Tsarist Government Research Articles

The North Caucasus between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy: The Beginnings, 1552-1570

The present paper explores the hitherto unknown beginnings of the Ottoman-Russian imperial rivalry by focusing on the mid-16th-century encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy over the North Caucasus, where the ambitions of these two asymmetric powers—the Ottomans being an established “super power” and the Muscovites a rising power—became entangled for the first time. This first encounter, which was the harbinger of many future engagements not only in this region but also in the broader steppe frontier around the Black Sea, was more of a “cold war” rather than a military confrontation, as both the Ottomans and the Muscovites rather preferred to establish spheres of influence and eventually their hegemony over the North Caucasus through their vassals and clients. In addition to demonstrating the Tsardom of Muscovy’s initial claims and policies over the North Caucasus, this study will shed light on the reasons of the Ottoman failure to transform their nominal claims over the region to a de facto hegemony similar to what they had established over Eastern European principalities.

British humanitarianism and the Russian famine, 1891-2

In 1891, southern Russia experienced a famine which affected 30–40 million people in an area the size of France, killing 650,000 in the highest estimates. The response of the Russian government was widely criticized by both opponents within Russia and observers abroad. This article analyses the response of the British liberal press and the Quaker relief fund, considering how the famine and its causes were presented with respect to the tsarist government's culpability and ideas of Russian backwardness. It goes on to show how the framing of Quaker relief work highlighted these ideas of Russian underdevelopment and mismanagement, and advanced a liberal internationalist position within Britain. It is argued that we cannot explain the appeal of humanitarianism purely by its aesthetics of suffering and sympathy, but must also look to a wider range of social and political values held by its protagonists.

СИСТЕМА СУДОУСТРОЙСТВА КАЛМЫКОВ В XVIII В.

The purpose of this article is to review the judiciary system in the Kalmyk society of the 18th century. Based on the analysis of legislative and historiographical sources, the author reconstructed the order of the formation and powers of Zargo. In 1771 when the greater part of Kalmyk uluses migrated to Dzungaria, the Kalmyk khanate was liquidated by a rescript of Catherine II, which resulted in the restructuring of the Kalmyk People Administration (UKN). The Commission for Kalmyk Affairs was attached to the office of the Governor of Astrakhan, where in 1772 the Kalmyk court - Zargo was founded, consisting of three members - by one representative from the three sub-ethnic groups of the Kalmyk people. Instead of the Commission for Kalmyk Affairs, the Kalmyk Military Chancellery was established. However, the reform of P. S. Potemkin proved to be unsuccessful, as well as the decision to delegate the functions of Zargo to the Russian district courts. Having lost the ability to exercise civil proceedings by its own laws, Kalmyks without knowing the Russian language and Russian laws appeared to be vulnerable in legal terms. Having superseded the Governor-General of the Caucasus and the Astrakhan Governor P. S. Potemkin, the State Counsellor - L. S. Alekseev tried to rectify the situation of his predecessor. All civil judicial cases related to the Kalmyk people were transferred to the Kalmyk Chancellery from the lower courts. Though, the land law, criminal and other important cases were in charge of the Caucasian Governor-General and his government. After the tsarist government had abolished the institution of the vicegerency in 1796, Astrakhan and the Caucasus regions regained the status of independent provinces. In 1797 the Kalmyk Chancellery was renamed to the Kalmyk Board and under this title, it continued to combine administrative and judicial functions up to August 1800. Thus, the authors conclude that during the 18th century, as a result of the imperial policy of the authorities, the judiciary system in the Kalmyk society underwent the transformation process.

Reconstructing the Late 16th-and 17th-Century Muscovite State Budget

Reconstructing the Late 16th-and 17th-Century Muscovite State Budget Dmitrii Liseitsev (bio) Translated by Richard Bland In recent decades, scholars have renewed their interest in the history of the 17th-century Muscovite state. The evolution of the Muscovite fiscal system (and the development of the Russian economy in general) in this period has, however, yet to attract sufficient attention from scholars. Admittedly, we have almost no information on the Russian budget in the 16th and 17th centuries that rests on a firm foundation of bureaucratic recordkeeping. As a result, works on the history of pre-Petrine Russia abound with fantastic figures, taken as a rule from narrative sources the accuracy of which has not been subjected to serious criticism. Such a deficit of research on the economic history of pre-Petrine Russia severely constricts our chances of analyzing historical trends in the 16th- and 17th-century Muscovite state. We are unable to assess not only the general tendency of state development but also the effectiveness of individual fiscal measures: for example, the significance of the imposition of extraordinary taxes in this or that period (such as interrogation [zaprosnye] and fifths [piatinnye] money, which S. B. Veselovskii wrote about more than a century ago).1 International comparisons are also difficult.2 It is characteristic that the author of the most recent survey of Russia as a military-fiscal state does not even attempt [End Page 5] to provide a quantitative or qualitative assessment of that state’s financial resources prior to 1680.3 It seems, therefore, that we must at least try to approximate the size of the Muscovite state budget in the late 16th and 17th centuries. This article undertakes such an attempt: to reconstruct the Russian government’s budget for this period. With this goal in mind, we must understand that in those centuries the very idea of a state budget did not exist. The term authentic to the period, the sovereign’s treasury (gosudareva kazna), corresponds to the modern idea of a state budget only in part, since the sovereign’s treasury, because of its specific material content, was in a sense a “virtual” idea. In the 16th and 17th centuries, neither a single fiscal system covering the whole state nor a single authority acting as the final destination of tax revenues existed. Monetary (and not just monetary) funds at the disposal of city authorities were dispersed among the central agencies of state administration—the chancelleries, of which there were about 30 in the mid-17th century (not counting small court service bureaus, which in fact did not enjoy complete autonomy or their own budgets). Many chancelleries had, in accordance with their functions, certain revenues set aside for them (individual territories or categories of taxable population from which a given chancellery collected this or that tax). In simplified form, the “state budget” of the Muscovite tsardom was the aggregate of its chancelleries’ budgets. The dispersal of the Muscovite state’s budget among its central agencies of administration complicates the modern scholar’s task, because the chancellery system was extremely flexible: throughout the system’s existence in the 16th–17th centuries some chancelleries were created, others abolished or combined. Simultaneously, territories or fees subordinate to chancelleries were changed. For example, in the mid-1660s the Ambassadorial Chancellery collected money intended to ransom captives, which, according to the undersecretary (pod´iachii) Grigorii Kotoshikhin, brought in 150,000 rubles per year.4 But when a special Captives Chancellery was established in 1667, ransom money ceased to be placed at the disposal of the diplomatic corps. Ten years later, the Captives Chancellery was abolished, and the Postal Chancellery took over the collection of ransom money. Altogether, this chancellery, which had collected about 50,000 rubles in the mid-1660s, according to Kotoshikhin, [End Page 6] increased its revenues in 1680 to 235,000 rubles—that is, by four to five times.5 As a result, the dynamics and changeability of the chancellery system make it impossible to extend conclusions based on documents of one period to the situation in other decades or the 17th century as a whole. I would also note that even aggregating the monetary revenues allotted to the...

Towards the Panopticon: School Building and Discipline in Early Modern Russia

This article explores the notion of discipline in Russia since the late 17th century and up to the accession of Catherine II. Discipline and disciplining occupy a central place in our thinking about early modern state, and the reconstruction of debates about school building helps to illuminate the ways in which this notion has been articulated. The article traces the emerging concern with using the school building as an instrument of confinement and surveillance, and demonstrates unexpected links between the Noble Cadet Corps in St Petersburg and Bentham's 'Panopticn' via the Ecole Militaire in Paris. It argues that the peculiarly modern understanding of discipline was rooted in specific religious sensibilities that had not been developed in seventeenth-century Orthodox thinking. Rather, it stresses the central role of Pietism and the Pietists in introducing these notions in post-Petrine Russia, as well as the ways in which these notions have been appropriated, 'domesticated,' and 'secularized' by a variety of Russian palters. At the end, the article reflects on the relationship between discipline, religious sensibilities, was, and the estate in a non-Western early modern context.

Hospitality at the Hands of the Muscovite Tsar: The Welcoming of Foreign Envoys in Early Modern Russia

This article discusses hospitality as it connects to diplomatic practice in early modern Russia, or Muscovy. First-hand accounts of a number of embassies, as well as Muscovite archival documents preserved in Moscow strongly suggest that the Russians placed greater emphasis on hospitality when receiving foreign envoys than did most of their contemporaries. The tsar saw to all of his guests’ needs, and with pronounced generosity and public display, thereby not only honouring his fellow rulers, but also broadcasting to onlookers, Russian and foreign alike, his wealth, power and international status. Muscovy's rulers also showed themselves able to transform the critical Moscow stage of the tsar's welcome at moments of dynastic weakness, thus enhancing the representation of the majesty and legitimacy of rulers who found themselves particularly at risk of appearing weak and vulnerable in politically turbulent times.

Criminal Law in Muscovy

Criminal Law in Muscovy George G. Weickhardt Nancy Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia. xvi + 488 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-1107025134. $115.00. On the last page of this monumental and important work Nancy Kollmann summarizes some of her principal conclusions: “This research also shows that Russia in the early modern period possessed a defined law and functioning legal system. It was not excessively violent in the European context, nor was it arbitrary in applying the law. Justice could be slow in coming or suborned, but the system was not one of unbridled satrapies, vigilante justice or uncontrolled brutality. Russia was not a despotism” (426). Thirty years ago, the claims that the early modern Russian legal system was not arbitrary and that Russia was not a despotism might have been greeted with disbelief and derision. But scholarship on Russian law in the last three decades has pointed toward Kollmann’s conclusions, which she fully supports with thorough and meticulous research into the actual practice and application of criminal law in the 17th century and Petrine period.1 Kollmann’s principal data base is homicide and serious felony cases from two regions: Beloozero in the north and Arzamas in the Middle Volga. The Beloozero archive consists of the records of 128 “litigations” (“criminal actions” might have been a more suitable term), of which 53 are homicides but only 23 are complete (extending through judgment, sentence, and punishment), including 13 homicides. The Arzamas archive contains records of 100 criminal actions, of which only 12 are complete, including 8 homicides (11). “To counterbalance the dearth of completed cases,” Kollmann also looked at 152 criminal actions from the Military Service Chancellory and [End Page 461] two other archives, which include 72 homicide cases, of which 30 were complete. In sum, her data base consists of 380 total criminal actions, of which 51 are complete homicide cases. Any doubts about how representative this data base is are removed by Kollmann’s inclusion of countless other cases and evidence from published sources, including a register of 158 cases from Tobol´sk listing the crime, social status of the accused, and the punishment (218–22). Kollmann incidentally explains the scarcity of complete case records by the loss of records over time and the possible abandonment of cases by the litigants (128). Although Kollmann’s data base of criminal actions is the largest studied to date, one hopes that future scholarship will locate and analyze more complete cases. It is, of course, difficult to judge how fairly justice was dispensed without knowing the sentence and punishment. One particularly valuable contribution of this superlative work is to compare Russia’s legal system with contemporary systems in states of Western Europe, generally assumed to have been more sophisticated and advanced. Kollmann, however, concludes that “Russia essentially fit into the pattern of statebuilding, local governance and adjudication seen in some of its early modern peers” (425). Russia was so vast and sparsely populated that it, like its early modern peers, had to rely on the local population to support centrally assigned officials. Coopting the local community meant that community norms played an important role in the administration of justice.2 Kollmann’s book is divided into two parts. The first deals with “Judicial Culture.” In this part she describes the various judicial organs or courts, both in Moscow and the provinces, and how they were staffed. She argues that judicial expertise resided in the scribal class (d´iachestvo), who assisted members of the upper service class heading the central chancelleries and serving as governors. The scribes would receive essentially “on-the-job” training in the law throughout their often decades-long service. They would master and follow a uniform model of bureaucratic language and paperwork. That they developed legal expertise is evidenced by the written reports of cases, which generally show familiarity with the Conciliar Law Code (the huge codification completed in 1649) and other statutes. Indeed, this Law Code itself is the best evidence of the vast accumulated expertise of the Muscovite legal system: it was one of the most comprehensive codifications of its time.3 [End Page 462] Kollmann, however, perhaps overstates...

КЛАССИКИ МАРКСИЗМА О ХАРАКТЕРЕ РАБОЧЕГО ДВИЖЕНИЯ В РОССИИ

The article analyzes the assessment of the nature of the labor movement in the industrialized countries and in Russia in the 19th -early 20th centuries by the Marxist theorists. They marked out three stages of the workers' struggle: the struggle of pre-proletariat (apprentices and plebs) of medieval towns, the struggle of manufacturing workers and the social movement of factory workers. On the example of the workers' struggle in Europe and North America in the 19th century they concluded the inevitability of a social revolution in the capitalist society. However, the labor movement in the late 19th - early 20th centuries in Western Europe and the United States, after the turbulent period of class struggles, moved into a more effective legal economic and political struggle. It was observed and theoretically comprehended by the leaders of European social democracy who made conclusions about the prevalence of evolutionism in the labor movement, in contrast to the revolutionary spirit of the previous time. However, the Marxist theorists of Western Europe noted that the struggle of the Russian proletariat did not come out of the early revolutionary phase of the labor movement, in contrast to the struggle of the working class in more developed countries of Europe and North America. This was the reason for disagreement between V.I. Lenin and the reformist leaders of European social democracy in determining the political tasks of the proletariat. V.I. Lenin came from the practical problems of the Russian social-democrats in the analysis of the history of the labor movement in Russia, so he gave a description of the labor movement in Russia only in relation to the end of the 19th - early 20th centuries, without covering its previous stages. On the basis of the same practice of political struggle, V.I. Lenin placed the labor movement in the history of the people's liberation struggle against the tsarist regime as the highest stage of the struggle that his party, the RSDLP, headed. This fight was definitely revolutionary. Progress of the country, according to V.I. Lenin, could only be achieved through a socialist revolution, by overthrowing the existing government. While V.I. Lenin fought for political power, he put the class interests of the proletariat above the national interests of the country, identifying the latter with the interests of the ruling classes. During World War I, V.I. Lenin came across the misunderstanding of leaders of European social democracy who supported their governments in the war, putting national interests above class interests of the proletariat in their countries. Even in the first years after the victory of the October Revolution, Lenin did not lose hope for the world proletarian revolution. The author believes that the working class of modern Russia that lost its political leadership, social and ideological orientations in the crises of the last quarter of the century never said its last word in its history; for this reason, the Marxist analysis of the labor movement has not lost its relevance.

Рецепция имперского / царского пространства власти в России 1990-х – 2010-х гг.

The article by Ekaterina Boltunova discusses a situation that is rarely addressed in studies of the politics of historical memory. Rather than focusing on the process of the “invention of tradition” (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger) and the designation of “sites of memory” (Pierre Nora) in post-Soviet Russia, Boltunova shows what happens afterward, when politicians and the general public begin inhabiting the newly created spaces of important historical symbolism and fall under the influence of their recently created narratives. More specifically, the article focuses on ceremonial spaces related to tsars and emperors in Moscow and St. Petersburg: the Faceted Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin, St. Andrew Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace (Moscow), St. Peter and St. George Halls in the Winter Palace (the Hermitage in St. Petersburg). Russian presidents Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitry Medvedev felt it necessary to fashion their own ceremonial quarters in former imperial palaces by using and adapting the symbolism of spatial representation of past authority – even though those historical precedents themselves were the products of very recent architectural restorations. Once reconstructed, Russia’s historical memory of political grandeur has appealed in different ways to the main centers of power. While the government (president) feels more comfortable with symbolism of the imperial period, the Russian Orthodox Church (the Moscow Patriarchate) has claimed representations of the pre-Petrine Moscow tsardom. Thus, the “invented traditions” acquire agency of their own.

Keeping the Germans Out of the Straits: The Five Ottoman Dreadnought Thesis Reconsidered

This article contests Sean McMeekin’s claims concerning Russian culpability for the First World War. McMeekin maintains that Ottoman rearmament, particularly the purchase of several battleships released onto the global arms market by South American states, threatened to create a situation where the Russian Black Sea Fleet would be outclassed by its Ottoman opposite number. Rather than waiting for this to happen, the tsarist regime chose to go to war. Yet, contrary to McMeekin’s claims, the Ottoman naval expansion never assumed threatening dimensions because the Porte was unable to purchase battleships from Chile or Argentina. As a result, it provided no incentive for Russia to go to war in 1914.

Engineering Empire

This essay examines hydraulic engineers in Central Asia under tsarist rule and their participation in processes of agricultural expansion and empire-building in the imperial province of Turkestan. This province theoretically provided the perfect space in which Russians, who continually worried about their own “backwardness” in relation to Europe, could demonstrate their ability to be a colonial power on par with European empires, yet the lack of an understanding of irrigation engineering and the difficulties of irrigating arid regions threatened to jeopardize Russia’s efforts at a “civilizing mission.” Still, a growing group of Russian technical specialists was able to participate in scientific dialogue and transnational technological exchanges with other hydraulic engineers in other parts of the world who were similarly enthusiastic about the potential of science and technology to create a more modern future in the Russian Central Asian borderlands. Ultimately, however, even though the zeal of these Russian and foreign hydraulic experts coincided with Russian political ambitions in Turkestan, the political realities of the tsarist government’s position in the region would determine the fate of their grand visions for transformation.

‘Peculiar Resistance’: Tuberculosis, Identity and Conflict among Jewish Physicians in Early- Twentieth-Century America

‘Peculiar Resistance’:Tuberculosis, Identity and Conflict among Jewish Physicians in Early- Twentieth-Century America Adrienne Denoyelles (bio) Throughout the nineteenth century, tuberculosis (TB) killed more Americans than any other infectious disease.1 For much of this period, people regarded TB as an age-old, private malady caused largely by hereditary factors. Only after German physician Robert Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus in the 1880s did its image begin shifting into that of a modern, public scourge requiring medical intervention.2 This reconceptualization also reflected Americans’ reactions to the modern forces transforming their physical and cultural landscape. Prominent citizens questioned whether unchecked immigration, industrialization, and urban development had compromised their nation’s ability to compete for resources, defend its borders, or even reproduce effectively, triggering widespread fears of “race suicide.”3 Tuberculosis, an infectious disease that saps the inner strength and vitality of its victims, embodied these fears perfectly. Social anxiety, together with the fluid etiology of TB, created ideal conditions for associating tuberculosis with “new” immigrants—particularly Eastern European Jews, whose urban backgrounds, indoor occupations, [End Page 349] and popular caricatures suggested strong ties between modernity and physical weakness.4 Immigration Restriction League officer Prescott Hall spoke for many antisemitic Americans when he portrayed Jews as potential societal burdens who were likely to contract tuberculosis shortly after their arrival.5 These depictions of the foreign-born as deadly vectors of disease comprised a central component of the growing debate over immigration, which became increasingly racialized and reinforced by scientific or pseudoscientific arguments.6 While historians have shed considerable light on the role of immigrant physicians as cultural mediators, much work remains in examining the difficult terrain they negotiated as aspiring professionals and as representatives for their minority groups.7 The writings of Maurice Fishberg, Theodore B. Sachs, and Charles David Spivak demonstrate that Jewish immigrant physicians did not speak with one voice as they worked to safeguard their fellows’ health and advancement opportunities. Fishberg, who was also a physical anthropologist, promoted Jews as hardy, tuberculosis-resistant survivors whose cultural values resonated with America’s white middle class. This argument placed him into conflict with Sachs and Spivak, who founded sanitariums to address a growing tuberculosis crisis among the Jewish poor. These approaches in turn faced criticism from Solomon Solis-Cohen, a nativeborn physician whose [End Page 350] assessment of Jewish tuberculosis called for a drastic restructuring of American society altogether. Placing these physicians into conversation through their professional publications yields valuable insights into the challenges of American identity-building for immigrant Jews and their communities—most notably the intra-ethnic and individual conflicts accompanying that process.8 Fishberg, Sachs, Spivak: Common Background Factors A glimpse into these immigrant physicians’ formative years suggests that they, along with a generation of aspiring Russian Jews, encountered discrimination and the challenges of bridging their cultural and national identities long before arriving in the United States. Born between 1860 and 1875 in different regions of present-day Ukraine, Maurice Fishberg, Theodore Sachs, and Charles Spivak grew up amid the social and intellectual ferment of the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment movement.9 As the tsarist government began easing restrictions in the 1860s regarding where educated Jewish professionals could live and work, increasing numbers of Jews abandoned traditional religious training to pursue a secular education in state-sponsored gymnasiums and universities.10 There, they hoped to find new paths upward where “a person would [End Page 351] be judged not by his wealth, fame or race, but by his knowledge and character.”11 These opportunities introduced Fishberg, Sachs, and Spivak to a broad range of Western languages and ideas, situating them within an emerging “Russified,” Jewish intelligentsia.12 Many Jewish students at the university level, Sachs and Spivak among them, achieved a measure of solidarity with their Russian classmates through common causes, most notably radical political activism.13 Fishberg, who attended university in the United States, listed his Russian secondary-school education among his professional credentials throughout his thirty-seven-year career, suggesting that he valued it highly as a mark of distinction.14 As they sought social mobility through state-sponsored channels, these men experienced the pressures of representing their ethnic group in non...

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, by Joshua M. Karlip

The Tragedy of a Generation: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism in Eastern Europe, by Joshua M. Karlip. Cambridge, and London, Harvard University Press, 2013. xii, 378 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). Among the dizzying array of political ideologies that circulated among Russian and Eastern European Jews in the early years of the twentieth-century, diaspora nationalism is often overshadowed by the more influential ideologies of Zionism and Marxism. Recent works by Simon Rabinovitch, Kenneth Moss, Adam Rovner and others have sought to correct this imbalance, by turning our attention as well to the diaspora nationalists, Territorialists, and others who sought Jewish national autonomy outside of Palestine. In this, his first book, Joshua Karlip tells the tragic story of a trio of diaspora nationalists--Elias Tcherikower, Yisroel Efroikin, and Zelig Hirsh Kalmanovitch--each of whose career and ideological trajectories followed a similar path from idealism to despair. All three were born in the 1880s in the western provinces of Russia, to which Jewish residence was largely restricted. Tcherikower and Efroikin came from middle-class families, whereas Kalmanovitch had more modest roots. Yet all three managed to receive university educations, a difficult feat given restrictions on Jewish movement and quotas against Jewish students. In the university environment of the Russian fin-de-siecle and immediate aftermath of the 1905 revolution, all three became active in political opposition to the tsarist regime--Tcherikower as a Menshevik, Efroikin in the Jewish Socialist Labor Party (SERP), and Kalmanovitch as a Socialist Zionist. Within a few years, though, they became disillusioned with the possibilities of parliamentary politics in Russia, and instead turned to cultural activity, believing that a return to Jewish traditions, particularly as manifested in secular Yiddish culture, could help save Russian Jewry. Tcherikower first became involved with the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia and then moved to the United States to write for the Yiddish press; Efroikin put his faith in the cooperative movement in Russia; and Kalmanovitch became co-editor of the influential Kletskin press. By the time war broke out, all three were united in their belief in secular Jewish cultural autonomy. Like most Russian Jews, they greeted the fall of the tsar and the February Revolution of 1917 with euphoria, convinced that Jewish cultural autonomy was about to be fulfilled, only to be crestfallen with the Bolshevik takeover. They were once again disappointed when the pogroms destroyed any hopes for Jewish autonomy in Ukraine. Tcherikower now devoted himself to collecting documentation of the pogroms that plagued the region, encompassing a massive archive of testimonies. Efroikin, too, despaired of the shrinking opportunities for autonomy in the new states of Europe, and advocated for the establishment of a type of world Jewish congress. …

The South Manchurian Railway Company and the Mining Industry: The Case of the Fushun Coal Mine

Following the Japanese victory over Czarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, the southernmost section of the southern branch of the China Far East Railway (Changchun–Port Arthur) was transferred to Japanese control. A new, semi-privately held company, the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR, Mantetsu, was established with 85.6 percent capitalization by the Japanese government and foreign bonds to operate the railroad and to develop settlements (including highways, public health facilities, educational institutions,) and industries (coal mines, harbor facilities, electrical power plants, shale oil plants, chemical plants, and restaurants) along its route. SMR nonetheless emphasized railway and mining investment. The centerpiece of its mining interests was the Fushun Coal Mine. Starting in 1917, SMR began to prosper, with most profits coming from its coal mines, and it soon spun off subsidiary companies. In this sense, although the factors that influenced development of the Fushun Coal Mine in each period were different, this development still shows continuity of the business management.

Zadoff, Mirjam William Templer (review)

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 768 Army). Whilst they destroyed the dynasty, much of the old ruling elite, and the ideologies that sustained them, they replaced them with a new cosmopolitan ruling elite and over-arching ideology of their own, albeit one that was able to accommodate minority nationalisms in ways which neither the tsarist regime nor Ungern ever contemplated. The Baron’s Cloak manages the rare feat of being both readable and scholarly — my only real criticism would be that, no doubt with an eye to the general reader, the publishers have banished the references to endnotes, rather than at the foot of each page where they belong. Nazarbayev University Alexander Morrison Zadoff, Mirjam. Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture. Translated by William Templer. Jewish Culture and Contexts. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2012. x + 320 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $49.95: £32.50. Mirjam Zadoff’s rigorous study of Carlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad, recently translated from German, will be of great interest to scholars of multi-ethnic central Europe, Jewish historians and medical humanists, alike. Beginningherstudyinthe1870sandendingin1938,Zadoffexaminesthewestern Bohemian spa not only as a cosmopolitan place of healing and leisure but as a ‘Jewish place, with different sides and protagonists, infused with connotations both positive and negative’ (p. 4). Although she focuses on the experience of a minority population, Zadoff powerfully insists on the heterogeneity of the Jewish subjects who lived, visited and worked in the spa triangle. As she posits: ‘an important prerequisite’ of her project ‘is to conceptualize the individual Jewish groups as “cultures” and not as static units’ (p. 6). The merits of this approach become apparent over the course of the study’s four sections. In part one, Zadoff turns her eye to the group of Jewish physicians and balneological scientists who found work in the newly established sanatoria and hospitals. The spas offered opportunities for career advancement otherwise denied these Jewish professionals. In part two, Zadoff moves away from the Jewish medical professionals to examine the overlapping individuals and social groups who encountered each other in the spa. They included now famous figures as Franz Kafka, Ernst Bloch and Theodor Lessing alongside middle-class women looking for marriage matches, Yiddish writers who combined ‘taking the cure’ with public performances, and Chassidic rebbes and their followers. Zadoff plots the ‘invisible social boundaries’ (p. 9) and ‘miscounters’ (ch. 6) of these individuals and groups, exploring how they both engaged each other and self-segregated everywhere from the promenade to the REVIEWS 769 hotel dining room. Zadoff profiles the diverse motivations of these ‘cultures’ by drawing on memoirs, travel guides, fictional texts, spa ephemera and various archival sources in German, Hebrew, Yiddish and, to a lesser extent, Czech. For scholars unfamiliar with the diversity of Jewish life, Zadoff provides a nuanced portrait of intracommunal differences. It was the ability of the spa to anchor such variegated moments of Jewish self-identification and differentiation that also motivates Zadoff’s second interpretive key. Zadoff looks to Foucault to argue that the spas functioned as ‘compensatory heterotopias’ or, in her words, as ‘idealized counter-worlds of everydaylife’(p.9).Andinpartsthreeandfour,theabilityofthespastofunction as such idealized, orderly and protective espaces autres assumes the clearest urgency. These final sections draw attention to Jewish spa culture between the World Wars. Located between western and eastern Europe, the Bohemian resort offered tourists a reachable sanctuary of ‘relaxation and recuperation’ as German and Austrian spas became increasingly hostile to Jewish visitors (p. 208). In 1921 and 1923, for example, the World Zionist Congress convened in Carlsbad. In this atmosphere, the rhetoric of bodily healing easily translated into a Zionist discussion of national-political revivification and many Congress participants ‘stay[ed] on afterward to take the healing waters’ (p. 199). ThesefinalsectionsarealsowhereZadoff’sskillsasbothreaderandinterpreter are at their best. Here, Zadoff does the most work to examine the reaction of local Jews to the growing sentiments of antisemitism in the spa towns. As she does throughout, Zadoff draws on the tools of microhistory to narrate a number of conversations as to how best to respond to such obstacles. Jewish business owners and community organizations feared that such antisemitic rhetoric would discourage the arrival...

Likwidacja unii cerkiewnej na Białorusi według Wasyla Lencyka

As a result of the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century more than half of 4 million faithful of the Uniate Church in the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands fell under Russian rule. The theory and practice of religious and ethnic policies of the Russian Empire had not allowed the existence of East Slavic Christians minority not subject to the Great Russian Orthodoxy but associated with Rome and Latin culture. The first dissolution of the Church Union performed immediately after the partitions of Poland proved to be only partially successful for tsarist regime. Another liquidation of Church Union during the reign of tsar Nicholas I, completed in 1839, was carried out in the so-called Taken Lands (Western Krai) on the right bank of the Bug River following a carefully prepared and consistently implemented plan of “reforms” of the rite in the Great Russian and Orthodox spirit until completely merge into the state religion. The Work of Vasil’ Lencik, American historian of Ukrainian origin, was the first attempt to bring the researchers and the general public in the Western world the issue of the controversial religious policy of the Russian state in the first half of the nineteenth century. The author argued that the objectives of tsarist religious policy was the complete unification of the East Slavic inhabitants of Belarus and its neighbouring lands with Russia, breaking all ties of hierarchy and clergy with the Latin and Polish culture influence and the destruction of emerging national consciousness among Ukrainian and Belarussian population.

, : Xviii . (Taxes and Budget Information in Early Modern Russia: The Poll Tax in the City and the Village of the Xviii Century.)

Russian Abstract: В данной работе на основе широкого круга источников, в том числе впервые вводимых в научный оборот, проанализированы законодательные нормы, административные механизмы и практики, касающиеся сбора подушной подати в России XVIII в. Выявлены специфика работы административного аппарата в городе и в деревне, восприятие подушной подати и методов ее сбора городским и сельским населением.English Abstract: This paper analyzes legal norms and administrative practices typical for collecting the poll tax that was established in Russia by Peter I and formed the basis of state income during the eighteenth century. The research, based on various archival collections, compares the work of state apparatus in Russia’s countryside and cities.

SEEKING INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION: THE CHALLENGE THE MOUNTAIN REPUBLIC HAD FACED UP

paper examined the foreign policy carried by the Mountain Republic proclaimed within the boundaries of the Tersk and the Provinces (of Russia). In December 1917, The Union of the United Highlanders of Northern Caucasus and Dagestan unilaterally declared secession from Russia and while seeking recognition of the Government of the Mountain Republic addressed to a number of European states. paper considered the diplomatic attempts made by the leaders of the Republic to enlist support by Germany and other European Powers, and the United States and Turkey as well. Turkey has brought troops into Dagestan, while the Entente associate countries seeking restoration of the Tsarist Regime in Russia, have not supported the Republic, once having observed the country leaders taking an ambiguous position towards the Bolshevik Government. author made an inference that the foreign policy factor significantly contributed to both the making of the Mountain Republic and its dissolution.

Hartnett, Lynne Ann. The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution (review)

REVIEWS 573 Hartnett, Lynne Ann. The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2014. xvii + 324 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00:£22.99. ‘Vera Figner was supposed to die in 1884’ (p. xiii). The opening line of Lynne Ann Hartnett’s work would not be out of place at the start of a novel and, indeed, stripped to its essentials, Figner’s life seems like the stuff of fiction. Born into wealth, and blessed with intelligence, charisma and good looks, she trained as a doctor, despite Russian state opposition to such a venture, then sacrificed her financial security (to an extent), her marriage, and her relatively secure position as a member of the Russian nobility, to join the revolutionary movement. She became a terrorist and participated in the successful plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881, escaped a death sentence, which was commuted to imprisonment, then survived a twenty-year term in Shlisselburg Fortress. Finally, and perhaps most startlingly, she lived on through the Revolutions and Civil War, as well as the upheavals of the 1930s, taking her place amongst the celebrated revolutionary elite of the Soviet regime, and carrying out philanthropic work until the end of her life in 1942. Given the potential for myth making around her and her own propensity to exploit her legend for revolutionary (and her own) purposes, it is astonishing that her long and colourful life, played out as it was against a background of seismic political, economic and social change, has not spawned numerous biographies. Shorter accounts have been published, but Hartnett’s is the first full-length biography of Figner in English. This can probably be attributed to two key reasons: Figner was not a Bolshevik and she was a woman. Yet, to Hartnett, these facts make Figner an even more fascinating figure and it is apparent from her acknowledgements that this has been a labour of love. Nonetheless, Hartnett takes a clear-sighted and approach to her subject. She demonstrates a deep familiarity with Figner’s own numerous memoirs, as well as her personal correspondence, but also makes effective use of the testimony of others about her. Hartnett skilfully draws out the central tensions in Figner’s character and life, some of which are a familiar part of biographies of other prominent revolutionaries and others which are entirely her own. It was Figner’s noble birth which enabled her to take up the peasants’ and workers’ cause, but though she rejected the inequalities of the tsarist regime, she never entirely gave up the privileges, assumptions or mannerisms of her class. She chose a life of personal sacrifice, but had a confident, even at times theatrical, sense of self, which always seems to have given her the strength to carry on in the face of risk, oppression and overwhelming odds. Her refusal to join any political party or organization after 1917 was as much a reflection of her consistent refusal to do anything she was not entirely committed to, as it SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 574 was a new determination to choose practical philanthropy over party politics. Lastly, as Hartnett’s rigorous use of gender analysis highlights, Figner both defied expectations of her sex, but also exploited them to enable her survival and success as a revolutionary. While her early life and career as a terrorist is a compelling tale, Figner’s experiencesafterherreleasefromprisonarealsoanimportantandilluminating element of the biography. Figner was elected to the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies (ahead of Gor´kii, Kropotkin and Lenin), joined the Council of the Republic/ Pre-parliament and was a member of the Constituent Assembly. She also dedicated herself to promoting a vision of a humane revolutionary society by forming and working on committees to improve women’s rights, to help the starving and to support political prisoners. Lastly, she helped preserve the history of the revolutionary movement by co-founding Culture and Liberty, overseeing the publication of her own considerable memoirs and publishing numerous works on other revolutionaries. On her death she merited a halfpage obituary on page 4 of Pravda. Although Figner was a famous and politically active figure throughout her life, historians...

Riga and Tallinn in the late tsarist era: Multiethnicity and social and political change

This article offers a comparative perspective on the impact of the rapid development of the Baltic cities of Riga and Tallinn (Ger. Reval) from the 1860s to the eve of the First World War in 1914. In many ways typical East-Central European cities, Riga and Tallinn had been dominated by a Baltic German elite for centuries until the middle of the nineteenth century. In the six-decade period until the collapse of the tsarist regime the population of the two cities mushroomed and their ethnic composition changed drastically, especially as Latvians and Estonians increasingly chose the urban option. Adapting to this growing multiethnic diversity provided a challenge for both cities in the last decades of the Russian Empire. Various forms of modernization, including industrialization, expanded trade, and new access to various options in the free professions, afforded the opportunity for upward social mobility. In the contest for hegemony between the Russian and German languages Latvian and Estonian found a niche for themselves, also buoyed by their rapidly growing numbers. Even some local political change transpired in the last years of the Russian Empire.