Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340055
Russell E. Martin
This review article surveys and assesses the first 12 issues of the journal Rossiiskaia genealogiia. Nauchnyi al’manakh, published by Staraia Basmannaia press beginning in 2016. It surveys in detail the three regular sections of the journal – Articles and Notices (Stat’i i soobshcheniia), Source Publications (Publikatsii istochnikov), and Reference Materials (Spravochnye materialy) – and provides detailed descriptions and assessments of selected contents in each. The article calls attention to the high-quality publications that will be of interest not only to scholars working in genealogy, but also in a host of related themes in early modern and modern Russian history and culture, including questions of social identity, kinship awareness, demography, onomastics, and political alliances among the elite (among other themes), as well as methods for mining and publishing complex manuscript sources.
这篇综述文章对《俄罗斯家谱》杂志的前12期进行调查和评估。《Nauchnyi al 'manakh》，由Staraia Basmannaia出版社于2016年开始出版。它详细调查了期刊的三个常规部分-文章和通知(Stat 'i i soobshcheniia)，来源出版物(Publikatsii istochnikov)和参考材料(Spravochnye材料)-并对每个部分的选定内容提供了详细的描述和评估。这篇文章呼吁人们关注高质量的出版物，这些出版物不仅对从事家谱研究的学者感兴趣，而且对早期近现代俄罗斯历史和文化的许多相关主题也感兴趣，包括社会认同、亲属意识、人口统计学、onomastics和精英之间的政治联盟(以及其他主题)的问题，以及挖掘和出版复杂手稿来源的方法。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340046
R. English
The recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev prompted many tributes to the former Soviet leader’s signal achievements in democratizing the USSR, ending the Cold War, and permitting the peaceful collapse of empire. However, a number of prominent pundits have attacked Gorbachev in post mortems that are factually flawed, internally contradictory, and deeply ahistorical. Descriptions of Gorbachev as a “quintessential apparatchik,” a bloody “totalitarian,” and a dyed-in-the wool defender of “Russian empire” tell more about the present biases of their authors than they do about the past dramas of perestroika and the Cold War’s end. Unfortunately, the coincidence of Gorbachev’s death in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine seems to have unleashed a Russophobia that unfairly stains Gorbachev’s remarkable legacy.
{"title":"Rescuing Gorbachev from the Memory Hole","authors":"R. English","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340046","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The recent death of Mikhail Gorbachev prompted many tributes to the former Soviet leader’s signal achievements in democratizing the USSR, ending the Cold War, and permitting the peaceful collapse of empire. However, a number of prominent pundits have attacked Gorbachev in post mortems that are factually flawed, internally contradictory, and deeply ahistorical. Descriptions of Gorbachev as a “quintessential apparatchik,” a bloody “totalitarian,” and a dyed-in-the wool defender of “Russian empire” tell more about the present biases of their authors than they do about the past dramas of perestroika and the Cold War’s end. Unfortunately, the coincidence of Gorbachev’s death in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine seems to have unleashed a Russophobia that unfairly stains Gorbachev’s remarkable legacy.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44735473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340045
C. De Stefano
The article deals with the evolution of Gorbachev’s thinking on the national question during perestroika, providing additional empirical proof to the existing literature on the subject. It looks at why Gorbachev did not consider the national question a priority initially and how he approached nationalist mobilization and interethnic conflicts throughout his period in office. Prominent scholars agree that Gorbachev was blind in managing the national question. The article argues that, while Gorbachev could not elaborate a compelling nationalities policy, his approach did not fundamentally differ from the one he adopted in other policy spheres. Besides, the article shows how his position on the Baltic states and Ukraine led to growing disagreements with some of his key advisors. Also, it stresses the dilemmas Gorbachev had to cope with when dealing with the national question, which he could have hardly solved with single solutions or a new conception of nationalities policy. The article builds on declassified material, Gorbachev’s speeches, notes of the Politburo meetings, and memoirs of former Soviet politicians.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340049
K. Ironside
Gorbachev’s 1997 television ad for Pizza Hut, which opened its first restaurants in the Soviet Union in 1990 through a joint venture between parent company PepsiCo, Inc. and the Moscow city soviet, is an important part of his popular image in the West, reflecting the role that capitalist consumerism is often presumed to have played in the Soviet system’s collapse. Yet, as this article shows, such joint ventures were supposed to increase the Soviet Union’s role not as a consumer, but as a producer, by showcasing the benefits of international economic cooperation with it. Joint ventures won Gorbachev powerful allies, including the CEO of Pepsi, Donald H. Kendall, who advocated for removing American trade restrictions that stood in the way of the Soviet Union assuming a larger function in world trade. As Gorbachev’s economic reforms began to fail, however, the long line in front of Pizza Hut also came to symbolize communism’s failure to deliver prosperity. Gorbachev used the difficulties of foreign companies like Pizza Hut as proof of why the Soviet Union should be given Western aid, to no avail. Ultimately, the policy of joint ventures was a failure and Pizza Hut’s presence in the post-Soviet Russian market was short lived: it left during the 1998 ruble crisis only to return under Putin in the early 2000s, only to leave once again after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340051
M. Kramer
The Soviet Union, like the large, multiethnic land empires in Europe that came to an end in the early 20th century (Habsburg, Imperial Russian, Ottoman), consisted of a central government ruling over far-flung regions in which particular ethnic and cultural groups were predominant. For many years, Soviet leaders were able to maintain the internal stability of the multiethnic Soviet state by relying on a mix of extreme coercion and occasional concessions to local demands. Soon after Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, he adopted sweeping political liberalization and democratization, including the first free elections ever held in the USSR. The loosening of political control in a state that had long been known for brutal repression had far-reaching consequences for social stability. The political opportunities that opened for ethnic groups in the Soviet Union to push for far-reaching change, including independence, created great difficulty for Gorbachev’s attempts to hold the Soviet Union together. Although he could have resorted to the use of large-scale violence as previous Soviet leaders had repeatedly done, he was deeply reluctant to cause mass bloodshed. His aversion to the use of mass repression was one of the key factors that precipitated the unraveling of the USSR. This article presents an in-depth analysis of Gorbachev’s responses to ethnic unrest in the Soviet Union from 1986 through 1991.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340053
William Taubman
Comments from around the world following Gorbachev’s death revealed yet again how polarized views of him are. Most Westerners still see him as a man who changed his country and the world for the better. Most Russians condemn him for having intentionally or unintentionally destroyed the USSR. This essay attempts to reassess his record – to ask what a leader like him was to do when he had noble aims for his country and the world and possessed the power potentially to achieve them, but confronted huge obstacles to doing so. Should he have pursued them at the risk not only of failure, but of making things worse? Should he have settled for presiding over the status quo and preserving his own power? To address such questions, I pose others: What were Gorbachev’s goals and how did he come by them? Were they so ambitious as to be unrealistic? Did he have sufficient power as Soviet leader possibly to achieve them? What obstacles did he face? Did he foresee them? How effectively did he cope with them? Were there alternatives that were preferable to his approach? I conclude that Gorbachev was right to make the attempt.
{"title":"Reassessing Gorbachev","authors":"William Taubman","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340053","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Comments from around the world following Gorbachev’s death revealed yet again how polarized views of him are. Most Westerners still see him as a man who changed his country and the world for the better. Most Russians condemn him for having intentionally or unintentionally destroyed the USSR. This essay attempts to reassess his record – to ask what a leader like him was to do when he had noble aims for his country and the world and possessed the power potentially to achieve them, but confronted huge obstacles to doing so. Should he have pursued them at the risk not only of failure, but of making things worse? Should he have settled for presiding over the status quo and preserving his own power? To address such questions, I pose others: What were Gorbachev’s goals and how did he come by them? Were they so ambitious as to be unrealistic? Did he have sufficient power as Soviet leader possibly to achieve them? What obstacles did he face? Did he foresee them? How effectively did he cope with them? Were there alternatives that were preferable to his approach? I conclude that Gorbachev was right to make the attempt.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47109831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340054
L. Marasinova
This paper focusses on the use of the sacred space of monasteries for the punishment of criminals and their simultaneous spiritual purification. The uniqueness and therefore special heuristic value of study into this phenomenon is determined by the following circumstances. The ritual of tonsure has long been used by rulers to punish undesirable and dangerous individuals and remove them from proximity to the throne. However, the “honor” of such a manifestation of royal anger was only awarded to those belonging to the tsar’s inner circle, and disgraced courtiers did not find themselves locked behind monastic walls for the sake of their internal spiritual correction, but solely in order to isolate them. During the reign of Catherine II, the Empress’s own initiative saw a marked increase in the practice of penance in monasteries as punishment for serious crimes. It is noteworthy that such sentences first appeared in Catherine’s written confirmations of sentences, after which they began to be widely utilized by the secular courts. The conclusions of this work are based on royal confirmations of death sentences passed by the Senate, the archives of the local chancelleries, and reports submitted by the abbots of monastic foundations. These materials enable us to draw preliminary conclusions regarding the gradual humanization of punishments in Russia in the second half of the 18th century and the growing use of ecclesiastical practices in court sentences, all at a time in which the scope of spiritual jurisdiction was being reduced.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340044
Archie Brown
Archie Brown notes how the meaning of perestroika, a concept Gorbachev used well before he became Soviet leader, changed over time. The focus is on Gorbachev as a politician operating in the Soviet domestic context. Contrary to widespread retrospective belief, the USSR was not in crisis when Gorbachev became general secretary, and he was not forced to embark on fundamental change. He began with the aim of achieving economic reform and some political liberalization. However, from January 1987 onwards, he prioritized political reform. His thinking continued to evolve, and by 1988–89 he had embraced not only liberalization but a political pluralization that amounted to systemic change. Such, however, was the intertwining of party and state that abandonment of ‘democratic centralism’ and the Communist Party’s monopoly of power led to a crisis of Soviet statehood by 1990–91 and to perestroika’s major unintended consequence – the dissolution of the USSR. Through persuasion and negotiation, rather than violent coercion, Gorbachev had tried and failed to prevent this disintegration of the USSR. But, successfully overcoming entrenched conservative resistance, he had already used the authority of his office and his powers of persuasion to leave Russia a freer country than it had ever been.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340052
Tobias Rupprecht
While Mikhail Gorbachev opened a door for a possible democratic transformation of the Soviet Union, the economic and financial policies of his Perestroika led to state collapse. Those who reproach him for not having a coherent concept of economic reform often point to Deng Xiaoping, whose ostensibly more clear-eyed vision led China to prosper. Yet on a conceptual level, Gorbachev’s economic and legal arrangements were very similar to Deng’s; both drew on the domestic and international intellectual repertoires of market socialism. It was their political implementation under fundamentally different political, economic and social conditions that led to economic catastrophe in the USSR and to economic growth in the People’s Republic. A ‘Chinese path’ in the Soviet Union, including the application of political violence, may have preserved one-party dictatorship – but would not have provided the basis for an economic upswing. Gorbachev should be given great credit for rejecting such authoritarian market reforms.
{"title":"The Socialist Great Divergence. Why Mikhail Gorbachev Failed Where Deng Xiaoping Succeeded","authors":"Tobias Rupprecht","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340052","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000While Mikhail Gorbachev opened a door for a possible democratic transformation of the Soviet Union, the economic and financial policies of his Perestroika led to state collapse. Those who reproach him for not having a coherent concept of economic reform often point to Deng Xiaoping, whose ostensibly more clear-eyed vision led China to prosper. Yet on a conceptual level, Gorbachev’s economic and legal arrangements were very similar to Deng’s; both drew on the domestic and international intellectual repertoires of market socialism. It was their political implementation under fundamentally different political, economic and social conditions that led to economic catastrophe in the USSR and to economic growth in the People’s Republic. A ‘Chinese path’ in the Soviet Union, including the application of political violence, may have preserved one-party dictatorship – but would not have provided the basis for an economic upswing. Gorbachev should be given great credit for rejecting such authoritarian market reforms.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42255102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.30965/18763316-12340047
M. Evangelista
The essay describes the anti-Stalinist tradition as a source of reformist thinking in the USSR and the policies of Nikita Khrushchev as precedents for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. It identifies promoters of reform within the Communist Party, among dissidents, and among their foreign supporters. It claims that those who supported Gorbachev were fewer and less influential than it appeared at the time, and that their ideas for economic reform were less developed and coherent than those for democratization and foreign policy. The essay describes the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s advocated by Nikolai Bukharin as an example of what at the time seemed to serve as a precedent for Gorbachev’s reforms, but had little actual impact. The essay discusses how opponents of Gorbachev’s reforms at home and abroad sought to undermine his initiatives. It considers the role of the United States in bringing the Gorbachev Moment to an end, by highlighting US rejection of Gorbachev’s vision of a nuclear-free, demilitarized world; insistence on promoting “shock therapy” for the Russian economy and support for Boris Yeltsin’s antidemocratic means of doing so; and policies that undermined democratic opposition to Yeltsin, even as his brutal war against Chechnya helped set a precedent for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
{"title":"The Gorbachev Moment – and Why It Was So Brief","authors":"M. Evangelista","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340047","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The essay describes the anti-Stalinist tradition as a source of reformist thinking in the USSR and the policies of Nikita Khrushchev as precedents for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. It identifies promoters of reform within the Communist Party, among dissidents, and among their foreign supporters. It claims that those who supported Gorbachev were fewer and less influential than it appeared at the time, and that their ideas for economic reform were less developed and coherent than those for democratization and foreign policy. The essay describes the New Economic Policy of the early 1920s advocated by Nikolai Bukharin as an example of what at the time seemed to serve as a precedent for Gorbachev’s reforms, but had little actual impact. The essay discusses how opponents of Gorbachev’s reforms at home and abroad sought to undermine his initiatives. It considers the role of the United States in bringing the Gorbachev Moment to an end, by highlighting US rejection of Gorbachev’s vision of a nuclear-free, demilitarized world; insistence on promoting “shock therapy” for the Russian economy and support for Boris Yeltsin’s antidemocratic means of doing so; and policies that undermined democratic opposition to Yeltsin, even as his brutal war against Chechnya helped set a precedent for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41784603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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