In September 1991, Vladimir Elagin, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (LKSM RSFSR), was speaking to a sparse audience. It was the first time in the organization’s history that the attendance was so low: only two-thirds of both the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee members had arrived to hear what Elagin had to say about the organization’s future a week after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had been outlawed on Soviet territory.1 Contrary to one contemporary interpretation,2 he did not, however, take the floor to confirm the youth league’s liquidation but instead urged his listeners to revive it: “To keep up with the current turbulent time, we need to make serious, responsible, and radical decisions on the transformation of the Union.... We must transform ourselves into a public organization [obshchestvennaia organizatsiia] ... [and] say that we will continue to develop and participate in the youth movement and help revive it.”3 Speaking almost three decades after the meeting, one of the members of the organizing committee of the LKSM RSFSR, interviewed for this study, claimed that the dismantling of the Russian Komsomol organization was never even considered. “It was because they were real organizations that genuinely worked with youth. They were real organizations, projects, and programs. The activity was real.”4
{"title":"From State to Society: The Komsomol in Yeltsin’s Russia","authors":"Kristiina Silvan","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"In September 1991, Vladimir Elagin, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (LKSM RSFSR), was speaking to a sparse audience. It was the first time in the organization’s history that the attendance was so low: only two-thirds of both the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee members had arrived to hear what Elagin had to say about the organization’s future a week after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had been outlawed on Soviet territory.1 Contrary to one contemporary interpretation,2 he did not, however, take the floor to confirm the youth league’s liquidation but instead urged his listeners to revive it: “To keep up with the current turbulent time, we need to make serious, responsible, and radical decisions on the transformation of the Union.... We must transform ourselves into a public organization [obshchestvennaia organizatsiia] ... [and] say that we will continue to develop and participate in the youth movement and help revive it.”3 Speaking almost three decades after the meeting, one of the members of the organizing committee of the LKSM RSFSR, interviewed for this study, claimed that the dismantling of the Russian Komsomol organization was never even considered. “It was because they were real organizations that genuinely worked with youth. They were real organizations, projects, and programs. The activity was real.”4","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44505567","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}
Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand— not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration ... as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that
{"title":"Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power","authors":"I. Campbell","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand— not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration ... as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44002958","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}
There is a proverb from a retired Kyrgyz water engineer that I jotted down during fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley a decade ago: “It’s better to be the head of the water than the head of the people” (el bashchysy bolgucha, suu bashchysy bol ). The engineer who shared this piece of local wisdom had been describing the system of sluices that regulated the flow of water between the Isfara River and the Soviet-built irrigation canal that provided water for a swath of agricultural land downstream. In this mountainous corner of Central Asia, water is a materially scare and symbolically loaded resource. During the spring snowmelt, natural drainage channels often flood, leaving homes and gardens in peril. Limited summer rainfall can make sown fields and domestic garden plots dependent upon irrigation water that is distributed, household to household, by the hour. The skilled suu bashchy or mirob (the “head of the water”), the engineer explained, could anticipate flow depending on the season and snowmelt; he could predict demand according to the phase of the agricultural cycle. He and his fellow engineers, who regulated the allocation of water between river and irrigation canal at the headwater sluice, wielded considerable responsibility for sustaining local livelihoods and thus maintaining local peace. I was reminded of the water engineer’s comment, and the delicate challenge of “heading the water” to which he alluded, while reading the late Maya Peterson’s magisterial Pipe Dreams.1 Imperial and Soviet programs for transforming Central Asia through irrigation continue to haunt the region’s landscapes and livelihoods in myriad ways.2 Beyond the desiccation of the Aral Sea, which has come to serve as an icon of late Soviet hubris and environmental devastation, that ambition is visible in the crumbling concrete water
十年前，我在费尔干纳河谷(Ferghana Valley)实地考察时，从一位退休的吉尔吉斯斯坦水利工程师那里记下了一句谚语:“做水的头比做人民的头更好”(el bashchysy bolgucha, suu bashchysy bol)。分享这段当地智慧的工程师一直在描述调节伊斯法拉河和苏联建造的灌溉运河之间水流的水闸系统，该灌溉运河为下游的大片农田提供水。在中亚这个多山的角落，水是一种物质稀缺和象征意义丰富的资源。在春季融雪期间，自然排水渠道经常会发生洪水，使房屋和花园处于危险之中。有限的夏季降雨会使播种的田地和家庭菜园依赖于按小时分配的灌溉用水。工程师解释说，熟练的苏巴什或米罗布(“水头”)可以根据季节和融雪来预测流量;他可以根据农业周期的阶段来预测需求。他和他的工程师同事们在源头水闸处管理河流和灌溉渠之间的水分配，对维持当地的生计，从而维持当地的和平负有相当大的责任。在阅读已故的玛雅·彼得森(Maya Peterson)的权威著作《水管梦》(Pipe dreams)时，我想起了那位水利工程师的评论，以及他提到的“驾驭水”的微妙挑战。帝国和苏联通过灌溉改造中亚的计划，继续以各种方式困扰着该地区的景观和生计咸海已成为前苏联晚期狂妄自大和环境破坏的象征，在这片干涸的咸海之外，这种野心在破碎的混凝土海水中可见一斑
{"title":"Infrastructures of Empire in Central Asia","authors":"M. Reeves","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0028","url":null,"abstract":"There is a proverb from a retired Kyrgyz water engineer that I jotted down during fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley a decade ago: “It’s better to be the head of the water than the head of the people” (el bashchysy bolgucha, suu bashchysy bol ). The engineer who shared this piece of local wisdom had been describing the system of sluices that regulated the flow of water between the Isfara River and the Soviet-built irrigation canal that provided water for a swath of agricultural land downstream. In this mountainous corner of Central Asia, water is a materially scare and symbolically loaded resource. During the spring snowmelt, natural drainage channels often flood, leaving homes and gardens in peril. Limited summer rainfall can make sown fields and domestic garden plots dependent upon irrigation water that is distributed, household to household, by the hour. The skilled suu bashchy or mirob (the “head of the water”), the engineer explained, could anticipate flow depending on the season and snowmelt; he could predict demand according to the phase of the agricultural cycle. He and his fellow engineers, who regulated the allocation of water between river and irrigation canal at the headwater sluice, wielded considerable responsibility for sustaining local livelihoods and thus maintaining local peace. I was reminded of the water engineer’s comment, and the delicate challenge of “heading the water” to which he alluded, while reading the late Maya Peterson’s magisterial Pipe Dreams.1 Imperial and Soviet programs for transforming Central Asia through irrigation continue to haunt the region’s landscapes and livelihoods in myriad ways.2 Beyond the desiccation of the Aral Sea, which has come to serve as an icon of late Soviet hubris and environmental devastation, that ambition is visible in the crumbling concrete water","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42537748","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}
At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire’s largest units of administration (its territorial “governments”) right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian “province.”1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited “the provinces” in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores “the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being” (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes
{"title":"The Provinces in Russian Fiction","authors":"John Randolph","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0010","url":null,"abstract":"At the beginning of the 18th century, Peter I and his advisers sought to transform the governance of the Russian Empire. They turned to examples drawn from other states and imported terminology for the new administration they planned. Some of this new vocabulary never made it far beyond the project stage (for example, the Swedish inspiration of calling a local military commander the landsgevding). The loanword guberniia, meanwhile, was a great success, used to describe the Russian Empire’s largest units of administration (its territorial “governments”) right through 1917. A middling fate awaited the kindred calque provintsiia. Employed in the Petrine era to create smaller, more manageable divisions (or provinces) within the gubernii, provintsiia was ultimately discarded by Catherine II. Catherine right-sized her territorial governments not by subdividing them but by shrinking them and increasing their number, thereby superannuating the original Russian “province.”1 That might have been it for provintsiia, which could have shared the fate of many other imperial projects: to be given to the archive to be forgotten forever. Instead, as Anne Lounsbery shows in this wondrous and incisive study, a much grander destiny awaited “the provinces” in modern Russian culture. Life Is Elsewhere explores “the process by which nineteenth-century Russian writers imagined the provinces into being” (243), taking an abandoned administrative term of art and making it into one of the central tropes","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44876451","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}
Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of the Russian psychologist Alex Kozulin’s call-to-arms, Psychology in Utopia (1984), which presents six case studies of famous Russian and Soviet psychologists in an effort to contextualize the development of Soviet psychology within Soviet social history. Kozulin examines the interactions among Marxist philosophy, the science of psychology, and social history, challenging other scholars to expand upon his work. While the text does not advance any overarching conclusions per se, Kozulin aimed for the book to represent “a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that [distinguishes] between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in an ideologically coherent form.”1 Designed to challenge both Soviet and Western scholars, who had long conceptualized psychology as either merely a single component of a broader history of Soviet science or as a theoretical issue entirely excluding historical analysis, 1 Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 2.
俄罗斯心理学家亚历克斯·科祖林(Alex Kozulin)的《乌托邦中的心理学》(1984)一书出版至今已近40年，该书介绍了六个著名的俄罗斯和苏联心理学家的案例研究，试图将苏联心理学的发展放在苏联社会历史的背景下。Kozulin考察了马克思主义哲学、心理学和社会历史之间的相互作用，挑战其他学者在他的工作上进行扩展。虽然文本本身没有提出任何总体结论，但Kozulin的目的是代表“对苏联心理学的社会信息研究，[区分]其发展的实际条件和那些为了以意识形态连贯的形式呈现这些条件而发明的次要解释。”1 Alex Kozulin，《乌托邦中的心理学:走向苏联心理学社会史》(马萨诸塞州剑桥:麻省理工学院出版社，1984年)，该书旨在挑战苏联和西方学者，他们长期以来将心理学概念化，要么仅仅是苏联科学史的一个组成部分，要么是一个完全排除历史分析的理论问题。
{"title":"Marxism, Psychology, and the Soviet Mind","authors":"Garrett McDonald","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of the Russian psychologist Alex Kozulin’s call-to-arms, Psychology in Utopia (1984), which presents six case studies of famous Russian and Soviet psychologists in an effort to contextualize the development of Soviet psychology within Soviet social history. Kozulin examines the interactions among Marxist philosophy, the science of psychology, and social history, challenging other scholars to expand upon his work. While the text does not advance any overarching conclusions per se, Kozulin aimed for the book to represent “a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that [distinguishes] between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in an ideologically coherent form.”1 Designed to challenge both Soviet and Western scholars, who had long conceptualized psychology as either merely a single component of a broader history of Soviet science or as a theoretical issue entirely excluding historical analysis, 1 Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 2.","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45672901","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}
In the preface to her field-transforming study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981 and currently in its third edition, Katerina Clark described the embarrassment she felt when revealing to colleagues the subject of her research. Are you delving into Platonov or Bulgakov, they would ask, or perhaps Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn? No? You mean ... you’re analyzing the Soviet Soviet novel? Those unreadable texts that slavishly follow the conventions of socialist realism? At this point, she wrote, her incredulous interlocutors would either “back out of the conversation or ... mutter words of sympathy and amazement.” “It is considered far more worthy,” Clark noted, “to write on dissidents.”1 What a difference 40 years make. To write about Soviet dissidents today is to risk seeming naive or, even worse, in thrall to a version of what the musicologist Richard Taruskin called “the Great Either/Or”: in this case, the Cold War view that in the Soviet Union an unbridgeable chasm separated gray, mendacious official culture from the vibrant, autonomous, truth-seeking
{"title":"The Many Shades of Soviet Dissidence","authors":"Benjamin Nathans","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0013","url":null,"abstract":"In the preface to her field-transforming study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, first published in 1981 and currently in its third edition, Katerina Clark described the embarrassment she felt when revealing to colleagues the subject of her research. Are you delving into Platonov or Bulgakov, they would ask, or perhaps Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn? No? You mean ... you’re analyzing the Soviet Soviet novel? Those unreadable texts that slavishly follow the conventions of socialist realism? At this point, she wrote, her incredulous interlocutors would either “back out of the conversation or ... mutter words of sympathy and amazement.” “It is considered far more worthy,” Clark noted, “to write on dissidents.”1 What a difference 40 years make. To write about Soviet dissidents today is to risk seeming naive or, even worse, in thrall to a version of what the musicologist Richard Taruskin called “the Great Either/Or”: in this case, the Cold War view that in the Soviet Union an unbridgeable chasm separated gray, mendacious official culture from the vibrant, autonomous, truth-seeking","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44334095","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}
In the summer of 1919, the Russian Civil War was in its bloodiest phase. The Volunteer Army, a faction of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, had steadily gathered strength over the spring. It had won a string of victories in the southwest region of the former Russian Empire, gaining territories that had previously been conquered by the Bolshevik Red Army.1 The chaos that had overtaken huge swaths of the former empire was magnified in these months as White Army troops began taking reprisals against the inhabitants of the territories formerly occupied by the Red Army. By August, antiBolshevik forces, including White Army units and Ukrainian nationalist forces, had begun perpetrating mass pogroms in Ukrainian territories that were quantitatively and qualitatively different from the anti-Jewish violence that had previously taken place in Russia or Europe as a whole.2 In July 1919, even before the outbreak of organized pogroms, Patriarch Tikhon, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, strongly condemned both the violence of the Civil War in general, and the pogroms specifically,
{"title":"\"A Dishonor to You and to the Church\": Patriarch Tikhon, Pogroms, and the Russian Revolution, 1917–19","authors":"Francesca Silano","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"In the summer of 1919, the Russian Civil War was in its bloodiest phase. The Volunteer Army, a faction of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, had steadily gathered strength over the spring. It had won a string of victories in the southwest region of the former Russian Empire, gaining territories that had previously been conquered by the Bolshevik Red Army.1 The chaos that had overtaken huge swaths of the former empire was magnified in these months as White Army troops began taking reprisals against the inhabitants of the territories formerly occupied by the Red Army. By August, antiBolshevik forces, including White Army units and Ukrainian nationalist forces, had begun perpetrating mass pogroms in Ukrainian territories that were quantitatively and qualitatively different from the anti-Jewish violence that had previously taken place in Russia or Europe as a whole.2 In July 1919, even before the outbreak of organized pogroms, Patriarch Tikhon, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, strongly condemned both the violence of the Civil War in general, and the pogroms specifically,","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47808273","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}
The beginning of the new millennium witnessed unprecedented changes for Russian journals, driven not by shifts in scholarship or publishing technology but by external factors. By far the most of important of these has been an overt initiative on the part of the Russian government to disincentivize low-impact publication and raise the general level, visibility, and competitiveness of Russian scholarship in the international arena. Given the critical importance that state policy has accorded to numerical/statistical measurement (naukometriia) in this area, journals and authors have found themselves forced to pay attention to their work in new ways, developing the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in what has become an increasingly scrutinized and quantified publishing environment. Although this essay focuses on publication in the historical field, the developments affecting history are similar to those affecting other disciplines. At issue is the unprecedented decision by the government to transform academic journals into the arbiters and regulators of the quality of national research. The shift began some 15 years ago, when the Supreme Commission for Accreditation (Vysshaia attestatsionnaia komissiia [VAK]) of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education determined that successfully defended dissertations could be announced only in a select list of journals—the so-called “VAK list”—that met a number of formal expectations established by the commission. Though the reform prompted some grumbling at first, most prospective authors—that is, advanced graduate students and scholars like myself studying or working in Russian academia—ultimately accepted the commission’s decision and adapted to the new development.
{"title":"Good Intentions Gone Wrong: Russian Historical Scholarship and the Proliferation Effect","authors":"Evgenii A. Krestiannikov","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The beginning of the new millennium witnessed unprecedented changes for Russian journals, driven not by shifts in scholarship or publishing technology but by external factors. By far the most of important of these has been an overt initiative on the part of the Russian government to disincentivize low-impact publication and raise the general level, visibility, and competitiveness of Russian scholarship in the international arena. Given the critical importance that state policy has accorded to numerical/statistical measurement (naukometriia) in this area, journals and authors have found themselves forced to pay attention to their work in new ways, developing the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in what has become an increasingly scrutinized and quantified publishing environment. Although this essay focuses on publication in the historical field, the developments affecting history are similar to those affecting other disciplines. At issue is the unprecedented decision by the government to transform academic journals into the arbiters and regulators of the quality of national research. The shift began some 15 years ago, when the Supreme Commission for Accreditation (Vysshaia attestatsionnaia komissiia [VAK]) of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education determined that successfully defended dissertations could be announced only in a select list of journals—the so-called “VAK list”—that met a number of formal expectations established by the commission. Though the reform prompted some grumbling at first, most prospective authors—that is, advanced graduate students and scholars like myself studying or working in Russian academia—ultimately accepted the commission’s decision and adapted to the new development.","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45470460","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}
{"title":"Maya K. Peterson (1980–2021)","authors":"S. Cameron, Jennifer L. Derr, J. Obertreis","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44886561","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}
{"title":"Re-Reading Two Classics of Russian Cultural History","authors":"J. Brooks","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46914608","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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