Russian Baltic Research Articles

The Tsar's Last Armada: The Epic Journey to the Battle of Tsushima by Constantine s> Pleshakov (review)

REVIEWS 747 Sirotkina's book evokes well the complexity and ambiguity of Russian psychiatry's engagement with literature at this crucial historical juncture. However, although the book is very readable, one sometimes struggles to connect all its differentstrandsinto a single, focused argument. The problem lies in the ambitiousnessof Sirotkina'sproject,which spansno less than half a centuryand definesitselfasboth a 'culturalhistoryofpsychiatry'and a history of Russian 'pathographies'. By trying to alleviate the lack of comprehensive histories of Russian psychiatry in English, Sirotkinamakes her study do too much. Consequently, subsections that refer to the history of Russian psychiatric institutions or to the careers of key Russian psychiatrists on occasion fail to 'gel' with the specific discussion of psychiatry'sengagement with and professionalinterest in literature.The study also lacks a conclusion that would tie all its themes into a coherent whole. The volume's brief and overly general introduction hardly does the job. Despite these weaknesses Sirotkina's history includes an abundance of valuable material and enlightening argument of use and interestto anyone studyingthe intellectual historyof late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. The most interestingchapter is arguablythe one connecting the emergence of psychotherapyin Russiawith Tolstoi and 'tolstoism'via the careerof the psychiatristN. E. Osipov. One should note that Sirotkina does not seriously tackle the issue of the incorporation of psychiatric discourse into literature or its relation to (lay) 'psychological' literary criticism. Although this is hardly a failing for a book that defines itself as a 'cultural history of psychiatry', the question of what exactly happens to meta-literarydiscourse on the boundary between literary studies and other human sciences, from which literary studies regularly borrowkey concepts and methods of analysis,remainsas yet to be explored. Woifson College, Oxford ANDY BYFORD Pleshakov, Constantine. TheTsar'sLastArmada.TheEpicJourney totheBattleof Tsushima. PerseusPress,Oxford, 2002. xx + 396 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography.Index. fi8.99. THIs Armada', the Russian Baltic Fleet sent out as the 'Second Pacific Squadron' to fight in the Russo-JapaneseWar, lost its point when both the existing Pacificfleet and its PortArthurbase fell to theJapanese. But, despite the misgivings of its commander, Admiral Rozhestvenskii, it continued its arduous voyage on the instructions of Tsar Nicholas II and met its end at Tsushima in I905. This reviewer's I3-year-oldson had greatfun with the book, likeningit to a novel and thereby neatly underlining its excellence as a popularization. But suchpopularizationhas itsdownside. The said I3-year-oldopened his innings by enquiringaboutwhy the authorhad speculated(p. I3)about the possibility of Nicholas II using the same oriental prostitutes as Chekhov, and then continued his quest for parental guidance by askingwhat the Kaiser's sexual preferences (p. I8) had to do with the Russian navy. The titillatingpower of subjects like prostitutes and spies does seem over-exploited in this book (althoughgore, creditably,does not). The mythicallyomniscient Britishsecret service,which seems to fascinateadolescentsof all ages, gets a good run. 748 SEER, 8 i, 4, 2003 The book is well designed and printed, but the editorial side could have given more support to the author, who is not thoroughly familiar with the English language, nor with naval practice. To write 'dove mail' instead of 'carrier pigeons' (p. I25) is harmless and endearing, and so perhaps is the description of Nicholas's face as 'impervious' (p. 4), but things can become unclear when 'gun-sight'is rendered as 'target-finder'(p. Io) and 'gunboats' by 'canon boats' (p. 43), and so on. Popular histories of Tsushima appear at quite frequent intervals, each successivepublisherclaiming that it is a book about a long-neglected subject. ConstantinePleshakov'sbest-knownpredecessoris GrahamHough's TheFleet thathadtoDie (London, 1958),which is clearlyinferiorto hisvolume. Butboth rely rather heavily on tainted sources. For example, A. S. Novikov Priboi's Tsusima (Moscow, I958) providesboth authorswith a good deal of luriddetail; Hough does not seem to have realized that this book was a novel, while Pleshakov might have been more cautious in using material from a book whose main object was the condemnation of the tsaristnavy and the tsarist regime. Pleshakovhas reinforcedhis account with archivalbrowsing, notably in St Petersburgand London. Forthis reviewer, the resultingtreatment of how the Britishgovernment reacted to events seems freshand well done, and archival access may alsobe responsibleforthe sympatheticaccount of...

Patrilines, surnames, and family identity:: A Case Study From the Russian Baltic Provinces in the Nineteenth Century

The Imperial decrees emancipating the serfs of the Russian Baltic provinces (1816–1820) included the requirement that serfs, who would now become free peasants and obtain legal standing, have both a first name and a surname, the latter of their own choosing. The article examines the process through which Baltic peasants obtained surnames and analyzes the choices they made. In the Pinkenhof estate, in the province of Livland, emancipated serfs most often chose surnames that reflected their place of residence, but also frequently chose names from the natural world, occupations, and other similar sources. The acquisition of surnames helped to consolidate family and lineage identity, which had been difficult in the pre-emancipation perion when individuals bore only a first name plus the name of the place in which they were currently residing, the latter changing as they moved.

A Baltic-German Lessing? Johann Friedrich Recke's Mitau Dramaturgy

The and Baltic-German librarian Johann cultural Friedrich journal Recke of the (1764-1846) scholar, was collector called and l brarian Johann Friedrich Recke (1764-1846) was called Wochentliche Unierhaltungen fur Liebhaber deutscher Lekture in Rusland. At first, it appeared during 1805-1807 in three volumes, then in two subsequent volumes during 1807-1808 as the Neue Wochentliche Unterhaltungen (Pistohlkors 297). This little, short-lived journal has survived as a typical product of the Enlightenment. It brought informative articles by Recke as well as many reports sent in by correspondents about various topics of German-Baltic cultural life in the Russian Baltic Provinces, notably Courland, now a part of Latvia. Recke was a leading personality in Mitau; in 1816 he founded the learned society Kurlandische Gesellschaft fur Literatur und Kunst. He was its secretary since 1 827 and became director of the Kurlandisches Museum, established in 1818. Together with Eduard Napiersky he compiled an extensive biography and bibliography of Baltic-German writers and scholars, the Allgemeine Schriftsteller und Gelehrtenlexikon der Provinzen Livland, Esthland und Kurland (Bd. 1-4, 1827-1861). The work remains an indispensable handbook for the contemporary researcher about the history of the Baltic provinces. I am concerned primarily with the of German-language stage performances in Courland's more important cities: Goldingen, Libau, Riga, and Mitau, especially the latter (now Jelgava, Latvia), as reflected in Recke's thoughtful reviews of summer season theatrical presentations in German by visiting troupes and artists. Taken together, one could say Recke's essays in the Wochentliche Unterhaltungen constitute a Mitau Dramaturgy, much in the enlightened manner of that seminal German theatre critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (17291781) in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie. By the term reception I mean in the following how the critic Recke assessed these summer season performances from the perspective of a normative view and concept of an artistic ideal, in contrast to popular by a subjective and uncritical audience. The structure of this study consists of two sections: an appreciation of Recke's ideas, followed by a selection of illustrative examples of his criticism. The question: Why bother with Recke's accounts of an early nineteenth century Riga theatre troupe? can be answered simply: His writings have intrinsic historical value as

The Shchastny File: Trotsky and the Case of the Hero of the Baltic Fleet

One of the most sensational and illuminating yet little known judicial episodes in early Soviet history is the case of Aleksei Mikhailovich Shchastny, so-called admiral of the Baltic Fleet, who was arrested by Lev Trotsky and summarily tried, convicted, and executed in June 1918 for conspiring to overthrow Soviet power. The Shchastny file, a recently declassified top-secret Cheka criminal case file in the Archive of the Russian Federal Security Service for St. Petersburg and the St. Petersburg region, documents this episode in vivid detail.' While making it possible to reconstruct the dynamics of the Shchastny case, the file, some 362 pages long, also sheds light on broader issues such as Trotsky's political and military leadership; complexities in the outlook, employment, and situation of military specialists; the Soviet-German relationship in the aftermath of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; the centralizing of state power in Moscow and resulting tensions between Moscow and Petrograd; early politicization of the Soviet judicial system; and political instability in the Petrograd region in the spring and early summer of 1918. Captain First Rank Shchastny was commander of the Russian Baltic Fleet. Named to that position temporarily on 20 March 1918, after the arrest of Admiral A. V. Razvozov, who had refused to recognize the authority of the Soviet government, Shchastny was confirmed in the post by the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) on 5 April.2 It bears noting that Trotsky, then commissar for war and the navy, supported the appointment and that Shchastny accepted it reluctantly. As he later explained, felt a moral obligation to try to save the fleet, which I had served for twenty years, survived Port Arthur with, and worked to rebuild.3 Born in Zhitomir in 1881, the son of a general in the Imperial army, Shchastny graduated with honors from the Kiev Military Academy and the prestigious Naval Academy in St. Petersburg. The February 1917 revolution found him in Helsingfors (Helsinki), where

Borders, ethnicity, and demographic patterns in the Russian Baltic provinces in the late nineteenth century

In his pioneering and now classic 1953 study, Nationalism and social communication, Karl Deutsch laid out a social science agenda for the study of national consciousness in contemporary and historic populations. Central to this agenda was communication, and central to communication was language: ‘If we knew how to compare and measure the ability of groups and cultures to transmit information, we might gain a better understanding of their behaviour and capacities.’ At that time historians were not paying attention to social scientists, as neither historical demography nor social science history had yet been born, and Deutsch's call remained unanswered. It took the study of the secular decline of fertility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to raise the question again for the European past. When Susan Cotts Watkins concluded that ‘those people who spoke a common language appeared to behave in similar ways with respect to reproduction, but they behaved quite differently from those with whom they could not communicate’, she offered one answer to Deutsch's inquiry about social communication and social behaviour. Apparently the spread of linguistic uniformity in populations living within long-established boundaries helped to disseminate information about controlling marital fertility. Throughout Europe, or more precisely Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, variation in fertility within nations declined and variation between nations rose.From a different vantage point, historical questions about the process of individuation among European language communities, nationalities, and national cultures, and about communication between and within them, are inevitably questions about borders and borderlands. Nowhere is this more true than in Eastern Europe where, for the past two hundred years, few peoples remained untouched by changing borders. Official borders were alternately drawn around them and through them, separating fragments of language communities from each other, only to reunite them later and to separate them again later still. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sense of nationality, most often language-centred, became increasingly stronger, bringing with it the emergence of identifiable ‘national cultures’, entities within which, presumably, a single national language dominated and made the flow of information easier than in the past.

Intergenerational transfers of headships over the life course in an Eastern European peasant community, 1782–1850

Research on intergenerational transfers of valued goods has focused mostly on historical western Europe and its propertied peasantry. This article analyzes the population of an estate (Pinkenhof) in the Russian Baltic province of Livland—one of the lands of the so-called “second serfdom”—during the nineteenth century, before and after the emancipation of serfs. Here peasants did not own land; the most valued good that peasant families had to bequeath was an office—the headship of a farmstead. Emancipation brought a substantial decrease of kin as successors to headships, and a corresponding increase in the proportion of headships that went to non-kin from the same farmstead. A possible explanation for this phenomenon lies in the new attitudes of the post-emancipation period, as estate owners and peasant families gave greater value te demonstrated competence than to kinship in choosing candidates for headships.

‘Das haus am see:’ An unpublished memoir of a Baltic baron

Already badly shaken by World War I and its aftermath, Baltic German civilization disappeared forever in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin pact and World War II. Providentially, however, a chorus of gifted writers emerged before 1939 to give final voice to a doomed culture. Born for the most part around the turn of the century in what were then the Russian Baltic provinces of Estonia, Livonia, and Courland, this was the last generation to come to maturity in the old homeland, the last to experience and portray for posterity their way of life which otherwise would have been consigned to oblivion. Who are these authors? Eduard von Keyserling and Werner Bergengruen come to mind immediately, as do Frank Thiess, Edzard Schaper and Fred von Hoerschelmann. But there were others, no doubt less well known, and among these a now almost completely forgotten master of the classic Novelle, Herbert von Hoerner, author of the memoir to be discussed here. From an old, ennobled family that had come to the Baltic in 1547 from Bohemia, Hoerner was born in 1884 in Courland on the ancestral estate called Ihlen, not far fron Jelgava (Mitau), the old ducal capital. Because of T sarist policy in the Baltic provinces, the language of instruction in the schools of Hoerner's youth was Russian. Thus he grew up with that language as well as his native German and some Latvian. An indication of Hoerner's proficiency in Russian is the fact that during the early 1 920s he published several polished translations: The memoirs of Count Witte, the Russian statesman, as well as works by Gogol, Turgenev, and A.K. Tolstoy, and it is probable that Hoerner's literary talent was honed by his exposure to these masters.' Translation was not the only way in which Hoerner was able to put his knowledge of Russian to good use. During World War II he was a court interpreter for the German army in occupied Ukraine and applied his skills for humanitarian purposes. Unwitting Russian and Ukrainian civilians who had innocently run afoul of the rules and regulations of the German occupation found a friend in Hoerner. He interpreted their testimony in such a way that it would lead to acquittal, perhaps even saving some lives in the process.2 For a long time Hoemer was unsure where his true talent lay. He felt drawn to the graphic arts, architecture, and music, as well as to literature. With a view to becoming a painter he studied art, first in Riga, then Munich,

Johann Georg Eisen: Minor writings

(1990). Johann Georg Eisen: Minor writings. Journal of Baltic Studies: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 95-104.

New phenomena in the baltic trade of Russia in the seventeenth century

Abstract Extract In the Russian pre-revolutionary historiography and among Western European historians, the view was held that the reforms of Peter I had been the manifestations of the sovereign will of a powerful monarch who had arbitrarily introduced profound changes into the life of his enormous country. By contrast, Soviet historians showed, in much of their research work, that the reforms conducted by Peter I had been prepared by the whole course of social, economic, and political developments in the preceding century, and reflected the ripened needs of the country and its people. Both the coming of Russia to the Baltic Sea shores and the founding of St. Petersburg, the first Russian seaport on the Baltic, and its becoming the principal commercial port of the country, were prepared by the whole course of the preceding development of the Russian Baltic trade, reflecting its ripened and very urgent needs.1

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917.

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917.

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

A Navy in Revolution: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

A Navy in Revolution: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917

Peasants, Intellectuals, and Nationalism in the Russian Baltic Provinces, 1820-90.

An observer of urban life in the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century might have found the German word Volkswerdung singularly appropriate for describing the character of urban change. Riga, Wolmar, Wenden, Fellin, Pemau, and Dorpat in Livland; Libau and Mitau in Kurland; and Reval in Estland-in all these towns the number of inhabitants was increasing rapidly.' Yet in the Baltic area mere numerical expansion was not the most important change. The more dramatic break with the past lay in the rapid growth and reconstitution of those urban language groups that also possessed a new consciousness of nationality. German speakers-for centuries the proprietors of urban land, occupations, and culture-were crowded aside by Latvian and Estonian speakers, whose vociferous leaders saw this process of displacement as long overdue and its conclusion as preordained. The population of the major city of Riga, for instance, expanding from 102,590 inhabitants in 1867 to 282,230 in 1897, experienced a reversal of the significant language groups: in 1867, 24 percent of the city population was Latvian-speaking and 43 percent German-speaking, while in 1897, Latvian speakers made up 45 percent and German speakers 22 percent of the total (see table 1).2

Russian War, 1854, Baltic and Black Sea: Official Correspondence. D. Bonnersmith , A. C. Dewar

<i>Russian War, 1854, Baltic and Black Sea: Official Correspondence</i>. D. Bonnersmith , A. C. Dewar

Russian Baltic Fleet in 1788

Russian Baltic Fleet in 1788