Eugene M. Avrutin – författare

From the 1880s to the 1940s, an upsurge of explosive pogroms caused much pain and suffering across the eastern borderlands of Europe. Rioters attacked Jewish property and caused physical harm to women and children. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, pogrom violence turned into full-blown military actions. In some cases, pogroms wiped out of existence entire Jewish communities. More generally, they were part of a larger story of destruction, ethnic purification, and coexistence that played out in the region over a span of some six decades.Pogroms: A Documentary History surveys the complex history of anti-Jewish violence by bringing together archival and published sources--many appearing for the first time in English translation. The documents assembled here include eyewitness testimony, oral histories, diary excerpts, literary works, trial records, and press coverage. They also include memos and field reports authored by army officials, investigative commissions, humanitarian organizations, and government officials. This landmark volume and its distinguished roster of scholars provides an unprecedented view of the history of pogroms.

From the 1880s to the 1940s, an upsurge of explosive pogroms caused much pain and suffering across the eastern borderlands of Europe. Rioters attacked Jewish property and caused physical harm to women and children. During World War I and the Russian Civil War, pogrom violence turned into full-blown military actions. In some cases, pogroms wiped out of existence entire Jewish communities. More generally, they were part of a larger story of destruction, ethnic purification, and coexistence that played out in the region over a span of some six decades.Pogroms: A Documentary History surveys the complex history of anti-Jewish violence by bringing together archival and published sources--many appearing for the first time in English translation. The documents assembled here include eyewitness testimony, oral histories, diary excerpts, literary works, trial records, and press coverage. They also include memos and field reports authored by army officials, investigative commissions, humanitarian organizations, and government officials. This landmark volume and its distinguished roster of scholars provides an unprecedented view of the history of pogroms.

On April 22, 1823, a three-year-old boy named Fedor finished his lunch and went to play outside. Fedor never returned home from his walk. Several days later, a neighbor found his mutilated body drained of blood and repeatedly pierced. In small market towns, where houses were clustered together, where residents knew each other on intimate terms, and where people gossiped in the taverns, the courtyards, and the streets, even the most trivial bits of news spread like wildfire. And it did not take long before rumors began to spread that Jews had murdered the little boy. The Velizh Affair reconstructs the lives of Jews and their Christian neighbors caught up in the aftermath of this chilling criminal act. The inquisitorial commission into the murder resulted in the charging of forty-two Jews with ritual murder, theft, and desecration of Church property, and the forcible conversion of three town residents. Drawing on an astonishing number of newly discovered trial records, historian Eugene M. Avrutin explores the multiple factors that not only caused fear and conflict in everyday life, but also the social and cultural worlds of a multiethnic population that had coexisted for hundreds of years. This beautifully crafted book provides an intimate glimpse into small-town life in eastern Europe. The case unfolded in a town like any other town in the Russian Empire where lives were closely interwoven, where rivalries and confrontations were part of day-to-day existence, and where the blood libel was part of a well-established belief system.

On April 22, 1823, a three-year-old boy named Fedor finished his lunch and went to play outside. Fedor never returned home from his walk. Several days later, a neighbor found his mutilated body drained of blood and repeatedly pierced. In small market towns, where houses were clustered together, residents knew each other on intimate terms, and people gossiped in taverns, courtyards, and streets, even the most trivial bits of news spread like wildfire. It did not take long before rumors began to emerge that Jews murdered the little boy. The Velizh Affair reconstructs the lives of Jews and their Christian neighbors caught up in the aftermath of this chilling criminal act. The investigation into Fedor's death resulted in the charging of forty-three Jews with ritual murder, theft and desecration of church property, and the forcible conversion of three town residents. Drawing on an astonishing number of newly discovered trial records, historian Eugene M. Avrutin explores the multiple factors that not only caused fear and conflict in everyday life, but also the social and cultural worlds of a multiethnic population that had coexisted for hundreds of years. This beautifully crafted book provides an intimate glimpse into small-town life in eastern Europe. The case unfolded in a town like any other town in the Russian Empire where lives were closely interwoven, where rivalries and confrontations were part of day-to-day existence, and where the blood libel was part of a well-established belief system.

Since its rapid imperial expansion in the seventeenth century, Russia's politics, society, and culture have exerted a profound influence on movement throughout Eurasia. The circulation of people, information, and things across Russian space transformed populations, restructured collective and individual identities, and created enduring legacies. This volume represents the latest discoveries of scholars attempting to rediscover this experience, and to understand its lasting meaning for today. These gathered essays tell a broad range of stories, involving a remarkable cross-section of historical actors: imperial visionaries, stage-coach entrepreneurs, religious pilgrims, tourists, disability activists and metropolitan police, among others. The book illuminates three major themes: the role of human mobility in Russian governance; the processes by which people decide where and how to move; and the political and cultural power of different kinds of movement. A strong contribution to our understanding of the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, this volume offers new models of research for historians, sociologists, political scientists, and others who are seeking to integrate the study of human mobility into their work. Contributors are Eugene M. Avrutin, Alexandra Bekasova, Faith Hillis, Gijs Kessler, Diane P. Koenker, Chia Yin Hsu, Eileen Kane, Anne Lounsbery, Matthew Light, Sarah D. Phillips, John Randolph, Anatolyi Remnev, Jeff Sahadeo, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Charles Steinwedel, Willard Sunderland, and Elena Tyuryukanova.

This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that made these phenomena possible. In doing so, the book helps to explain why blood libel accusations continued to spread in Europe even after modernization seemingly made them obsolete. Drawing on untapped and unconventional historical sources, the collection explores a range of intriguing topics: popular belief and scientific knowledge; the connections between antisemitism, prejudice, and violence; the rule of law versus the power of rumors; the politics of memory; and humanitarian intervention on a global scale.

This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that made these phenomena possible. In doing so, the book helps to explain why blood libel accusations continued to spread in Europe even after modernization seemingly made them obsolete. Drawing on untapped and unconventional historical sources, the collection explores a range of intriguing topics: popular belief and scientific knowledge; the connections between antisemitism, prejudice, and violence; the rule of law versus the power of rumors; the politics of memory; and humanitarian intervention on a global scale.

At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a gradual shift occurred in the ways in which European governments managed their populations. In the Russian Empire, this transformation in governance meant that Jews could no longer remain a people apart. The identification of Jews by passports, vital statistics records, and censuses was tied to the growth and development of government institutions, the creation of elaborate record-keeping procedures, and the universalistic challenge of documenting populations. In Jews and the Imperial State, Eugene M. Avrutin argues that the challenge of knowing who was Jewish and where Jews were, evolved from the everyday administrative concerns of managing territorial movement, ethnic diversity, and the maze of rights, special privileges, and temporary exemptions that composed the imperial legal code. Drawing on a wealth of previously unexplored archival materials, Avrutin tells the story of how one imperial population, the Jews, shaped the world in which they lived by negotiating with what were often perceived to be contradictory and highly restrictive laws and institutions. Although scholars have long interpreted imperial policies toward Jews in essentially negative terms, this groundbreaking book shifts the focus by analyzing what the law made possible. Some Jews responded to the system of government by circumventing legal statutes, others by bribing, converting, or resorting to various forms of manipulations, and still others by appealing to the state with individual grievances and requests.

Anna Pavlovna Vygodskaia's autobiography, originally published in 1938, is a rare and fascinating historical account of Jewish childhood and young adult life in Tsarist Russia. At a time when the vast majority of Jews resided in small market towns in the Pale of Settlement, Vygodskaia liberated herself from that world and embraced the day-to-day rhythms, educational activities, and new intellectual opportunities in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Her story offers a unique glimpse of Jewish daily life that is rarely documented in public sources—of neighborly interactions, children's games and household rituals, love affairs and emotional outbursts, clothing customs, and leisure time.Most first-person narratives of this kind reconstruct an isolated and self-contained Jewish world, but The Story of a Life uniquely describes the unprecedented social opportunities, as well as the many political and personal challenges, that young Jewish women and men experienced in the Russia of the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to their artful translation, Eugene M. Avrutin and Robert H. Greene thoroughly explicate this historical context in their introduction.

In October 2013, one of the largest anti-migrant riots took place in Moscow. Clashes and arrests continued late into the night. Some in the crowd, which grew to several thousand people, could be heard chanting “Russia for the Russians” with their animus directed towards dark-skinned labor migrants from the southern border. The slogan “Russia for the Russians” is not a recent invention. It first gained notoriety in the very last years of the tsarist regime, appealing primarily to individuals drawn to the radical right. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, Racism in Modern Russia marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racism over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin’s panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Winner of the 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic TitlesMark D. Steinberg explores the work of individuals he recognizes as utopians during the most dramatic period in Russian and Soviet history. It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of ‘utopian dreaming’ – claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. For the first time, Russian Utopian digs deeper and asks what utopians meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience. Despite the fact that many would have resisted the ‘utopian’ label at the time because of its dismissive meanings, Steinberg’s comprehensive approach sees him take in political leaders, intellectuals, writers, and artists (visual, material, and musical), as well as workers, peasants, soldiers, students and others. Ideologically, the figures discussed range from reactionaries to anarchists, nationalists (including non-Russians) to feminists, both religious believers and ‘the militant godless’. This innovative text dissects the very notion of the Russian utopian and examines its significance in its various fascinating contexts.

A vivid account of the Gulag, the Soviet Union’s infamous penal system, this book charts how Bolshevik visions of a humane alternative to Tsarist exile and Western penitentiaries became a chaotic and violent system of mass incarceration that bore a tragic human toll.As the first concise history in the English language, The Soviet Gulag: History and Memory provides an illuminating account of the Gulag from 1917, through to the end of the Soviet Union and the contested memory of the Gulag that persists today.Beginning with their conception, during the various penal experiments of the 1920s, their expansion, during the campaigns against perceived enemies of the Soviet regime in the 1930s, and their decline in the years proceeding Stalin’s death, Jeffrey S. Hardy explores how many facets of Gulag life endured right up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He addresses both the intentions of administrators and the experience of inmates, as well as covering the main scholarly debates surrounding these issues,Crucially, the book also examines the post-Soviet era. You discover how politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and Gulag survivors have debated how or even if to commemorate the victims of the Gulag. Hardy reveals that despite numerous monuments and museum displays emerging out of these discussions, the Gulag’s legacy remains hotly contested in Russia today

This book is the first to offer a concise, accessible overview of the evolution of the Soviet Union as a multiethnic empire. It reflects on how the Soviet Union was home to many ethnic minorities, and how their fates, and that of the USSR itself, were bound to the question of how the Soviet state responded variously throughout its existence to the fundamental question of ethnic difference across its vast and diverse territory. The book then examines how the Soviet collapse in 1991 fractured the Union along markedly national lines, leading to a variety of new nation-states – including the Russian Federation – being born.Brigid O’Keeffe explains how and why the Bolsheviks inscribed ethnic difference into the bedrock of the Soviet Union and explores how minority peoples experienced the potential advantages and disadvantages of ethnic politics within the Soviet Union. Ukrainians and Georgians, Jews and Roma, Chechens and Poles, Kazakhs and Uzbeks – these and many other minority groups all distinctively shaped and were shaped by the Soviet and post-Soviet politics of ethnic difference. The Multiethnic Soviet Union and its Demise gives you the historical context necessary to understand contemporary Russia’s relationships and conflicts with its ‘post-Soviet’ neighbors and the wider world beyond.

Almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, today more often than ever, global media and intellectuals rely on the concept of homo sovieticus to explain Russia’s authoritarian ills. Homo sovieticus - or the Soviet man - is understood to be a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality, an innate obedience to authority and no public demands; they have been forged in the fires of the totalitarian conditions in which they find themselves.But where did this concept come from? What analytical and ideological pillars does it stand on? What is at stake in using this term today? The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’ addresses all these questions and even explains why – at least in its contemporary usage – this concept should be abandoned altogether.

In Russia, food has a hugely important role in political, symbolic, and practical terms. In this illuminating history of Russian food in the modern age, Catriona Kelly – a leading cultural historian and keen amateur cook – reflects on this and an environment where what you eat (and drink) indicates how patriotic you are.Kelly argues that an expectation of ‘feeding’ is embedded in attitudes to the state as provider, and that rationing systems have traditionally replicated and even enforced social hierarchies. The book looks at how Russian food is intimately connected with family and friends, and was an important source of delight even in the Soviet period, when official culinary provision and practices ostensibly sought to promote nutrition above all, and food was often short. Russian Food since 1800 traces these complex and contradictory associations. It also examines various shifts in diet and cuisine over the last three centuries, including the ways in which old traditions such as pickling and jam-making sit alongside wider world influences from the vast imperial hinterland in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Western Europe and America.

For nearly two centuries readers all over the world have turned to the great canon of Russian literature. Love and death, war and peace, yes, even crime and punishment; readers across the globe have found in Russian writing a substantial measure of intellectual provocation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance, and personal solace. Why We (Still) Need Russian Literature explores the familiar names of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov to connect readers with these experiences.With a lively, jargon-free style and insightful analyses of thought-provoking texts, this concise volume helps you to understand more fully the pleasure to be found in reading, and re-reading. By identifying what readers seek and find in Russian books—from aesthetically pleasing descriptions to apt psychological renderings—Angela Brintlinger aims to enhance the gratification of reading, giving armchair travelers an excuse to embark on a series of fascinating journeys.Drawing on Brintlinger’s experiences as a scholar, teacher, and reader of literature, the book is informed by a deep cultural understanding of Russia and Russians. It reveals this through engaging literary meditations that connect Russian literature to the losses, ironies, and ambiguities that define the human condition. Exploring authors’ imagined readers as well as authors themselves, Brintlinger argues that it is these readers, from all over the world, who get to decide what literary works are worth reading. As a bonus, she offers an appendix with more names and titles, familiar and perhaps utterly new—books that show the ways in which Russian literature remains vital today.

This unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares representations of identity, ethics and memory across the corpus.The Soviet labour camp system, or Gulag, was a highly complex network of different types of penal institutions, scattered across the vast Soviet territory and affecting millions of Soviet citizens directly and indirectly. As Gulag Fiction shows, its legacies remain palpable today, though survivors of the camps are now increasingly scarce, and successive Soviet and post-Soviet leaders have been reluctant to authorise a full working through of the Gulag past. This is the first book to compare Soviet, samizdat and post-Soviet literary prose about the Gulag as penal system, carceral experience and traumatic memory. Polly Jones analyses prose texts from across the 20th and 21st centuries through the prism of key themes in contemporary Soviet historiography and Holocaust literature scholarship: selfhood and survival; perpetration and responsibility; memory and post-memory.

Since its first publication in 2022, Racism in Modern Russia has become a key text for understanding the role that race has played in Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet history and politics. Analyzing a wide range of printed and visual sources, this timely accessible open access volume marks the first serious attempt to understand the history of racialization over a span of 150 years. A brilliant examination of the complexities of racism, Eugene M. Avrutin's panoramic book asks powerful questions about inequality and privilege, denigration and belonging, power and policy, the creation of exclusionary boundaries in everyday life, and the complex historical links between race, whiteness, and geography. The revised edition includes significant new research on race and racism in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the history of color consciousness and biopolitics, and the aesthetics of anti-racism campaigns, as well as a thoroughly updated selected bibliography for further reading.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Illinois, USA.