{"title":"The Last Vikings: Russian Boat Bandits and the Formation of Princely Power","authors":"J. Korpela","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Viking age ended in the twelfth century in Scandinavia. Rising royal powers recruited most magnates and secured the development of medieval maritime trade. Only a few people who were marginalized to the peripheries turned to piracy. The situation in the Eastern Baltic and along Russian rivers was different. The Viking culture arrived there in the ninth century, but princely power formed late. Control of remote areas was superficial. Raiding by private gangs of young men and warlords continued: this activity was part of the economy and local societies benefited from it. The culture faded away gradually after the late fourteenth century but still in the seventeenth century, dragon ships raided along Siberian rivers. This activity provided the context for the formation of the early modern Muscovite economy, which differed from the West European pattern. This difference is essential to understand the situation in Russia today.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46301019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Defiantly Unfashionable Dr LeDonne","authors":"P. Werth","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340019","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000John P. LeDonne’s Forging of a Unitary State represents the culmination of a long and illustrious career in the study of various aspects of Russia’s early-modern experience. This review offers a critical assessment of this important monograph, focusing above all on the author’s contrarian conception of Russia-as-empire and his defiant determination to shun the fashionable in favor of the fundamental. It pays particular attention to LeDonne’s claim that in the crucial period between the reigns of Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645–76) and Nicholas I (1825–55) Russia was aspiring to construct not an empire rooted in difference, but a unitary state featuring broadly homogeneous territorial organization, institutions, and practices. It also explores “superstratification,” LeDonne’s distinct conception of elite integration. It ends with questions that remain unanswered in LeDonne’s account.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43640225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Power and the Glory – and the Money","authors":"A. Kleimola","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000These two anthologies continue Charles Halperin’s exploration of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The first presents nineteen essays, each focused on a question that Halperin believes needs further investigation, ranging from family relationships to state policy to cultural achievements. He discusses sources and interpretations, then suggests additional avenues for further research. The second volume analyzes Ivan’s place in Russian historical memory in light of the new openings for discussion in the post-Soviet period. Looking at popularized accounts, textbooks, and specialist research, Halperin finds a range of opinion from supporters of canonization to harsh critics of policies and methods of implementation. Part Two examines Ivan on the silver screen, focusing on Eisenstein’s classic (pre-1991 but imprinted on everyone’s memory) and Lungin’s recent portrayal of the tsar in the Oprichnina years. What it meant to be Ivan remains as contested in the public mind as it is among specialists. Throughout both volumes, a consistent thread is the continuing influence of Karamzin’s concept of the two Ivans, Ivan the Good and Ivan the Terrible. Two centuries later, Ivan the Only continues to stride over the landscape of the Russian past. Halperin’s studies point the way to new assessments of his impact.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45037617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Author’s Response","authors":"J. Ledonne","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The author thanks the panelists for their comments. He appreciated their raising questions in need of further study and he tried to answer them: the concept of core power, security fringe, limits of Russian expansion, and he himself raised additional questions. One of the most intractable questions raised by Barbara Skinner concerned the role of the Jesuits in the conflict between the Orthodox and Catholic churches; another concerned the meaning of the phrase “the partitions of Poland.” The author answered them hopefully to her satisfaction. Semyonov placed the rise of the Russian Empire in the broad context of Eurasian geopolitics and the author responded by submitting a number of issues in need of further study. He only regrets that no one raised the broad issue of the roleof the law and its codification as a factor of integration, and expresses the hope that this panel will raise an awareness among interested scholars of strategic and economic issues.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48909570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Return of longue durée in Political History of the Russian Empire","authors":"A. Semyonov","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The present intervention makes a mental experiment of thinking about recent historiographic “turns” in terms of “returns.” It takes its point of departure from the recent book by John LeDonne Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space, 1650–1850. This book shows how much is needed to be done in terms of returning to the institutional, military, and legal history of the Russian imperial state. But there is also a return to the long-term historical perspective that presents the challenge of constructing a coherent historical narrative when the process of imperial expansion produced the growing diversity of the imperial realm. This challenge can be solved and the narrative can be stabilized by projecting nation-centered categories on to the past experience (such as “majority” and “minority”). But the same long-term perspective can also empower historians to align their analytical language with the grammar of the imperial archive and lexicon of the political praxis and register shifts and ruptures in the grand trajectory spanning several centuries.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44909284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Unitary State of Difference?”","authors":"N. Kollmann","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340018","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Based on an abstract theory of geopolitics, LeDonne’s Forging a Unitary State presents a problematic and insupportable interpretation of early modern Russian history and empire.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46635108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Search of One’s Self: Russian Travelers in the Balkans in 1800–1830s","authors":"K. Kasatkin","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340023","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this paper, we are going to demonstrate that the writings of Russian travelers of the early 19th century laid the foundation of a discourse of Slavism. The travelers stopped perceiving the Balkans as part of the Near East and began considering them as ‘Ours’. This allowed the Russians to assert their identity within the boundaries of the European community while simultaneously separating themselves from the Roman-Germanic “West”. We examined four different types of descriptions of the Balkans by Russian travelers of the 1800–1830s. The authors’ approaches to these narratives were either orientalist or Slavic in nature. Works written in the framework of Orientalism are often characterized by the view of the Balkans as the land of the past, and travels perceived the Balkans as the antithesis of Russia, which they saw as being part of the West. Discourse of Slavism was fundamentally different from Orientalism. Firstly, it replaced the East-West binary relationship with a West-Russia-East triptych. Secondly, it sought to equate Russia and the Slavs. The travelers of the 3rd group were the first to discover a way to reconcile with the “backwards” past within the West-Russia-East triptych. Fourthly, Venelin verbalized a new paradigm in Russia’s description of the Balkans. He was the first to consider Russia as the center of the Slavic world, as opposed to the wild European periphery.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46722934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Russia Was Not an Empire, Poland Was: LeDonne’s Perspective on the Polish-Lithuanian Borderlands","authors":"B. Skinner","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340020","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This review of John P. LeDonne’s Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of the Eurasian Space 1650–1850 recognizes the author’s monumental effort to trace Russian civil, military, judicial, fiscal, economic, religious and educational policies and institutions that bound the Eurasian landmass in a Russian “unitary state” but criticizes his heavy-handed treatment of the Polish-Lithuanian lands gained by Russian during the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Admitting the complexity of this frontier, LeDonne nevertheless makes little effort to move beyond a stereotypical anti-Polish (and anti-Catholic) perspective on this history, particularly regarding its religious and educational developments. The bold argument of a Russian “unitary state” across Eurasia elides too many complexities and vulnerabilities in this western/southern frontier to be convincing.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41382523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ultimate Bolshevik","authors":"P. Gregory","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Ron Suny’s Stalin: Passage to Revolution traces Stalin from a young revolutionary in the Caucasus to his ascent to the top of the Bolshevik hierarchy. Discovered and promoted by Lenin, the young Stalin agitated among the workers of the giant factories in Baku, Tiflis, and Batumi as Russian socialists split between Menshevism’s social democracy and Bolshevism’s Marxist revolution. Between 1902 and 1917, Stalin was arrested or exiled six times, escaping five times. Rushing to Petrograd in the wake of the abdication and formation of the coalition government, Stalin managed the Bolshevik press and served as the main Bolshevik figure in Lenin’s absence. Although not among the most popular political parties, the Bolshevik’s “ground game” among workers and soldiers proved decisive once Lenin concluded to begin the Bolshevik coup.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49359123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collectivization and National Question in Soviet Udmurtia","authors":"M. Gabbas","doi":"10.30965/18763316-12340015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.30965/18763316-12340015","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The subject of this article is the collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Udmurtia at the turn of the 1930s. Situated in the Urals, Udmurtia was an autonomous region, largely agricultural, and with a developing industrial center, Izhevsk, as capital. The titular nationality of the region, the Udmurts, represented slightly more than 50% of the total inhabitants, while the rest was made up by Russians and other national minorities. Udmurts were mostly peasants and concentrated in the countryside, whereas city-dwellers and factory workers were mostly Russians. Due to these and other circumstances, collectivization in Udmurtia was carried out in a very specific way. The campaign began here in 1928, one year before than in the rest of the Union, and had possibly the highest pace in the country, with 76% of collectivized farms by 1933. The years 1928–1931 were the highest point of the campaign, when the most opposition and the most violence took place.\u0000The local Party Committee put before itself the special task to carry out a revolutionary collectivization campaign in the Udmurt countryside, which should have been a definitive solution to its “national” backwardness and to all its problems, from illiteracy to trachoma, from syphilis to the strip system (that is, each family worked on small “strips” of land far from each other). The Party Committee failed to exert much support from the peasant Udmurt masses, which stayed at best inert to collectivization propaganda, or opposed it openly. However, the back of the Udmurt peasantry was finally broken, and Udmurtia was totally collectivized by the end of the 1930s.","PeriodicalId":43441,"journal":{"name":"RUSSIAN HISTORY-HISTOIRE RUSSE","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49327285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}