Soviet Context Research Articles

Choosing One or Being Both: The Identity Dilemmas of Russian-Jewish Mixed Ethnics Living in Russia and in Israel

ABSTRACTA large share of Russian/Soviet Jews, especially among younger cohorts, are descendants of intermarriage. In this essay, I reflect on the implications of the built-in ambivalence of these mixed ethnics, comparing their identity qualms and social strategies in their native Russia and after migration to Israel. My analysis draws upon participant observation and interviews conducted in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and across Israel over the last 20 years. My theoretical anchors are recent discussions on the evolving nature of Jewish identity, formed at the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and culture, in the context of ongoing intermarriage and assimilation. The comparison between the (ex-)Soviet and Israeli context underscores the role of local social constructions of ethno-religious belonging, nationalism, and citizenship as synergistic forces in shaping social locations of mixed ethnics. It also sheds light on the tactics of adjustment and “passing” among individuals with ambivalent ethnic identities who experience rapid social transformation or migration.

The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History by Timothy Cheek

Reviewed by: The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History by Timothy Cheek Vera Schwarcz The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History by Timothy Cheek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv + 370. $105.00 cloth, $32.99 paper, $26.00 e-book. The reason I have suffered in silence and lived on in disgrace, refusing to retreat even when mired in filth, was that I would have hated not to fully express what I held in my heart. Sima Qian 司馬遷, “Letter to Ren An”1 The rancor in the heart of Chinese intellectuals has been brewing for many centuries. From the painful castration suffered by historian Sima Qian in 98 bce to the imprisonment of Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo 劉曉波 in December 2009, there stretches a direct lineage of both suffering and the conscious defense of historical truths obscured by the state.2 Timothy Cheek’s innovative study illuminates aspects of the last century of this lineage as well as the enduring impact of these intellectuals’ concern for the well-being of the people—even when avenues for the expression of this concern have been choked off by political authorities. In Chinese, zhishifenzi 知識分子 (lit. knowledgeable elements, particles, or fragments) connotes partiality and a sense of reduced significance from the traditional praise embedded in the Confucian expression wenren 文人. This older term once referred to a person of culture and civilization broadly conceived. Cheek’s more contemporary term for “intellectual” (closer in meaning to “intelligentsia” in the [End Page 561] Soviet context) came into use during the late 1920s, after decades of borrowing from Japanese terminologies for Marxist class analysis.3 In the introduction of this book, the social calling of zhishifenzi is linked to the traditional mission of scholar-officials as “defenders of truth” (p. 234). This public mission stands in sharp contrast to the internal qualms, aspirations, and grief that are expressed in Sima Qian’s letter to Ren An. Sima’s sorrowful interiority continues to color the writings of men and women who have not found a meaningful echo for their ideals in what Timothy Cheek rightfully calls China’s “directed public sphere” (p. 9). Drawing upon a wide range of research about the evolution of the intelligentsia both by Chinese and Western scholars, Cheek’s book aims to document the enduring ideological commitments of six different generations who sought to answer the classical question: Wei gong ruhe 為公如何?—“How best to serve the public good?” (p. 1). Once the focus landed firmly upon “public good,” China’s educated elites could not but bend to the winds of social change again and again, even though this compromise came at the cost of individual conscience. Long before Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, with its brutal attack on zhishifenzi as the “stinking ninth” (labeled thus since they were deemed to be the worst category of public enemies, more pernicious than the first eight groups of traitors, landlords, Guomindang 國民黨 agents, and the like), intellectuals themselves struggled to express their loyalty to the people and to the Party despite the small still voice of doubt within. A similar inclination to serve a larger purpose at the cost of conscience is the subject of Julian Benda’s pathbreaking work, La trahison des clercs.4 Published in 1927, this work was an early warning about the temptations besetting the Marxist intellectuals of Europe to give up their sacred vocation as “scribes” who had previously defended the autonomy of the written word. Once swept up in the thrill and urgency of social revolution, intellectuals in China (as in Europe) could not but betray what they held most dear. During decade after decade of moral compromise, they continued to cling to three enduring ideas that carry through Cheek’s analysis: [End Page 562] the people, democracy, and the importance of being or remaining “Chinese.” Each of the six generations discussed in this work is situated in its own historical context, which generated quite specific ideological demands that zhishifenzi were forced to meet—even as they imagined themselves as cocreators of the nation’s destiny, along with political authorities far more powerful than their fragile written words. From the reform movement of the 1890s through the rejuvenation...

The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and Bolshevik Power by Andrew Sloin (review)

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 778 Sloin, Andrew. The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia: Economy, Race, and BolshevikPower.TheModernJewishExperience.IndianaUniversityPress, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2017. xi + 329 pp. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $38.00: £33.00 (paperback). In a meticulously researched book, Andrew Sloin explores how the Bolshevik experiment, premised upon principles of national liberation in a post-capitalist order, gave way to repeated outbreaks of popular ethnic resentment and racial animosity. In many respects, the story that Sloin tells is well known. Much has been written about the promises and pitfalls of Soviet nationality policies and the ways in which the Soviet state managed its multi-ethnic empire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival materials from Belorussian archives, Sloin’s excellent study nonetheless fills a major lacuna. It will stand alongside some of the best scholarship in Soviet Jewish history that has been published in recent years. Sloin’s focus is on ‘ordinary’ people — Jewish artisans, workers, local party operatives and small-scale labourers — most of whom lived in small towns in Belorussia. Moving beyond official statist agendas or top-down modernization campaigns, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia emphasizes that, above all, local contexts mattered. The book is divided into seven well-developed chapters, with the most innovative sections dealing with the problem of race. Sloin positions himself in the larger debates on the meanings and practices of race, articulated most forcefully by Francine Hirsch and Eric Weitz, and wisely moves away from what he labels as ‘extreme measures in determining the degree to which race persisted in the Soviet context’ (p. 16). By focusing on the relationship between economy, labour and identity formation, Sloin’s study enlarges our understanding of the role that the logic of race played in everyday Jewish life. Regardless of its commitment to equality, antiracism and internationalism, Sloin demonstrates that the policies embraced by the Soviet state reproduced the conditions of race socially and shaped understandings of nationality at the grassroots level. The new economic reality of the Soviet helped produce much of the racial animosity. In fascinating detail, Sloin describes the interethnic tensions, antagonisms and anxieties that resulted from the NEP economy slidingintocrisis.ReaderslearnhowBelorussianworkersmockedandassaulted Jews on the shop floor, how the new regime of labour caused ethnic divisions, and how the state repeatedly questioned Jewish assimilability. Antisemitic incidents surged in the late 1920s, as the Stalin revolution helped fuel violence against Jews. Sloin provides a compelling, multivalent explanation of the debates on the integration and assimilability of Jews in the post-Revolutionary order. He argues that the Soviet state helped fuel antisemitism. As the Soviet Union slid into crisis, the language used to describe Jews became more absolute. REVIEWS 779 More broadly, The Jewish Revolution in Belorussia also provides a compelling argument that the global economic and political crisis of the late 1920s played no small role in shaping racialized conceptions of antisemitism. ‘Each episode of crisis,’ Sloin writes, ‘hypostasized a certain manifestation of “Jewishness” and took this manifestation to be a malignancy on the body politic’ (p. 243). Andrew Sloin’s attempt to chart how the Bolshevik movement restructured Jewish lives in Belorussia is an engaging and theoretically sophisticated study. The book makes a timely contribution to Soviet and Jewish history and modern European history, and deserves to be read widely. University of Illinois Eugene M. Avrutin Graziosi, Andrea and Sysyn, Frank (eds). Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2016. viii + 158 pp. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. $24.95 (paperback). This book presents six of the papers from a conference on Communism and hunger held at the University of Toronto in 2014. Only a few of the papers have substantial academic value, while most of them have flaws that undermine their validity and novelty. The best contribution is the comparative study of famines in Central Asia by Niccolò Pianciola, which places the history of the Soviet Kazakh famine of 1931–33 in the context of Soviet and Chinese treatment of their spheres in Mongolia and of the effects of the Chinese Great Leap Famine [GLF] in Tibet and Central Asia in...

Soviet Union and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This essay examines the Soviet role in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drawing distinctions between the Soviet and the Western models of fundamental rights up to 1948, with the Soviet context put into perspective via a comprehensive historical review of its origins and development. Furthermore, the supposed characteristics of the Soviet concept of fundamental rights are applied to the 1948 debate, with Soviet speeches and proposals thoroughly examined from that standpoint. It is argued that the disagreement displayed between both sides of the negotiation stemmed from the Soviet understanding of human rights being more collectivist and focused on economic and social rights. Hence, the essay intends to challenge the common perception of the USSR as only being hostile to human rights and opens a conversation about firstly fundamental, and then human rights as diplomatic devices.

‘They know not what they do’? Bolshevik understandings of the agency of perpetrators, 1918-30

This article examines how the Bolshevik party and state officials in early Soviet Russia understood the agency of their enemies, an important consideration which illuminates the particular dynamics and complexities of state violence in the Soviet context. It focusses on criminal justice, and on the relationship between the state and peasantry. The evolution of Bolshevik thought on these issues is traced from the revolution to the onset of Stalinism, providing intellectual context for the violent campaigns of the nineteen‐thirties. The article exposes the theoretical ambiguities, ironies and inconsistencies that characterize the intellectual history of the Soviet state's violent and punitive practices.

The Communist Drama of Individuation in Lev Vygotsky

The article addresses the concept of individuation in the work of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It argues that the concept reveals the Soviet epistemological constructions based on a strategic union between Spinoza and Hegel. Although Vygotsky did make an original contribution to materialist philosophy and this contribution cannot be isolated from the Soviet context, he is better known as a practitioner, whose Marxism is often suppressed as an unimportant holdover from the past. It is suggested that individuation links a Hegelian dialectical logic of mediation with a Spinozist understanding of activity through a Marxian epistemology explicit to Das Kapital. Vygotsky overcomes both mechanistic and teleological conceptions of the individual and class, the social and the collective, in order to be able to sketch a political theory of communization that is an “adequate form” of individuation. This brings us to another, interrelated, observation concerning debates on individuation, developed by Gilbert Simondon, Etienne Balibar, and Paolo Virno. It is concluded that Vygotsky’s theory may help overcome the Hegel/Spinoza divide in a contemporary radical thought.

Pension Taxes and Labor Supply: Evidence from a Soviet Context

Pension Taxes and Labor Supply: Evidence from a Soviet Context

Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight by Michael G. Smith

Reviewed by: Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight by Michael G. Smith Guillaume de Syon (bio) Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight. By Michael G. Smith. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Pp. 448. $34.95. In his intriguing prehistory of the space age, Michael Smith invites us to view rocket science as an infusion of cultural influences. In so doing, he suggests that rocketry can serve as an allegory of the human understanding of science, and also illustrate how a transnational flow of ideas can shape human knowledge. Smith’s emphasis centers on the Russian experience, but uses the metaphor of the parabola that brings ideas back to Russia or the Soviet Union. Purists may argue that a more accurate description would involve an ellipsis, but the parabola idea works if one accepts the linearity of history, a concept popular in the science fiction that also influenced early rocketry. [End Page 276] Starting in the nineteenth century, Smith surveys the popularizers of science and how their message helped popularize not only relativism, but also such concepts as cosmism as well as a notion of plurality of worlds. A notable quality of his study involves the drawing on writings not usually associated with flight. (Henri) Bergsonian philosophy’s argument that human intellect is bound up with space, for example, helps frame the diversity of thoughts that characterized the start of the twentieth century. Moving on to rocketry pioneers, notably Konstantin Tsiolkovskii’s and Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s works, Smith ably demonstrates how fantasy played an important role in clearing the way for rational explorations of rocket propulsion. This canvassing of a seamless web of knowledge, though successful, is done to show how the arc heads to Russia, whether through private correspondence (including Robert Goddard’s dealings with Russian rocket enthusiasts), through popular media, or through the writings of Tsiolkoskii (who freely incorporated foreign ideas into his own work.) Many elements of Smith’s canvas will be familiar to readers of Asif Siddiqi’s and Scott Palmer’s works on Russian aerospace, but Smith’s own combination of these sources provides a remarkable image of the fascination with space travel. Rocketry also served as a fulcrum to push the USSR toward a positive vision of technology, in stark contrast to the Western pessimism of Oswald Spengler and others. True, the Bauhaus and the likes of Joan Miró echoed technological fascination, but the Russian interpretation thereof emphasized ideology and revolutionary optimism reaching a form of escapism that carried interesting connotations of religiosity. This Russian, later Soviet, fascination with space extended beyond the obvious fascination with the “red planet.” Echoing cosmism, it emphasized the notion of immortality and thus served as a metaphor for ideological permanence. One could speak of worlds, rather than workers uniting. Any cultural history, even one as rich as Smith’s, overlooks certain chronological elements. Very little is discussed in relation to the technological pessimism following World War I, for example, and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was devised in 1915, not 1916. Also, some interpretations may surprise readers. When Smith compares Tsiolkovskii to Charles Lindbergh, for example, he does not do so on the basis of their achievements but their inspirational effects on others. (Tsiolkovskii after all kept his eye on the future, whereas Lindbergh became obsessed with the past.) On the other hand, the author offers an attractive interpretation of the stratonauts, an often overlooked realm of aeronautics at the intersection of ballooning, scientific inquiry, and treading on the edge of space. Western nations engaged in such “pre-space” races, but the place of stratonautics as an example of dialectical materialism fits nicely into the Soviet context: the balloon was revolutionary, the airplane matched Russian culture, and the rocket would be Soviet, with stratonauts acting as intermediate portents of [End Page 277] revolution. This element of Communist ideology paradoxically relied, through Friedrich Engels, on Newton’s third law of motion. As such, it confirms further the Soviet obsession with space flight, a fascination Stalin was only too happy to capitalize on even as his own actions sent the likes of rocket scientist Sergei Korolev to the Gulag during World...

Objects in Motion: Globalizing Technology ed. by Nina Möllers, Bryan Dewalt

Reviewed by: Objects in Motion: Globalizing Technology ed. by Nina Möllers, Bryan Dewalt Marta Macedo (bio) Objects in Motion: Globalizing Technology. Edited by Nina Möllers and Bryan Dewalt. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016. Pp. 256. $44.99. Objects in Motion, edited by Nina Möllers and Bryan Dewalt, is the tenth volume of the book series Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology. The series is the most visible output of the Artefacts consortium. In the last two decades, this rather informal network, gathering scholars from museums and universities in Europe and the United States, has supported a material-based historical research agenda able to challenge both academics and curators. The present volume clearly furthers the group’s goals. But the ten papers drawn together by Möllers and Dewalt do more than that. Collectively they open an important discussion on the “methodological nationalism” of many histories of science and technology and, at the same time, they interrogate the unproblematic role ascribed to technology in several works dealing with globalization. The role of markets in linking diverse parts of the globe justifies the vital place that international trade has as the element that binds the book’s first five chapters together. The politics of identity, as linked to objects, organize the second group of essays. The diversity of objects studied and the variety of methodological and academic traditions employed—ranging from anthropology to media studies to design to history of technology—do not undermine the volume’s coherence and goals. On the contrary, one of the book’s major strengths is the ability of these objects and methods to problematize the master narratives of globalization. [End Page 902] This is clearly shown in the articles by Knut Stegmann and Johanna Conterio, both dealing with the circulation of American technologies. As argued by Stegmann, the deskilling of construction workers and the consolidation of technical elites in Germany explain the adoption of U.S. reinforced concrete technologies. Conversely, the specificities of the Soviet context, studied by Conterio, justify the rejection of Californian orchard heaters in the citrus groves of the USSR. A comparative reading of these studies helps us think about the limits of Western globalization, and the importance of local dynamics in the making of global technological landscapes. The recognition of the historical importance of engineers and of the sciences in putting objects in circulation is another significant contribution. It is exactly by following experts and things around that authors explore alternatives to the standard geographies of the global world. Thomas Schuetz, David McGee, and Rian Manson take common ingredients of histories of technology, such as car technologies and locomotives, to unveil less obvious material connections, such as the ones established between West Germany and the USSR or Canada or India. But Objects in Motion also defies popular assumptions of what count as objects of study relevant to globalization. The excellent article by Matthew Hockenberry reminds us that the clean rooms of high-tech electronic factories are intrinsically linked with commodities, disrupted landscapes, and exploitative labor systems, like the tin islands of Indonesia, very seldom portrayed as technological. The second set of essays aims to challenge the fixity of the local, the nation, or the globe, and to interrogate narratives of cultural homogenization and hybridity. The inspiring papers by P. Allen Roda and Harun Kaygan take the global circulation of tablas and electric Turkish coffeemakers to discuss politics of regional authenticity and national pride. Both articles portray the way objects are transformed while crossing political boundaries and how in this process they convey ideas of belonging. These are also the arguments explored by Bryan Dewalt, Oliver Schmidt, and Kimberly Coulter in their articles. The multiplicity of case studies along with the consistency of their arguments make Objects in Motion a good companion for historians of technology interested in exploring transnational scales in their work. However, the book allows for the expansion of Artefacts’ academic audience by arguing for the ability of science and technology to reveal concrete dynamics of the global world. Pneumatic tools, canoes, coffeemakers, or tractors, as presented in this volume, become relevant objects for general historians, as they help to bring new...

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Poetics of Passivity

Confusion over the aesthetic quality of strength are pronounced in the Soviet context of underground and dissident fiction. Strength, and more broadly the alternatives to it employed by silenced authors and unpublished texts, is a central problem already in Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s 1926 novel The Letter Killers Club. Krzhizhanovsky’s meditation on literary irrelevance–questions of a censored art’s ability to exert itself in the world, and of an inadequate artist’s ability to realize an idea–braids together in a single fiction two concerns underpinning major theoretical approaches to strength vis à vis weakness: the automatization of production and the inspiration of influence. In The Letter Killers Club’s carefully curated re‐stagings of precursor texts in their intersection with literary economies, Krzhizhanovsky asks us to find the intersection between writing as the manifestation of literary influence (the author moved by the spirit of past culture) and artistic production as the result of automation (the worker moved by a mechanized will), both of which conceive the artwork as emanating from a condition of passivity. The metaphor of inspiration (vdokhnovenie), which suggests the alienated spirit of the divine animating the dumb, passive clay of human material, becomes for Krzhizhanovsky a demonic possession, identified with the frightening potential of a radically different industrial future, which nonetheless underwrites the continuity and independence of cultural tradition.

The system of language, dialogue and discourse

The objective of this article developed at Post-Graduate studies at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul State is to refl ect on the conception of discourse, as a complex object, constituted by opacity and hybridity. For investigating this conception, we will analyze some important notions introduced in the Soviet context by Valentin N. Volochinov, Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Lev Jakubinskij, during the fi rst decades of the twentieth century, that not only contributed to the construction of the conception of discourse but also infl uenced the basis of important studies developed about the notions of polyphony, heterogeneity and ideology, in European context, by famous french semanticists, linguists and philosophers as Oswald Ducrot, Jacqueline Authier-Revuz and Michel Pêcheux.

Empires of Conquest and Civilization in Georgian Political and Intellectual Discourse since Late Nineteenth Century

This paper explores understandings of the concept of empire in Georgian political intellectual discourses in the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet Georgian contexts. Beginning with an elaboration of contemporary political and scholarly understanding of empire, the paper then – drawing on the approaches of intellectual and transnational history – distils two meanings: empire of conquest and of civilisation. Both meanings are mainly attributed to the Russian State in its political incarnations as an empire, as the fulcrum of the Soviet Union and more recently as an entity in search of a Eurasian Union. The paper argues that while for most of the nineteenth century, the concept of empire embodied by the Russia state was invested with both meanings, particularly by the end of the Soviet period, it came to be singularised to that of conquest. More generally, it suggests that in contemporary context in which empire as a political entity is discredited morally and legally, it is easier to detect political entities when they act as empires of conquest as opposed to those in the name of civilisation or other universalising values.

Ideology, Nationalism and Law: Legal Tools for an Ideological Machinery in Latvia

For around 25 years Latvia has moved further and further away from Soviet Marxism-Leninist state ideology and has successfully re-integrated with European legal culture. It is obvious that the term ‘ideology’, due to its historical Soviet context, has a mostly negative colouring even nowadays. Integration within the European Union and the implementation of social and political programs and concepts have led to questions raised about leading contemporary ideology (ies) and its (their) role in the development of Latvia’s legal system. The issue of ideologies becomes more complicated and unclear when regarding specific legal reforms or Parliament`s drafts of laws. The article will explore the elements of different ideologies manifested in the Latvian legal corpus and try to identify how the contemporary legislator (the Saeima) deals with the challenges of competing ideologies in the context of what remains post-Soviet legal thinking.

Пародийное в творчестве Владимира Шинкарева

Vladimir Shinkarev is a famous Russian writer and painter. His Mitki and Maxim and Fedor were among the most popular underground books in Leningrad in the late 1980s. This article is devoted to studying both of these famous texts and represents an attempt to find a parody of other books or of Japanese culture. The author also analyzes Shinkarev’s literature and religious parodies in the Soviet context.

Scientists, punks, engineers and gurus: Soviet experimental film culture in the 1960s–1980s

ABSTRACTThis essay discusses the most popular but least understood modes of experimental cinema that developed in the Soviet Union in the period between the late 1950s and early 1990s. It focuses on two officially sanctioned types of film production, popular science and amateur cinema, each produced within specially designated film studios. My paper discusses the ways in which these studios could act as creative environments that nurtured experimental film culture. The paper argues that in the Soviet context, visual arts community and the unofficial art circles were not the only domain of experimental art and filmmaking and highlights the role of science-technological intelligentsia in artistic experimentation.

Kachurin, Pamela Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928 (review)

SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 164 Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s study remains inconclusive in regard to the degree of the poets’ agency and undecided whether the artworks are passive records of trauma or radical critiques that succeed in productively sublimating it. Notably, the book is haunted by two radically divergent interpretations of schizophrenia as a prominent trait of both capitalism and postmodern art. When like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, 1987), Lutzkanova-Vassileva wishestoaffirmtheradicalismofpostmodernschizophrenicart,shenotestheir rhizomatic structures, their desire for social critique, and their propensity to scramble all codes. But when the author leans toward treating her case studies as mere traces, testimonies of trauma, she paradoxically appears to be closer to Fredric Jameson, who declared in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991) that postmodern culture replicates and reinforces the logic of capitalism. Paradoxically, because it is precisely this assumption about postmodern art’s inefficacy that Lutzkanova-Vassileva’s book intends to target. Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures Julia Vaingurt University of Illinois at Chicago Kachurin, Pamela. Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era, 1918–1928. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. xxiii + 145 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. It is a well-known fact that in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917 and during the ensuing Civil War, avant-garde artists ran the Art Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Otdel izobrazitel´nykh iskusstv, Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniya — IZO Narkompros). Having been neglected and spurned by the tsarist establishment in the pre-war period, these creative figures now took centre stage and became responsible for deciding and implementing artistic policy, organizing art galleries and museums, purchasing works of art, reforming art education and publishing journals. They acted as the creative arm of the Communist Party and the new state, committing themselves to specific approaches and types of activity. But in 1921, they had to adjust to very different circumstances as the government took back control of culture and instituted NEP (the New Economic Policy) which established state capitalism and some degree of free enterprise. Then in 1928–29, artists faced the new challenges of Socialism in one country, Collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan. The story of how the avant-garde responded to the various shifts in official policy, accommodating REVIEWS 165 new demands and beginning to ‘speak Bolshevik’ as Stephen Kotkin puts it (Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, Berkeley, CA, 1995), forms the fascinating subject of Making Modernism Soviet. Dr Kachurin’s riveting book presents a highly detailed and well researched study of three institutions that were essentially set up by Russian avant-garde artists and acted as strongholds of avant-garde values: Moscow’s Museum of Painterly Culture (Muzei zhivopisnyi kul´tury) directed by Wassilii Kandinskii and Aleksandr Rodchenko among others; the Vitebsk People’s Art School set up by Marc Chagall and the home of Kazimir Malevich’s UNOVIS group (‘Utverditeli novogo iskusstva’ — ‘Champions of the New Art’); and finally the State Institute of Artistic Culture also known as GINKhUK (Gosudarstvennyi institut khudozhestvennoi kul´tury) directed by Malevich in Petrograd (subsequently Leningrad). The avant-garde credentials of all three organizations were impeccable and all three were eventually shut down as Stalin’s regime began to exert total control over all spheres of activity, including art and culture. Kachurin argues that in the 1920s, the avant-garde figures who ran these organizations ‘developed strategies not only to survive but also thrive in the new Soviet context’ (p. xvii). One might quibble that ‘thrive’ is perhaps putting it too strongly, but Kachurin’s study does reveal that many artists managed to adapt effectively to the twists and turns of the new order and did more than merely survive. Malevich, for instance, proved to be extremely adept and politically savvy in developing tactics to ensure that GINKhUK was allotted sufficient funds to maintain an independent existence for four years (1923–27). The quotations from his reports to various official bodies demonstrate his ability to present information in the most favourable light possible. Patronage, as Dr Kachurin emphasizes, also played a crucial...

Conformity and Defiance in a Religious Key

Conformity and Defiance in a Religious Key Paul W. Werth (bio) Emily B. Baran, Dissent on the Margins: How Soviet Jehovah’s Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach about It. 402pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 (repr. 2016). ISBN-13 978-0190495497. $35.00. Stéphane Dudoignon and Christian Noack, eds., Allah’s Kolkhozes: Migration, De-Stalinisation, Privatisation and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm, 1950s–2000s. 541pp. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2014. ISBN-13 978-3879974214. €67.00. Ulrike Huhn, Glaube und Eigensinn: Volksfrömmigkeit zwischen orthodoxer Kirche und Sowjetischem Staat, 1941 bis 1960 (Faith and Obstinacy: Popular Piety between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet State, 1941–60). 363pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. ISBN-13 978-3447101035. €48.00. Hiroaki Kuromiya, Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin’s Ukraine, 1952–1953. 224pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-1442644618. $64.00. Leonid Smilovitsky, Jewish Life in Belarus: The Final Decade of the Stalin Regime, 1944–1953. 310pp. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-9633860250. $60.00. After neglect over much of the 20th century, the topic of religion occupies a prominent place in the historiography of modern Russia today. Recent work [End Page 869] on the Soviet period has explored antireligious policies and campaigns,1 the Soviet regime’s “concordat” with Orthodoxy in the midst of World War II,2 the distinct experience of non-Orthodox religious groups,3 secularism and atheism in the postwar period,4 and finally the connections of other religious groups with global communities of believers.5 A separate literature examines the experience of believers and communities in the post-Soviet era, thus revealing both continuities and ruptures across 1991.6 [End Page 870] The books reviewed here connect to all these trends, while also linking religious questions to broader historical problems of dissidence, wartime trauma, migration, and economic life. Even as they address different problems and religious traditions, all five confront the degree to which believers in the USSR conformed to that country’s established structures and worldviews. The religious people at the center of each book exhibited varying inclinations to conform with the Soviet order, though their determination to practice their faith made them all dissidents to one degree or another.7 Together, the books provide valuable insights into the mechanisms by which dissident elements in the USSR could be integrated into the Soviet order, the foundations for resisting such integration, and the compromises that the regime itself was willing to make to secure such compliance. They also help reveal the meanings and limits of privacy in the Soviet context, as well as the consequences for believers of all stripes of the regime’s turn toward Russocentrism from the late 1930s. The chronological center of gravity for all five books is the postwar period, with one starting in 1941 and two taking their accounts into post-Soviet decades. They explore the experience of ordinary believers without ignoring the larger political frameworks and agents that shaped that experience. The books address five different religious groups—Muslims, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, and Orthodox Christians—which allows us to consider both predominant and minority faiths, including those that were denied recognition by the Soviet state. The most sharply focused study is Hiroaki Kuromiya’s account of the depressing experience of 14 Adventists in Soviet Ukraine, against whom a remarkable criminal case was launched in December 1952. Ascribing these unfortunate citizens to a splinter group of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, authorities accused them of violating Soviet law by taking a pacifist stance against universal military service. In effect, these defendants were triply marginal: already at the edge of society in a socioeconomic sense—they were poorly educated and lacked steady work—they were also targeted as dissidents within a religious tradition that was itself marginal to Soviet society. [End Page 871] Several overlapping issues were central to the Adventists’ prosecution, beginning with their pacifism. Whereas the early Soviet state had made some allowances for conscientious objection, these were subsequently withdrawn, and by the early 1950s refusing military service “constituted a grave criminal offence, almost an act of treachery” (44). While some Adventists had...

Transnationalism in One Country? Seeing and Not Seeing Cross-Border Migration within the Soviet Union

In the early 1990s social scientists began to refer to migrants who retained familial and economic ties with their country of origin as transnational. The term eventually gained currency among historians who had found multiple examples of such ties in earlier decades and centuries. Although migrants traveling among former Soviet republics came to be understood as transnational, Soviet-era migrants never have been so characterized. We contend that this is due to a double blindness: that of migration scholars to the Soviet Union as a “state of nations,” and that of historians of the Soviet period to migration as a complicating element in the construction of nationality. By emphasizing the transnational dimension of “internal” Soviet migration, we seek to sharpen awareness of how nationality worked in the Soviet context, particularly in its last decades. We thus posit the maintenance of economic, familial and other affective ties across Soviet national boundaries as the Soviet version of transnationalism—transnationalism in one country. We also suggest the ways that despite its well-deserved reputation for limiting international migration and otherwise restricting its citizenry, the Soviet state facilitated transnationalism within its borders.

MacKay, John. True Songs of Freedom: ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin in Russian Culture and Society (review)

REVIEWS 543 less indiscriminately. This is regrettable, as some attempt, however constrained by the limited material, to determine local variations would have been one of the most interesting and informative aspects of the study, particularly in the context of the practices of neighbouring countries which may have coexisted with local traditions in some of the territories considered. This context, however, is totally lacking:thereisnoattempttocompareorcontrastSerbiandocumentarypractice with that elsewhere in Europe. This considerably hampers the reader’s ability to assess the significance of the material. Even worse, perhaps, is the complete lack of statistical data. Beyond the fact that we are dealing with ‘approximately 1000 Serbian medieval documents’ we are given no information about the numbers preserved in particular archives or written at specific times or places. This again makes it very difficult to know what significance to attach to any particular example. The book is provided with thirty-eight monochrome illustrations, mostly of reasonable quality but all considerably reduced and, more seriously, with no indication of the size of the original. This book, therefore, provides a comprehensive survey of the surviving documentary materials current in Serbia up to the second half of the fifteenth century. The fact that it ends with a few general remarks ‘in place of a conclusion’ is sufficiently expressive of its weaknesses; nor, unfortunately, does it really provide the tools for its readers to draw conclusions of their own. Winchester R. M. Cleminson MacKay, John. True Songs of Freedom: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in Russian Culture and Society. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2013. xv + 157 pp. Illustrations. Historical Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index. $24.95 (paperback). In his introduction, John MacKay writes, ‘I see this book […] as primarily a study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — even a close reading of sorts, but executed as if through a multifaceted crystal, turning on its axes’ (p. 9). That is exactly what the book is, a study of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, as seen through the many facets of a crystal — Russian, American and Western European history, society and culture from the mid nineteenth century through the Cold War era, up to the present. MacKay attaches a coda and conclusion that place his investigation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period and within the context of the contemporary global issues of borders, migration and labour. He writes that True Songs of Freedom ‘was a lot of fun to write’ (p. xi). It’s a lot of fun to read, too. The reader learns curious facts, such as this: ‘the […] first SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 544 public performance of tango in Argentina took place during a staging of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1856’ (p. xii). The book is a pleasure to read. It is well-researched, intelligently conceived and intelligently presented, well-written and lively. MacKay is a knowledgeable, authoritative, enthusiastic guide through his discoveries. Not only is the book fun to read, but it is well worth reading because of the many connections that the author makes to literature, history and culture as he leads his readers through the complexities of the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russia. It was a wise decision, on MacKay’s part, to write an appendix with a brief summary of Stowe’s novel, for those who have not read it and for those who may have read it long ago. Also useful is an historical timeline of American and Russian events for the years covered in his study. The four chapters that comprise the main body of the book follow the general lines of Russian historical development: the pre-emancipation years; then, the period until 1917; the beginning of the Soviet era until the end of World War Two; and the Cold War years. Thus, we see the responses of advocates of literature as social criticism, Chernyshevskii and Pisarev, and their divergences of opinion, just as their views on so many topics diverged. We learn that Herzen was the first Russian, in a British publication, to evaluate Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We learn of the parallels that have been drawn between Turgenev’s Sketches from a...

Introduction to the Work of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya

In their article "Introduction to the Work of Uygur Poet Bakhtiya" Dilfuza Rozieva and Anna Oldfield introduce Ilya Bakhtiya's (1932-1987) work. For writers like Bakhtiya, the task was to create a Kazakh Uygur print culture that combined their ethnic heritage with their new reality in the Soviet Union. Bakhtiya published in a variety of genres including lyric, satire, and children's literature in vernacular Uygur. Importantly, Bakhtiya's texts merge and bridge identities in both graceful and appealing ways overcoming the required Soviet context and continuing to inspire Uygurs today.