{"title":"The 1905–07 Russian Revolution as a ‘Moment of Truth’: An Overlooked Contribution from Menshevism","authors":"Ian D. Thatcher","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1984064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1984064","url":null,"abstract":"This article is the first exposition of a projected five-part Menshevik study of social forces in the Russian Revolution of 1905, only four volumes of which appeared in 1907 covering reaction, the proletariat, the peasantry, and the liberal and democratic bourgeoisie. This collective effort marked perhaps the first attempt to present an overall analysis of the revolution from within one perspective, that of the Menshevik variety of Russian Marxism. Despite the centrality of perceptions of revolution to participants and future historians of Russian socialism and of 1905, this project has been largely overlooked. This is to be regretted, for the volumes contain interpretations now familiar on the nature of the 1905 revolution and why it failed. Furthermore, there is continuity between the works and authors of 1907 and the subsequent (1909–14) much more famous Menshevik history of social movements in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"175 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47163816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Great Game Thinking: The British Foreign Office and Revolutionary Russia","authors":"H. Campbell","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1978638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1978638","url":null,"abstract":"While the revolution of October 1917 may have ushered a new regime into Moscow, many within the British government continued to view Russia through the lens of the Great Game. For decades, the Great Game had defined relations between the two countries, and while the Anglo-Russian Convention and the Triple Entente had created the illusion of friendship, this was simply a marriage of convenience. Thus, when revolution and civil war broke out in Russia, men such as Lord George Curzon rushed at the opportunity to try to seize the upper hand and win the game. Unfortunately for Curzon, times had changed and countries such as Persia were no longer happy to be mere pawns in a game.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"239 - 258"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44298497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Use of History in Putin’s Russia","authors":"Jade McGlynn","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1918873","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918873","url":null,"abstract":"scene of the 1930s – Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Lugovsky, Nikolai Zelinsky among many more – who were experiencing tremendous hardship due to the early years of the war, evacuation, censorship, Stalin’s terror and family dramas (much of it intimately connected). As Gromova notes, gradually one gets to see the writers’ personal stories and the many faces they encountered, or an invisible map of these people and their lives. What emerges is an entwined and distinctive landscape resembling a book of anatomy and its blood vessels (p. 80). A number of important letters and locations in central Moscow are introduced to the reader, almost taking us on a virtual tour of Arbat’s backstreets and alleyways. Whilst this is a very well written and intriguing novel, it is rather easy to get lost. Gromova focuses her book on those in the background, who surrounded the great Russian writers, not only to piece together the period but to ‘open up the past in a fuller way’. The novel’s appeal is in its archival nature, and yet, this is precisely why the reader might stumble along the way. By design, the novel continuously moves between time periods, persons and subjects – much like one would in the archives. If one does not have a notepad beside them, losing track of the characters is all too easy. Sections within lengthy chapters that regularly chop and change make for a challenging read. One line I revisited several times offers an explanation as to why the reader loses their bearings and may struggle to keep up: ‘It’s impossible to immerse oneself in an era that one hadn’t lived’ (p. 78). And perhaps that is the point; the past is gone and may be beyond our ability to reconstruct. Olga Bessarabova’s and Maria Belkina’s notebooks bring this world back to life through Gromova’s account, but in a way difficult to piece together properly. Whilst Moscow in the 1930s is certainly a slow read, it is worthwhile for scholars and students. What doors are we trying to unlock, and what keys will fit? The prize behind the door may simply be a key to another door, which when opened, takes our path in a completely new direction. Much like a mosaic, the past looks messy up close. One must take a step back to both admire and conceptualize it properly. The small pieces around the primary picture are often those which bring the past to life.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"154 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918873","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49267717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stalin. Passage to Revolution","authors":"D. Rayfield","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1918875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918875","url":null,"abstract":"exchange between high and popular cultures was multidirectional, even within Russia’s highly stratified society. Innovations by artistic elites coloured the work of the newly literate, but folk and oral cultures were hugely influential on those revered for their contributions to high culture. Not only were high, middle and popular cultures in constant interaction with one another, but the interplay between them was central to the creative process. This examination of the ecosystem is particularly fruitful in chapter 3 on post-Emancipation visual culture, in which Brooks masterfully explores the contributions of the Wanderers and illustrators of cheap masscirculation (‘thin’) magazines to cultural conversations side by side. Brooks’s sensitivity to the interactions between the social, the cultural and the political makes him attuned to the anxieties related to gender that were in broad circulation amid industrialisation, urbanisation and modernisation. Brooks explores the tensions surrounding the disruption of the traditional gender order in the late nineteenth century through depictions of the vixen in popular culture, the female protagonists in the novels of Lev Tolstoy, and fantasies of male domination in The Rite of Spring. Therefore, it is disappointing that Brooks’s astuteness in analysing gendered representations does not extend across the revolutionary divide, as the New Soviet Woman and her emergence as both a protagonist (and antagonist) in the early 1920s is absent from discussions of the Soviet era. Relatedly, an analysis of sexuality does not feature in Brooks’s study. As Laura Engelstein, Dan Healey, Alison Rowley and others have shown, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, discussions and visions of sexuality reverberated across Russia’s increasingly noisy public sphere. New technologies like photography and the falling printing costs coincided with the commodification of bodies and proliferation of sexualized images in high and popular visual culture. Acknowledging these trends would have added further nuance to Brooks’s discussions of gender and power in fin-de-siècle Russia. These issues aside, The Firebird and the Fox is a rigorous and highly engaging study that brings Russian culture to life. This book was a pleasure to read and will be of interest to scholars and students of modern Russian history.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"146 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918875","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48923354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pale Horse. A Novel of Revolutionary Russia","authors":"George H. Gilbert","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1918871","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918871","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"149 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09546545.2021.1918871","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41470380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kerensky as ‘Traitor’: Symbolic Politics, Rumour and the Political Deployment of Rumours in the Revolutionary Period","authors":"B. Kolonitskii","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1915594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1915594","url":null,"abstract":"This article is concerned with the de-legitimating tactics used against Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerensky. It draws on both expert political assessments and a considerable quantity of rumours. Journalism, political resolutions, and letters and diaries written by people of different views are examined for negative representations of Kerensky that are associated with allegations of ‘betrayal’, ‘treachery’ or ‘moral degeneracy’ during his time in the Winter Palace. Such negative representations were informed by both the European republican tradition and the patriotic mobilization, which portrayed the residences of enemy heads of state during the First World War as hotbeds of corruption, treason and depravity. For example, in 1917 rumours about Nicholas II, the empress Aleksandra Fedorovna and Rasputin became a conspicuous element of mass culture. In Kerensky’s case, negative representations had begun to spread in connection with the preparations for the June Offensive, but they proliferated in July when he became head of the Provisional Government and especially when the seat of the government was moved to the Winter Palace. Kerensky was compared to the former emperor and rumoured to be enjoying the trappings of imperial power, engaging in amoral behaviour and using narcotic substances. There were also implausible rumours that the head of the government was a traitor. Such rumours were spread publicly by Kerensky’s opponents on right and left alike in a sign of the Provisional Government’s growing political isolation. This period (Kerenshchina) repelled parties that both were opposed to one another and favoured resolving the crisis by violent means, social compromise became harder to achieve and the slide to civil war gained momentum.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"1 - 18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09546545.2021.1915594","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44417299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ten Months that No Longer Shake the World? The Centenary of the Russian Revolution and Beyond","authors":"C. Read","doi":"10.1080/09546545.2021.1921919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09546545.2021.1921919","url":null,"abstract":"Centenaries are times to reflect and assess status. This essay discusses accounts of how the centenary of the Russian Revolution was marked around the globe by governments, national media and civil society in general before going on to examine some of the large number of academic contributions to the debate in the form of books, special editions of journals and so on. As well as reflecting on what was said the article also discusses what the centennial output told us about the standing of the revolution around the world, about its meaning in different contexts and about whether we learned anything new. Among its conclusions are that, with the formidable exception of China, very few claims were made for ownership of and support for the revolution, that western academic contributions tended to repeat rather than expand existing interpretations and that Russian interpretations tended to ignore aspects of the revolution associated with the once dominant official Soviet era discourse.","PeriodicalId":42121,"journal":{"name":"Revolutionary Russia","volume":"34 1","pages":"91 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/09546545.2021.1921919","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46245707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}