Russia Archives - Not Even Past

Road Rage

This article is reposted from Russian History Blog.

This blog post is inspired by petty anger. In this deeply weird and unsettling time, I am, like virtually everyone, staying at home. I am in almost every way lucky—I have a job (though hoo boy do I sometimes wish I had listened to my gut and not said yes to being department chair), I have a comfortable home, our restrictions are not too extreme. I live alone, which on balance right now feels like probably also a lucky thing, though it has its own stresses and sources of sadness. I’ve in particular come to rely on a daily walk to get out into the air, to stretch my legs, to try to turn off from all the stresses of my job right now.

Gatchina Palace (via Flickr)

On these walks, though, I often find myself seething with rage at the pettiest of things—people who do not keep to the right while walking or riding or running. Even in a time of social distancing, my rage feels out of proportion to the offense. But then I remembered a letter of complaint I came across in one of my beloved files of random correspondence from the Gatchina Palace administration [Gatchina Palace was built near St. Petersburg in the 18th century for a favorite of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great].

To His Excellency, the Director of the Gatchina Palace Administration

Riding yesterday, the 3rd of August [1892], at 9 in the evening, on a bicycle, in the Imperial Priorate Park, I came upon a gentleman unknown to me, driving a white trotter at full speed, who, despite my increasingly ringing my bell, continued to ride on the left side of the road, as a result of which I, at risk of being trampled, was forced to jump down from my bicycle onto the grass; at my comment, made in the most polite form, that one should drive on the right side, the gentleman sitting in the charabanc and driving the horse answered me with unacceptable obscenity. On my way back, about twenty minutes later, I had the misfortune to again come across this same gentleman, continuing as before to drive on the left side of the road; in response to my bell and to my comment that besides the existing rule to drive on the right side, even only politeness demands that one should give way, the gentleman informed me that such a rule does not exist, having added along with this message personally to me insulting expressions so impolite, that repeating them word for word in the present letter I consider impossible; in the end of all of this insulting actions were threatened. Of all of this I immediately gave a report to the duty officer of the Gatchina Police. [Hearing] my description of the characteristics of the horse and the gentleman, the Police officers sitting in the duty room recognized the owner of the horse as Gatchina homeowner Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich; in order to definitively establish the identity of the culprit, I gave the Police a detailed description.

Having in mind that a simple monetary penalty such as laying a fine by judicial process will hardly guarantee that the public visiting the Imperial Priorate Park [will not be bothered by] a repetition of such misconduct on the part of the above mentioned gentleman, [misconduct that] violates social morality and order in the Imperial park, and that the insult given by him to me was without any reason on my part, I have the honor to present all above noted to the discretion and resultant decision of Your Excellence, humbly asking that you inform me of what is done about this matter.

Collegiate Secretary

Feodor Feodorovich Rein.

4 August 1892

Someone looked into the matter the day it was sent, and noted down the following report:

Feodor Feodorovich Rein, Collegiate Secretary, works as a Secretary of the Main Military-Sanitary Committee of the Ministry of War. Residence: in the town of Gatchina, on Baggovutovskaia ulitsa, no. 46, the home of engineer Rein.

I have the honor to report … that in the matter of the offenses committed in the Priorate Park by nobleman Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich to Collegiate Secretary Fedor Fedorovich Rein, a witness statement by Luga meshchanin Artur Karlov Reikhenberg, residing in the village Bol’shaia Zagvozdka, Gatchina township, explains that it was completely possible for Rein to pass without obstruction along the road on the right side, and beside that it is necessary for all bicyclists to pull over and get off their bicycles when they meet people riding on horses in light of the fact that every horse seeing the unfamiliar sight of a bicycle without fail begins to buck and to shy and in general to sidle, so for Rein to be offended by Adamovich there is no foundation, all the more so because, as Reikhenberg reports, Rein was the first to address Adamovich in rude form, with the comment “you do not know how you should drive, why don’t you keep to the right side,” but all the same from my point of view Adamovich should be given proper warning that he should drive more calmly, and that if there is a second complaint about him driving quickly and not following the general rules of driving, then he will be prohibited from driving in the Priorate Park forever and for reckless driving in general he will face legal liability.

I’m not going to try to spin this out too much—of course, there’s plenty of stuff to say about these figures and who they might be, or of the fact that Mr. Rein was a thoroughly modern man on his bicycle in 1892. Perhaps I’ll come back to them in another post at some point. But I copied this all out because I thought it was sort of funny, and I loved the resonance of the idea of bicyclists and drivers at odds over road usage, because that’s still such a present part of urban discourse.

Image of a bicycle from B. Kaul’fus, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k izucheniiu ezdy na velocipede i obrashcheiiu svelosipedami fabric Adamants Opelia v Riussel’sgeime (Kiev, 1893)

Now, though, I’m struck by the anger. The anger that seemed to motivate Rein—if Reikhenberg was right and he really did have enough space, his action to jump down into the grass feels like a bit of a conscious display of being inconvenienced for the sake of show, rather than anything real—the anger he received in return—although Reikhenberg reported that Rein was the first person to be rude, his reported statement (which, I should note, used the proper vy, not the familiar and potentially offensive ty) hardly seems to be enough to cause someone to respond with obscenity.

In 1892 Gatchina was a bustling place, with Alexander III often in residence (though probably not in August) and its two railway lines making it an increasingly desirable suburban residence for people who worked in St. Petersburg. The park might simply have been busier than normal with summer dacha residents, making the whole exercise of bicycling or driving more frustrating. I suppose one could also make a case that the quickness to anger on the part of these men reflects the internal opposition they might have felt about their own status as modern men—one a nobleman (probably a Polish nobleman) with a fancy horse, one with cutting edge bicycle—in an anti-modern system, an anti-modern system that could not be ignored at that time and in that place because it was centered on the palace next to the park.

And then I think about my own petty anger, and wonder about which of the many background worries we all face right now that is manifesting itself in those feelings of rage.Sources:
RGIA [Russian State Historical Archive) f. 491, op. 3, d. 386, ll. 311-312ob.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Five Sisters: Women Against The Tsar | Faculty Recommendation Series

This year Not Even Past asked UT History faculty to tell us about a book that they love teach. What makes it a great book for teaching history? What interesting and revealing questions does it raise? How do students respond to it? This is the first article in what we hope will be a series on books we love to teach.

by Joan Neuberger

Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar
Edited and translated by Barbara Alpern Engel and Clifford Rosenthal
Original publication: New York: Knopf/Random House 1975

Why would anyone give up a life of the utmost leisure and privilege to become a revolutionary, isolated from society and hunted by the police? How does an individual choose to become a terrorist – to kill for an idea or an ideology? What country comes to mind when you think about these questions? It is probably not nineteenth-century Russia and you are probably not imagining women in these roles. Yet arguably, modern terrorism was born in the aristocratic manor houses of the Russian empire. This collection of translated memoirs takes us deep into the everyday lives of the girls who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

I have taught this book almost every year since I began teaching in 1985, every time I teach my survey of Russian history from 1613-1917. These fascinating and accessible memoirs give us a highly detailed and deeply personal view of the decisions five revolutionary women made on the journeys they took to the revolutionary underground. Vera Figner (1852-1942) is especially thoughtful and reflective about her path from childhood innocence to growing awareness of social and economic inequality on her parents’ estate, to her desire to help the impoverished in her province, to her frustration with her own abilities and government obstacles for personal improvement and social-economic justice. In 1872, at age nineteen, Figner went to Zurich to study to be a doctor so that she could come back and have a greater impact at home serving the poor. But in Switzerland she met radical thinkers and activists who cast doubt on her ideas about individual service and reform. When she and her friends returned to Russia, they decided that the only way to effect change was through revolution, and the only way to bring about a revolution –to spark a peasant uprising — was to assassinate the tsar. Figner was one of the chief agents of that plot, but instead of igniting revolution, the assassination ushered in a period of reaction and repression. Figner was eventually arrested but not executed, which gave her decades in prison to think about her life and write her revealing – and unapologetic — memoirs.

The moral ambiguities of the women’s ideas and actions fascinate my students year after year. Were these young women nothing more than spoiled rich kids with no sense of political realities or were they dedicated realists, taking the only steps possible to transform people’s lives in a country where the government was indifferent to the suffering of ninety percent of the population? How did they understand the moral stakes of their choices? What did they hope to accomplish? How did their lives as revolutionary women compare to those of revolutionary men? And are they comparable to terrorists in the twentieth century and today? The students’ discussion of these questions changes, often dramatically, from year to year, reflecting current events and their current political concerns, which provides its own set of historical lessons, and has the added benefit of giving me a sense of the issues that matter to the succeeding generations of students in my classes.

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Digital Resources – “The Reddest of the Blacks”

By Sean Guillory

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in 1889 and died in a Stalinist labor camp sometime after 1938. The son of a former slave, a graduate of Tuskegee University, Fort-Whiteman became one of the most important African American Communist activists and organizers of the 1920s and the only known African American to be a victim of the Stalinist Terror. How did the Dallas native, dubbed “The Reddest of The Blacks,” by Time Magazine in 1925, wind up a victim of Stalinist violence in Soviet Russia? Sean Guillory has made this short video to recount his fascinating and moving story. The video was originally posted on Guillory’s excellent podcast and blog page, “Sean’s Russia Blog” and we re-post it here with his permission.

Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” in Stalin’s Russia

By Joan Neuberger

At the beginning of 1941, Sergei Eisenstein was feeling defeated. Three years had passed since he had completed a film and, on January 2, the great Russian film maker confided to his diary that he felt like his broken-down car, lethargic and depressed. A few days earlier, tired of waiting for the film administration to approve his latest proposal, he had written directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting him to intercede. When the phone rang on January 11, it was Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo’s Committee on Cinema Affairs, calling to say that no one was interested in his most recent pitch, but that they should meet to discuss the film Stalin wanted him to make. We don’t know exactly what was said at that meeting, but immediately afterward Eisenstein began reading and thinking and jotting down ideas about Ivan the Terrible, the tsar who ruled Russia in the sixteenth century. By January 21, the possibilities for a film on Ivan had captured his imagination and would not let him go. Eventually, he would fill more than a hundred notebooks with ideas related to the film and finish two books of film theory and one 800-page memoir deeply imprinted by his experience of making it. He was writing about Ivan the Terrible when he died, at age fifty, only seven years later.

In commissioning a film about Ivan the Terrible, Stalin expected Eisenstein to celebrate Ivan as the first tsar, a progressive and visionary leader, and the founder of a unified, centralized, modern Russian state. What made it tricky is that Ivan the Terrible, like Stalin himself, was infamous for carrying out a ruthless campaign of terror against the people he ruled. Everyone expected Eisenstein to make a film that justified Ivan’s violence as necessary for defeating those who opposed him in founding and protecting the new state. Stalin, who didn’t like surprises, got much more than he bargained for. Eisenstein’s film ranged far from the official commission and was controversial even before it hit the screen. Ivan the Terrible was not only a shrewd critique of Stalin and Stalinism, it also raised profound questions about the nature of power, violence, and tyranny in contemporary politics, and in the history of state power more broadly. Eisenstein’s film used Ivan’s story to examine the psychology of political ambition, the history of absolute power and recurrent cycles of violence. It explores the inner struggles of the people who achieved power as well as their rivals and victims.

Eisenstein worked on Ivan the Terrible for five years, from January 1941 to February 1946, completing only two-thirds of a projected three-part film. Part I of the trilogy was completed in December 1944 and went into general release in early 1945; Part II was submitted in February 1946; it was banned in March and only released in 1958; Part III remained incomplete at Eisenstein’s death in February 1948, but the screenplay, some footage, and many of his notes have survived.

Ivan the Terrible took so long to make because production was repeatedly postponed by the second World War. A few months after receiving the commission, on June 22, 1941, Eisenstein’s work on the screenplay was interrupted when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. As Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Studio (Mosfilm), he was immediately put in charge of producing morale-lifting films and dealing with supply, personnel, and production problems brought on by the war and the nightly bombing raids that began in July. As German troops moved close enough to threaten Moscow, most of the population of the capital, including its entire film industry, was evacuated to Alma Ata (Almaty) in Kazakhstan. It took another year for negotiations over the screenplay and the casting to conclude, and filming itself didn’t begin until April 1943.

Ivan with Anastasia's corpse in her bedroom surrounded by icons and tapestries. drawing by SM Eisenstein for Ivan the Terrible

“Ivan decides to completely annihilate the feudal landlords” Drawing by S. M.Eisenstein

During the long months of waiting, Eisenstein read hundreds of books, filled dozens of notebooks with ideas, and made thousands of drawings. In addition to the story-boards, he drew his memories of other times and places, illustrations of the books he was reading, caricatures of his colleagues and friends, and sexually explicit fantasies and satires. Despite the often inhuman forms represented in his story boards, Eisenstein insisted that his actors reproduce the poses he envisioned and hold those poses for hours at a time. He was famous for his ability to use pranks and jokes to defuse tension on the set, but not all the actors loved the demanding physical workout Eisenstein required.

Camera operator Andrei Moskvin and Sergei Eisenstein on the set of Ivan the Terrible

Once underway, Eisenstein took his time, as meticulous as he wanted to be and determined to make the film he wanted to make. He worked closely with his brilliant cameraman, Andrei Moskvin, his lead actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, and the renowned composer, Sergei Prokofiev, who wrote the score, all of whom shared his willingness to risk making the transgressive film Eisenstein had in mind.

For many viewers, the result was alienating and difficult to understand. American critic Pauline Kael famously wrote that Ivan the Terrible was “so lacking in human dimensions that you may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great – it’s a brilliant collection of stills – but as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous.” That’s not really what Eisenstein was going for. The Russian critic Sergei Yutkevich came closer; he saw Ivan as “a symphonic film [that] puts all his tremendous culture of cinematographic expression into the service of his theme and, as in no other film of his, he achieves a unity of the different expressive means available to the cinematic art. This is not only a brilliant duel of remarks and glances but a passionate battle of sound and silence, light and dark. Brightness and shadow, color and textures—all influence one’s mind and feelings.”

Ivan’s rivals: Bishop Pimen (L) Efrosinia and Vladimir Staritsky (R)

The strange look and feel, and the difficult narrative were intentional. Not only did Eisenstein have to evade the censor and the wrath of the ruler, but the complexities of Ivan’s biography paralleled his ideas about cinematic method, about how to make a film that would have the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. Eisenstein was the first film theorist to systematically explore the ways films are constructed and the ways viewers perceive what they see on screen. He was also one of the first modern thinkers to explore the ways feeling were as important as thinking in both the production and reception of art. Studying biography and history for the first time when making Ivan the Terrible also convinced him that feelings were as important as ideas in shaping the decisions that historical and political figures make.

The Golden Hall and the Angel of the Apocalypse

To tell the story of Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein wanted not just show but make us feel Ivan’s hunger for power and the ensuing conflicts that resulted. To draw viewers in and engage our deepest feelings and most complex thinking, Eisenstein devised two parallel strategies. First he believed that viewers respond consciously and unconsciously to even the tiniest of details that we see and hear when watching a film. So he broke down every element of the film image to its constitutive parts, what he called its “essential bone structure,” for the audience to gradually reconstruct for themselves into something meaningful and moving. This is why Eisenstein had his actors hold such inhuman poses: so that viewers would see every single minute gesture that went into conventional movements. This is why the production design exaggerated and distorted familiar images – from religious icons and rituals, for example. And this is why we see a hodge-podge of visual styles juxtaposed — melodrama, tragedy, gothic, grotesque, satire, and comedy. All of these design choices were meant not just to challenge conventional meanings but to let the viewer see from Ivan’s point of view, by compelling us to engage in the same process of making sense of fragmented, contradictory cues.

Ivan at his coronation, deciding to continue executing his enemies, deciding to be “Terrible.”

At the same time, Eisenstein structured the narrative around a set of questions. How does an innocent, vulnerable child become a sadistic, bloody tyrant? To what extent is Ivan like the people around him and, by extension, like us? When is killing justifiable? Do Russian rulers and, by implication, all Russians differ from their contemporaries in the West? When are we responsible for our own actions, and when can we blame circumstances? Each scene raises these questions in some form, so the audience is constantly being invited to wonder, compare, evaluate, and judge. And underlying these moral-political issues is a set of related questions concerning human emotions. In general, Ivan the Terrible asks us to consider what role emotions play—in relation to reason and logic—in motivating us to act. More specifically, Eisenstein asks what happens when love, affection, sexual attraction, grief, loneliness, hate, distrust, and the desire for revenge enter into politics. How are political affections and rivalries gendered? What happens when we are asked to love a ruler like a father? What role does affection play in a political brotherhood?

These are not the typical structuring devices of the Stalinist biopic. Soviet film biographies of this period were supposed to provide clear-cut models of behavior. Individuals in film biographies, whether cult figures or ordinary people, were to undergo some transitional improvement, make a heroic contribution to their community, and offer moments of inspiration and motivation. Eisenstein’s interrogative mode challenged viewers to make up their own minds. The ambiguities of the interrogative deny viewers a neutral vantage point and challenge us to reclaim our authority to make meaning from observation and experience.

Part I of Ivan the Terrible gives us a young and determined ruler, committed to defeating Russia’s external enemies, and the obsolete aristocracy, who opposed his efforts to centralize Russian power and establish The Great Russian State. And apparently the portrait of Ivan was just monumental and triumphalist enough for Part I to win the Stalin Prize and cause American critics to see it as pure Soviet propaganda. But this view of the film required ignoring the paranoia, violence, trauma, vengeance, treason, and betrayal that permeate its story, its characterizations, and its bizarre and murky visual setting. Ivan himself is beset by inner conflicts over his mission and constantly asks if he is on the right path. He repeatedly beseeches himself, his friends and his enemies, God, and the audience, “Am I right in what I am doing?” His own uncertainty cues us to ask if the opposition to the centralization of power is, perhaps, in some ways justified, a question that is, in fact, at the heart of Eisenstein’s conception of the film. In Part II, the questions become darker, revolving insistently around cycles of murder and revenge. Ivan still asks for reassurance but God is silent and no one else gives him the answers he wants, spurring him on to greater, more vicious acts of violence.

Ivan declaring that he is free to act against the country’s enemies (L) Stalin in a widely reproduced photograph by Ivan Shagin (R)

All Eisenstein’s questions had obvious analogues in Stalinist society. But the film maker was after something more than simple critique. He wanted to explain how Ivan became the bloody, manipulative, demagogic tyrant he became. Eisenstein had stated from the beginning that he did not intend to “whitewash” the medieval ruler or justify his violent reign, but rather to explain, as he put it, “the most atrocious things.” The interrogative mode that he used in Ivan the Terrible established a set of standards for judging any ruler. That’s how you make a film about a bloody tyrant for a bloody tyrant.

If Stalin was instrumental in bestowing Part I with the Stalin Prize, he hated Part II and had it immediately banned.

Ivan the Terrible is a difficult film because it continually presents us with contradictions and questions, it forces us to respond to unfamiliar, difficult, and ambiguous cues, and it denies us a hero to identify with or a villain to hate. It is a great film because it creates a portrait of power that resists simplification and provokes us to engage with hard questions, precisely the hard questions the Stalinist artist was supposed to suppress.

This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia
Cornell University Press, 2019

For more on Eisenstein and early Soviet filmmaking, you might like these:

The Eisenstein Reader, edited by Richard Taylor, translated by Richard Taylor and William Powell (1998)

A good selection of Eisenstein’s writing, translated into English.

Maria Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking Under Stalin (2017)

A history of Soviet filmmaking that focuses on film institutions rather than political leadership.

David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (2nd edition, 2005)

A comprehensive and insightful survey of Eisenstein’s films by one of the leading film historians in the US.

Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound (2018)

Analyzes the unique ways sound shaped cinema in the the Soviet Union. Kaganovsky shows that sound films made the voice of state power audible, reaching viewers directly for the first time.

Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (2003)

A study of each of Eisenstein’s films in the context of the director’s unpublished writing, that shows the importance of contradiction, fracture, and wildly imaginative and beguiling strangeness in all his work.

Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible (2001)

An intertextual study of Ivan the Terrible that provides sharp insights into Eisenstein’s thinking in images.

Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 (2018)

With a focus on the depiction of the senses in an extraordinary range of early Soviet films, this book shows how the new Soviet subjectivity was shaped first by a revitalized engagement with the material and natural world and later by an enriched inner emotional world.

Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali

Nikita Khrushchev is one of the most important men of the last century. Moreover, he was the main protagonist of Soviet foreign policy during the most perilous period of the Cold War which climaxed with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. How dangerous was the Soviet Union to the West during Khrushchev’s term? Which factors contributed to sow distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, and to what extent the Soviet menace was more bluff than real capabilities? Fursenko and Naftali answer these questions successfully by presenting an extensive and well-researched study that uncovers Soviet foreign policy during the Khrushchev’s Era.

In Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, the authors explore the complicated balance between cooperation with the West and competition for Third World support that undergirded the Soviet diplomatic strategy from 1955 to 1963.To understand these diplomatic maneuvers, Fursenko and Naftali focus on Khrushchev’s complex policies of building détente with his penchant for risky brinkmanship and coercive diplomacy which, he hoped, would yield substantive geopolitical gains. From the two Germanys question to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the final outcome of this dual diplomatic approach proved contradictory. The competition for Third World allies diverted scarce economic resources from domestic problems, and exacerbated tensions between the superpowers effectively undermining any sustainable opportunity for détente.

Fursenko and Naftali underline two elements that contributed to heightened tensions during the Cold War. The first one, perception in international politics, led to the frequent misreading of the adversary’s intentions, fostering a strong and lingering feeling of mistrust and deception. This atmosphere of misunderstanding transformed the years between 1958 and 1962 into the most dangerous period of the Cold War concluding with the perilous Cuban Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

1960s poster with Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev: “Long live the eternal, indestructible friendship and cooperation between the Soviet and Cuban peoples” (via Wikipedia)

The second element draws on the first, and involves the crucial role played by Third World leaders in aggravating the perceived threat that each superpower felt from the other. The authors do an excellent job in dispelling one of the greatest myths of the Cold War, the erroneous impression that the United States and the Soviet Union orchestrated and fully controlled events in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To the contrary, leaders like Fidel Castro and Gamal Nasser skillfully courted and played off the superpowers for their own gains. This perspective restores a great deal of agency to social and political actors that in other Cold War narratives have been relegated to the roles of mere pawns.

The authors conclude that Khrushchev’s foreign policy did much to preserve the boundaries of the Soviet empire but less in extracting considerable geopolitical concessions from the West. The inherent military weaknesses of the Soviet Union, coupled with limited economic resources, led Khrushchev to rely more on the appearance rather than the reality of Soviet power. However, his brinkmanship at least succeeded in deterring the United States from invading Cuba and in securing recognition for East Germany in the long run.

The book’s writing style is fluid with a clear prose, making it accessible to any audience. This is quite an achievement in a co-authored work. Fursenko and Naftali also succeed in providing an informative and compelling account of Soviet foreign policy under Khrushchev by relying mostly on declassified material from the Soviet Presidium. It is certainly a pertinent starting point for anyone interested in the intricacies of world affairs and foreign relations from the Soviet perspective.

Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union by Michael David-Fox (2015)

By Stuart Finkel

One of the pivotal issues that western historians of the USSR have debated since its collapse more than 25 years ago is its so-called “exceptionalism.” That is, to what extent should the history of the Soviet Union be considered as but one variation of the remarkable process of state modernization in the twentieth century, and to what extent might we posit a distinctively “Soviet modernity,” distinguished by its communist ideology, its party-based state, and its social and/or nationalist “neo-traditionalism.” In Crossing Borders, Michael David-Fox, a prolific scholar and one of the founding editors of the field-defining journal Kritika, brings together significantly revised versions of earlier publications with new material in a volume that takes aim at a comprehensive, holistic reframing of these much-debated questions. The very sensible central thrust is that we should and can transcend the binarisms that have developed — modernity vs. neo-traditionalism, exceptionalism vs. likeness. As he asserts in an ambitious introduction that sets a frame for the disparate chapters that follow, there is a way to “thread the needle” between the various interpretations that will allow scholars to arrive at richer understandings.

David-Fox determinedly asserts that the way out of historiographical and theoretical conundrums is not to abandon the terms of debate but rather to expand them. In particular, he suggests, that the way out of the impasse between proponents of Soviet modernity and neo-traditionalism is to utilize the concept of “multiple modernities,” which can resolve or at least contain some of the paradoxes. Of course, deconstructing binaries to arrive at a more sophisticated synthesis is not in itself a radically novel solution to historical debates, and the author strives to avoid oversimplifications of the numerous scholarly works that he examines. Threading the needle requires more than simply saying that the answer lies “in between,” and to his credit David-Fox claims to be aiming at that (or, more precisely, beginning the process of doing that) in compiling these essays and articles.

1924 pro-literacy poster by Alexander Rodchenko (via Wikipedia)

The chief features of this interpretation include a rigorous examination of what is denoted by modernity, and, in particular by an approach that is not merely comparative but aggressively transnational. Any evaluation of Soviet modernity must be done not only via comparison with multiple other modernities (and not just a stereotype of Western modernity), but also through an empirical examination of international interactions at the time. Focused primarily, but not exclusively, on the interwar period, David-Fox aims to demonstrate – in work building on his previous scholarship, in particular the recent Showcasing the Great Experiment – that patterns of influence were complex and multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a simple question of imitation. This volume aims not to resolve these complexities but rather to show empirically how intricate these interactions could be, and thus to suggest the need for still further examination by the field.

The book aims to “cross borders” not just between nations but also among various subdisciplines and approaches. In a new essay entitled “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” David-Fox examines definitions of “ideology,” asserting that for a concept so ubiquitous it has been curiously undertheorized by Soviet historians. This explication of six different modalities for studying ideology (as doctrine, as worldview, as historical concept, as discourse, as performance, as faith, and in the mirror of French revolutionary and Nazi historiography) offers a useful, concise, and comprehensive overview. Together with the examination of Soviet modernity and a significantly revised and expanded version of the author’s well-known “What is the Cultural Revolution?” the historiographical and theoretical chapters might offer, among other things, a precise introduction to the basic questions of Soviet history for graduate students and general readers.

Poster of the experimental Soviet silent film “Man with a Movie Camera,” 1929 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The other major new inquiry in this volume is “The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West,” which provides a sort of précis of the author’s own original interpretation of what he calls “intelligentsia-statist modernity.” Impressively integrating the work of a diverse array of scholars, David-Fox posits that Russian/Soviet modernity was marked by “the way long-standing traditions of state-sponsored transformation were wedded to Westernized elites’ attempts to overcome Russian backwardness, and they all revolved around enlightenment from above and a search for alternatives to the market.” At the center of this conception is the well-known impulse of the Russian intelligentsia, the Kulturträger tradition, to disseminate “culture” to the masses. Here and in the revised version of his piece on the Communist Academy and the Academy of Sciences included later in the volume, David-Fox studiously avoids reducing the complexities and paradoxes of the Soviet integration of long-standing intelligentsia traditions. At the same time, in a book that strives to analyze and deconstruct major interpretative categories (modernity, ideology, etc.), it might be argued that this essay reifies a notion of “the intelligentsia” that is not sufficiently complicated. From at least the turn of the century, intelligentsia conceptions had been debated and contested, so that the original, more integral understanding had already been broken down. While there were undoubted strong étatist and tutelary propensities among the Russian/Soviet intellectual classes, there were also contradictory tendencies, including anti-intelligentsia sentiment and debates over fundamental concepts of social and intellectual life.

But it is clear that both this essay and the rest of the volume’s impressively erudite analysis represent far from the author’s last word on these matters. One expects an even more comprehensive framework will be built on these thought-provoking foundations.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part II)

To commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies held an international conference entitled, “The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917.”

The second keynote speech was given by Professor Lisa Kirschenbaum, Professor of History at West Chester University. Professor Kirschenbaum has published three books, including: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932; The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments; and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion.

Watch a recording of Professor Kirschenbaum’s keynote here.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part I)

The first keynote speech was given by Sheila Fitzpatrick, preeminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Professor of History at The University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Professor Fitzpatrick taught at UT Austin from 1980-1989.

Click here to watch a recording of Professor Fitzpatrick’s keynote.

A Deportation Story: Russia 1914

On the same day the President of the United States announced that he was ending DACA (the program that provides some immigrants who were brought to the US as minors protection from deportation and eligibility for a work permit), this moving essay appeared on the Russian History Blog, which we re-post with their permission. In the context of our IHS annual theme and our film series on the FACES OF MIGRATION, this story offers a cautionary tale on bureaucracy and vulnerability. ~Joan Neuberger

The Failures of Arbitrary Mercy

by Alison Smith

Toward the end of a very long archival file, toward the end of a long research trip, I came across a letter that made me gasp and then tear up as I sat in the reading room. It was sent from the Minister of the Interior to the Minister of the Imperial Court on December 12, 1914, and then forwarded on to the Gatchina town authorities:

On October 26, Iuliia and Luiza Ruprekht, the first 71, and the second 67 years old, German subjects who lived in Gatchina and were subject to deportation due to the war, gave the Gatchina police chief a petition in which they asked to be allowed to remain in their place of residence in Russia, where they were born and had lived all their lives, and referring to their elderly years, illness, and material dependence on their sister, a Russian subject living in Petrograd. [The police chief] presented this petition to the Petrograd governor only after thirteen days, that is on November 8, with а favorable conclusion, due to which [the governor] placed a decision favorable to the petitioners on the report. But not waiting for notice of [the resolution of their petition], the aforementioned foreigners on November 9 ended their lives with suicide, having hanged themselves in their apartment; the reason for their suicide, according to the same police chief, was that they were dejected under the influence of the threat of the possibility of being sent, as German subjects, out of Russia. The police chief’s explanation of why there was such a delay in presenting the late Ruprekhts’ petition to the Petrograd governor does not hold up.

Where to begin? Well, there’s a horrible irony here, because the other actors were hardly themselves all Russians, even if they were all Russian subjects. The police chief’s name was Kavtaradze; the Minister of the Imperial Court’s name was Frederiks, the Petrograd governor’s name Adlerberg. The officials of imperial Russia were of its empire, not all of Russia. I could go on about the unfairness of former non-Russians turning on current non-Russians, particularly current non-Russians who had lived their whole lives in Russia, except that I think that’s not really the story here.

Let’s start instead with the specifics of the file itself. This letter comes at the end of a long file “with confidential correspondence on various questions,” the same file that had the many lists of foreigners that I mentioned in my last post. The reason for this letter being there was due not to the fact that it involved “foreigners” but instead to the fact that it involved criticizing the police. The Minister of the Interior, who had oversight over the governor, was writing to the Minister of the Imperial Court, who had oversight over the Gatchina authorities, because he was casting blame for this suicide on the Gatchina police chief. A number of the other issues that show up in this file also involve cases in which police officials are found guilty of some bad act—wrongdoing by the police had to be kept secret. So that means that this outcome was seen as a very bad thing, and that there was real worry that the police chief had failed to carry out his important duty of dealing with petitions.

The royal palace at Gatchina. Lithograph by K.K.Schultz from the drawing by I.I.Charlemagne, mid-19c. (Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia)

The Gatchina authorities investigated the incident, and believed that the police chief was innocent of any wrongdoing—if anything, they blamed the Petrograd governor’s office. According to their investigation, the two sisters had received notice that they were to be kicked out of Russia, much to their shock (after all, that’s where they’d been born), and decided to travel straight to Petrograd to petition the governor directly. Once they got there, however, they were told they had to follow the normal chain of command, which meant turning first to the Gatchina authorities. Only those authorities could then forward their petition to Petrograd. When the sisters returned to Gatchina, still upset, they went to see the police chief to make their petition. He was surprised that they had been sent notice of their deportation, because he had thought the lists of foreigners were in the process of being corrected and that their names oughtn’t to have appeared on it anyway (he apparently considered them non-foreigners even if they’d never formally taken on Russian subjecthood). He also advised them to get a letter from a doctor to bolster their claim of ill health. Once they got such a letter, he forwarded the petition, but before any response could come, the women were so overcome by the set of events that their fear took over.

Perhaps in part because I am a woman living and working in a country where I do not have citizenship, I find this story almost unbearable. Had Iuliia and Luiza’s father taken Russian subjecthood, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Had they married Russian subjects, they wouldn’t have had a problem. Instead, most likely, no one had ever really noticed that these two maiden ladies weren’t Russian subjects. They don’t show up on the lists of foreigners, probably because they were women, and the lists almost always only include men. They just lived their lives until suddenly their citizenship became meaningful in a most awful way. What must that have felt like? Well, we have the answer. It felt hopeless.

Even sadder is that clearly no one expected it to turn out this way. No one even expected them to be deported. The governor was going to grant their petition; the police chief supported them in their efforts, and gave them suggestions for how to make their case stronger. That goes back to the idea that the real concern for this case, the reason it ended up in the confidential file, was that it involved the system of petitions breaking down. The autocracy could make laws that were as harsh as it wanted to—like, say, deporting people based on the sheer fact of their citizenship, not because of anything to do with who they were as individuals—in part because it had the system of petitions in place to allow it to say, “oh, but we didn’t really mean you, you can stay.” Petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful. So it could make laws that it knew were going to be bad for some people it didn’t actually want to hurt, because it knew that petitions could create those exceptions. Except of course that mercy was just as arbitrary as the autocracy’s punishment could be. It could not be relied upon, it could not be trusted, because the law was also the law.

(Letter from RGIA f. 491, op. 3, d. 279, ll. 480-80ob; Barbara Engel has written about the ways that petitions allowed the autocracy to be merciful in “In the Name of the Tsar: Competing Legalities and Marital Conflict in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 1 (2005): 70-96.)

Alison Smith is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is the author, most recently, of For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Originally posted on Russian History Blog (September 5, 2017).

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

By Julia L. Mickenberg

Until quite recently, tales of Americans’ enchantment with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s were typically told as prelude to their eventual disenchantment: this “liberal narrative” described immature, naïve, utopian idealism replaced by contrition and mature, rational rejection of radical extremism. So it was that I felt embarrassed by the excitement I found myself experiencing when I read descriptions from the time of exciting developments in the “new Russia.” In addition to the Soviet avant garde’s innovations in visual art, theatre, film, and literature, I found repeated emphasis on the special provisions being made for women and children: eliminating the very idea of an “illegitimate” child; radically democratizing education; simplifying divorce; mandating equal pay in the workplace; legalizing and subsidizing abortion; extending pre-natal and maternal welfare provisions; and creating public dining halls, laundries, and nurseries so that domestic duties would not limit women’s professional capacity (yes, these duties were still understood to be women’s).

I felt in my own gut some of the deep attraction that many people in the West experienced amid and following the Russian Revolution. But as a historian, I had incontrovertible proof that the Soviet state, despite every artist it supported, every cool program it put into effect, every effort it made to raise the level of the masses, was at a very fundamental level dehumanizing, repressive, and often violent, all of which became clear to many outsiders fairly early on. I remember telling a colleague that I was interested in exploring and perhaps making sense of all the hopeful rhetoric in the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and her warning me that following this path would get me into a whole lot of mishegas, craziness, a Yiddish word that I’ve always figured needs no translation. But the Soviet thing was like an itch I couldn’t keep myself from scratching. I wondered if I could take on this topic, or some piece of it, without seeming to be an apologist for Stalin or denying the facts of history. I had written about left wingers who wrote children’s books during the McCarthy era, which is to say, I had already spent some time thinking about the inherent contradictions within the communist movement.

British Quakers postcard appealing for funds and supplies to support children suffering from the 1921 famine in Russia. © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. Used with permission. This same image was used in a booklet published by the communist Friends of Soviet Russia.

A few scholars who had come of age after the end of the Cold War were writing about Americans and the Soviet Union in more nuanced ways than had been possible in an earlier era. However, I’d seen very little written specifically about attraction to the “new Russia” on the part of women, particularly independent, educated, and liberated “new women”— this despite the fact that, as the title of a breezy syndicated news article published in 1932 would suggest, “American Girls in Red Russia” were, well, a thing.

American Friends Service Committee workers in a Quaker hut in Buzuluk, Christmas Eve, 1922. Bottom left, Robert Dunn and Dorothy North “reading an Irish play.” Bottom right, Ann Herkner. The other two men are Karl Borders and a Russian coworker. (Andree A. Brooks Research Files on Bluet Rabinoff, box 2, Robert Dunn photographs, Tamiment Library, New York University).

Oddly enough, it was continuing research in children’s literature that finally convinced me to go ahead and write a book about “American Girls in Red Russia,” mishegas and all. In the archives of Ruth Epperson Kennell, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, published a number of books and stories about children in the Soviet Union, I found myself intrigued by Kennell’s own story, especially her years as a “pioneer” in Siberia working on an industrial commune founded by several American Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) in the early 1920s. Seeking release from what Lenin had described as the “household drudgery” that confines women in most societies, Kennell was attracted to the idea of living communally—and also working collectively toward the shared goal of creating a better world. Answering a call from the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, she and her husband Frank signed a two-year contract, packed up their worldly possessions, and left their 18-month-old son back in California with Frank’s mother.

Ruth Kennell in Siberia, wearing a Russian blouse. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak).

Ruth worked as the colony’s secretary, librarian, and postmistress and was also its most avid chronicler, writing in The Nation about the “new Pennsylvania” they were building. She also wrote, even more revealingly, about her experiences in letters, a diary, and an unpublished memoir/novel. In these private sources Ruth describes the personal awakening she experienced in Siberia, where she fell in love with a Cornell-trained engineer she met in the colony office: a Jew, a Communist, and an avid reader of literature and philosophy. When Frank decided to go back to California amid a dispute between Wobblies and Communists, Ruth insisted that she wanted to fulfill her two-year contract, but actually, she had other reasons for staying: as she noted in her diary, “I want to be free, free!” She was not alone. Ruth noted in an article that she published in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, “In the spring of 1925 more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife’s initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved.”

John Reed Colony, of which Anna Louise Strong was “chief” or, more accurately, patron, in the mid-1920s. (Anna Louise Strong papers, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW37340. Used with permission from Tracy Strong.)

Kennell helped me begin to recognize the deeply personal attractions that American women felt to the Soviet Union, as well the moral and ethical compromises they made to rationalize so much that was deeply troubling about the Soviet system. Ruth was well aware of inefficiency, hostility to communism among many Russians, gender and ethnic conflicts, as well as the pettiness, corruption, cruelty, and ineptitude among Bolshevik leaders. But ultimately she still thought the Soviet experiment was worth supporting. Kennell’s friend Milly Bennett, author of the article on “American Girls in Red Russia” from which I took my book title, flippantly but also revealingly told a friend: “the thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right. . . . . And then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say . . . ‘facts are not important.’”

Milly Bennett and other workers from the Moscow News marching in a May Day parade. Bennett is the woman, second from the right, wearing glasses. (Milly Bennett papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University.)

Historians of the Russian empire have used Soviet citizen’s diaries to gain insights into “Stalinist subjectivity,” that is, the ways that individuals actively incorporated the Bolshevik ideal into their very sense of themselves. But diaries and other intimate sources have barely been tapped as a means of exploring ways in which the Soviet system likewise brought meaning to the lives of Americans and other foreigners. American women’s diaries and letters reveal both their genuine excitement—about Soviet schools, theatre, public spectacles, nurseries, workers’ housing, laws supporting maternal and child health, the “new morality,” and the simple fact of women’s visibility in public life.

Kuzbas pilgrims picnicking. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak.)

“Women do everything here,” Louise Thompson wrote to her mother in the summer of 1932 from Moscow. “Work on building construction, on the streets, in factories of course, and everywhere.” Thompson’s activism on behalf of African-American civil rights had attracted her to the Soviet Union, and she wound up leading a group of 22 African Americans, among them luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Dorothy West to act in what was being billed as the first true-to-life film about American race relations. Although the film was never made, group members, several of whom stayed on in the Soviet Union, were treated like the stars they might have been, honored rather than shunned for their blackness. Thompson liked to joke, “It will really be difficult to scramble back to obscurity when we return to the old USA, I suspect.”

Pauline Koner with her students from the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute. (Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.)

The young Jewish dancer Pauline Koner, like Isadora Duncan a generation earlier, was deeply inspired by the very fact of being in the Soviet Union and the opportunity that offered to embody a revolutionary ethos through her movement. “I have to pinch myself to really believe I’m here,” Koner wrote in her diary, in December 1934. “Since arriving on Soviet soil I’ve felt different, the air smelled different and the land looked different. . . . Moscow is the most energizing and invigorating place in the world. It is the place for creative thought and for happiness. Its beauty at times is unbelievable.” As a Jew, Koner had reveled in the experience of visiting Palestine; in the Soviet Union she reveled in the idea of shedding her ethnic particularity and joining the Soviet people.

My book includes suffragists, settlement house workers, “child savers,” journalists, photographers, educators, social reformers, and a range of “new women” who felt drawn to Russia and the Soviet Union from approximately 1905-1945.

Today, as American women continue to struggle for many of the same things as these women of yesteryear—satisfying work that will allow them to balance motherhood and career, romantic relationships that are not bound by economic incentives, and a way to make sense of a society that is exploitative, unjust, racist, and demeaning to women—Russia is once again in the news. Now, ironically, it is mostly right-wing men who see possibility in Russia thanks to its breed of capitalism that puts profit above all else. Like the Communist dictators of old, the new administration in Russia, utterly focused on its own power and gain, shows a callous disregard for individuals and personal freedoms. Meanwhile, American women—like women in many parts of the world—remain as hungry as ever for more just and satisfying social arrangements.

Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Learn more about Americans’ attraction to revolutionary Russia:

Warren Beatty’s classic 1981 film, Reds, captures the romance of the Russian Revolution for many Americans. Beatty plays the journalist John Reed and Diane Keaton plays his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant; dramatic reenactment of their relationship with each other and with the Russian revolution is interspersed with interviews from surviving members of their Greenwich Village milieu.

The Patriots, a novel by Sana Krasikov, tells the story of a woman who moves from Brooklyn to the Soviet Union, “in pursuit of economic revolution, a classless society, gender equality — and a strapping engineer she met while working at the Soviet Trade Mission,” as the New York Times’ review puts it. She stays in the Soviet Union much longer than most of the women I write about, at a high cost. The book chronicles not just her life in Russia but also that of her son, who returns to the Russia of his childhood and youth as a Big Oil executive, navigating Putin’s Russia as he tries to learn more about his mother’s past.

Mary Leder’s My Life in Stalinist Russia is the memoir of a woman who, at 16, went with her parents from Los Angeles to Birobidjian, a planned Jewish colony in Soviet Far East, but quickly decided this muddy, disorganized mess in the middle of nowhere was not for her and went on to Moscow. There she found she could not get a job without her passport, but when her father sent that on to her it was mysteriously lost in the mail. Leder felt she had no choice but to take Soviet citizenship—and hence wound up being stuck in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years.

Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (1995) by Wendy Goldman speaks to both the ambitious Bolshevik program vis-à-vis women and children and the material and practical realities that prevented realization of the most utopian visions in realms ranging from social welfare to morality.

Anna Louise Strong’s memoir, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of An American, was a bestseller when it was published in 1935 and it offers an insightful picture into what motivated Strong to be a self-appointed propagandist for the Soviet Union, despite awareness of the system’s many limitations. She wrote the book hoping it would provide her with entry into the Communist Party, but in fact neither the Soviet or American parties would have her, despite having devoted much of her life to serving the Soviet Union.

Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. This popular history describes the thousands of Americans drawn to the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plan, and the significant numbers who wound up in the gulag or dead, with far too little protest from the US Embassy.

The Failures of Arbitrary Mercy

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