Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910982
Mark R. Beissinger
Collapse from Inside-Out or Outside-In? Mark R. Beissinger (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). You know you are old when the events that you lived through and wrote about in your youth become the domain of historians. The collapse of the Soviet Union has now entered that realm, and Vladislav Zubok's monumental tome is the most detailed study yet of elite politics during the Soviet collapse. It is a major contribution to our understanding of the subject. Let me start by noting that there is a fundamental difference between writing a political history, as Zubok has done, and writing a historically sensitive social scientific inquiry, as I aspired to do in my own study two decades ago.1 My purpose was not to provide a full-fledged historical interpretation of the politics of the time. Rather, I sought to shed light on previously unaccentuated aspects of the collapse: to explicate the enormous transformations in identities that occurred, how those transformations related to one another, the ways that they affected Russians, the relationship between what happened on the street and what took place in government offices, and how the seemingly impossible in 1987 (the breakup of the USSR) could become the seemingly inevitable by 1991. I did this with purposes of theory building in mind, not as an encompassing historical explanation. In the social sciences, we do not have the luxury of talking about "perfect storms," as Zubok does in this book; we are tasked instead with analyzing the dynamics of storms in general—how they function and how they behave. Since the publication of my study, a trove of new information has become available. Zubok has been indefatigable in tracking these down and [End Page 847] deserves much credit for doing so. He has scoured the archives, delved into diaries and memoirs, and interviewed many of the key decision makers and their aides (including their US counterparts). I am in awe of the sheer volume of material he has digested, and indeed Zubok treats us to a cornucopia of new details on what occurred behind the scenes. We learn, for instance, of the opulence of Mikhail Gorbachev's villa, how much George Bush's judgments flowed from his personal attachment to Gorbachev, how Dmitrii Iazov thought he could fix the "Lithuanian problem" in less than a week, the details of the back-and-forth over economic reform in 1990, the intense bickering and relentless tug-of-war for control between Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev, Yeltsin's ubiquitous drinking (hardly a surprise), the frustrations of Gorbachev's aides and ministers over his constant prevarication, and many other insights. We even discover that Yeltsin learned of the August 1991 coup while watching television in his underwear—though what the relevance of that detail is (and who else learned about the coup in t
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910987
Andy Willimott
"A Past Charged with the Time of the Now"How Do Radical Movements Sustain a Sense of Past? Andy Willimott (bio) Jay Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. 543 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0198842705. $130.00. David Brandenberger and Mikhail Zelenov, eds., Stalin's Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. 744 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0300155365. $72.00. How do radical movements sustain a sense of past even as they boldly declare their newness? With the Reformation a whole historiography of medieval dissent was forged by 16th-century Protestants, all vying to find a sense of origin in a virtuous past. Various 19th-century national movements embraced narratives proclaiming and explaining their existence, often retrospectively projecting their values back to a time armorial. In 1917, the Bolsheviks confidently proclaimed their newness, heralded a red dawn, and insisted on a new way of life. But the past mattered to the Bolsheviks, too. Far from disregarding the events and developments that preceded them, as Marxists they understood history as a linear, progressive process. They were deeply conscious of their place in "the march of history." More than that, the past could be meaningful to the Bolsheviks—a place where example and purpose were to be found. After all, as Marxists, they believed that the past was composed of manifest "universal laws" that could both explain and help unlock the course of history (Bergman, viii). Not so much rooted in a fixed sense of "time armorial," the forces of history seemed very much alive in the present [End Page 901] for the Bolsheviks. Or as Walter Benjamin observed, theirs was "a past charged with the time of the now."1 Understanding the past as having an active and evolving importance to the Bolsheviks—as opposed to a redundant, unchanging, or even purely subservient role—is crucial to explaining the formative underpinnings of 1917 and the Soviet Union.2 It has not always been thus. The long-dominant totalitarian school of thought presumed that ideology was fixed, permanent, and impervious to evolving circumstances. The meanings found in the past were deemed largely irrelevant next to the power of a "founding idea."3 In recent years, however, a growing array of scholars have sought to examine the Soviet relationship to the past, influenced by the burgeoning field of memory studies, building on Pierre Nora's formative assessment of rituals and symbols as sites of memory, Hayden White's pronouncements on our collective desire for narrative construction and storytelling in historical writing, and Henry Steele Commager's focus on presentism and the search for a "usable past," as well as Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger's notion of "invented traditions."4 The last particularly resonated with a field tending to foc
{"title":"\"A Past Charged with the Time of the Now\": How Do Radical Movements Sustain a Sense of Past?","authors":"Andy Willimott","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910987","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910987","url":null,"abstract":"\"A Past Charged with the Time of the Now\"How Do Radical Movements Sustain a Sense of Past? Andy Willimott (bio) Jay Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. 543 pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0198842705. $130.00. David Brandenberger and Mikhail Zelenov, eds., Stalin's Master Narrative: A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course. 744 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-0300155365. $72.00. How do radical movements sustain a sense of past even as they boldly declare their newness? With the Reformation a whole historiography of medieval dissent was forged by 16th-century Protestants, all vying to find a sense of origin in a virtuous past. Various 19th-century national movements embraced narratives proclaiming and explaining their existence, often retrospectively projecting their values back to a time armorial. In 1917, the Bolsheviks confidently proclaimed their newness, heralded a red dawn, and insisted on a new way of life. But the past mattered to the Bolsheviks, too. Far from disregarding the events and developments that preceded them, as Marxists they understood history as a linear, progressive process. They were deeply conscious of their place in \"the march of history.\" More than that, the past could be meaningful to the Bolsheviks—a place where example and purpose were to be found. After all, as Marxists, they believed that the past was composed of manifest \"universal laws\" that could both explain and help unlock the course of history (Bergman, viii). Not so much rooted in a fixed sense of \"time armorial,\" the forces of history seemed very much alive in the present [End Page 901] for the Bolsheviks. Or as Walter Benjamin observed, theirs was \"a past charged with the time of the now.\"1 Understanding the past as having an active and evolving importance to the Bolsheviks—as opposed to a redundant, unchanging, or even purely subservient role—is crucial to explaining the formative underpinnings of 1917 and the Soviet Union.2 It has not always been thus. The long-dominant totalitarian school of thought presumed that ideology was fixed, permanent, and impervious to evolving circumstances. The meanings found in the past were deemed largely irrelevant next to the power of a \"founding idea.\"3 In recent years, however, a growing array of scholars have sought to examine the Soviet relationship to the past, influenced by the burgeoning field of memory studies, building on Pierre Nora's formative assessment of rituals and symbols as sites of memory, Hayden White's pronouncements on our collective desire for narrative construction and storytelling in historical writing, and Henry Steele Commager's focus on presentism and the search for a \"usable past,\" as well as Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger's notion of \"invented traditions.\"4 The last particularly resonated with a field tending to foc","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910980
Vassily A. Klimentov
Not a Threat?The Russian Elites' Disregard for the "Islamist Danger" in the North Caucasus in the 1990s Vassily A. Klimentov (bio) Since the 1980s, Western pundits have claimed that Muslims in the Soviet Union would rise to challenge communism. Proponents of this school of thought centered on Alexandre Bennigsen, the Russian émigré scholar and specialist on Islam. Bennigsen postulated that, because Soviet Muslims actively nurtured plans to overthrow the communist regime, Soviet authorities both in Moscow and the Muslim republics were in constant fear of Islam and closely monitored the "parallel clergy," the Islamic scholars who escaped registration by official institutions tasked with policing religion.1 The Bennigsen school also convinced the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the necessity to nurture the opposition among Soviet Muslims to the Soviet authorities by smuggling Islamic literature to them and broadcasting Islamic radio content in Muslim regions. These attempts to undermine the Soviet system proved, however, underwhelming.2 When the USSR collapsed, Soviet Muslims often proved to be the most loyal of Soviet citizens and Islam did not become a driving factor for separatism.3 Except for Azerbaijan, which became embroiled in a war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, Muslim republics left the Soviet Union unwillingly. [End Page 817] Overall, policymakers in Moscow disregarded Islam as a source of dispute throughout the Soviet period. They did not see it as a challenge to communism.4 Despite being discredited, the Bennigsen school has had a long life, continuing to influence studies on Soviet and post-Soviet Muslims. Western and Russian scholars and policymakers, often from among security elites, have built on its legacy to analyze the rise of Islamism, a movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology and hopes for the establishment of a theocratic state in the post-Soviet space.5 Constructing a retrospectively deterministic narrative after the consolidation of radical Islamism in the North Caucasus in the 2000s, they have argued that the Soviet and Russian states consistently fought Islamism in the 20th century. Such accounts have too often traced uncritical filiations from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet-Afghan War, the Tajik Civil War, the First and Second Chechen Wars and, ultimately, the war in Syria.6 Since 1999, they have followed the ideology of Vladimir Putin's regime, which has repeatedly emphasized the existential and, importantly, foreign threat that Islamism represented to Russia.7 In that narrative Moscow appeared to have continuously been at the forefront of a messianic civilizational fight against Islamism. [End Page 818] Other scholars have questioned such accounts, highlighting how perceptions and policies on Islam connected with the longue durée of Russia's relationship with Muslims that was marked by orientalist stereotypes and, depending on the period, accommodation or confrontation;8 how the Soviets
{"title":"Not a Threat? The Russian Elites' Disregard for the \"Islamist Danger\" in the North Caucasus in the 1990s","authors":"Vassily A. Klimentov","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910980","url":null,"abstract":"Not a Threat?The Russian Elites' Disregard for the \"Islamist Danger\" in the North Caucasus in the 1990s Vassily A. Klimentov (bio) Since the 1980s, Western pundits have claimed that Muslims in the Soviet Union would rise to challenge communism. Proponents of this school of thought centered on Alexandre Bennigsen, the Russian émigré scholar and specialist on Islam. Bennigsen postulated that, because Soviet Muslims actively nurtured plans to overthrow the communist regime, Soviet authorities both in Moscow and the Muslim republics were in constant fear of Islam and closely monitored the \"parallel clergy,\" the Islamic scholars who escaped registration by official institutions tasked with policing religion.1 The Bennigsen school also convinced the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the necessity to nurture the opposition among Soviet Muslims to the Soviet authorities by smuggling Islamic literature to them and broadcasting Islamic radio content in Muslim regions. These attempts to undermine the Soviet system proved, however, underwhelming.2 When the USSR collapsed, Soviet Muslims often proved to be the most loyal of Soviet citizens and Islam did not become a driving factor for separatism.3 Except for Azerbaijan, which became embroiled in a war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, Muslim republics left the Soviet Union unwillingly. [End Page 817] Overall, policymakers in Moscow disregarded Islam as a source of dispute throughout the Soviet period. They did not see it as a challenge to communism.4 Despite being discredited, the Bennigsen school has had a long life, continuing to influence studies on Soviet and post-Soviet Muslims. Western and Russian scholars and policymakers, often from among security elites, have built on its legacy to analyze the rise of Islamism, a movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology and hopes for the establishment of a theocratic state in the post-Soviet space.5 Constructing a retrospectively deterministic narrative after the consolidation of radical Islamism in the North Caucasus in the 2000s, they have argued that the Soviet and Russian states consistently fought Islamism in the 20th century. Such accounts have too often traced uncritical filiations from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet-Afghan War, the Tajik Civil War, the First and Second Chechen Wars and, ultimately, the war in Syria.6 Since 1999, they have followed the ideology of Vladimir Putin's regime, which has repeatedly emphasized the existential and, importantly, foreign threat that Islamism represented to Russia.7 In that narrative Moscow appeared to have continuously been at the forefront of a messianic civilizational fight against Islamism. [End Page 818] Other scholars have questioned such accounts, highlighting how perceptions and policies on Islam connected with the longue durée of Russia's relationship with Muslims that was marked by orientalist stereotypes and, depending on the period, accommodation or confrontation;8 how the Soviets","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"143 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910986
Yelizaveta Raykhlina
Reading Practices and the Uses of Print in Russian History Yelizaveta Raykhlina (bio) Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena, eds., Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, vols. 1–3. 295 + 561 + 435 pp. Milan: Ledizioni, 2020. ISBN-13 978-8855261920 (vol. 1), 978-8855261937 (vol. 2), 978-8867055944 (vol. 3). Open access via OpenEdition Books. Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi, eds., Publishing in Tsarist Russia: A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution. xv + 264 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. ISBN-13 978-1350246768. $40.95. The history of Russian civil society has been examined by scholars looking to explain the underdevelopment of independent political institutions, weak rule of law, and relative illiberalism of successive Russian regimes across the centuries.1 Turning to the history of reading, printing, and the control of public discourse, scholars once saw imperial Russia's public sphere as lacking in critical mass and degree of political influence in comparison to its European and North American counterparts, while Soviet publics were constrained under the tight control of the state. This understanding has undergone significant revision in recent decades, as scholars have interrogated both the prescriptive categories and models of Western political theory, and as new research has uncovered broader types of agency and participation across Russian history. Working largely in the disciplines of literature, history, and historical sociology, these approaches [End Page 886] have produced deeply researched studies of publishers, presses, publics, and readers in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Examining questions such as canon formation and marketplace influence, literary scholars have looked to the Formalist tradition, semiotics, and sociological concepts to provide critical context and analysis for understanding the work of renowned authors and their "classics."2 Historians, inspired by the Annales school and the various historiographical "turns"—cultural, imperial, transnational—have explored the manifold applications and uses of publishing, from mass readerships and cultural production to the entanglements among writers, publishers, politics, and the state.3 Cumulatively, this research has not only underscored the integral role of reading and texts for understanding the imperial and Soviet periods but has also pointed to multiple new avenues for scholars to explore. This review focuses on four edited volumes which do precisely that: examine text consumption and production using novel and multidisciplinary approaches. Reading Russia: A History of Reading in Modern Russia, the three-volume series edited by Damiano Rebecchini and Raffaella Vassena, surveys Russian reading practices from the late 17th century to the post-Soviet period, while Publishing in Tsarist Russia: A History of Print Media from Enlightenment to Revolution, edited by Yukiko Tatsumi and Taro Tsurumi, provides an innovative approach
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910978
Sean Pollock
"The Duty of Perfect Obedience"The Laws of Subjecthood in Tsarist Russia Sean Pollock (bio) Sometime between 1666 and 1667, Grigorii Kotoshikhin, a former long-serving undersecretary (pod´iachii) in Muscovy's Ambassadorial Chancellery, Swedish spy and defector, composed what the historian Marshall Poe has characterized as "a tell-all description of Russian politics."1 The Swedes, having accepted Kotoshikhin into state service and granted him a salary in 1666, commissioned him to write a book focused on Muscovite statecraft, "to describe," in Kotoshikhin's words, "the whole Muscovite state."2 To explain how the Muscovite state worked, Kotoshikhin organized the book around questions and answers, many of which throw light on a neglected dimension of Russian state formation—namely, the political subjectification of the country's population, or what Russian law beginning in the second half of the 17th century referred to as poddanstvo. Question: Why does the Muscovite tsar write to Christian states using his full long title, [including] after "ruler [of all the northern lands]": "sovereign of the Iberian lands of the Kartlian and Georgian tsars, and [End Page 753] of the Kabardinian lands of the Circassian and Mountain princes, and heir through his fathers and forefathers, and sovereign and possessor, of many eastern and western and northern realms and lands"; whereas to the Mohammedan states he does not write these titles? What is the reason for this? Answer: The Iberian, Kartlian, and Georgian states are under the authority of the Persian shah and [owe him] the greatest obedience; and the tsar writes to other [Christian] states [using these titles] in order to glorify himself, without good reason; and in those [Caucasian] states it is the custom, when writing to the tsar, to humble oneself and to exalt him, and to call oneself his slave, just as in other states it is the custom, when one lord writes to another, to refer to oneself as his obedient servant. But [the Muscovites] interpret their humble language as if it were really true that they are [permanent] subjects (vechnye poddannye); but this is not true…. As for the Circassian and Mountain princes of the Kabardinian land, they are indeed his subjects (pod ego poddanstvom), but it is awkward for [the tsar] to use these titles in writing to the Shah of Persia without the others. And if he used all those titles with which he writes to the Christian states, all the Mohammedan states would make war on him on this account. And if the Shah of Persia learned truly about the sovereigns from those realms who address [the tsar] as his slaves, he would order them and their realms to be devastated and utterly ruined. And for this reason those titles are not used in writing to Mohammedan sovereigns.3 Clearly, much was at stake in claiming Caucasian peoples as Muscovite subjects: the power and prestige of Muscovy's ruler; the quality of relations with its Christian and Muslim rivals; and the political status
{"title":"\"The Duty of Perfect Obedience\": The Laws of Subjecthood in Tsarist Russia","authors":"Sean Pollock","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910978","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910978","url":null,"abstract":"\"The Duty of Perfect Obedience\"The Laws of Subjecthood in Tsarist Russia Sean Pollock (bio) Sometime between 1666 and 1667, Grigorii Kotoshikhin, a former long-serving undersecretary (pod´iachii) in Muscovy's Ambassadorial Chancellery, Swedish spy and defector, composed what the historian Marshall Poe has characterized as \"a tell-all description of Russian politics.\"1 The Swedes, having accepted Kotoshikhin into state service and granted him a salary in 1666, commissioned him to write a book focused on Muscovite statecraft, \"to describe,\" in Kotoshikhin's words, \"the whole Muscovite state.\"2 To explain how the Muscovite state worked, Kotoshikhin organized the book around questions and answers, many of which throw light on a neglected dimension of Russian state formation—namely, the political subjectification of the country's population, or what Russian law beginning in the second half of the 17th century referred to as poddanstvo. Question: Why does the Muscovite tsar write to Christian states using his full long title, [including] after \"ruler [of all the northern lands]\": \"sovereign of the Iberian lands of the Kartlian and Georgian tsars, and [End Page 753] of the Kabardinian lands of the Circassian and Mountain princes, and heir through his fathers and forefathers, and sovereign and possessor, of many eastern and western and northern realms and lands\"; whereas to the Mohammedan states he does not write these titles? What is the reason for this? Answer: The Iberian, Kartlian, and Georgian states are under the authority of the Persian shah and [owe him] the greatest obedience; and the tsar writes to other [Christian] states [using these titles] in order to glorify himself, without good reason; and in those [Caucasian] states it is the custom, when writing to the tsar, to humble oneself and to exalt him, and to call oneself his slave, just as in other states it is the custom, when one lord writes to another, to refer to oneself as his obedient servant. But [the Muscovites] interpret their humble language as if it were really true that they are [permanent] subjects (vechnye poddannye); but this is not true…. As for the Circassian and Mountain princes of the Kabardinian land, they are indeed his subjects (pod ego poddanstvom), but it is awkward for [the tsar] to use these titles in writing to the Shah of Persia without the others. And if he used all those titles with which he writes to the Christian states, all the Mohammedan states would make war on him on this account. And if the Shah of Persia learned truly about the sovereigns from those realms who address [the tsar] as his slaves, he would order them and their realms to be devastated and utterly ruined. And for this reason those titles are not used in writing to Mohammedan sovereigns.3 Clearly, much was at stake in claiming Caucasian peoples as Muscovite subjects: the power and prestige of Muscovy's ruler; the quality of relations with its Christian and Muslim rivals; and the political status ","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910985
Gleb Kazakov
Russian History Pre-1600A Turn to a Postcolonial Perspective? Gleb Kazakov (bio) Marat Shaikhutdinov, Between East and West: The Formation of the Moscow State. 274 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1644697139. $109.00. Vladimir Shirogorov, War on the Eve of Nations: Conflicts and Militaries in Eastern Europe, 1450–1500. 509 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1793622402. $142.00. Cornelia Soldat, Russland als Ziel kolonialer Eroberung: Heinrich von Stadens Pläne für ein Moskauer Reich im 16. Jahrhundert (Russia as a Goal of Colonial Conquest: Heinrich von Staden's Plans for a Muscovite State in the 16th Century). 285 pp. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. ISBN-13 978-3837661644. €45.00. It is not a simple task to define what should be considered the "premodern" era in Russian history. A long-standing tradition in Russian historical literature sees an important threshold in the Petrine reforms at the beginning of the 18th century, thus everything before Peter the Great is labeled as "Old Russia" (Drevniaia Rus´). A different approach has gained popularity in recent years among North American scholars: here the Russian 18th century is viewed as a natural continuation of the state and empire building begun by Ivan III (1462–1505) of Muscovy, and the start of Russian modernity is postponed to roughly 1800.1 The early modern period of Russian [End Page 873] history thus stretches over three and a half centuries. Different stages of this long epoch have received different levels of attention in the historiography. Interest toward the study of the 18th-century Russian empire has indisputably been greatest. The rather uncomplicated access—for foreign scholars—to archival sources (most of which are stored in one central archive—the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, RGADA]), which was the norm from the 1990s to the outbreak of war in 2022, has accelerated research on 17th-century Russian history, opening it up to new approaches, topics, and methods. The history of Russia (or, to be more precise, of the Grand Principality of Moscow) before the 1530s has, however, received less attention and is still largely viewed within the old Karamzinian paradigm of the "gathering of the Rus´ lands" by the grand princes of Moscow. This paradigm remains, by and large, very Moscow centered and, as one may even call it, proto-imperial in its main narrative, for it recognizes only the agency of one particular actor, leaving other entities of the region—be it the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Tver´, or Novgorod—in the role of mere obstacles along the path of the emerging centralized state. Since the appearance of Andreas Kappeler's Russland als Vielvölkerreich in 1992 (published in English as The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History), the view of tsarist Russia as an empire and a multiethnic colonial state has been largely accepted by Western academics.2 However, the discourse about Russia's colo
{"title":"Russian History Pre-1600: A Turn to a Postcolonial Perspective?","authors":"Gleb Kazakov","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910985","url":null,"abstract":"Russian History Pre-1600A Turn to a Postcolonial Perspective? Gleb Kazakov (bio) Marat Shaikhutdinov, Between East and West: The Formation of the Moscow State. 274 pp. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1644697139. $109.00. Vladimir Shirogorov, War on the Eve of Nations: Conflicts and Militaries in Eastern Europe, 1450–1500. 509 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. ISBN-13 978-1793622402. $142.00. Cornelia Soldat, Russland als Ziel kolonialer Eroberung: Heinrich von Stadens Pläne für ein Moskauer Reich im 16. Jahrhundert (Russia as a Goal of Colonial Conquest: Heinrich von Staden's Plans for a Muscovite State in the 16th Century). 285 pp. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. ISBN-13 978-3837661644. €45.00. It is not a simple task to define what should be considered the \"premodern\" era in Russian history. A long-standing tradition in Russian historical literature sees an important threshold in the Petrine reforms at the beginning of the 18th century, thus everything before Peter the Great is labeled as \"Old Russia\" (Drevniaia Rus´). A different approach has gained popularity in recent years among North American scholars: here the Russian 18th century is viewed as a natural continuation of the state and empire building begun by Ivan III (1462–1505) of Muscovy, and the start of Russian modernity is postponed to roughly 1800.1 The early modern period of Russian [End Page 873] history thus stretches over three and a half centuries. Different stages of this long epoch have received different levels of attention in the historiography. Interest toward the study of the 18th-century Russian empire has indisputably been greatest. The rather uncomplicated access—for foreign scholars—to archival sources (most of which are stored in one central archive—the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts [Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov, RGADA]), which was the norm from the 1990s to the outbreak of war in 2022, has accelerated research on 17th-century Russian history, opening it up to new approaches, topics, and methods. The history of Russia (or, to be more precise, of the Grand Principality of Moscow) before the 1530s has, however, received less attention and is still largely viewed within the old Karamzinian paradigm of the \"gathering of the Rus´ lands\" by the grand princes of Moscow. This paradigm remains, by and large, very Moscow centered and, as one may even call it, proto-imperial in its main narrative, for it recognizes only the agency of one particular actor, leaving other entities of the region—be it the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Tver´, or Novgorod—in the role of mere obstacles along the path of the emerging centralized state. Since the appearance of Andreas Kappeler's Russland als Vielvölkerreich in 1992 (published in English as The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History), the view of tsarist Russia as an empire and a multiethnic colonial state has been largely accepted by Western academics.2 However, the discourse about Russia's colo","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910983
Serhy Yekelchyk
Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the Way Things Looked from Kyiv Serhy Yekelchyk (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). Like Vladislav M. Zubok, I have a vivid recollection of my immediate reaction to the news of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The August 1991 coup left a particularly strong imprint on my memory. At the time I was an aspirant with an almost-completed dissertation draft, and my first thought was that "they" would force me to rewrite most of the text or write a new thesis on a Soviet-style topic. But my thought about "them" came complete with the notion of "us," the members of Ukraine's generation of the late 1980s and early 1990s—students and young professionals for whom the notion of political freedom had become fused with the conscious choice of Ukrainian culture as an anti-imperial identity marker. I knew that this imagined community would not give up and allow the authorities to go back to the bleak days of the late Soviet period. The student hunger strike on the Maidan in October 1990 had proved that by forcing the resignation of Vitaly Masol, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of Ministers. The different memories of 1991 do not suggest that one particular memory was right and the other was not. Instead, all of them highlight the fact that the end of the Soviet Union was a complex event produced by multiple social and political processes that unfolded simultaneously, the resulting dynamic differing depending on the region. The optics of a Russian contemporary could differ from that of a Ukrainian one, and the full picture would emerge only when these two optics (and many more) were reconciled. Just as the perceptions of the fall of the Soviet superpower differed in 1991, so do its subsequent interpretations—depending on their [End Page 853] focus. In this sense, Zubok's gripping and extremely well-researched account concentrating on the actions (or lack thereof) undertaken by the central authorities reads particularly well in concert with studies emphasizing the agency of mass movements in the non-Russian republics, such as Ronald G. Suny's The Revenge of the Past, Mark Beissinger's Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, and Serhii Plokhy's The Last Empire.1 Among the many contributions of this book, the most important one is Zubok's detailed inquiry into the role of Mikhail Gorbachev and his motivation for starting the fateful reforms in the first place. It is true that the constitutional structure of the Soviet Union made the Union republics natural default foci of loyalty, if the center were to weaken and Soviet policies made ethnicity a powerful idiom of dissent.2 It is also correct to say that many republics, especially in the so-called Soviet West, experienced national mobilization outside the USSR during the interwar peri
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910981
Michael David-Fox
Revolutionary Reform, Stillborn Revolution Michael David-Fox (bio) Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. xv + 576 pp., illus., maps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. ISBN-13 978-0300257304, $35.00 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0300268171, $25 (paper). Vladislav Zubok's Collapse sets a new standard for understanding and debating the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book takes the form of an unprecedentedly rich and detailed narrative of political decision making, with a focus on three major areas. The most sustained is domestic high politics, and the treatment is notable for its unprecedented depth on Mikhail Gorbachev and the rival Boris Yeltsin "team." The second, in keeping with Zubok's distinguished contributions to the history of Soviet foreign policy, is international diplomacy, with particular reference to the key factor of late Soviet interactions with the US superpower under US Secretary of State James Baker and President George H. W. Bush. The third is "the decisive and implacable role" (9) of economics and finance. This includes an account of the disastrous macroeconomic consequences of banking reform starting in 1987, which destabilized the unique Soviet system of beznal (cashless) accounting between the Soviet state and its enterprises. Fateful decisions and missteps in each of these areas by Gorbachev, the work's antihero, converged in what became the USSR's final death spiral. Zubok not only shows that the last Soviet leader was a true believer in his "socialist choice," something that has been emphasized before. He demonstrates that Gorbachev's reform program was seriously, even bizarrely, formulated under the influence of Vladimir Lenin—or, more accurately, Gorbachev's own reading of the Bolshevik revolutionary. Lenin's influence can be boiled down to Gorbachev's admiration for Lenin's world-historical risk taking, encapsulated in the political credo of on s'engage, et puis on voit. In his 1923 "On Revolution," Lenin translated Napoleon's aphorism as "first [End Page 839] engage in a serious battle and then see what happens."1 Zubok's unforgettable portrait of the last Soviet leader paints Gorbachev as a "bizarre political animal, who misunderstood power" (210). In the study's tripartite focus and its explanation of Gorbachev, the narrative deploys the extensive use of interviews and about 50 published memoirs and diaries. Among many others, it weaves in the critical, not infrequently incredulous voice of Gorbachev's top foreign policy aide Anatolii Cherniaev. Both the painstakingly detailed chronological narrative and personal sources on the highest levels of decision making in Moscow bring us deep into the choices and calculations that informed the crucial turning points in perestroika's several stages. In other words, the entire organization of the book serves to emphasize the contingency of a converging series of gambles, missteps, and misunderstandings for which Gorbachev was responsible. The introduct
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910979
William Whitham
Lenin, the Anarchist?A Constructive Misinterpretation William Whitham (bio) V. I. Lenin's "thunder-like speech" to Petrograd Bolsheviks on 3 April 1917 "startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidentally dropped in, but all the true believers," remembered Nikolai Sukhanov. The idea of a government of soviets struck "every listener with any experience in political theory" as "a purely anarchist schema," as "a totality of local authority, like the absence of any state in general, like a schema of 'free' (independent) workers' communes." The "April Theses"—advocating a "commune state" and the abolition of the army, police, and bureaucracy—met "protests and exclamations of outrage" from Social Democrats.1 Iosif Gol´denberg declared Lenin an "anarchist" and "the heir of [Mikhail] Bakunin."2 "The pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Lenin are the natural offspring of the pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Bakunin," wrote Georgii Plekhanov in June 1917.3 In January 1918, Iulii Martov argued that Lenin "rehashed the old ideas of Bakunin." The following year, Pavel Aksel´rod called Bolshevism "a savage and pernicious throwback to Bakuninism." In 1924, Mensheviks may have placed a funeral wreath on Lenin's coffin that identified him as "the most outstanding Bakuninist among Marxists."4 "It is well known, I suppose," [End Page 791] mused Mark Aldanov in his 1919 Lenin biography, "that no worse insult could have been offered a Russian Social-Democrat than to call him an anarchist and compare him to Bakunin."5 Anarchists described Lenin similarly, but to praise him. Anatolii Gorelik commented favorably on Lenin's Political Parties in Russia (April 1917) and on State and Revolution (1918), "where he reveals and proves that the Bolsheviks are more anarchist than the anarchists themselves. Many other Bolsheviks expressed themselves the same way."6 Vsevolod "Voline" Eikhenbaum noted "the perfect parallelism between [Lenin's] ideas and those of the Anarchists, except the idea of the State and of Power." Bolshevik activists used "watchwords that, until then, were precisely characteristic of anarchism," including demands for peace, land, and workers' control.7 They initially adopted "certain fundamental principles and methods of Anarchist Communism"—including direct action, antiparliamentarism, soviet democracy, and expropriation—ventured a group of Moscow anarchists in June 1921.8 Grigorii Maksimov went farther. "Lenin, in demanding the abolition of the army, police and officialdom impressed the workers, peasants and soldiers with the idea that a Soviet Republic is an Anarchist Federation of many thousands of Communes-Soviets scattered throughout the vast expanses of Russia, and that this Republic is a full democracy, developed to its logical end—the extinction of the State." The Bolsheviks abandoned "orthodox Marxism" for "Anarchist slogans and methods," Maksimov argued, and "were indeed revolutionists and Anarchists of a sort."9 Upon Lenin's death, Apollon K
{"title":"Lenin, the Anarchist? A Constructive Misinterpretation","authors":"William Whitham","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910979","url":null,"abstract":"Lenin, the Anarchist?A Constructive Misinterpretation William Whitham (bio) V. I. Lenin's \"thunder-like speech\" to Petrograd Bolsheviks on 3 April 1917 \"startled and amazed not only me, a heretic who had accidentally dropped in, but all the true believers,\" remembered Nikolai Sukhanov. The idea of a government of soviets struck \"every listener with any experience in political theory\" as \"a purely anarchist schema,\" as \"a totality of local authority, like the absence of any state in general, like a schema of 'free' (independent) workers' communes.\" The \"April Theses\"—advocating a \"commune state\" and the abolition of the army, police, and bureaucracy—met \"protests and exclamations of outrage\" from Social Democrats.1 Iosif Gol´denberg declared Lenin an \"anarchist\" and \"the heir of [Mikhail] Bakunin.\"2 \"The pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Lenin are the natural offspring of the pseudo-revolutionary tactics of Bakunin,\" wrote Georgii Plekhanov in June 1917.3 In January 1918, Iulii Martov argued that Lenin \"rehashed the old ideas of Bakunin.\" The following year, Pavel Aksel´rod called Bolshevism \"a savage and pernicious throwback to Bakuninism.\" In 1924, Mensheviks may have placed a funeral wreath on Lenin's coffin that identified him as \"the most outstanding Bakuninist among Marxists.\"4 \"It is well known, I suppose,\" [End Page 791] mused Mark Aldanov in his 1919 Lenin biography, \"that no worse insult could have been offered a Russian Social-Democrat than to call him an anarchist and compare him to Bakunin.\"5 Anarchists described Lenin similarly, but to praise him. Anatolii Gorelik commented favorably on Lenin's Political Parties in Russia (April 1917) and on State and Revolution (1918), \"where he reveals and proves that the Bolsheviks are more anarchist than the anarchists themselves. Many other Bolsheviks expressed themselves the same way.\"6 Vsevolod \"Voline\" Eikhenbaum noted \"the perfect parallelism between [Lenin's] ideas and those of the Anarchists, except the idea of the State and of Power.\" Bolshevik activists used \"watchwords that, until then, were precisely characteristic of anarchism,\" including demands for peace, land, and workers' control.7 They initially adopted \"certain fundamental principles and methods of Anarchist Communism\"—including direct action, antiparliamentarism, soviet democracy, and expropriation—ventured a group of Moscow anarchists in June 1921.8 Grigorii Maksimov went farther. \"Lenin, in demanding the abolition of the army, police and officialdom impressed the workers, peasants and soldiers with the idea that a Soviet Republic is an Anarchist Federation of many thousands of Communes-Soviets scattered throughout the vast expanses of Russia, and that this Republic is a full democracy, developed to its logical end—the extinction of the State.\" The Bolsheviks abandoned \"orthodox Marxism\" for \"Anarchist slogans and methods,\" Maksimov argued, and \"were indeed revolutionists and Anarchists of a sort.\"9 Upon Lenin's death, Apollon K","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"96 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/kri.2023.a910988
Brigid O'Keeffe
Hiding in Plain SightRussia in World History Brigid O'Keeffe (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin. 140 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350097285. $17.95. Choi Chatterjee, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach. 226 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350026414. $29.95. V. I. Zhuravleva, Obshchee proshloe russkikh i amerikantsev: Kurs lektsii (The Common Past of Russians and Americans: A Lecture Course). 618 pp. Moscow: RGGU, 2021. ISBN-13 978-5728129790. How exceptional are imperial Russia and the Soviet Union when it comes to some of modern world history's defining phenomena, not least race and racism; empire, imperialism, and colonialism? Can the methodologies of transnational, transimperial, and comparative history help us to better appreciate the many and complex worlds that imperial Russian and Soviet histories inhabit and share with other polities? How and why might we—or, how and why must we—better integrate imperial Russian and Soviet history into world history? None of these questions are new in our field. Nor are the controversies that they have periodically inspired. Historians and anthropologists have long debated these very questions with a rightful sense of urgency. The stakes have never been small, and in our current moment the debates can feel weightier than ever. In the aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some scholars are perhaps now arriving at these [End Page 921] concerns only belatedly, with contrition—and others, grudgingly, with hesitation and eyes lowered in wariness. Yet three fascinating books recently published by Choi Chatterjee, Eugene Avrutin, and Victoria Zhuravleva suggest that scholars of imperial Russian and Soviet history would do well to open their eyes more widely to what often has been hiding in plain sight. In particular, their books should prompt the field to pursue these questions about Russia's place in world history still more energetically and searchingly—in our writing and research, but also and especially in our teaching and public outreach. Each presents a plea not only for a better understanding of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union's place in world history but also for the historian's role in imagining possibilities for a more humane global future. Bridging Worlds Choi Chatterjee's new book seeks to show how the Russian and Soviet empires were not the outliers that many often assume them to have been. It is a stale yet persistent conceit in Slavic studies, she insists, that poses Russia as exceptional—exceptionally deficient, backward, illiberal, authoritarian, unique—and thereby both awkwardly situated outside the conventional paradigms of world history and ill suited for productive comparisons. Chatterjee demands a nuanced integration of Russia into world history. She hinges this demand to her book's fundamental comparison of the British, Russian, and Soviet empires. Me
{"title":"Hiding in Plain Sight: Russia in World History","authors":"Brigid O'Keeffe","doi":"10.1353/kri.2023.a910988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2023.a910988","url":null,"abstract":"Hiding in Plain SightRussia in World History Brigid O'Keeffe (bio) Eugene M. Avrutin, Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin. 140 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350097285. $17.95. Choi Chatterjee, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach. 226 pp. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1350026414. $29.95. V. I. Zhuravleva, Obshchee proshloe russkikh i amerikantsev: Kurs lektsii (The Common Past of Russians and Americans: A Lecture Course). 618 pp. Moscow: RGGU, 2021. ISBN-13 978-5728129790. How exceptional are imperial Russia and the Soviet Union when it comes to some of modern world history's defining phenomena, not least race and racism; empire, imperialism, and colonialism? Can the methodologies of transnational, transimperial, and comparative history help us to better appreciate the many and complex worlds that imperial Russian and Soviet histories inhabit and share with other polities? How and why might we—or, how and why must we—better integrate imperial Russian and Soviet history into world history? None of these questions are new in our field. Nor are the controversies that they have periodically inspired. Historians and anthropologists have long debated these very questions with a rightful sense of urgency. The stakes have never been small, and in our current moment the debates can feel weightier than ever. In the aftermath of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some scholars are perhaps now arriving at these [End Page 921] concerns only belatedly, with contrition—and others, grudgingly, with hesitation and eyes lowered in wariness. Yet three fascinating books recently published by Choi Chatterjee, Eugene Avrutin, and Victoria Zhuravleva suggest that scholars of imperial Russian and Soviet history would do well to open their eyes more widely to what often has been hiding in plain sight. In particular, their books should prompt the field to pursue these questions about Russia's place in world history still more energetically and searchingly—in our writing and research, but also and especially in our teaching and public outreach. Each presents a plea not only for a better understanding of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union's place in world history but also for the historian's role in imagining possibilities for a more humane global future. Bridging Worlds Choi Chatterjee's new book seeks to show how the Russian and Soviet empires were not the outliers that many often assume them to have been. It is a stale yet persistent conceit in Slavic studies, she insists, that poses Russia as exceptional—exceptionally deficient, backward, illiberal, authoritarian, unique—and thereby both awkwardly situated outside the conventional paradigms of world history and ill suited for productive comparisons. Chatterjee demands a nuanced integration of Russia into world history. She hinges this demand to her book's fundamental comparison of the British, Russian, and Soviet empires. Me","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135737510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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