1000+ images about Russia in the Age of Absolutism on Pinterest | Emperor, Swedish army and Saint petersburg Pinterest • The world’s catalog of ideas Russia in the Age of Absolutism The era of absolutism, exemplified by the "Sun King" Louis XIV Bourbon of France, marks the rise of rulers throughout Europe who had absolute power over their nations. Mercantilism became the primary form of economy of the day, and the issue of religion disappeared in European wars, now replaced by the issue of the balance of power. 93 Pins359 Followers William Craft Brumfield [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: History, by definition, depends on the existence of written records; everything before the appearance of writing is considered prehistory. Material objects have always informed scholars’ understanding of the past, and since the appearance of the Annales school almost a century ago, the study of the material world has taken on increasing importance. Even so, historical research tends to focus on documents—laws, letters, diaries, literature, and whatever other forms of written expression have survived the crises and catastrophes of time.

Yet there is a certain magic in standing inside an ancient building—especially one where one’s research subject lived or worked—and sensing its weight, its colors, its smell, the patterns on its walls. To look at those soaring spires or cramped corners, to see how low the lintels lie compared to the head of the contemporary person standing next to them, or to imagine maneuvering through that set of narrow doors in skirts six feet wide is to experience the past in a visceral way. Although a photograph does not quite match that level of intensity, it creates its own kind of record, capturing a moment in time while allowing a deeper appreciation of both the whole and the individual details that make up that whole. The shape of the Solovki towers, the glorious blue of the Ferapontovo frescoes painted by Dionisii in 1502, the Transfiguration Church on Kizhi Island silhouetted against a blazing sunset: these images linger in the mind, anchoring the documentary descriptions in ways not easily accomplished by words alone. William Craft Brumfield has devoted much of his career to creating a photographic record of Russia’s architectural heritage.

His works provide striking visual images to spark the historian’s imagination and the necessary academic context that explains how to interpret what we see. Professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University, he has been and remains a scholar of Russian literature, but he is now best known for his architectural photography, which [End Page 379] has won multiple awards.1 In addition to publishing six books in English and four times as many in Russian, as well as contributing chapters to and editing three more collections—all on Russian architectural history—he has mounted exhibitions of his photographs in the United States and abroad, including a large exhibit devoted to the Russian North in 2001.2 A list of online collections of Brumfield’s photographs appears at the end of this interview. Over the years, Brumfield’s many fellowships and grants have enabled him to take thousands of high-quality color and black-and-white photographs of buildings—some destroyed by revolution and war, others miraculously surviving almost intact for centuries, still others renovated or newly built after the collapse of communism.

The churches of the North and Siberia, merchants’ houses and monasteries, the fortifications of western Russian towns invaded first by Napoleon and then by Hitler, and many more are documented in these photographs—a small selection of which appears in the color insert included with the interview. We at Kritika thank Professor Brumfield for his work, which vastly enriches our field. The conversation that follows reveals both what historians miss when they overlook the physical structures of Muscovy, imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union and the processes by which these enduring remnants of the Russian past have been captured in print. Your first book publication was Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture (1983), followed by The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (1991). Few other historians of Russia pay much attention to architecture and the role it plays in human life. What are we missing? The architectural environment of any particular time and place is a compendium of historical layers defined by what has survived from the past. We can often learn as much about a society from what is not there (what has been destroyed or allowed to decay) as from what is present. An obvious example is the destruction of churches during the Soviet period.

[End Page 380] More recently, the widespread neglect and destruction of traditional wooden buildings in... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Michael David-Fox [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Do new biographies of the dictator provoke deeper analysis of the Soviet system? Will the life of Stalin open up new ways of understanding Stalinism? Past experience, it has to be said, raises doubts. Of all the biographies of Stalin, few have integrated, much less altered, the state of the art in Soviet history. The main reason for this fact also explains why so many Stalin biographies get written: they sell. The temptation is perennial for semilearned amateurs to pen sensationalist blockbusters. More sober-minded academic biographies, when written by those focused on the leader more than the system, tend to elide the much more difficult conceptual questions of how Stalin shaped—and, crucially, was shaped by—first revolutionary Russia and then the broader Soviet political system, culture, and ideology. The Russian field has never had anything like Ian Kershaw’s two-volume Hitler biography.

Kershaw came to Hitler’s life steeped in historiographical analysis: his interpretation of the literature on National Socialism went through four editions. Through his famous concept of “working toward the Führer,” Kershaw linked the Nazi system in new ways to the leader, thus helping to transcend the intentionalist-functionalist split. If one were to pick any two Soviet historians capable of producing something analogous for our own field, it would be Stephen Kotkin, the American historian who helped the field move beyond the totalitarian-revisionist divide with his notion of “Stalinism as a civilization,” and Oleg Khlevniuk, the Russian authority on the archival holdings related to Stalin-era high politics and a world-renowned expert on Stalinism. In many ways, the two works are very different. If Kotkin’s opus resembles a tank, seeking to awe if not shock the reader with its sheer scope and force, Khlevniuk’s deceptively simple craftsmanship is more akin to a fine watch. Kotkin’s sprawling 949 pages takes the story up until the onset of collectivization, constituting but one of three projected volumes.

Yet one could justifiably say that volume 1 is really three books in one: the first, the biography of Stalin, is a story that develops very slowly, because the gradually increasing importance of the Georgian’s improbable trajectory is placed within the second book-within-a-book, a history of the Russian and Soviet states, punctuated by the history of the Russian Revolution. The third dimension is a geopolitical narrative about Russia, its foreign policy, and the world of the great powers. In a kind of treasure hunt for specialists, long textbook-like sections are strewn with brilliant insights, striking turns of phrase, and original interpretations; the research and synthetic interpretation of Stalin and his role are integrated into this grand récit. The modest and hardworking Khlevniuk, by contrast, delivers concise coverage of Stalin’s entire life and times in under 400 pages and delineates a consistent focus on Stalin’s political methods of rule, especially in terms of the top political elite. Given these differences in form, the similarities and tacit consensus between them are just as striking. Both see the vozhd´ emerge squarely from the revolutionary movement and political struggle rather than, say, the alleged abnormalities of his childhood or personality.

Both focus on high politics, with Kotkin putting special stress on foreign policy and giving strong coverage to issues of empire and economics, while Khlevniuk highlights repressions and the Politburo elite. Both repudiate the tradition of depicting Stalin as a mediocrity or mere praktik. Both, quite rightly, take it as a given that, despite the condescension of elite Old Bolshevik theoreticians, he was very much a member of the party intelligentsia. For Kotkin, the seminarian was a striver with “tremendous dedication to self-improvement” who “devoured books, which, as a Marxist, he did so in order to change the world” (10). Khlevniuk, acutely aware of Stalin’s growing approval ratings in today’s Russia, makes more of a point of emphasizing the future theoretical genius’s intellectual deficiencies, such as his reduction of complex problems to simplistic slogans. But he sees Stalin’s attraction to the teacher-like role of the professional revolutionary as the primary reason he adhered to Leninism in the first place (24). Both, at least on...

Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Galina Ulianova [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: In recent years, historians have increasingly concentrated on the history of private life, inspired by the traditions established by the Annales school and Jürgen Habermas. The historiography of imperial Russia has been enriched by dozens of studies of various aspects of private life in cities and in rural Russia. This review focuses on three recent studies of private everyday life in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. They have three elements in common. First, they examine how the idea of private life was interpreted by various social strata and under different circumstances. Second, most of their materials concern Russian provincial life. Finally, all the works employ the microhistorical method and are based on little-used letters, diaries, and memoirs. Microhistory as a methodology in historical writing first appeared in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The USSR, then Russia, were latecomers, and the first similar studies based on Russian materials began to appear only in the late 1980s.

Philological and cultural studies were the first disciplines to deploy this method (above all, Iurii Lotman’s Tartu school); among historians, the first were medievalists studying Western Europe (for example, Aron Gurevich with his Categories of Medieval Culture). Over the last 20 years, historical anthropology has finally become prominent in Russianist studies, both in Russia and in the West. But despite hundreds of articles of this kind, larger studies are still rare. This dearth relates to the difficulty of finding a compact and complete set of sources, such as the diaries of the US midwife Martha Ballard or the Russian merchant Ivan Tolchënov, which enable a full-scale microhistorical study. The three books under review concern different historical epochs and different levels of practices of private life. The earliest chronologically is the collection edited by Andrew Kahn, which deals not only with Russia but other countries as well—France, Italy, and England. The 4 articles out of 14 that deal with Russia interpret the period from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great as the age when individualistic aspirations and desires first ripened within Russian society.

The collection is interdisciplinary and includes articles from historians and philologists studying different aspects of private life: religious experience (Viktor Zhivov), gentry writing (Irina Reyfman), gardens as public space (Andreas Schönle), and the acquisition of self-knowledge through sexual experience accompanied by infection from venereal disease (Andrei Zorin). The monograph by Katherine Pickering Antonova presents virtually all aspects of the private life of a middling noble provincial family in the 1820s–60s: birth and death, illness and health, motherhood and fatherhood, economic life and interaction with neighbors, and the conceptualization of one family’s position in provincial society and in Russia’s estate hierarchy. Svetlana Malysheva’s book examines the sphere of leisure and cultural communication, attempting to trace the development of free time and entertainment in the public sphere in 1860–1914, the period when Russian urban space became municipalized after the Great Reforms. Considerable attention is given to the discourse of dialogue and conflict among the multiconfessional population of Kazan, in which the cultural preferences of Russian Orthodox and Muslim Tatar inhabitants did not always coincide.

All three books address crucial methodological and empirical questions. How can one use private life to understand the rigidly hierarchical structure of Russian society? And just how rigid was this social matrix? To what extent did it permit individual development in the age of modernity? Each of the authors constructs an argument about Russian models of public space formation, separate spheres, domesticity, and so on. Representing Private Lives of the Enlightenment is a lively and engaging work that deserves an important place in contemporary social studies of European bourgeois culture. In the introduction, Andrew Kahn notes, “by bringing Russia into the fold, the case studies offer a comparative framework with more instructive symmetries and asymmetries than might have been the case if other Western European countries had been set alongside the English and French material that traditionally dominates” (3–4). Also, the authors of the volume seek to demonstrate how figures from very diverse social groups mapped their social and domestic world. The points of conjunction between private and public...

Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Martin Aust [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Jürgen Osterhammel’s Transformation of the World is a balanced and thoughtful example of a true world history. The book consists of three parts. Part 1, “Approaches,” discusses Memory and Self-Observation, Time, and Space and thus convincingly addresses the fundamental categories of history writing in general. Part 2 is called “Panoramas” and Part 3 “Themes,” both of which are also appropriate, although it’s unclear why Osterhammel chose to place topics such as Mobilities, Living Standards, Cities, Frontiers, Imperial Systems and Nation-States, International Orders, Revolutions, and The State under “Panoramas,” while grouping topics such as Energy and Industry, Labor, Networks, Hierarchies, Knowledge, Civilization and Exclusion, and Religion under “Themes.” Still, there’s no doubt that the book fully deserves to be considered a world history, as all the regions of the globe are represented and receive their fair share of attention. This includes Russia, which is treated fairly consistently throughout the book.

But even more important is the way that Osterhammel integrates the Russian experience into his analysis. Basically he goes about this in three ways, adopting the same approach to Russia that he does to the other countries and continents that figure in the narrative. He includes individual cases in his narration of general global developments; he makes comparisons between states and regions to underscore the realities of historical variation; and he draws attention to the entanglements between countries and continents, ranging from political interaction to the flows of commodities and the movement of ideas and peoples that tied them together. This approach applies to the whole analytical sweep of the book. No single paragraph highlights a given country or region for its own sake. Instead every detail appears as part of a larger interpretation. As for Russia specifically, Osterhammel relates its history to the larger world in a few key ways. First, he uses Russia to exemplify general global developments of the 19th century. Of the many ways that Osterhammel does this, four of the analytical rubrics that he devises strike me as particularly useful: the 1880s threshold, territoriality, mobilities, and wars.

Discussing various chronologies that structure the 19th century, Osterhammel highlights the so-called 1880s threshold as a time of change on a global scale. This threshold links the Victorian age and the fin de siècle leading up to World War I. In terms of political, military, and economic history, Russia serves as one of many examples to drive home this view of the 1880s as a key period of transition (63–65). Alexander’s III restoration of autocracy is compared to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s suspension of the Ottoman constitution in 1878. The Russian revolution of 1905–7 is put into line with revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and China in the early 20th century. As to the economy, Osterhammel says: “Global industrialization entered a new phase. Japan and Russia experienced what economic historians used to call a ‘takeoff,’ that is, transition to self-sustaining growth.

Things were not yet so advanced in India or in South Africa (where large gold deposits were discovered in 1886), but a core of industrial and mining capitalism began to take shape in both countries, for the first time outside the West and Japan” (63). Thus Russian history from the 1880s until World War I appears to be in line with trends in a number of other countries across the globe. Russia also plays an important role when it comes to the issue of 19th-century territoriality: “Large states came into being—huge entities such as the United States, Canada (federated in 1867), and the Tsarist Empire, which only now really took possession of Siberia and expanded into Central Asia. The sober Friedrich Ratzel was not merely engaging in social Darwinist reverie when he elaborated a ‘law of the spatial growth of states’ ” (108). Border zones provided another important feature of imperial territoriality: “Every empire had its open flanks: France in the Algerian Sahara, Britain in the North-West Frontier of India, the Tsarist Empire in the Caucasus” (113).

Osterhammel’s rendering of frontiers also includes Russia’s expansion into global patterns, in this case in regards to sources of wealth: “The other source... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History François-Xavier Nérard [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: J. Arch Getty has played a major role in defining our understanding of Soviet history. His 1985 book on purges was an important study within the socalled revisionist school.1 There he advanced a new understanding of political violence in the Soviet Union that was different from the then-dominant paradigm of a violence conceived, ordered, and carried out carefully from above through an efficient chain of command. His new book represents both continuity and rupture with his earlier works. Just as he did 30 years ago, Getty tries to understand the origins of the political violence that peaked in 1937–38. In this respect, Practicing Stalinism echoes his earlier book and in a certain sense represents a completion of 30-years’ research, bringing in archival sources that were unavailable at the beginning of the 1980s.

As in his earlier work, in his new book Getty is interested in conflicts, tensions, groups, and rivalry. But many of his interpretations are new: most noticeably, the role of Iosif Stalin is conceptualized in a different way, and the dictator occupies a far more central place in Getty’s new book. Practicing Stalinism combines two layers of argumentation. The core chapters of the book (chaps. 3–8) focus on political conflicts in Stalin’s USSR that are mostly interpreted in terms of struggle between clans and groups, and as center-periphery tensions. In this part of the book, Getty studies the personal and political conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, discussing the actors, development, and resolution. But in the first chapters of the book—and this is new—the author attempts to situate these struggles within the broader [End Page 475] context of the modernization/tradition debate.2 Arch Getty opens his book by drawing continuities among Ivan IV’s Muscovy, Stalin’s USSR, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

He also underscores these continuities in the “epilogue.” It is through this persistence of Russian traditionalism that Getty seeks to explain many of the phenomena he is discussing. Getty follows in the footsteps of several other scholars of Soviet history by uncovering signs of archaism in interwar Soviet political practices.3 In the first two chapters of the book, he discusses some of these archaic practices from a long-term perspective. For the pre-Soviet period of Russian history, Getty mostly relies on secondary sources; he reveals numerous practices the first appearances of which may be found as early as in 16th-century Russia but can be seen again in the Soviet Union. These practices include restricted access of foreigners to Russia, denunciatory letters written to the authorities, the existence of an aristocracy with a particular status, and collective responsibility. This assertion of the persistence of tradition, which features even in the subtitle of the book, is almost always pervasive. For example, Getty twice mentions, “The famous ‘anointing’ photographs of Stalin alongside Lenin recall those of Nicholas II alongside his son Aleksei and preview those for sale today in Moscow of Putin skiing and chatting with Medvedev” (4, 89).

He also speaks on numerous occasions of “boyars” and “king’s men” in the Stalin period. Getty’s main point is that these practices represent something totally and specifically Russian. In his opinion, they were neither Soviet nor Stalinist but Russian. Getty explains: “Because we find this understanding of politics and government from Riurik to Putin, at all levels of the hierarchies at all times and places, it was inescapable. This was the deep structure by which Russia had always been governed” (95). Getty’s interpretation of the persistence of archaic practices differs markedly from the neotraditional model earlier proposed by Terry Martin.4 In his seminal article Martin claimed: “Neo-traditional societies, rather, represent an alternative form of modernization, one that includes the most characteristic processes of market-driven modernization (industrialization, [End Page 476] urbanization, secularization, universal education, and literacy), but one which likewise produces a variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic features of... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Jonathan W.

Daly [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Vladlen Semenovich Izmozik, a professor at the Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications, is incomparably the world expert on late imperial Russia’s government-sponsored interception of mail (perliustratsiia), to which he has devoted over 20 years of study and some 30 publications, including this massive book.

Perlustration was one of the three principal secret methods of security policing and information gathering before the rise of the electronic wizardry culminating in the exploits of the National Security Agency (and the counterexploits of Edward Snowden).1 The other two were surveillance by plainclothes policemen and infiltration by secret informants, neither of which has received anything like the detailed and wide-ranging treatment provided by Izmozik.2 This is somewhat surprising, because both the security police themselves and the revolutionaries they hunted and watched all considered secret informants to be the “linchpin” of the entire system.3 Yet the disparity of attention probably makes sense, as Izmozik demonstrates in his book, because unlike the other two methods, [End Page 466] which evolved late in imperial Russian history and were focused largely on a narrow group of political dissidents, the interception of mail emerged early and had a broad and ever-increasing scope.

In 2003, when I surveyed recent scholarship on the Russian security police for this journal, the field was just coming of age.4 At that time, the doyenne in terms of expertise and output was Zinaida Peregudova, an archivist at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), who has helped countless researchers to find their way through the archival labyrinth.5 Since then, many more studies have appeared, almost entirely in Russia, including many focused on localities and regions,6 though a few monographs also came out in the West.7 Now Vladlen Izmozik is just as prominent as Peregudova in security and especially surveillance studies of late imperial Russia. Yet his work also bridges the Great Revolutionary Divide, contributing nearly as significantly to the history of political surveillance in the early Soviet as in the late imperial era.8 His concept of “political control” (politicheskii kontrol´), by which he [End Page 467] means “efforts to ascertain and manage the people’s ‘mood,’ especially their attitudes to the authorities,” has been particularly influential.9 The book under review is encyclopedic.

It draws upon vast unpublished and published documentation, including materials gathered in ten archives in Russia, among them the less pregnable collections of the Federal Security Service (FSB, St. Petersburg branch), the navy, the military, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Izmozik supplies a detailed bibliography, a lengthy index of names, and six appendices. The appendices present key official documents, the revolutionary-era memoir of a leading practitioner of perlustration, prosopographical data on officials engaged in the work, and a list of the shifting locations throughout the empire where it was conducted. The author begins by distinguishing between what he calls official military censorship (voennaia tsenzura) of the mail, as well as the judicially imposed inspection of the correspondence of convicts and individuals under police supervision (politseiskii nadzor), which were overt and regulated by laws, and perlustration as such, which was an extralegal practice.

Yet the Russian Code on Punishments of 1845 (revised in 1885) stated unambiguously that a government official could not be held liable for exceeding his authority, even when he deviated from established rules, “so long as, in regard to this particular instance or such instances in general, he was doing so on the basis of a directive issued from a higher authority” (13–14). Moreover, the government officials who drafted the Fundamental Laws of 1906 explicitly decided against including an assertion of the inviolability of personal correspondence. Therefore, the practitioners of perlustration before 1917, as well as the senior officials who sanctioned their work, could not be prosecuted as lawbreakers, because their actions had been sanctioned by the highest authority of the land—the emperor. Perlustration took on a systematic character from... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Jörg Baberowski · Nicole Eaton [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Yet another Stalin biography? This time in three volumes? Who needs such a biography, and what can it explain to a reader already familiar with Stalin’s life?

Stephen Kotkin has not written a Stalin biography but rather a fascinating and unsurpassed history of power in the early Soviet Union. It is actually the volume title that reveals what the book is about: the paradoxes of power. Accordingly, Stalin enters the stage only late in the book. Kotkin introduces him at the beginning, describes his youth in Georgia, but then allows him to disappear. Only toward the middle of the book does he appear once more. Kotkin tells a story of power and its effects, of the autocracy and its prime ministers, of peasants and revolutionaries and of the Great War that ultimately destroyed the tsarist empire. We see how the revolutionaries were in no way certain about their cause, with liberals, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks just as uncertain as the Bolsheviks. They understood that they also had to adapt themselves to the circumstances that had sealed the fate of the tsar’s government: the size of the country and the weakness of its institutions. Lenin was not a strategist. He had no plan when he decided to overthrow the government in October 1917. There was not even a clear idea about how the new state and its government were supposed to be formed.

They had no control over the chaotic events unfolding. Day by day, Lenin and his comrades had to reckon with the possibility of being driven out of power. The government, Kotkin writes, consisted of only four people: Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotskii, Iosif Stalin, and Iakov Sverdlov—men who had had encounters with the tsarist police or been sent into exile or imprisoned but had no idea about how a state should be governed. They gave free rein to whatever happened because they did not know to which outcome they should direct events. The result was chaos and anarchy, a rule designed for one day at a time. A contemporary who worked at Smolny, the headquarters of the regime, remembered seeing fear on the faces of the Bolshevik people’s commissars. This fear grew because the authorities refused to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, because theft and violence ruled the streets, because the German kaiser’s troops threatened the heart of the empire, and because no one knew whether the opponents of the Bolsheviks would ultimately gain the upper hand. In the beginning, there was not even a state police force, and the new rulers had no choice but to cede power to the looters and robbers.

Even Lenin himself, the leader of the revolution, was dragged out of a car in 1918, robbed, and left standing on the street. It was a period of “Dada and Lenin,” as Kotkin describes the events of 1918 (227–88). Power means either imposing one’s will on another or preventing another from exercising power. But such power is only temporary and does not itself establish rule; power becomes durable only when it is institutionalized. Rule arises when the vanquished themselves perform what those with power demand from them. Lenin’s state was based on exploitation and redistribution, on intimidation and terror, on privilege and disenfranchisement. Its police resembled a band of marauders; its governmental agencies were commanded by men who transformed improvised terror into a strategy of rule. As the Civil War (1918–21) broke out, the Bolsheviks got the opportunity of a lifetime. They could turn all the improvisation and management of crises through force into the foundation for their regime. They learned how to overcome crises, fight battles, and destroy enemies; it was in this context that the Soviet state was formed.

The Bolsheviks were forged by the Civil War, as Kotkin tells it. They maintained themselves against “Dada,” kept themselves from certain doom, and gave a distinctive shape to their political culture. Kotkin describes the building that housed the new institutions and their functionaries, the paths one traversed between them, and the decisions that were made in them. Now Stalin reappears on the narrator’s stage. Kotkin’s Stalin is a man of action, one who knew... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Artemy M. Kalinovsky [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, resigned on Christmas Day in 1991. Gorbachev’s advisers had originally planned the announcement for 24 December, Christmas Eve, but decided to wait a day so that television viewers in the United States could celebrate their holiday in peace.

As Serhii Plokhy explains in his lively, engaging book on the last six months of the USSR, Gorbachev’s resignation speech was just the last of a series of performances played out by the Soviet leader, his rival Boris Yeltsin, and the other republic leaders for US audiences. Discussions of the Soviet collapse tend to focus on causal factors—including the relative importance of nationalist mobilization, the “exit” of communist elites, or the relative impact of events in Eastern Europe. Most accounts tend to treat the postcoup period as essentially a process of protracted agony, in which the question of the USSR’s future was more or less already settled. The exceptions have either been memoirs by Gorbachev’s associates or works on relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and Russia. The main achievement of Plokhy’s book is to bring together the high drama of that short period—the political struggles between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the attempts to win over Central Asian leaders, and the rapidly changing situation in Ukraine. Plokhy is not dismissive of long-term causes—on the contrary, he insists on the importance of the “nationality question” for understanding the Soviet collapse (409).

Throughout the book, however, he emphasizes the importance of contingencies in this period. As Plokhy shows, republican leaders were dealing with two problems in the wake of the August putsch. First, the public mood had changed. If earlier in the year referendums seemed to show substantial support for preserving some sort of union, after the coup the calls for sovereignty and even independence became much louder. Republican leaders who had hesitated to denounce the coup had to fight for their political lives by reinventing themselves as democrats and nationalists. Second, even those who were eager to preserve some kind of union—including the leaders of the Central Asian republics, who counted on investments from the center to prevent economic collapse and to smooth any kind of economic transition—were wary of a union too heavily dominated by Russia. With Yeltsin rising as a political force in 1991 and increasingly dominating not just Russian but Soviet politics, leaders like Kazakhstan’s Nursultan Nazarbaev and Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov began to think they might be better off alone. Although Plokhy touches on the role of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and other republics, it is Russia and Ukraine that are at the center of his story.

Plokhy is especially effective explaining how Ukrainian nationalism developed as a potent political force even as the communist elite in the republic became alienated from Gorbachev. Although the Ukrainian party had supported the coup, the leadership and Leonid Kravchuk himself quickly came out in favor of independence in the wake of the attempted putsch. What made the Ukrainian declaration of independence in August particularly damaging for the union was that it was the first case of a communist-controlled legislature taking the lead. Similarly, Plokhy demonstrates convincingly how important the “Russia first” sentiment, shared by some of Yeltsin’s advisers and increasingly by Yeltsin himself, was in the political struggles of 1991. Yeltsin, who was initially a supporter of a strong Soviet Union, became one of the most enthusiastic contributors to its dissolution. The role of other republics, by contrast, is given relatively little treatment. True, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbaev, usually left out of the story, emerges as a major political player. But we learn relatively little about the political dramas within the republics themselves, where pro- and antiunion forces were mobilizing, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

We also get little sense of the content behind various proposals to keep the union together, something that is crucial if we are to comprehend how a union (or confederation) could have functioned. Could this new confederation restore economic ties, provide investment from the center, and accommodate the various ideological movements that had appeared in the republics? How did actors at the time propose... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Maria Mayofis · Victoria Frede [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: The ideology of Russian nationalism within the USSR and its development, together with the movements that gave rise to it, appear to have been studied fairly thoroughly. Research began with Mikhail Agurskii’s classic Ideology of National Bolshevism and has been advanced by Andreas Umland, David Brandenberger, Yitzhak Brudny, Nikolai Mitrokhin, Marlène Laruelle, Viktor Shnirel´man, and others. Two aspects of the problem, however, require further investigation: the prerevolutionary roots of the Soviet Union’s nationalist movements and the interrelationship between modernizing and antimodernizing tendencies within those movements.

Both aspects can be addressed by investigating a significant sociocultural movement—the history of the All-Russian Choral Society (Vserossiiskoe khorovoe obshchestvo, VKhO)—which has heretofore been ignored by historians of Russian nationalism in the post-Stalinist period and has hardly been touched upon by social historians of Russia. This neglect can primarily be attributed to scholars’ preoccupation with writers, literary journals, and publishing houses and, somewhat less frequently, with artists and the communities they belonged to. Music has barely been addressed, except for pathbreaking investigations by Laura Olson, Susannah Lockwood Smith, and, for the period prior to Stalin’s death, Marina Frolova-Walker. In this article I trace the history of the developmental movement for Russian choral singing in the framework of the All-Russian Choral Society, which was founded in 1957, remained in operation until 1987, and was unexpectedly resurrected in 2013. I reconstruct the prerevolutionary genesis of the Society’s guiding principles, their deep transformation under the influence of modernizing and antimodernizing elements in its ideology and institutional praxis, drawing on its organizers’ writings and their biographies.

As the sources show, the All-Russian Choral Society should be understood as an aesthetic and sociological project, one that dovetailed with the state’s cultural politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, drawing from and contributing to them. Having systematically analyzed the various ideological, aesthetic, and organizational sources of the All-Russian Choral Society, I also trace how the intentions behind its ideological program were understood by cultural figures of the 1950s and 1960s who did not join the movement, and how they entered into a polemic with the Society in order to defend their own conceptions of social solidarity. In the final section of the article I demonstrate how this institution has once again gained resonance in contemporary Russian society. Soviet political and cultural elites never completely assimilated the ideological program of social solidarity advanced by the All-Russian Choral Society. Only in the 2010s did it reach its apogee, when it was reanimated in a scope that was far more limited but also significantly more radical than the Society’s founding ideologists had intended. A major characteristic of the All-Russian Choral Society was its emphasis on the formation of a highly developed culture of choral performance.

Based on the accomplishments of prerevolutionary music around the beginning of the 20th century, it also drew on new types of social, emotionally experienced solidarity, for which Soviet political elites had been calling since the early 1920s, and which gained renewed traction immediately following the 20th Party Congress in 1956. The All-Russian Choral Society de facto advanced a program of nationalism, based not on narratives of the “greatness of the people” but on specific performative practices that gave expression to such greatness. Officially, the All-Russian Choral Society dates to 10 June 1957, when the Soviet of Ministers of the RSFSR created an organizing committee (orgkomitet) to oversee its formation. At the outset, the new institution was intended to function within the RSFSR, with branches in all its regions (oblasti), territories (krai), and autonomous republics. Deliberations on the statutes and establishment of branches took longer than initially planned: the Organizing Committee’s first plenary session met in April 1958.

Only in June 1959, two years after the founding resolution, did the All-Russian Choral Society hold its first congress, ratifying its statutes and working program. The Society was initiated and headed by the famous choirmaster Aleksandr Vasil´evich Sveshnikov (1890–1980), who had been rector of the Moscow State Conservatory (Moskovskaia gosudarstvennaia konservatoriia) since 1948. Sveshnikov had been active since the... Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Volodymyr Ryzhkovskyi [Show abstract] [Hide abstract] ABSTRACT: The memory of the Thaw operates almost as the subconscious of the late 20th- and early 21th-century Russian intelligentsia, at least of its elite. The divisions solidified during the Thaw between “conservatives” and “liberals,” “Stalinists” and “anti-Stalinists,” have been played out over and over again at the most crucial junctures of Russian recent history.

Perestroika was perceived by the “liberal” intellectuals behind Gorbachev’s reforms as a way to defeat old “conservative” rivals and to accomplish the unfinished tasks of the Thaw. In turn, the rise and the fall of the Russian protest movement of the 2011–12 again made the Thaw into a relevant object of political reflection, though not always in a celebratory key. For example, Mark Lipovetsky’s thought-provoking [End Page 447] article “The Poetics of ITR Discourse” suggests that the Thaw and its heritage might be seen as a possible source of the present Russian “liberal” debacle and as such should be “critically” worked through.1 At the same time, debuting on Russian television in the wake of the protests, Valerii Todorovskii’s show The Thaw presented an utterly depoliticized and “uncritical” image of the period, which nicely complemented the conflictless narrative of Russia’s past promoted in Putin’s Russia.

Ironically, it was Todorovskii himself who in the early 1990s produced the harshest deconstructive attack on the celebratory narrative of the Thaw. His film Over the Dark Water exposed the excessive machismo and the abuse of empty rhetoric by the generation of the “sixties,” featuring Ivan Okhlobystin—then an actor, now an Orthodox priest and a prominent media symbol of the Russian turn toward neotraditionalism—in the role of the hero effecting this deconstruction. It seems that a constant renegotiation of the distance between memory of the past and changing present circumstances by members of the intelligentsia has made fluid the boundaries between the binaries imagined during the Thaw while keeping intact their crucial importance in organizing the Russian intellectual landscape. Indeed, binaries can be helpful for Russian intellectuals identifying their intellectual “foes” and “friends,” but deceiving when applied to the dynamic of the intellectual process. That is why critical engagement with the history of the postwar Russian intelligentsia is better conceived as a distancing from and at the same time digging into the origins and the evolution of binary frameworks.

In fact, historians both in Russia and abroad have already been grappling with the image of the Thaw as an advance of Soviet “liberals” against Stalinist “dogmatics” for almost 15 years. In tandem with critiques that stressed the deeply rooted conservative and repressive features of post-Stalinist relaxation, historians questioned the validity of the rigid oppositions of official/unofficial, Soviet/non-Soviet, and conformist/nonconformist for understanding the transformations that Soviet intellectual culture has undergone since Stalin’s death.2 The volumes under review here [End Page 448] continue to reconsider the history of the postwar Soviet intelligentsia beyond the interpretive framework that was defined by binary thinking, thus making significant contributions to the ongoing debate. Benjamin Tromly’s Making the Soviet Intelligentsia not only questions the metaphor of the Thaw as an index of the intelligentsia’s decade-long search for freedom but boldly targets its elitism, which “universalizes a reading of Soviet history that was not shared by all intellectuals, let alone Soviet society as a whole” (20). Using materials both from central (Moscow) and provincial archives (Saratov and Kiev...

Article · Jan 2016 · Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

Question: In the 17th Century, which Eurasian country ordered men to pay a tax on their beard, in order to keep the men clean shaven?
Answer: Russia