NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies – serie

As minister of education and president of the Academy of Sciences, Count Sergei Uvarov was one of the most important statesmen in nineteenth-century Russia. But, because he has often been labeled as a reactionary and sycophant, his ideas and policies have tended to be dismissed as examples of the bankruptcy of the Russian "cold regime."Whittaker's intellectual biography, based on research in Russia and Finland, offers a striking reinterpretation of Uvarov's career and of the quality of Russian intellectual life in his age and in assuring his country's place in the mainstream of European educational development. With its wealth of new insights, The Origins of Modern Russian Education will be of interest to readers, specialists and nonspecialists alike who are concerned with nineteenth-century Russia and with the history of education in general.

Klier's analysis of the motivations behind government policies and attitudes is well documented and convincing.... [An] important and well-researched monograph.― The Journal of Modern HistoryThis classic study by the late John Doyle Klier is considered a seminal text in modern Jewish history by one of the foremost scholars in the field. In this, his first book, Klier offers an important analysis of Russia's early acquisition of, attitudes toward, and administration of its Jewish population. He argues that the Russian response to the Jewish Question was based less on a tradition or religious antipathy than on the failure to develop a consistent, well-articulated policy in the face of a new and unusual problem. This failure led to ineffective social legislation and became the legacy of Russia's first encounter with the Jews.This essential book will be of enduring interest to scholars of modern Russian and Jewish history.

No other thinker so engaged the Russian cultural imagination of the early twentieth century as did Friedrich Nietzche. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness shows how Nietzschean thought influenced the brilliant resurgence of literary life that started in the 1890s and continued for four decades. Through an analysis of the Russian encounter with Nietzsche, Edith Clowes defines the shift in ethical and aesthetic vision that motivated Russia's unprecedented artistic renascence and at the same time led its followers to the brink of cultural despair. Clowes shows how in the last years of the nineteenth century a diverse array of writers and critics discovered Nietzsche's thought, embracing or repudiating it with equal vigor. The literary storm brewing around Nietzsche and the concurrent relaxation of censorship combined to attract a public eager to follow the new intellectual fashion. Young writers, such as Andreev and Kuprin, welcomed the idea of the "superman" as a promising path to personal fulfillment. The tragic fates of their protagonists and the alluring gospel of the vulgar Zarathustra-like characters of such bestselling authors as Boborykin, Artsybashev, and Verbitskaia found enthusiastic, if indiscriminating, audiences ready to be "taught" how to "find themselves." By considering this Nietzschean cult, Clowes draws fresh insight into the nature of the budding popular-culture industry in Russia and the fast-growing reading public. From this ferment emerged the greatest Russian literary voices of the early twentieth century. The revolutionary romantics, Gorky and Lunacharsky, sought in Nietzsche's writing a new vision of total social and cultural change. Merezhkovsky led a generation of mystic symbolists in the search for a literary myth of resurrection. Ivanov, Blok, and Belyi appropriated the image of the "crucified Dionysus" as the central symbol of spiritual transfiguration. Their encounters with Nietzschean thought disclose an even more profound creative struggle with their own cultural past and its established formulations of nation and individual, culture and history. Clowes uses the term future anxiety to speak of a creative mentality that strove to assert itself by diminishing the impact of powerful literary precursors, such as Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Solovyov, and opening to the imagination the vision of a future full of vast creative possibility.

The Great Reforms of the 1860s marked the broadest attempt at social and economic renovation to occur in Russia between the death of Peter the Great in 1725 and the Revolution of 1905. In just more than a decade, imperial reform acts freed Russia's serfs, restructured her courts, established institutions of local self-government in parts of the empire, altered the constraints that censorship imposed on the press, and transformed Russia's vast serf armed forces into a citizen army in which men from all classes bore equal responsibility for military service. This invaluable study explains why the legislation assumed the shape that it did and estimates what the Great Reforms ultimately accomplished. The Great Reforms offered readers a vital starting point from which to evaluate the prospects for glasnost', perestroika, and reform in the Gorbachev era.

Startlingly original artist and writer, Aleksei Remizov began to make his mark on Russian literature at the turn of the century. Inextricably tied to the rich culture of the Russian Silver Age, Remizov shunned association with any single school, yet his work reflects the many trends and transitions that characterized this exceptionally creative and turbulent time in Russia's cultural history.Slobin's study is the first in English to address Remizov's fiction in its cultural and historical context. A chronological reading of Remizov's early work reflects the novel's transition in Russia from the realist to the modern tradition. Slobin's focus on Remizov's development as a writer also illuminates his experimental explorations of the interaction between Russia's literary and nonliterary heritage, including medieval texts, folklore, and popular culture.In addition to providing extensive analysis of Remizov's longer fiction, considered in stages representative of his artistic and philosophical development, Slobin includes biographical information introducing the reader to aspects of the writer's life that help to elucidate his work. Throughout, the study provides information concerning Remizov's seminal role in the development of modernist Russian prose, a role that opened creative pathways for such important post-revolutionary writers as Zamyatin, Pilnyak, and the Serapion Brothers.

Originating in the symposium on The Recovery of Religious Identity in the Soviet Union, held at Arizona State U. in March 1991, this volume examines the roots and recovery of Orthodox religious culture in Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. The volume is divided into three major sections: popular religi

The Bolshevik takeover in 1917 and the subsequent Civil War drove thousands of Russians into exile. Expecting the Bolshevik dictatorship would soon collapse, they settled in the West, waiting for the moment they could leave their refuges in Berlin, Prague, and Paris and return to their homeland in triumph. But as the Reds tightened their grip, these emigres faced the dilemma of coming to terms with their enemies or accepting the loneliness of exile.Early in the 1920s, some of the emigres began to argue for an end to resistance, pleading that the Russian nation and state could be saved only if opposition to Soviet power came to an end. The smenovekhovstvo ("changing signposts") movement called for emigres to come to terms with the Soviet regime. Taking its name from a collection of articles written by young emigre intellectuals who had fought on the side of the Whites in the Civil War, the movement appealed for an end to the anti-Bolshevik struggle, the acceptance of the October Revolution as a Russian national revolution, and the return of the emigres to help rebuild Russia.Coming to Terms with the Soviet Regime traces the rise of the smenovekhovstvo movement among the emigres and those anti-Bolshevik intellectuals who had remained in Russia. The first comprehensive study of this long-ignored and critical subject, it broadens our understanding of the Russian intelligentsia and sheds new light on the relationship of the emigre community to the intellectual and political forces in their homeland. Of particular interest to historians of the Russian emigration and the Russian intelligentsia, Hardeman's study serves also as a sensitive case study of how men and women struggled to come to grips with the victory of the Bolsheviks.

A category of persons best defined by what they were not, the raznochintsy-"people of various ranks" or "people of diverse origins"-inhabited the shifting social territory between nobles and serfs in preindustrial Russia. Neither merchants nor clergy nor military servicemen, they may have been by occupation administrative clerks, teachers, artists, retired soldiers, or street vendors. In official society, they were outsiders. In this first major study of the raznochintsy, Wirtschafter draws on a rich array of archival, legal, administrative, and public sources to show how this important but elusive category functioned in Russian society from the time of Peter the Great to the late nineteenth century. Challenging the traditional image of a rigidly hierarchical social structure, her conclusions indicate that there was much more mobility within imperial Russian society than historians have previously thought. Developing a representational interpretation, Wirtschafter examines the raznochintsy as a legal, social, and cultural category. Focusing on the usages, meanings, and dynamic evolution of the category, she analyzes the origins of the raznochintsy as well as larger theoretical issues of social categorization and delimitation. Her depiction of a society where social boundaries were porous and social definitions fundamentally indeterminate provides a new perspective on some of the most stubbornly problematic themes in imperial Russian history.

Four decades prior to World War I, coal and steel managers working in the Donbass region formed Russia's first major industrial advocacy group, the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. Founded by southern industrializers who ran the country's most important coal and steel industry, the organization quickly grew to become one of the most powerful in the empire, influencing government policy from its inception in the 1870s until the Revolution of 1917. The members who made up this important group as well as their collective effort to modernize Russia are the focus of The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia.McCaffray draws from a wide array of sources to reveal the intellectual, cultural, and social underpinnings of Russia's early industrialization. Representing nearly sixty firms responsible for most of the south's coal and steel production, the middle-class men who ran tsarist Russia's coal and steel industry composed a substantial portion of Russia's technical intelligentsia. What emerges is a portrait of self-conscious modernizers, motivated in part by professional and class considerations, in part by their shared faith that modern, large-scale industry would elevate not only themselves but also their country and compatriots.McCaffray shows how the engineer-managers of the Donbass became enmeshed in the grand project of creating industrial capitalism with a Russian face, in particular, how they were involved in all aspects of the workers' welfare question in the early twentieth century. In illuminating their ultimately frustrated efforts, she sheds light on the difficulties in establishing West European-style capitalism in tsarist Russia and offers insights into the crisis and collapse of the Russian old regime. She further suggests that the economic ideas of Russia's middle class as well as other segments of Russian society made it unlikely that Russia would build a system of capitalism resembling that of the West.The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia presents for scholars of Russian and modern European history a new perspective on late imperial Russia by bringing to light a group of individuals previously unstudied. While it supports the emerging notion in recent Western scholarship that Russian elites were fragmented at the end of the Old Regime, McCaffray's analysis of the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers will initiate fresh discussion of the values and the cultural-economic assumptions of Russian modernizers.

Focusing on the lived experience of individuals in Russia and Ukraine, twelve essays explore continuity and change comparatively and in the context of larger interpretative issues, such as popular culture, mentality, and religiosity.

In this richly researched and highly original study, Alexander M. Martin explores conservatism in Russian thought, politics, and culture during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Tracing the indigenous and foreign origins of conservative ideology through a wide range of sources, he shows how the Russians reacted to threats posed by the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and how this reaction shaped state policy and national consciousness. Martin views the development of Russian conservatism in several contexts, the most important of which is the new nationalism that linked the crisis brought on by the Napoleonic wars to the eras of Catherine the Great and Nicholas I. Exploring the growth of nationalistic thinking, he shows its relation to sentimentalism, to a broad religious awakening, and to the growing pride in Russian distinctiveness. Linking Russia's intellectual and cultural life with national politics, Martin identifies conservative groups and investigates their role in influencing foreign and domestic policy. He shows how public opinion responded to the conservatives' initiatives and explores the relationship between conservative-nationalist ideas and Russian society.By placing Russian conservatism firmly in the context of contemporary Western thought, Martin presents the striking conclusion that Russian conservatives were part of the political and cultural upheaval that took place all across Europe between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Russian conservatism was thus uniquely double-edged: far from mainly defending the status quo, Russia's conservatives were also part of the movement for change.Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries is the first in-depth probe of the origins of Russian conservatism. It will appeal not only to Russian historians but to all readers concerned with political culture and the history of conservative thought.

Overturning the view of early Russian prose fiction as a pale imitation of European models, this discussion locates the origins of the Russian novel in 18th century indigenous writing. Tracing the novel's development, it analyzes the prose of Fedor Emin, Mikhail Chulkov and Matvei Komarov.

Imperial Russia's security police have long been popularly associated with administrative lawlessness, harsh repression, and throngs of spies. Shocking tales told by revolutionaries and tendentious Soviet accounts have perpetuated such views. Yet Russia's security service on the eve of the Revolution of 1905 was relatively small-scale, law-abiding, and humane, especially given the extent of social and politcal opposition the regim faced. Autocracy under Siege examines the role of the security service in the titanic struggle between the regime and those dedicated to the defeat of monarchical absolutism. From the first terrorist attempt on the life of a Russian emperor in 1866 through the seismic upheaval of 1905, Daly traces the reaction, expansion, and evolution of the security police in the face of the increased antigovernment activity that threatened the continued survival of the regime. Drawing upon a wealth of sources, including many recently declassified archival documents, Autocracy under Siege provides a detailed analysis of the personnel, institutions, and effectiveness of the imperial Russian security police. Daly further explores the interplay of regime and opposition when they confronted each other most directly in the years before the 1905 upheaval. Through comparisons with western European police institutions, Daly ultimately reveals that, despite its infamous reputation, the imperial Russian security police actually resembled European models, a notion previously rejected by other historians. The most probing analysis to date of how and why Russia's security police developed, this study will prove essential to historian of Russia and Europe and to readers interested in the fields of politics, law, and revolution.

Using a wealth of archival sources previously unavailable to scholars, Smith examines the forces that attracted many social and intellectual leaders of eighteenth-century Russia to Freemasonry as an instrument for change and progress. By "working the rough stone" of their inner thoughts and feelings, such men sought to become champions of moral enlightenment and to create a vision of social action that could bring about change without challenging the social and political precepts on which Russia's stability depended. By challenging a number of long-held notions about Russian society, Smith broadens our understanding of the complex history of eighteenth-century Russia. Engagingly written and richly illustrated with rare engravings of Masonic life and ritual, this volume will appeal to readers interested in Russia, Europe, the Enlightenment, and the history of Freemasonry.

A historical and empirical study of Russian economic and social policy, tracing long-term evolutions across the Soviet and Russian periods. Circumstances explain the failure of transition policies that worked elsewhere, leading Christensen to re-examine accepted post-communist transition theory.

This innovative study of drinking provides rich insights into changes and continuities in everyday life among revolutionary St. Petersburg's workers. Drawing on a wide array of previously untapped sources, Phillips sheds fresh light on issues of revolutionary change, class, and gender as she probes the tenacious resiliency of alcohol-centered culture in the face of state efforts at prohibition. Readers will find a sophisticated examination of workers' drinking habits and tavern culture, reflecting broader issues of working-class identity and relations with authority. Through the prism of drink, Phillips juxtaposes the world of rank-and-file working men, where the steady flow of alcohol facilitated comradeship and celebration, against the goals of political activists who encouraged self-improvement through sober pursuits such as education and increased productivity. Because working men were husbands and fathers, Phillips also assesses the complex involvement of women and children with this drinking culture. Phillips's provocative argument that revolution simultaneously empowered both champions and opponents of drink among the working class will invigorate scholarly debate about worker culture in Russia. Bolsheviks and the Bottle will appeal to readers interested in alcohol studies, gender issues, working-class culture, and Russian history.

Attempting to indoctrinate the public into a new society, the Bolsheviks staged show trials-legal trials that incorporated theatrical elements such as coached defendants, memorized scripts for confession, and grueling interrogatory rehearsals. The genre of legal spectacle, whose origins lay in Soviet theater and cinema of the 1920s, moved from mass public spectacles to the courtroom, as the Bolsheviks sought to effect ever- greater social change. In this intriguing interdisciplinary study, literature scholar Cassiday shows how Soviet show trials deliberately used avant-garde drama and cinema to educate the citizenry about the new social order. She examines how elements of theater and film were incorporated into Soviet courtrooms, turning public trials into vehicles for propaganda. Drawing on a variety of popular media from the 1920s, she reveals the origins of the show trials.