Reginald E. Zelnik – författare

Renowned Russian historian Reginald E. Zelnik’s final manuscript is a biography of Anna Pankratova, a woman from Odessa who became a leading labor historian and academic administrator in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to her death in 1957. Drawing upon archival materials once inaccessible to Western scholars, as well as memoirs published since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zelnik conceptualized his study as one of "constrained dissent," in the sense that Pankratova, a Communist scholar loyal to the Party, nevertheless courageously sought to protect her colleagues, students, and friends from disaster. Portraying Pankratova as both "victim" and "victimizer," Zelnik treats in evocative detail several revealing episodes in her career as "the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union’s history profession." These episodes include her husband’s arrest, her own exile, and the ruin of many scholarly colleagues during the Stalinist purges. One particularly interesting part of Pankratova’s life was her experience during World War II in Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, which led her to champion the “national rights” of the Kazakhs. Zelnik’s last monograph marks his first examination of issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the Soviet period, and in the Central Asian context in particular.Five essays that address Zelnik’s scholarship as a labor historian who approached the central question of class formation through his investigation of participants’ personal experience, as well as his teaching and citizenship, accompany the monograph. Contributors include Laura Engelstein, David A. Hollinger, Benjamin Nathans, Yuri Slezkine, and Glennys Young. The volume also encompasses excerpts from two Soviet texts, including Pankratova’s historic 1956 speech on the menace of Stalinist legacies in history and historiography.For more information on the Treadgold Papers visit: http://www.jsis.washington.edu/ellison/outreach_treadgold.shtml

Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode--a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant--to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.

This is the authoritative and long-awaited volume on Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributors--whose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr---shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."