This article deals with a historical paradox: the participation of former and present members of the secret Decembrist societies in suppressing the St Petersburg uprising on 14 December 1825, Decembrists against Decembrists. Thus, Colonel Vasily Perovsky, a former member of the Union of Welfare, Nicholas’s I adjutant, met Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, who arrived from Warsaw with a letter from Tsarevich Konstantin at the city outpost and then called troops loyal to the emperor to the square. Another adjutant, a member of the same Union, Colonel Alexander Kavelin, brought the young Tsarevich Alexander Nikolayevich (future Alexander II) to the Winter Palace and visited the mortally wounded Governor-General of St Petersburg Count Mikhail Miloradovich on behalf of the emperor. General Sergei Shipov, a member of the Union of Salvation and the Union of Prosperity, commanded the Guards Brigade and tried to prevent the Guards crew from joining the rebels. In a similar attempt, a member of the Union of Prosperity, Colonel Pavel Khvoshchinsky, was wounded in the Moscow Guards Regiment. That day, Alexander von Moller, colonel of the Finnish Guards Regiment, commanded the guards in the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, and the Senate. Officers-cavalry guards members of the St Petersburg branch of the Southern Society I. Annenkov, Prince A. Vyazemsky, H. Depreradovich, D. Artsybashev and a member of the Northern Society A. Muravyov, as well as a member of both secret societies cornet of the Guards Horse Regiment Prince A. Suvorov, participated in cavalry attacks on the rebels. Why and how did these people end up in the ranks of opponents of their comrades in secret societies? Can their actions be explained by something as banal as a betrayal? Did the participants in the uprising accept such an explanation? And how did Nicholas I take the revealed facts of officers’ participation in secret societies who took his side in the confrontation on 14 December? The author of the article puts forward answers to these questions.
{"title":"Senate Square: Decembrists Against Decembrists","authors":"V. Shkerin","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.797","url":null,"abstract":"This article deals with a historical paradox: the participation of former and present members of the secret Decembrist societies in suppressing the St Petersburg uprising on 14 December 1825, Decembrists against Decembrists. Thus, Colonel Vasily Perovsky, a former member of the Union of Welfare, Nicholas’s I adjutant, met Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, who arrived from Warsaw with a letter from Tsarevich Konstantin at the city outpost and then called troops loyal to the emperor to the square. Another adjutant, a member of the same Union, Colonel Alexander Kavelin, brought the young Tsarevich Alexander Nikolayevich (future Alexander II) to the Winter Palace and visited the mortally wounded Governor-General of St Petersburg Count Mikhail Miloradovich on behalf of the emperor. General Sergei Shipov, a member of the Union of Salvation and the Union of Prosperity, commanded the Guards Brigade and tried to prevent the Guards crew from joining the rebels. In a similar attempt, a member of the Union of Prosperity, Colonel Pavel Khvoshchinsky, was wounded in the Moscow Guards Regiment. That day, Alexander von Moller, colonel of the Finnish Guards Regiment, commanded the guards in the Winter Palace, the Admiralty, and the Senate. Officers-cavalry guards members of the St Petersburg branch of the Southern Society I. Annenkov, Prince A. Vyazemsky, H. Depreradovich, D. Artsybashev and a member of the Northern Society A. Muravyov, as well as a member of both secret societies cornet of the Guards Horse Regiment Prince A. Suvorov, participated in cavalry attacks on the rebels. Why and how did these people end up in the ranks of opponents of their comrades in secret societies? Can their actions be explained by something as banal as a betrayal? Did the participants in the uprising accept such an explanation? And how did Nicholas I take the revealed facts of officers’ participation in secret societies who took his side in the confrontation on 14 December? The author of the article puts forward answers to these questions.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47402941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article discusses the justification by Anton Kartashev, a Russian emigrant historian, theologian, and public figure for the ideal of Holy Rus’, which was supposed to serve as a religious basis for the creation of the cultural and historical identity of the representatives of the “second wave” of emigration from the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In the case study, the author of the article applies methods of “personal history” and “new intellectual history” to both historical works and such ego documents as letters published and stored in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University. Considering the genesis of the concept of Holy Rus’ in the publications of Karashev before the war, the author of the article shows the influence on the content of the political views of the public man who followed the principles of centrism, intransigence, and non-precondition. Along with this, the article reveals the links between the historical and cultural, canonical and dogmatic justifications of the ideal in his narratives which were constructed as the Hegelian triad: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. Kartashev represented the process of transformation of the emerging symphony of church and state in Ancient Rus’ and Muscovite State through its denial in the laic culture of the Russian Empire after the Petrine reforms into a new desired symphony of church and society. The central place in the article is occupied by the characteristics of changes among Russian émigrés at the end and after the Second World War and by the explanation of the impact of these changes on the motivation of Kartashev to present his vision of the ideal of Holy Rus’ in a form of a book. As a result of studying the long process of preparing the edition and the subsequent reviewing and discussion of the book, it is shown that this ideal was perceived ambiguously. Such perception of Kartashev’s book was influenced by the complication of ideological divisions among Russian emigrants as a result of the spread among the part of them of the mood of “Soviet patriotism” and the addition to their ranks of anti-Soviet-minded “displaced persons” from the Soviet Union, as well as differences in the vision of life prospects by the representatives of the “older” generations of refugees who had to leave Soviet Russia soon after the revolution and the “younger” one, who were entering into life abroad. As a result, most of the participants in the discussion of the book, speaking kindly about the author, nevertheless emphasized their disagreement with both the political and religious-dogmatic justifications of the ideal of Holy Rus’ as a basis for their cultural and historical identity.
{"title":"Anton Vladimirovich Kartashev as a Prophet not in His Own Country","authors":"A. Antoshchenko","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.811","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the justification by Anton Kartashev, a Russian emigrant historian, theologian, and public figure for the ideal of Holy Rus’, which was supposed to serve as a religious basis for the creation of the cultural and historical identity of the representatives of the “second wave” of emigration from the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In the case study, the author of the article applies methods of “personal history” and “new intellectual history” to both historical works and such ego documents as letters published and stored in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European Culture at Columbia University. Considering the genesis of the concept of Holy Rus’ in the publications of Karashev before the war, the author of the article shows the influence on the content of the political views of the public man who followed the principles of centrism, intransigence, and non-precondition. Along with this, the article reveals the links between the historical and cultural, canonical and dogmatic justifications of the ideal in his narratives which were constructed as the Hegelian triad: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. Kartashev represented the process of transformation of the emerging symphony of church and state in Ancient Rus’ and Muscovite State through its denial in the laic culture of the Russian Empire after the Petrine reforms into a new desired symphony of church and society. The central place in the article is occupied by the characteristics of changes among Russian émigrés at the end and after the Second World War and by the explanation of the impact of these changes on the motivation of Kartashev to present his vision of the ideal of Holy Rus’ in a form of a book. As a result of studying the long process of preparing the edition and the subsequent reviewing and discussion of the book, it is shown that this ideal was perceived ambiguously. Such perception of Kartashev’s book was influenced by the complication of ideological divisions among Russian emigrants as a result of the spread among the part of them of the mood of “Soviet patriotism” and the addition to their ranks of anti-Soviet-minded “displaced persons” from the Soviet Union, as well as differences in the vision of life prospects by the representatives of the “older” generations of refugees who had to leave Soviet Russia soon after the revolution and the “younger” one, who were entering into life abroad. As a result, most of the participants in the discussion of the book, speaking kindly about the author, nevertheless emphasized their disagreement with both the political and religious-dogmatic justifications of the ideal of Holy Rus’ as a basis for their cultural and historical identity.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46968793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the attitude to Moscow of Grand Princes Nicholas Alexandrovich and Alexander Alexandrovich; the latter became Emperor Alexander III afterwards. The opinion has taken root in historiography and become self-evident that the peacemaker tsar loved the ancient capital like no other ruler of the Russian Empire. The article aims to reconstruct the attitude of Alexander III and his elder brother to Moscow and understand why it arose and how it changed over time. The research methodology considers the achievements of the new political history, the history of everyday life, and the history of emotions. The article refers to unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs of contemporaries, the grand princes’ diaries, and their correspondence with Alexander II, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Princes Mikhail Nikolaevich, and Vladimir Alexandrovich, which have not been introduced into scholarly circulation previously. The analysis makes it possible to assert that warm feelings for Mother See did not arise in the tsar-liberator’s eldest sons immediately. The formation of their attitude toward the ancient capital was influenced by professors of Moscow University invited to teach the Grand Princes, such as statistician I. K. Babst, lawyer K. P. Pobedonostsev, and historian S. M. Solovyov. Also, the princes were influenced by the conservative Moscow periodicals they read and Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Unlike the Tsarina, Alexander II was suspicious of the Moscow public, which seemed insufficiently loyal to him. Therefore, his sons’ positive attitude towards Moscow and its society was not something taken for granted. At the same time, attempts to influence the sympathies of the grand princes to the ancient capital pursued the goal not so much to stimulate the tsarevichs’ interest in Moscow antiquities as to make them supporters of “people’s autocracy”, as well as adherents of the “national policy”. In conclusion, the author analyzes the phrase attributed to Alexander III that “Moscow is the temple of Russia, and the Kremlin is its altar” providing arguments about the doubtfulness of its authorship.
{"title":"Moscow as Perceived by Alexander II’s Elder Sons","authors":"F. Melentev","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.799","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.799","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the attitude to Moscow of Grand Princes Nicholas Alexandrovich and Alexander Alexandrovich; the latter became Emperor Alexander III afterwards. The opinion has taken root in historiography and become self-evident that the peacemaker tsar loved the ancient capital like no other ruler of the Russian Empire. The article aims to reconstruct the attitude of Alexander III and his elder brother to Moscow and understand why it arose and how it changed over time. The research methodology considers the achievements of the new political history, the history of everyday life, and the history of emotions. The article refers to unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs of contemporaries, the grand princes’ diaries, and their correspondence with Alexander II, Empress Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Princes Mikhail Nikolaevich, and Vladimir Alexandrovich, which have not been introduced into scholarly circulation previously. The analysis makes it possible to assert that warm feelings for Mother See did not arise in the tsar-liberator’s eldest sons immediately. The formation of their attitude toward the ancient capital was influenced by professors of Moscow University invited to teach the Grand Princes, such as statistician I. K. Babst, lawyer K. P. Pobedonostsev, and historian S. M. Solovyov. Also, the princes were influenced by the conservative Moscow periodicals they read and Empress Maria Alexandrovna. Unlike the Tsarina, Alexander II was suspicious of the Moscow public, which seemed insufficiently loyal to him. Therefore, his sons’ positive attitude towards Moscow and its society was not something taken for granted. At the same time, attempts to influence the sympathies of the grand princes to the ancient capital pursued the goal not so much to stimulate the tsarevichs’ interest in Moscow antiquities as to make them supporters of “people’s autocracy”, as well as adherents of the “national policy”. In conclusion, the author analyzes the phrase attributed to Alexander III that “Moscow is the temple of Russia, and the Kremlin is its altar” providing arguments about the doubtfulness of its authorship.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41288072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The authors explain the source peculiarity of medical statistics in Russia between the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries and identify the possibilities and limitations of its use for studying social history and the history of science. The features of the quantitative evidence at that time – them being fragmented, heterogeneous, and expressed in absolute numbers – prompted the authors to turn to the history of the organization of statistical studies in the Russian Empire. The estimation of information value and the discursive nature of health and morbidity statistics were performed based on the analysis of administrative documents (Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov – Complete Collection of Laws, ministerial prescriptions), accounts of medical administrations, uyezd doctors, and medical professors (military-historical and historical archives of Astrakhan, Moscow, Riga, and Vilnius). Based on the presumption that target setting, i. e. the purpose of quantitative indicators, determined the organization of the collection and processing of the data on morbidity, and they, in turn, determined the content of statistical knowledge, the authors reveal the possibilities of the health statistics of the time in question. This approach makes it possible to determine what can and what cannot be judged based on statistical data on health, general and infectious diseases. The authors conclude that medical statistics of that time describe the pathogenicity of landscapes and the state of public healthcare, but not the state of the residents’ health. Medical officials collected data on sick patients, distributed them by disease, and calculated how many lives each disease claimed. Although state doctors were not interested in healthy patients, the enlightened bureaucracy claimed that by doing so, the government was studying and preserving “public health.” The digital indicators collected do not make it possible to scrutinize the citizens’ health of the Russian Empire. But then the changes in the principles of collecting statistical data, their processing, and their use allow researchers to follow the process of the Russian state’s modernization. The participation of doctors in the collection of data on morbidity has two long-term consequences – the formation of aggregated thinking, which included the concept of “public health”, and the growing interest in the daily lives of Russians.
{"title":"Medical Statistics in Pre-Reform Russia: Intentions, Degree оf Reliability, Informative Value","authors":"E. Vishlenkova, S. Zatravkin","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.802","url":null,"abstract":"The authors explain the source peculiarity of medical statistics in Russia between the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries and identify the possibilities and limitations of its use for studying social history and the history of science. The features of the quantitative evidence at that time – them being fragmented, heterogeneous, and expressed in absolute numbers – prompted the authors to turn to the history of the organization of statistical studies in the Russian Empire. The estimation of information value and the discursive nature of health and morbidity statistics were performed based on the analysis of administrative documents (Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov – Complete Collection of Laws, ministerial prescriptions), accounts of medical administrations, uyezd doctors, and medical professors (military-historical and historical archives of Astrakhan, Moscow, Riga, and Vilnius). Based on the presumption that target setting, i. e. the purpose of quantitative indicators, determined the organization of the collection and processing of the data on morbidity, and they, in turn, determined the content of statistical knowledge, the authors reveal the possibilities of the health statistics of the time in question. This approach makes it possible to determine what can and what cannot be judged based on statistical data on health, general and infectious diseases. The authors conclude that medical statistics of that time describe the pathogenicity of landscapes and the state of public healthcare, but not the state of the residents’ health. Medical officials collected data on sick patients, distributed them by disease, and calculated how many lives each disease claimed. Although state doctors were not interested in healthy patients, the enlightened bureaucracy claimed that by doing so, the government was studying and preserving “public health.” The digital indicators collected do not make it possible to scrutinize the citizens’ health of the Russian Empire. But then the changes in the principles of collecting statistical data, their processing, and their use allow researchers to follow the process of the Russian state’s modernization. The participation of doctors in the collection of data on morbidity has two long-term consequences – the formation of aggregated thinking, which included the concept of “public health”, and the growing interest in the daily lives of Russians.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41538792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The author discusses some of the dominant assertions in the literature on Russian history. One of them is the disqualification of the myth of the benevolent tsar as “false”. This disqualification is accompanied by the formulas “naïve or popular monarchism”, which designate the “pre-scientific illusions” that would have guided the collective movements of resistance to autocracy. Given the importance of collective representations of the tsar and power in Russian history, the theoretical premises on which the above-mentioned disqualifications are based affect the general interpretation of this history, for example the conception of the Russian people as “passive”. The author proposes to abandon this positivist scaffolding and approach the sources from other theoretical perspectives, in particular conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), to pose a radically different question: what truth is contained in the myth of the benevolent tsar and to reconstruct, against the essentialist and teleological vision, the historicity of the collective resistance to power in Russia. The first part studies the genealogy of the expression samozvan/ets/stvo (self-appointment), its original meaning – individual initiative against divine appointment – and its functions in the autocratic political paradigm. The lack of heuristic value of the formulas of “popular, or naïve monarchism,” the logic of which is to deprive the most oppressed segments of the population of their culture and language, is emphasized.
{"title":"Towards a Conceptual-Historical Critique of the Essentialist and Teleological Interpretations of Russian History. Part 1","authors":"Claudio Ingerflom","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.812","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.812","url":null,"abstract":"The author discusses some of the dominant assertions in the literature on Russian history. One of them is the disqualification of the myth of the benevolent tsar as “false”. This disqualification is accompanied by the formulas “naïve or popular monarchism”, which designate the “pre-scientific illusions” that would have guided the collective movements of resistance to autocracy. Given the importance of collective representations of the tsar and power in Russian history, the theoretical premises on which the above-mentioned disqualifications are based affect the general interpretation of this history, for example the conception of the Russian people as “passive”. The author proposes to abandon this positivist scaffolding and approach the sources from other theoretical perspectives, in particular conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), to pose a radically different question: what truth is contained in the myth of the benevolent tsar and to reconstruct, against the essentialist and teleological vision, the historicity of the collective resistance to power in Russia. The first part studies the genealogy of the expression samozvan/ets/stvo (self-appointment), its original meaning – individual initiative against divine appointment – and its functions in the autocratic political paradigm. The lack of heuristic value of the formulas of “popular, or naïve monarchism,” the logic of which is to deprive the most oppressed segments of the population of their culture and language, is emphasized.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47727512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In terms of environmental history, the First World War represents one of the most significant information gaps of the Anthropocene, where the type of warfare and the fall of empires intensified the destructiveness of the interaction between people and nature, changing the geological and cultural characteristics of Central and Eastern European landscapes. The collision of mass armies with foreign landscapes and militarized natural environments left an indelible stamp on personal accounts of the Great War. The imagery of nature, both as an uncontrollable force and as an object of impact, abounds in a broad diversity of textual and visual sources, which range from official documentation to private correspondence and from propaganda newsreels to personal photographs. It appears that pictures of landscapes destroyed or transformed by war (as well as the related epidemiological and climatic threats) contributed to shaping combatants’ existential experience to the same degree as short military operations. Unlike the universalized experience of the Western Front countries in the available literature on the environmental and spatial history of the First World War, the multiple ways in which mobile belligerent landscapes of the Eastern Front were experienced and perceived are yet to be addressed documentarily as well as methodologically. The article aims to reconstruct the horizons of expectation and environment construction strategies in combatants’ individual narratives and to identify the meaning of belligerent landscapes in the formation of specific behavioral strategies and practices on the Eastern Front of the world’s first industrial war. The analysis of ego-documents (letters, diaries, and memoirs) left by participants of WWI has identified a diversity of models for anthropomorphizing environmental objects and phenomena on the Eastern Front, which range from romanticization to demonization. The author aims to establish the way the perception of belligerent landscapes depends on the cultural baggage, prior experience of warfare, military branch, and the density of contacts with civilians populating the militarized spaces. One of the key messages of this study is the suggestion that the militarised environment’s signification through religious, literary, epidemiological anti-Semitic and other lenses contributed to the normalization of combatants’ mortal terror of war, their negative military experience, mourning, and nostalgia for the lost life-worlds.
{"title":"Romanticization and Demonization: Galician Landscapes in Russian Combatants’ Narratives During the Great War","authors":"A. Likhacheva","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.808","url":null,"abstract":"In terms of environmental history, the First World War represents one of the most significant information gaps of the Anthropocene, where the type of warfare and the fall of empires intensified the destructiveness of the interaction between people and nature, changing the geological and cultural characteristics of Central and Eastern European landscapes. The collision of mass armies with foreign landscapes and militarized natural environments left an indelible stamp on personal accounts of the Great War. The imagery of nature, both as an uncontrollable force and as an object of impact, abounds in a broad diversity of textual and visual sources, which range from official documentation to private correspondence and from propaganda newsreels to personal photographs. It appears that pictures of landscapes destroyed or transformed by war (as well as the related epidemiological and climatic threats) contributed to shaping combatants’ existential experience to the same degree as short military operations. Unlike the universalized experience of the Western Front countries in the available literature on the environmental and spatial history of the First World War, the multiple ways in which mobile belligerent landscapes of the Eastern Front were experienced and perceived are yet to be addressed documentarily as well as methodologically. The article aims to reconstruct the horizons of expectation and environment construction strategies in combatants’ individual narratives and to identify the meaning of belligerent landscapes in the formation of specific behavioral strategies and practices on the Eastern Front of the world’s first industrial war. The analysis of ego-documents (letters, diaries, and memoirs) left by participants of WWI has identified a diversity of models for anthropomorphizing environmental objects and phenomena on the Eastern Front, which range from romanticization to demonization. The author aims to establish the way the perception of belligerent landscapes depends on the cultural baggage, prior experience of warfare, military branch, and the density of contacts with civilians populating the militarized spaces. One of the key messages of this study is the suggestion that the militarised environment’s signification through religious, literary, epidemiological anti-Semitic and other lenses contributed to the normalization of combatants’ mortal terror of war, their negative military experience, mourning, and nostalgia for the lost life-worlds.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43999952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines an underexplored episode in the history of the cholera riots – the ‘hunt for the poisoners’ which happened in St Petersburg in June 1831. This relevance of the topic is determined by the importance of studying the population’s behavior during an epidemic crisis, challenging both the authorities’ ability to stabilize the situation and the possibility of dialogue between them and society. Based on newly-introduced archival sources, the paper attempts to reconstruct the events of June 24–25, 1831 – essential for an understanding of the subsequent developments in Russia, but which have been overshadowed by the cholera riots of June 21–22, 1831, well described by contemporary sources. The cholera outbreak in the imperial capital in mid-June 1831 sparked popular discontent with anti-cholera measures, culminating in attacks on the city’s cholera hospitals. After a temporary respite following the events of June 22 on Sennaya Square, the riots erupted with renewed vigor but with a change in form and substance. On June 24 and 25, instead of attacking hospitals in large crowds, the rioters sought out alleged ‘poisoners’ detaining and handing them over to the authorities on suspicion of having poisoned food and water. Amongst part of the population, this poisoning was considered the real cause of the deaths attributed by doctors and the authorities to cholera. These events of June 24–25 have received little attention from researchers. But it was the St Petersburg ‘hunt for poisoners’ that provided a model for Russia’s ‘cholera panic’ of July 1831, during which the population sought to battle the alleged malicious poisoners. The panic caused a series of mass riots in the European part of Russia. The most violent events during the unrest were the bloody mutinies of military settlers in Novgorod province. The events of June 24–25 in St Petersburg played a significant role in the emergence of the cholera panic in Russia in the summer of 1831.
{"title":"Fighting Against the ‘Poisoners’ in Cholera-Stricken Petersburg","authors":"A. Egorov","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.803","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines an underexplored episode in the history of the cholera riots – the ‘hunt for the poisoners’ which happened in St Petersburg in June 1831. This relevance of the topic is determined by the importance of studying the population’s behavior during an epidemic crisis, challenging both the authorities’ ability to stabilize the situation and the possibility of dialogue between them and society. Based on newly-introduced archival sources, the paper attempts to reconstruct the events of June 24–25, 1831 – essential for an understanding of the subsequent developments in Russia, but which have been overshadowed by the cholera riots of June 21–22, 1831, well described by contemporary sources. The cholera outbreak in the imperial capital in mid-June 1831 sparked popular discontent with anti-cholera measures, culminating in attacks on the city’s cholera hospitals. After a temporary respite following the events of June 22 on Sennaya Square, the riots erupted with renewed vigor but with a change in form and substance. On June 24 and 25, instead of attacking hospitals in large crowds, the rioters sought out alleged ‘poisoners’ detaining and handing them over to the authorities on suspicion of having poisoned food and water. Amongst part of the population, this poisoning was considered the real cause of the deaths attributed by doctors and the authorities to cholera. These events of June 24–25 have received little attention from researchers. But it was the St Petersburg ‘hunt for poisoners’ that provided a model for Russia’s ‘cholera panic’ of July 1831, during which the population sought to battle the alleged malicious poisoners. The panic caused a series of mass riots in the European part of Russia. The most violent events during the unrest were the bloody mutinies of military settlers in Novgorod province. The events of June 24–25 in St Petersburg played a significant role in the emergence of the cholera panic in Russia in the summer of 1831.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47443089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the First World War, the Russian army was faced with the task of developing areas captured from the adversary and sought to integrate the new territorial acquisitions into the Russian economy while simultaneously adapting them for effective warfare. At the time of its occupation by the Russian troops, Austrian Galicia already existed as a fully-formed industrial landscape dominated by private and state-controlled oil fields and refineries. The environmental situation in Galicia had remained extremely problematic over several decades preceding the First World War due to intensive oil extraction and manufacturing of petroleum products. The Russian administration which largely ignored the environmental issues (or, rather, exacerbated them) attempted to resume oil mining in Galicia and organize the production and distribution of petrol, kerosene, and fuel oil to supply the urban centers as well as the army and railways. However, the 1915 Gorlice – Tarnów offensive by the German army prevented Russia from taking full advantage of the Galician oil production capacities and prompted the Russian commandment to apply the scorched earth tactic. Special military units were ordered to destroy most drilling rigs, oil reservoirs, and refineries around Boryslav and Drohobych. Official reports and testimonies by eyewitnesses provide a striking picture of demolition on a vast territory to the west and southwest of Lviv. The documentary and historiographical sources lack consensus as to the actual number of facilities destroyed and the overall damage caused to the country’s economy during the retreat of the Russian troops in April–May 1915. This study aims, firstly, to identify the key features of these events, and secondly, to explore the development of the Galician combat landscape, whose elements morph into “combat formations”, equally fit for productive activity and total (self-)destruction during warfare.
{"title":"Oil Fires of the First World War: Military Use and Destruction of Galicia’s Fuel Industry","authors":"Iaroslav Golubinov","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.807","url":null,"abstract":"During the First World War, the Russian army was faced with the task of developing areas captured from the adversary and sought to integrate the new territorial acquisitions into the Russian economy while simultaneously adapting them for effective warfare. At the time of its occupation by the Russian troops, Austrian Galicia already existed as a fully-formed industrial landscape dominated by private and state-controlled oil fields and refineries. The environmental situation in Galicia had remained extremely problematic over several decades preceding the First World War due to intensive oil extraction and manufacturing of petroleum products. The Russian administration which largely ignored the environmental issues (or, rather, exacerbated them) attempted to resume oil mining in Galicia and organize the production and distribution of petrol, kerosene, and fuel oil to supply the urban centers as well as the army and railways. However, the 1915 Gorlice – Tarnów offensive by the German army prevented Russia from taking full advantage of the Galician oil production capacities and prompted the Russian commandment to apply the scorched earth tactic. Special military units were ordered to destroy most drilling rigs, oil reservoirs, and refineries around Boryslav and Drohobych. Official reports and testimonies by eyewitnesses provide a striking picture of demolition on a vast territory to the west and southwest of Lviv. The documentary and historiographical sources lack consensus as to the actual number of facilities destroyed and the overall damage caused to the country’s economy during the retreat of the Russian troops in April–May 1915. This study aims, firstly, to identify the key features of these events, and secondly, to explore the development of the Galician combat landscape, whose elements morph into “combat formations”, equally fit for productive activity and total (self-)destruction during warfare.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43048725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The spatial and environmental dimension of WWI has recently taken the central place in academic debates on the military history of the “short twentieth century”. At present, the large-scale conflict of humanity and nature under totalized warfare is recognized as no less significant to the existential experience of combatants and civilians than actual battles. Functioning as a demiurge, the Great War created and re-molded landscapes, accelerated development trends shaped during the industrial era, triggered the construction and demolition of infrastructure, and determined the resource policy, economic practices, and language constructs of national communities during subsequent historical periods. Textual and visual narratives of the war feature the following three dimensions of the environment: a subject and adversary (sometimes even more dangerous than the real enemy); an object of destruction, invasion, and ordering; and an anthropological construct defining behavioral strategies and the memorial culture relating to the conflict. Modern researchers share a unanimous opinion that the pivotal role of the clash between humanity and the environment during WWI for subsequent historical development is paradoxically at odds with the degree to which the clash has been studied. This may be linked with the fact that the multidimensionality of militarized landscapes would require a research methodology incorporating elements of military history, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, geology (landscape studies), and cultural geography. Such a creative symbiosis has become possible only recently, owing to the adoption of the interdisciplinary approach by military historians. The gradual uptake of innovative study techniques has resulted in the uneven development of the spatial and environmental history of the First World War as a research field: at present, the best-studied locations are confined to the western front and, partly, the colonial periphery. This publication presents a review of the recent conceptual publications by authors developing this research avenue and seeks to identify the heuristic potential of the concepts “Anthropocene”, “belligerent landscapes”, “landscape biographies”, and “layered landscapes”, including their applicability to the history of the Eastern Front of the First World War.
{"title":"Conflict Landscapes of the Great War: The Spatial and Ecological Dimension of Military History","authors":"O. Nagornaia, K. Lingen","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.2.806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.2.806","url":null,"abstract":"The spatial and environmental dimension of WWI has recently taken the central place in academic debates on the military history of the “short twentieth century”. At present, the large-scale conflict of humanity and nature under totalized warfare is recognized as no less significant to the existential experience of combatants and civilians than actual battles. Functioning as a demiurge, the Great War created and re-molded landscapes, accelerated development trends shaped during the industrial era, triggered the construction and demolition of infrastructure, and determined the resource policy, economic practices, and language constructs of national communities during subsequent historical periods. Textual and visual narratives of the war feature the following three dimensions of the environment: a subject and adversary (sometimes even more dangerous than the real enemy); an object of destruction, invasion, and ordering; and an anthropological construct defining behavioral strategies and the memorial culture relating to the conflict. Modern researchers share a unanimous opinion that the pivotal role of the clash between humanity and the environment during WWI for subsequent historical development is paradoxically at odds with the degree to which the clash has been studied. This may be linked with the fact that the multidimensionality of militarized landscapes would require a research methodology incorporating elements of military history, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, geology (landscape studies), and cultural geography. Such a creative symbiosis has become possible only recently, owing to the adoption of the interdisciplinary approach by military historians. The gradual uptake of innovative study techniques has resulted in the uneven development of the spatial and environmental history of the First World War as a research field: at present, the best-studied locations are confined to the western front and, partly, the colonial periphery. This publication presents a review of the recent conceptual publications by authors developing this research avenue and seeks to identify the heuristic potential of the concepts “Anthropocene”, “belligerent landscapes”, “landscape biographies”, and “layered landscapes”, including their applicability to the history of the Eastern Front of the First World War.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42037521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper explores the poetry of Joseph Brodsky. One of the spiritual, semantic, and psychological dominants of the artistic consciousness and poetic work of the Nobel laureate acts as the subject of the analysis, and this aspect has not been considered either specifically or comprehensively so far. The author focuses on a typological, spiritual, and mental condition for Brodsky’s artistic consciousness that permeates all of his work, i. e. fatigue. And it is a peculiar kind of fatigue – culturogenic fatigue – which acts, on the one hand, as fatigue of culture itself, its spiritual content, and psychological forms. On the other hand, it is people’s fatigue from this weary culture and its phenomena. Through the analysis of Brodsky’s poems of different periods, the article shows and interprets the main aspects of fatigue expressed in his poetry: fatigue as a property of world attitude, including the perception of nature, space, and time; as an underlying feature of existence (existences); as a dominant psychological mindset/type of personality; as a spiritual and psychological characteristic of the creative process and attitude to creative work, its language and meaning, its works and their recipients. In conclusion, the author states that in Brodsky’s artistic work, the tiredness of art and its cultural foundations paradoxically go hand in hand with his devotion to art and will to create, his ability to find spiritual strength in it and its language.
{"title":"The Fatigue of Culture and Fatigue from Culture in Joseph Brodsky’s Poetry","authors":"Lev A. Zaks","doi":"10.15826/qr.2023.1.780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15826/qr.2023.1.780","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the poetry of Joseph Brodsky. One of the spiritual, semantic, and psychological dominants of the artistic consciousness and poetic work of the Nobel laureate acts as the subject of the analysis, and this aspect has not been considered either specifically or comprehensively so far. The author focuses on a typological, spiritual, and mental condition for Brodsky’s artistic consciousness that permeates all of his work, i. e. fatigue. And it is a peculiar kind of fatigue – culturogenic fatigue – which acts, on the one hand, as fatigue of culture itself, its spiritual content, and psychological forms. On the other hand, it is people’s fatigue from this weary culture and its phenomena. Through the analysis of Brodsky’s poems of different periods, the article shows and interprets the main aspects of fatigue expressed in his poetry: fatigue as a property of world attitude, including the perception of nature, space, and time; as an underlying feature of existence (existences); as a dominant psychological mindset/type of personality; as a spiritual and psychological characteristic of the creative process and attitude to creative work, its language and meaning, its works and their recipients. In conclusion, the author states that in Brodsky’s artistic work, the tiredness of art and its cultural foundations paradoxically go hand in hand with his devotion to art and will to create, his ability to find spiritual strength in it and its language.","PeriodicalId":43664,"journal":{"name":"Quaestio Rossica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48890580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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