical paradigm and the authoritarian cultural policy of the late revolutionary period. Hesse concludes that the novel proved to be the ideal form for women to explore issues of moral autonomy and to critique their society. Her final chapter, "Fiction as Philosophy," shows that literature allowed women to construct selves that transcended the definitions of gender imposed by science and law. Thus, while the Revolution did not give women political or legal rights, it did allow them...

Ideologies of legitimate mockery

This article examines a Korean American comedian’s use of Mock Asian and the ideologies that legitimate this racializing style. These ideologies of legitimacy depend on assumptions about the relationship between communities, the authentication of a speaker’s community membership, and the nature of the interpretive frame that has been “keyed”. Specifically, her Mock Asian depends on and, to some extent, reproduces particular ideological links between race, nation, and language despite the apparent process of ideological subversion. Yet her use of stereotypical Asian speech is not a straightforward instance of racial crossing, given that she is ‘Asian’ according to most racial ideologies in the U.S. Consequently, while her use of Mock Asian may necessarily reproduce mainstream American racializing discourses about Asians, she is able to simultaneously decontextualize and deconstruct these very discourses. This article suggests that it is her successful authentication as an Asian American comedian, particularly one who is critical of Asian marginalization in the U.S., that legitimizes her use of Mock Asian and that yields an interpretation of her practices primarily as a critique of racist mainstream ideologies.

Regionalism, Iran and Central Asia

A combination of revolutionary ideology, trouble with neighbours and location in the Middle East, where regionalism is moribund, make the Islamic Republic of Iran an unlikely enthusiast for regional coalition-building. The impetus towards regionalism derives first and foremost from geopolitical considerations–the need to counter the US government's efforts to isolate Iran–but also from domestic dynamics; the regionalist discourse has lent an acceptable ideological colouring to an increasingly pragmatic foreign policy. Iran's neighbours, however, share neither its geopolitical predicament nor its ideological complexion, and the actual implementation of Tehran's regionalist agenda has been based on functional cooperation, rather than on geopolitics and ideology. Trade promotion and the development of transport infrastructure to link Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and the Persian Gulf have been the most appealing areas for northern neighbours, and dominate the agenda of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Iran's main vehicle for multilateral cooperaton with Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Tehran's 1992 proposal for a Caspian Sea Cooperation Organization has so far been stymied by the littoral states' well-publicized disagreements over the sea's legal status, though their numerous multilateral meetings and handful of agreements suggest that the idea has potential in the medium–term. Notwithstanding the meagre tangible results to date, Iran's tilt towards regionalism has had a positive impact. It has helped to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of its neighbours, contributed to the evolution of policy debate at home and prepared the ground for future multilateral cooperation.

Public markets and civic culture in nineteenth-century America

Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. By Helen Tangires. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xx, 265. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.)The buying and selling of food was an inherently political process in nineteenth-century urban America. Who was entitled to which merchandise, from whom, at what price, at what location, and at what level of profit? As we learn from Helen Tangires's social history of municipal planning and privatism, the answers to these questions rarely went uncontested.Tangires begins her book in the 18.'3Os with the public market house as an expression of the idea of moral economy. Revolutionary ideology, supported by longstanding European traditions, supported the belief that individuals could not be permitted to manipulate basic food supplies for their own profit; only transparent and communally sanctioned transactions would foster republican institutions. Municipal authorities sought to assure reliable flow of pure food and fair price by issuing slew of regulations and by mandating that all market activity take place in an easily monitored central space. Residents volunteered their own funds and energies in popular subscriptions to build the covered sheds, located in the middle of the main street and acknowledged to be a town's most precious asset (47). Indeed, Tangires suggests that the markets assumed the status of multifaceted civic centers and sites of democratic interaction in the dense fabric of antebellum New York and Philadelphia.Within generation, however, the idea of the public market house came under attack. Many influential politicians, subscribing to laissezfaire ideology and devoted to party building, regarded the public market system more as source of patronage tban as an institution to be nurtured. Merchants and middlemen (formerly distrusted) stepped enthusiastically and effectively into the power vacuum. As cities such as New York and Philadelphia grew rapidly in population and physical extent, those living on the outskirts sought opportunities to shop closer to home. At the same time, individual trades and vendors began to insist on individual proprietorship of key locations and exemption from market rules; New York City recognized the right of its butchers to set up independent shops in the 184Os. But for the resistance of market advocates, the city might have dismantled its market houses altogether in the 185Os, as Philadelphia did. This scenario was repeated in number of smaller towns, where deregulation advocates portrayed municipal markets as obsolete and even corrupt.Public market houses were marginalized and neglected by the 187Os, Tangires concludes, but they survived by adapting to the changed political terrain and by accommodating more wholesalers and individual proprietors. By the 188Os, the tide had turned slightly: cities that had deregulated began to regret their inability to assure the safety both of the food supply and of the municipal revenue stream; others decided to keep full municipal control. …

'Show Me the Money!'

'Show Me the Money!'

When a Russian Formalist meets his individual history

The present paper is devoted to the relation between changing historical identity of Russian Formalists in the second half of the 1920s and their individual evolution — as writers, members of society, figures of culture. Formalists with their aggressive inclination to modernity are opposed here to structuralists, the bearers of a conservative, traditional ideology (relating to the idea of Revolution). It could be explained by the specific “romantic” identity of Russian Formalists whose purpose was to appropriate cultural values renamed and renewed by their revolutionary theory. As a revolutionary ideology, formalism was imported from the West. But the Stalinist “Renaissance” made the idea of Revolution both in mind and society senseless at the end of the 1920s. That is why Russian Formalism lost its mainstream positions and began to work out a new, adapted form of intellectual resistance (private life, domestic literature) in the next decade.

"Europe's Worst Enemy Is Europe Itself"

For a half century now, Europe has been beset by the torments of repentance. Reflecting on its past crimes-imperialism, fascism, Stalinism-it sees nothing more in its long history than continual episodes of slaughter and plunder culminating in two world wars. The average European, man or woman, is highly sensitive, forever ready not only to be moved by the world's misfortunes but to claim responsibility for them. For proof, we need only look at the evening of September 11: in spite of their compassion for the victims, a majority of my fellow French citizens arrived at the conclusion that the Americans had deserved it. But let there be no doubt: the same reasoning would have prevailed had the terrorists destroyed the Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral. Someone strikes us, we must be guilty. Of our own accord, we validate our enemies' claims in the judgments we bring to bear upon ourselves. Europe has, of course, given birth to its share of monsters, but it has also, in the very same movement, given birth to the theories that would make it possible to understand and destroy those monsters. Here lies Europe's great paradox: feudal despotism engendered democracy, an oppressive Church gave rise to critical thinking, overseas conquests led to anti-colonialism, and revolutionary ideologies have ended up generating anti-totalitarian thought. Similar to a jailer who

The Concept that Came Out of the Cold: the Progressive Historicization of Generic Fascism and its New Relevance to Teaching Twentieth‐century History

AbstractThis article first surveys the confusion that prevailed in fascist studies for decades, and which makes it quite understandable if the term ‘fascism’ has been generally avoided both by historians and by lecturers and others teaching inter‐war European history to students in non‐specialist ‘survey’ courses. It then outlines the main features of the ‘new consensus’ that is emerging among scholars on the heuristic value of seeing fascism as a form of revolutionary ideology, bent on purging society of decadence and inaugurating the rebirth of the nation. Next, it focuses on how this approach enables Fascism and Nazism to be located within the supranational forces shaping modern history, and on the light it throws on their profound relationship to totalitarianism, political religion and modernity. It closes with brief examples of how this approach can be applied to structuring answers to essays and exam questions on inter‐war Europe, and welcomes the prospect opened up by the new consensus for greater collaboration between specialists in fascist studies, empirical historians, university lecturers, textbook writers and students – and even, one day, students in secondary education, and their teachers and examiners – in this fascinating, and rapidly evolving, field of teaching and research.

La protesta por el comunal en la zona media de Navarra, 1841-1923

The Liberal Revolution spread throughout the middle of the 19th century across Navarra. This situation sometimes produced a breakdown in the concept of rural community, which was answered in various social sectors with an increase in the amount of disputes. These arguments, along with the change of the century, and after a long agricultural crisis, remained very active, although it had a remarkable nuance: the development of class conflicts, as a result of the establishment of some breakthrough revolutionary ideologies, which became the vindicating aspect par excellence for the communal.