Political power, elite support for the throne, and political ideologies were not solely represented by institutional rules or developed in polemical texts anywhere in early modern Europe. The two books reviewed below discuss, in different ways, how the vast and “undergoverned” early modern Russian Empire mustered its cultural resources to project political power and promote diffuse, if widely shared, political ideals outside of institutions and polemical texts. Instead, the ruling dynasties used art, architecture, and symbolic ritual to reinforce their divine authority and promote the related goals of unity, security, and social stability. The results contribute in important ways not only to understanding the ideals projected, but also to ongoing discussion about the dating of important transformations (“modernization”) in Russian society of the early modern period.
{"title":"Cultural Tropes and Political Power in Early Modern Russia","authors":"C. B. Stevens","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Political power, elite support for the throne, and political ideologies were not solely represented by institutional rules or developed in polemical texts anywhere in early modern Europe. The two books reviewed below discuss, in different ways, how the vast and “undergoverned” early modern Russian Empire mustered its cultural resources to project political power and promote diffuse, if widely shared, political ideals outside of institutions and polemical texts. Instead, the ruling dynasties used art, architecture, and symbolic ritual to reinforce their divine authority and promote the related goals of unity, security, and social stability. The results contribute in important ways not only to understanding the ideals projected, but also to ongoing discussion about the dating of important transformations (“modernization”) in Russian society of the early modern period. ","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"401 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41908168","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 common agreement that history museums are deeply engaged in transforming history into identity, because they create a public space where “personal, private or autobiographical narratives come into contact with larger-scale, collective or national narratives in mutually inter-animating ways.”1 It is thus very important to establish how museums affect the visitor’s memory and perception of the past on display. Visitor books in museums, where visitors can share their feedback and impressions of exhibitions, offer a space to present their views on the issues discussed in the exhibition.2 Moreover, they confirm that visitors are not mute observers but active participants in a public dialogue.3 As a specific source, visitor books do not offer
{"title":"The Museum Visitor Book as a Means of Public Dialogue about the Gulag Past: The Case of the Solovki Museum","authors":"Zuzanna Bogumił","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"There is common agreement that history museums are deeply engaged in transforming history into identity, because they create a public space where “personal, private or autobiographical narratives come into contact with larger-scale, collective or national narratives in mutually inter-animating ways.”1 It is thus very important to establish how museums affect the visitor’s memory and perception of the past on display. Visitor books in museums, where visitors can share their feedback and impressions of exhibitions, offer a space to present their views on the issues discussed in the exhibition.2 Moreover, they confirm that visitors are not mute observers but active participants in a public dialogue.3 As a specific source, visitor books do not offer","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"315 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48896266","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":"The Protagonists of Pipe Dreams","authors":"Jeff Sahadeo","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"371 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41550317","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}
Historians have recently been paying more attention to the margins. This is partly the long-term germination of seeds sown by the emergence of such approaches as microhistory, gender history, and Alltagsgeschichte. But it is also a reflection of the contemporary cultural and political climate: many of our own societies are paying more attention to those who once were, or still remain, on their margins. Scholarship on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is reflecting this broader trend. To their interrogations of Communist Party politics and the
{"title":"Social Deviants, Urban Myths, and the Socialist Everyday","authors":"N. Chernyshova","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Historians have recently been paying more attention to the margins. This is partly the long-term germination of seeds sown by the emergence of such approaches as microhistory, gender history, and Alltagsgeschichte. But it is also a reflection of the contemporary cultural and political climate: many of our own societies are paying more attention to those who once were, or still remain, on their margins. Scholarship on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is reflecting this broader trend. To their interrogations of Communist Party politics and the","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"431 - 442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43971397","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}
Pipe Dreams — the late Maya Peterson’s first and sadly sole monograph — presents a history of water and power in the Anthropocene. 1 Though the Anthropocene is a less overt facet of her overall framing than questions of empire and environment in the modern history of Central Asia, I would like to suggest that an enduring contribution of this splendid book will be the rich and sophisticated account it presents about how a major world region was forcefully brought into a new geological epoch. modern transformations contesta-tions and on and minus-cule scales, and struggles over touch food to the realization me she would a blue on her book’s cover rather than its vivid red. This design choice would have mir-rored the book’s suggestion that water was even more powerful in Central Asian history than the Soviet regime.
{"title":"An Anthropocene History of Central Asia","authors":"Andy Bruno","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Pipe Dreams — the late Maya Peterson’s first and sadly sole monograph — presents a history of water and power in the Anthropocene. 1 Though the Anthropocene is a less overt facet of her overall framing than questions of empire and environment in the modern history of Central Asia, I would like to suggest that an enduring contribution of this splendid book will be the rich and sophisticated account it presents about how a major world region was forcefully brought into a new geological epoch. modern transformations contesta-tions and on and minus-cule scales, and struggles over touch food to the realization me she would a blue on her book’s cover rather than its vivid red. This design choice would have mir-rored the book’s suggestion that water was even more powerful in Central Asian history than the Soviet regime.","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"339 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41699355","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}
Anyone who has traveled in rural areas of Central Asia will recall seeing oozing, salt-encrusted fields, rendered unfit for cultivation by faulty Soviet irrigation practices. On my first visit to Turkmenistan in the 1990s, I passed miles of such ruined land on my way to a friend’s home village.1 While the devastation of the Aral Sea is the best-known result of the Soviet drive for cotton in the region, the environmental effects of Soviet rule extend far beyond the shores of that doomed body of water. Maya Peterson’s important book helps us understand how this situation came to be. In Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, Peterson tells a story of technology, modernist ideology, and imperial hubris.2 The drive to remake Central Asia’s land and water, begun under the tsars, reached its culmination in the Soviet era. In a perfect cascade of unintended consequences, Soviet “modernizing” policies of agricultural development in Central Asia resulted in famine, the spread of malaria, the destruction of agricultural land through salinization, and the desertification of the Aral Sea and surrounding areas. Water and the environment are vitally important yet neglected aspects of Soviet history. Discontent over environmental damage was a key factor fueling the separatist sentiments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet successor states are still struggling with the legacy of poor stewardship of natural resources. Yet the study of environmental history in Russia and the Soviet Union is in its infancy, and the number of works on this topic relating 1 A 2012 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) study found that 60 percent of all agricultural land in Turkmenistan is affected by salinization (“1st Environmental Performance Review of Turkmenistan” [https://unece.org/environment-policy/ publications/1st-environmental-performance-review-turkmenistan]). 2 Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
任何去过中亚农村地区的人都会记得，苏联错误的灌溉做法使渗出的盐碱地变得不适合耕种。20世纪90年代，我第一次访问土库曼斯坦时，在去朋友家乡的路上，我经过了数英里的荒地。1虽然咸海的破坏是苏联在该地区争夺棉花的最著名结果，但苏联统治对环境的影响远远超出了这片注定要灭亡的水域的海岸。玛雅·彼得森（Maya Peterson）的重要著作有助于我们理解这种情况是如何发生的。在《管道梦：中亚咸海盆地的水与帝国》（Pipe Dreams:Water and Empire In Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin）一书中，彼得森告诉一个关于技术、现代主义意识形态和帝国傲慢的故事。苏联对中亚农业发展政策的“现代化”导致了饥荒、疟疾的传播、盐碱化对农业土地的破坏以及咸海及其周边地区的沙漠化，这是一系列意想不到的后果。水和环境是苏联历史上极其重要但被忽视的方面。对环境破坏的不满是助长分离主义情绪的一个关键因素，导致苏联解体，而苏联的继承国仍在与自然资源管理不善的遗留问题作斗争。然而，俄罗斯和苏联的环境史研究尚处于起步阶段，与此相关的著作数量1 2012年联合国欧洲经济委员会（UNECE）的一项研究发现，土库曼斯坦60%的农业用地受到盐碱化的影响（“土库曼斯坦第一次环境绩效审查”[https://unece.org/environment-policy/出版物/土库曼斯坦第一次环境绩效评估]）。2 Maya K.Peterson，《白日梦：中亚咸海盆地的水与帝国》（纽约：剑桥大学出版社，2019）。
{"title":"Crossing Boundaries: Maya Peterson’s Pipe Dreams","authors":"A. Edgar","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Anyone who has traveled in rural areas of Central Asia will recall seeing oozing, salt-encrusted fields, rendered unfit for cultivation by faulty Soviet irrigation practices. On my first visit to Turkmenistan in the 1990s, I passed miles of such ruined land on my way to a friend’s home village.1 While the devastation of the Aral Sea is the best-known result of the Soviet drive for cotton in the region, the environmental effects of Soviet rule extend far beyond the shores of that doomed body of water. Maya Peterson’s important book helps us understand how this situation came to be. In Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin, Peterson tells a story of technology, modernist ideology, and imperial hubris.2 The drive to remake Central Asia’s land and water, begun under the tsars, reached its culmination in the Soviet era. In a perfect cascade of unintended consequences, Soviet “modernizing” policies of agricultural development in Central Asia resulted in famine, the spread of malaria, the destruction of agricultural land through salinization, and the desertification of the Aral Sea and surrounding areas. Water and the environment are vitally important yet neglected aspects of Soviet history. Discontent over environmental damage was a key factor fueling the separatist sentiments that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet successor states are still struggling with the legacy of poor stewardship of natural resources. Yet the study of environmental history in Russia and the Soviet Union is in its infancy, and the number of works on this topic relating 1 A 2012 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) study found that 60 percent of all agricultural land in Turkmenistan is affected by salinization (“1st Environmental Performance Review of Turkmenistan” [https://unece.org/environment-policy/ publications/1st-environmental-performance-review-turkmenistan]). 2 Maya K. Peterson, Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"352 - 357"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41703552","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}
Artek, with its high-quality buildings and glorious Crimean location, was the most famous Pioneer camp in the Soviet Union. Following its foundation in the 1920s, its significance grew under Iosif Stalin, attracting children from elite families. By 1960, the camp had become an instantly recognizable institution inside the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR, with an all-union cultural presence and an international profile. It was also a gold-standard example of the relaunched post-Stalin welfare system. But if welfare was for everyone, and Artek had an elitist reputation, how did the camp’s social reality and cultural representation match up during the era of apparently protocommunist equality between 1953 and 1964? This article explores the myths and memories that constructed Artek as a Khrushchev-era welfare provider within the Soviet imaginary; it analyzes the lived experience of child welfare in Artek during that period; and it tests the competing pressures of elitism and equality in modulating access to Artek in the example year of 1960. Artek was an exceptional institution in the USSR, and its history is important in its own right, but it also offers a case study of how myths, memories, and social policy shaped childhood experiences during the Khrushchev era.
{"title":"Equality, Welfare, Myth, and Memory: The Artek Pioneer Camp at the Height of the Khrushchev Era","authors":"M. B. Smith","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Artek, with its high-quality buildings and glorious Crimean location, was the most famous Pioneer camp in the Soviet Union. Following its foundation in the 1920s, its significance grew under Iosif Stalin, attracting children from elite families. By 1960, the camp had become an instantly recognizable institution inside the Ukrainian Republic of the USSR, with an all-union cultural presence and an international profile. It was also a gold-standard example of the relaunched post-Stalin welfare system. But if welfare was for everyone, and Artek had an elitist reputation, how did the camp’s social reality and cultural representation match up during the era of apparently protocommunist equality between 1953 and 1964? This article explores the myths and memories that constructed Artek as a Khrushchev-era welfare provider within the Soviet imaginary; it analyzes the lived experience of child welfare in Artek during that period; and it tests the competing pressures of elitism and equality in modulating access to Artek in the example year of 1960. Artek was an exceptional institution in the USSR, and its history is important in its own right, but it also offers a case study of how myths, memories, and social policy shaped childhood experiences during the Khrushchev era. ","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"255 - 287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42669662","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}
Olivia Hanninen, Mark B. Smith, Kristiina Silvan, Zuzanna Bogumił, Andy Bruno, Ian W. Campbell, Adrienne Edgar, Julia Lajus, Madeleine Reeves, Jeff Sahadeo, Donald J. Raleigh, Uilleam Blacker, Carol B. Stevens, Shoshana Keller, Peter Whitewood, Natalya Chernyshova, Gregory L. Freeze
{"title":"Ні війні!/No to War!/Нет войне!","authors":"Olivia Hanninen, Mark B. Smith, Kristiina Silvan, Zuzanna Bogumił, Andy Bruno, Ian W. Campbell, Adrienne Edgar, Julia Lajus, Madeleine Reeves, Jeff Sahadeo, Donald J. Raleigh, Uilleam Blacker, Carol B. Stevens, Shoshana Keller, Peter Whitewood, Natalya Chernyshova, Gregory L. Freeze","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"211 - 212 - 213 - 224 - 225 - 253 - 255 - 287 - 289 - 314 - 315 - 338 - 339 - 344 - 345 - 351 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43030103","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}
Recent years have seen a renewed interest in Ukrainian culture of the early Soviet period, a topic that has previously enjoyed sparse academic attention among Western and English-language scholars. The landmark studies by eminent North American Ukrainian scholars such as George Luckyj, Oleh Ilnytzky, Myroslava Mudrak, or George Grabowicz have long stood as notable exceptions to this trend.1 Over the last ten years or so, new studies have built on this valuable work, as well as on the increasingly impressive achievements of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine (Solomiia Pavlychko, Rostyslav Mel ́nykiv, Yaryna Tsymbal, Vira Aheieva, and others).2 Of particular significance, and 1 George Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990; repr. of 1956 Columbia University Press ed.); Oleh Ilnytzky, Ukrainian Futurism 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Institute, 1997); Myroslava Mudrak, The New Generation and Artistic Modernism in the Ukraine (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986). 2 Solomiia Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukrains ́kii literaturi (Kyiv: Lybid, 1997); Rostyslav Mel ́nykiv, Literaturni 1920-ti: Postati (narysy, obrazky, etiudy) (Kharkiv: Maidan, 2013); Vira Aheieva, Apolohiia modernu: Obrys XX viku (Kyiv: Hrani-T, 2011); Galina Babak
{"title":"Managing the Arts in Soviet Ukraine","authors":"U. Blacker","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen a renewed interest in Ukrainian culture of the early Soviet period, a topic that has previously enjoyed sparse academic attention among Western and English-language scholars. The landmark studies by eminent North American Ukrainian scholars such as George Luckyj, Oleh Ilnytzky, Myroslava Mudrak, or George Grabowicz have long stood as notable exceptions to this trend.1 Over the last ten years or so, new studies have built on this valuable work, as well as on the increasingly impressive achievements of Ukrainian scholars in Ukraine (Solomiia Pavlychko, Rostyslav Mel ́nykiv, Yaryna Tsymbal, Vira Aheieva, and others).2 Of particular significance, and 1 George Luckyj, Literary Politics in the Soviet Ukraine, 1917–1934 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990; repr. of 1956 Columbia University Press ed.); Oleh Ilnytzky, Ukrainian Futurism 1914–1930: A Historical and Critical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Institute, 1997); Myroslava Mudrak, The New Generation and Artistic Modernism in the Ukraine (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986). 2 Solomiia Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukrains ́kii literaturi (Kyiv: Lybid, 1997); Rostyslav Mel ́nykiv, Literaturni 1920-ti: Postati (narysy, obrazky, etiudy) (Kharkiv: Maidan, 2013); Vira Aheieva, Apolohiia modernu: Obrys XX viku (Kyiv: Hrani-T, 2011); Galina Babak","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"389 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41455070","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}
Like other popular illustrated journals of the era, Niva deployed a “special correspondent” to the Far East to send back reports from the field during the Russo-Japanese War. In the issue published on 5 November 1904, the journalist Vladimir Taburin described the following adventure. He met with a lieutenant colonel at a train station and proceeded to join his detachment on an expedition along the Liao River to hunt down a group of so-called khunkhuzy. Although most of these bandits successfully evaded the Russian troops by fleeing over the border to Mongolia, one straggler was apprehended. Preparations were well underway for the bandit to be hanged when the brigade commander ordered a last-minute reprieve: “the Russians did not come here to fight with Chinese ... Russians are not violent. Any khunkhuz who is conscious of his guilt and drops his weapon will be forgiven. I release you to your freedom. Go and tell these words to your companions.”1 This resolution took Taburin by surprise. While this story shimmers with clichéd morality on its surface, dipping below reveals some striking absurdities, the most egregious being the Russian commander’s claim to nonviolence. Not only was Russia in the midst of fighting a brutal war (or, as was clear by November 1904, losing a brutal war), but Russian forces had been fiercely engaging with Chinese bandits at their Far Eastern border for years. What sort of edifice was capable of supporting this paradox? According to Judith Butler, nonviolence is more claim than principle; it is “an address or an appeal.” The pressing point thus becomes “under what conditions are we responsive to such a claim, what makes it possible to accept the claim when it arrives, or, rather, what provides for the arrival of the claim at all?”2 Some part of the answer can be gleaned from Taburin’s tale. 1 Niva, no. 51 (1905): 9–11. 2 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 165.
{"title":"Fear and Loathing in the Far East: Bandits, Law, and the Russo-Japanese War","authors":"Olivia Hanninen","doi":"10.1353/kri.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/kri.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Like other popular illustrated journals of the era, Niva deployed a “special correspondent” to the Far East to send back reports from the field during the Russo-Japanese War. In the issue published on 5 November 1904, the journalist Vladimir Taburin described the following adventure. He met with a lieutenant colonel at a train station and proceeded to join his detachment on an expedition along the Liao River to hunt down a group of so-called khunkhuzy. Although most of these bandits successfully evaded the Russian troops by fleeing over the border to Mongolia, one straggler was apprehended. Preparations were well underway for the bandit to be hanged when the brigade commander ordered a last-minute reprieve: “the Russians did not come here to fight with Chinese ... Russians are not violent. Any khunkhuz who is conscious of his guilt and drops his weapon will be forgiven. I release you to your freedom. Go and tell these words to your companions.”1 This resolution took Taburin by surprise. While this story shimmers with clichéd morality on its surface, dipping below reveals some striking absurdities, the most egregious being the Russian commander’s claim to nonviolence. Not only was Russia in the midst of fighting a brutal war (or, as was clear by November 1904, losing a brutal war), but Russian forces had been fiercely engaging with Chinese bandits at their Far Eastern border for years. What sort of edifice was capable of supporting this paradox? According to Judith Butler, nonviolence is more claim than principle; it is “an address or an appeal.” The pressing point thus becomes “under what conditions are we responsive to such a claim, what makes it possible to accept the claim when it arrives, or, rather, what provides for the arrival of the claim at all?”2 Some part of the answer can be gleaned from Taburin’s tale. 1 Niva, no. 51 (1905): 9–11. 2 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 165.","PeriodicalId":45639,"journal":{"name":"KRITIKA-EXPLORATIONS IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN HISTORY","volume":"23 1","pages":"225 - 253"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45621392","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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