Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1984703
Lara Green
them; the same is true of another theme of the text, on family and labour law. Children’s lives were touched by state power, as it placed limits on child labour, and as it reaffirmed (in the tsarist era) and then removed (in the Soviet era) patriarchal control within families. Other subjects of family law, like the regulation of legitimacy and illegitimacy (the distinction between the two was abolished with the coming of the Soviet state but then reestablished as a counterintuitive pro-natalist measure after the Second World War), adoption (also abolished by the new Soviet state on the grounds that it was often a form of exploitative child labour, but then encouraged again in the aftermath of the demographic shock of the Second World War), and divorce, all influenced the lives of children on a basic level. Another theme, however, straddles the experience of childhood itself and people thinking about it: children’s culture. In several sections White treats the idea of culture narrowly, as cultural products (books, starting with Karion Istomin’s delightful alphabet books, eventually cinema, and finally tv) produced for the child consumer. These sections tend to be brief but suggestive of the concerns of children at different times. In additional sections, White looks at a broader concept of culture, getting at the everyday experiences of children in certain social groups at certain times (particularly the children of the elite, but in one interesting section tsarist-era peasant children). These are all themes in many discussions of childhood, but the Soviet chapters, in particular, feature another theme that is (somewhat) less universal: the effect of crisis and trauma on children. Sections on the Civil War and Second World War, on dekulakization and on the impact of the family disruptions caused by the arrests and deaths of the Great Terror make clear the ways that twentieth-century Russian childhood, at least, often meant grappling with ‘unchildish’ things. White examines the ways that the Soviet state sought to cope with the effects of these events – soaring numbers of orphans and single parents – while also using memories of childhood experiences to give a sense of their impact on individual children.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1978638
H. Campbell
While the revolution of October 1917 may have ushered a new regime into Moscow, many within the British government continued to view Russia through the lens of the Great Game. For decades, the Great Game had defined relations between the two countries, and while the Anglo-Russian Convention and the Triple Entente had created the illusion of friendship, this was simply a marriage of convenience. Thus, when revolution and civil war broke out in Russia, men such as Lord George Curzon rushed at the opportunity to try to seize the upper hand and win the game. Unfortunately for Curzon, times had changed and countries such as Persia were no longer happy to be mere pawns in a game.
{"title":"Great Game Thinking: The British Foreign Office and Revolutionary Russia","authors":"H. Campbell","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1978638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1978638","url":null,"abstract":"While the revolution of October 1917 may have ushered a new regime into Moscow, many within the British government continued to view Russia through the lens of the Great Game. For decades, the Great Game had defined relations between the two countries, and while the Anglo-Russian Convention and the Triple Entente had created the illusion of friendship, this was simply a marriage of convenience. Thus, when revolution and civil war broke out in Russia, men such as Lord George Curzon rushed at the opportunity to try to seize the upper hand and win the game. Unfortunately for Curzon, times had changed and countries such as Persia were no longer happy to be mere pawns in a game.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"239 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44298497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1918873
Jade McGlynn
scene of the 1930s – Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Lugovsky, Nikolai Zelinsky among many more – who were experiencing tremendous hardship due to the early years of the war, evacuation, censorship, Stalin’s terror and family dramas (much of it intimately connected). As Gromova notes, gradually one gets to see the writers’ personal stories and the many faces they encountered, or an invisible map of these people and their lives. What emerges is an entwined and distinctive landscape resembling a book of anatomy and its blood vessels (p. 80). A number of important letters and locations in central Moscow are introduced to the reader, almost taking us on a virtual tour of Arbat’s backstreets and alleyways. Whilst this is a very well written and intriguing novel, it is rather easy to get lost. Gromova focuses her book on those in the background, who surrounded the great Russian writers, not only to piece together the period but to ‘open up the past in a fuller way’. The novel’s appeal is in its archival nature, and yet, this is precisely why the reader might stumble along the way. By design, the novel continuously moves between time periods, persons and subjects – much like one would in the archives. If one does not have a notepad beside them, losing track of the characters is all too easy. Sections within lengthy chapters that regularly chop and change make for a challenging read. One line I revisited several times offers an explanation as to why the reader loses their bearings and may struggle to keep up: ‘It’s impossible to immerse oneself in an era that one hadn’t lived’ (p. 78). And perhaps that is the point; the past is gone and may be beyond our ability to reconstruct. Olga Bessarabova’s and Maria Belkina’s notebooks bring this world back to life through Gromova’s account, but in a way difficult to piece together properly. Whilst Moscow in the 1930s is certainly a slow read, it is worthwhile for scholars and students. What doors are we trying to unlock, and what keys will fit? The prize behind the door may simply be a key to another door, which when opened, takes our path in a completely new direction. Much like a mosaic, the past looks messy up close. One must take a step back to both admire and conceptualize it properly. The small pieces around the primary picture are often those which bring the past to life.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1918875
D. Rayfield
exchange between high and popular cultures was multidirectional, even within Russia’s highly stratified society. Innovations by artistic elites coloured the work of the newly literate, but folk and oral cultures were hugely influential on those revered for their contributions to high culture. Not only were high, middle and popular cultures in constant interaction with one another, but the interplay between them was central to the creative process. This examination of the ecosystem is particularly fruitful in chapter 3 on post-Emancipation visual culture, in which Brooks masterfully explores the contributions of the Wanderers and illustrators of cheap masscirculation (‘thin’) magazines to cultural conversations side by side. Brooks’s sensitivity to the interactions between the social, the cultural and the political makes him attuned to the anxieties related to gender that were in broad circulation amid industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation. Brooks explores the tensions surrounding the disruption of the traditional gender order in the late nineteenth century through depictions of the vixen in popular culture, the female protagonists in the novels of Lev Tolstoy, and fantasies of male domination in The Rite of Spring. Therefore, it is disappointing that Brooks’s astuteness in analysing gendered representations does not extend across the revolutionary divide, as the New Soviet Woman and her emergence as both a protagonist (and antagonist) in the early 1920s is absent from discussions of the Soviet era. Relatedly, an analysis of sexuality does not feature in Brooks’s study. As Laura Engelstein, Dan Healey, Alison Rowley and others have shown, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions and visions of sexuality reverberated across Russia’s increasingly noisy public sphere. New technologies like photography and the falling printing costs coincided with the commodification of bodies and proliferation of sexualized images in high and popular visual culture. Acknowledging these trends would have added further nuance to Brooks’s discussions of gender and power in fin-de-siècle Russia. These issues aside, The Firebird and the Fox is a rigorous and highly engaging study that brings Russian culture to life. This book was a pleasure to read and will be of interest to scholars and students of modern Russian history.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1918871
George H. Gilbert
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1915594
B. Kolonitskii
This article is concerned with the de-legitimating tactics used against Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerensky. It draws on both expert political assessments and a considerable quantity of rumours. Journalism, political resolutions, and letters and diaries written by people of different views are examined for negative representations of Kerensky that are associated with allegations of ‘betrayal’, ‘treachery’ or ‘moral degeneracy’ during his time in the Winter Palace. Such negative representations were informed by both the European republican tradition and the patriotic mobilization, which portrayed the residences of enemy heads of state during the First World War as hotbeds of corruption, treason and depravity. For example, in 1917 rumours about Nicholas II, the empress Aleksandra Fedorovna and Rasputin became a conspicuous element of mass culture. In Kerensky’s case, negative representations had begun to spread in connection with the preparations for the June Offensive, but they proliferated in July when he became head of the Provisional Government and especially when the seat of the government was moved to the Winter Palace. Kerensky was compared to the former emperor and rumoured to be enjoying the trappings of imperial power, engaging in amoral behaviour and using narcotic substances. There were also implausible rumours that the head of the government was a traitor. Such rumours were spread publicly by Kerensky’s opponents on right and left alike in a sign of the Provisional Government’s growing political isolation. This period (Kerenshchina) repelled parties that both were opposed to one another and favoured resolving the crisis by violent means, social compromise became harder to achieve and the slide to civil war gained momentum.
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2021.1921919
C. Read
Centenaries are times to reflect and assess status. This essay discusses accounts of how the centenary of the Russian Revolution was marked around the globe by governments, national media and civil society in general before going on to examine some of the large number of academic contributions to the debate in the form of books, special editions of journals and so on. As well as reflecting on what was said the article also discusses what the centennial output told us about the standing of the revolution around the world, about its meaning in different contexts and about whether we learned anything new. Among its conclusions are that, with the formidable exception of China, very few claims were made for ownership of and support for the revolution, that western academic contributions tended to repeat rather than expand existing interpretations and that Russian interpretations tended to ignore aspects of the revolution associated with the once dominant official Soviet era discourse.
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