Browse

The Art of the Bribe: Corruption Under Stalin, 1943-1953

James Heinzen

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, ... More

Traditions of official corruption inherited from the Soviet and late Imperial eras have continued to touch Russian life since the collapse of the USSR. This study is the first archive-based, historical study of bribery and corruption in the Soviet Union for this period. A study of the solicitation and offering of bribes forms the heart of this research. Bribery (vziatochnichestvo)—typically defined in law as gifts in cash or in kind intended to influence public officials to the benefit of the giver—represents the paradigmatic variety of corruption. This study takes a novel approach to the phenomenon of the bribe, examining it as an integral part of an unofficial yet essential series of relationships upon which much of Soviet society and state administration relied in order to function, as it gradually became part of the fabric of everyday life. The book examines three major, related themes. The book’s first theme, “The Landscape of Bribery,” concerns the nature and varieties of bribery, while painting a sociological portrait of the people involved. Whom did prosecutors accuse of such crimes? The second major topic addresses the regime’s attempts to understand the causes of bribery, and then to wipe it out through centrally directed anti-corruption “campaigns.” “The view from below,” which examines popular perceptions and understandings of bribery, constitutes the third dimension of the study. Focusing on bribery among police, court, and other law enforcement employees, this phase explores the imprecise and shifting line that separated “acceptable” from “unacceptable” behavior.Less

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy

Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli

This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the ... More

This introductory chapter explores the transformative possibilities of reading Shakespeare for women, both collectively and individually, by combining work on women's clubs with recent work on the role of reading for individual and collective agency. It focuses on the variety of ways Shakespeare was read by American club women in order to suggest some of the repercussions of their literate practices for individual women, for groups, and for their communities in the decades around the fin de siècle. Women readers in large cities and small towns across America helped spread the idea that Shakespeare was for everyone, not just cultural elites in metropolitan areas. The efforts of club women to improve their communities also established Shakespeare as a local foundation of American culture and as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations.Less

Between Truth and Time: A History of Soviet Central Television

Christine E. Evans

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet ... More

This book—the first full-length study of Soviet Central Television to draw extensively on archival sources, interviews, and television recordings—challenges the idea that mass culture in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era was dull and formulaic. The book follows the history of Central Television in the Soviet Union from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tracing the emergence of play, conflict, and competition on Soviet news programs, serial films, and variety and game shows, the book shows that Central Television's most popular shows were experimental and creative, laying the groundwork for Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms and the post-Soviet media system. It shows that the highly televisual Putin era represents the culmination of a long Soviet—now Russian—“era of television” that began in the late 1950s.Less

Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border

Sören Urbansky

The Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. This book rectifies this by exploring the demarcation's ... More

The Sino-Russian border, once the world's longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. This book rectifies this by exploring the demarcation's remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. The book explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. It challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making. Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. The book demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda. It sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.Less

Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus

Michael Khodarkovsky

Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. This book tells a concise and compelling history of ... More

Russia's attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. This book tells a concise and compelling history of the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas during the centuries of Russia's long conquest (1500–1850s). The history of the region unfolds against the background of one man's life story, Semën Atarshchikov (1807–1845). Torn between his Chechen identity and his duties as a lieutenant and translator in the Russian army, Atarshchikov defected, not once but twice, to join the mountaineers against the invading Russian troops. His was the experience more typical of Russia's empire-building in the borderlands than the better-known stories of the audacious kidnappers and valiant battles. It is a history of the North Caucasus as seen from both sides of the conflict, which continues to make this region Russia's most violent and vulnerable frontier.Less

Breaking the Ties That Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia

Barbara Alpern Engel

Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed ... More

Russia's Great Reforms of 1861 were sweeping social and legal changes that aimed to modernize the country. In the following decades, rapid industrialization and urbanization profoundly transformed Russia's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book explores the personal, cultural, and political consequences of these dramatic changes, focusing on their impact on intimate life and expectations and the resulting challenges to the traditional, patriarchal family order, the cornerstone of Russia's authoritarian political and religious regime. The widely perceived “marriage crisis” had far-reaching legal, institutional, and political ramifications. The book draws on archival documentation to explore changing notions of marital relations, domesticity, childrearing, and intimate life among ordinary men and women in imperial Russia. It illustrates the human consequences of the marriage crisis and reveals that the new and more individualistic values of the capitalist marketplace and commercial culture challenged traditional definitions of gender roles and encouraged the self-creation of new social identities. The book captures the intimate experiences of women and men of the lower and middling classes in their own words, documenting instances not only of physical, mental, and emotional abuse but also of resistance and independence. These changes challenged Russia's rigid political order, forcing a range of state agents, up to and including those who spoke directly in the name of the tsar, to rethink traditional understandings of gender norms and family law.Less

Charand-o Parand: Revolutionary Satire from Iran, 1907-1909

Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda

A classic of modern Persian literature, Charand-o Parand (Stuff and Nonsense) is a work familiar to every literate Iranian. Originally a series of newspaper columns written by scholar and satirist ... More

A classic of modern Persian literature, Charand-o Parand (Stuff and Nonsense) is a work familiar to every literate Iranian. Originally a series of newspaper columns written by scholar and satirist Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, the pieces poke fun at mullahs, the shah, and the old religious and political order during the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1906–11). The chapters were the Daily Show of their era. The columns were heatedly debated in the Iranian parliament, and the newspaper was shut down on several occasions for its criticism of the religious establishment. Translated by two distinguished scholars of Persian language and history, this book makes Dehkhoda's entertaining political observations available to English readers for the first time.Less

Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation

Faith Hillis

This book recovers an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of the Tsarist Empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the ... More

This book recovers an all-but-forgotten chapter in the history of the Tsarist Empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian Empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, this region generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. The southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities. Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as the book shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, the book puts forth a new interpretation of state–society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.Less

Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia

Victoria Donovan

This book is a study of the powerful and pervasive myth of the Russian Northwest, its role in forming Soviet and Russian identities, and its impact on local communities. The book explores the ... More

This book is a study of the powerful and pervasive myth of the Russian Northwest, its role in forming Soviet and Russian identities, and its impact on local communities. The book explores the transformation of three northwestern Russian towns from provincial backwaters into the symbolic homelands of the Soviet and Russian nations. The book's central argument is that the Soviet state exploited the cultural heritage of the Northwest to craft patriotic narratives of the people's genius, heroism, and strength that could bind the nation together after 1945. Through sustained engagement with local voices, it reveals the ways these narratives were internalized, revised, and resisted by the communities living in the region. The book provides an alternative lens through which to view the rise of Russian patriotic consciousness in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, adding a valuable regional dimension to our knowledge of Russian nation building and identity politics.Less

Claiming Crimea: A History of Catherine the Great's Southern Empire

Kelly O'Neill

Russia's long-standing claims to Crimea date back to the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine II. This book is the first archive-based, multi-dimensional study of the initial “quiet conquest” of a ... More

Russia's long-standing claims to Crimea date back to the eighteenth-century reign of Catherine II. This book is the first archive-based, multi-dimensional study of the initial “quiet conquest” of a region that has once again moved to the forefront of international affairs. The book traces the impact of Russian rule on the diverse population of the former khanate, which included Muslim, Christian, and Jewish residents. The book discusses the arduous process of establishing the empire's social, administrative, and cultural institutions in a region that had been governed according to a dramatically different logic for centuries. With careful attention to how officials and subjects thought about the spaces they inhabited, this book reveals the lasting influence of Crimea and its people on the Russian imperial system, and sheds new light on the precarious contemporary relationship between Russia and the famous Black Sea peninsula.Less

Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin

Pauline Fairclough

This book explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state ... More

This book explores the evolving role of music in shaping the cultural identity of the Soviet Union in a revelatory work that counters certain hitherto accepted views of an unbending, unchanging state policy of repression, censorship, and dissonance that existed in all areas of Soviet artistic endeavour. Newly opened archives from the Leninist and Stalinist eras have shed new light on Soviet concert life, demonstrating how the music of the past was used to help mold and deliver cultural policy, how ‘undesirable’ repertoire was weeded out during the 1920s, and how Russian and non-Russian composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pëtr Chaykovskiy, Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Sergey Rachmaninov were ‘canonised’ during different, distinct periods in Stalinist culture. The book's study of the ever-shifting Soviet musical–political landscape identifies 1937 as the start of a cultural Cold War, rather than occurring post-World War II, as is often maintained, while documenting the efforts of musicians and bureaucrats during this period to keep musical channels open between Russia and the West.Less

Club Red: Vacation Travel and the Soviet Dream

Diane P. Koenker

The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within ... More

The Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers’ state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie. This book offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. It shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime’s effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women. The book emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While the book focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, it also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries) which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.Less

Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953

Kiril Tomoff

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence ... More

Why did the Stalin era, a period characterized by bureaucratic control and the reign of Socialist Realism in the arts, witness such an extraordinary upsurge of musical creativity and the prominence of musicians in the cultural elite? This is one of the questions that this book seeks to answer. The book shows how the Union of Soviet Composers established control over the music profession and negotiated the relationship between composers and the Communist Party leadership. Central to the book's argument is the institutional authority and prestige that the musical profession accrued and deployed within Soviet society, enabling musicians to withstand the postwar disciplinary campaigns that were so crippling in other artistic and literary spheres. Most accounts of Soviet musical life focus on famous individuals or the campaign against Shostakovich's ‘Lady Macbeth’ and Zhdanov's postwar attack on musical formalism. This book's approach, while not downplaying these notorious events, shows that the Union was able to develop and direct a musical profession that enjoyed enormous social prestige. The Union's leadership was able to use its expertise to determine the criteria of musical value with a degree of independence. The book reveals the complex and mutable interaction of creative intelligentsia and political elite in a period hitherto characterized as one of totalitarian control.Less

Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939

David L. Hoffmann

Under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were ... More

Under Joseph Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. This book examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime. To analyze Soviet social policies, the book places them in an international comparative context. It explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.Less

Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991

Claire L. Shaw

Deaf in the USSR explores the history of the deaf community in the Soviet Union from the February Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, situating the experience of deaf ... More

Deaf in the USSR explores the history of the deaf community in the Soviet Union from the February Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, situating the experience of deaf people within the broader framework of Soviet programs of identity. Using sources from the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (VOG), a deaf-run state body that can trace its history back to the revolutions of 1917, alongside institutional archives, deaf journalism, literature, theatre, art, cinema and personal memoirs, it considers deaf engagement with the Soviet project to remake society in its various incarnations throughout the Soviet era, and reveals the shifting ways in which the hearing world perceived Soviet deaf lives. By asking what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of humanity, and how Soviet ideologues sought to reconcile the fallibility of the body with the dream of a perfect future society, it interrogates the fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project, and reveals how these contradictions were negotiated – both individually and collectively – by Soviet deaf people.Less

Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society

Steven A. Barnes

This book offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag—the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons—in Soviet society. Soviet authorities ... More

This book offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag—the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons—in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. This book argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed “re-educated” through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who “failed” never got out alive. Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, the book shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. It takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. The book traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin. It reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would re-enter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.Less

Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Valerie Kivelson

In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe ... More

In the courtrooms of seventeenth-century Russia, the great majority of those accused of witchcraft were male, in sharp contrast to the profile of accused witches across Catholic and Protestant Europe in the same period. While European courts targeted and executed overwhelmingly female suspects, often on charges of compacting with the devil, the tsars’ courts vigorously pursued men and some women accused of practicing more down-to-earth magic, using poetic spells and home-grown potions. Instead of Satanism or heresy, the primary concern in witchcraft testimony in Russia involved efforts to use magic to subvert, mitigate, or avenge the harsh conditions of patriarchy, serfdom, and social hierarchy. This book places the trials of witches in the context of early modern Russian law, religion, and society. The book explores the interplay among the testimony of accusers, the leading questions of the interrogators, and the confessions of the accused to create a picture of a shared moral vision of the world that crossed social divides. Because of the routine use of torture, the book addresses questions about the Muscovite courts’ equation of pain and truth, questions with continuing resonance in the world today. Within a moral economy that paired unquestioned hierarchical inequities with expectations of reciprocity, magic and suspicions of magic emerged where those expectations were most egregiously violated. Witchcraft in Russia surfaces as one of the ways that oppression was contested by ordinary people.Less

The Gulag After Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev's Soviet Union, 1953-1964

Jeffrey S. Hardy

This book reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. The text argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to ... More

This book reveals how the vast Soviet penal system was reimagined and reformed in the wake of Stalin's death. The text argues that penal reform in the 1950s was a serious endeavor intended to transform the Gulag into a humane institution that re-educated criminals into honest Soviet citizens. Under the leadership of Minister of Internal Affairs Nikolai Dudorov, a Khrushchev appointee, this drive to change the Gulag into a “progressive” system where criminals were reformed through a combination of education, vocational training, leniency, sport, labor, cultural programs, and self-governance was both sincere and at least partially effective. The new vision for the Gulag faced many obstacles. Re-education proved difficult to quantify, a serious liability in a statistics-obsessed state. The entrenched habits of Gulag officials and the prisoner-guard power dynamic mitigated the effect of the post-Stalin reforms. And the Soviet public never fully accepted the new policies of leniency and the humane treatment of criminals. In the late 1950s, they joined with a coalition of party officials, criminologists, procurators, newspaper reporters, and some penal administrators to rally around the slogan “The camp is not a resort” and succeeded in re-imposing harsher conditions for inmates. By the mid-1960s the Soviet Gulag had emerged as a hybrid system forged from the old Stalinist system, the vision promoted by Khrushchev and others in the mid-1950s, and the ensuing counter-reform movement. This new penal equilibrium largely persisted until the fall of the Soviet Union.Less

Gulag Letters

Arsenii Formakov

Emily D. Johnson (ed.)

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least ... More

Memoirs and works of fiction that describe the Stalinist Gulag often depict labor camps as entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society. In fact, however, many prisoners corresponded at least sporadically with relatives either through the official, censored Gulag mail system or by smuggling letters out of camp with free laborers. Examples of such correspondence that survive to the present day represent a powerful, largely unstudied historical source with the potential to fundamentally change the way we understand both the Soviet forced labor system and Stalinist society in general. Gulag Letters offers readers an English-language translation of the letters of a single Gulag inmate, the journalist, poet, and novelist Arsenii Formakov (1900-1983), who was a prominent member of Latvia’s large and vibrant Russian Old Believer community during the interwar period. Formakov was arrested by the Soviet secret police in June 1940 as part of a broad round-up of anti-Soviet elements that began just weeks after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Latvia, and survived two terms in Soviet labor camps (1940-1947 and 1949-1955). The letters that he mailed home to his wife and children while serving these sentences reveal the surprising porousness of the Gulag and the variability of labor camp life and describe the difficult conditions that prisoners faced during and after World War II. They also represent an important eye-witness account of the experience of Latvian citizens deported to internment sites in the Soviet interior during the 1940s.Less

Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta

Alan Barenberg

Gulag Town, Company Town examines the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost that was built in the 1930s as one of the most notorious prison camp complexes in the Soviet Union. But ... More

Gulag Town, Company Town examines the history of Vorkuta, an arctic coal-mining outpost that was built in the 1930s as one of the most notorious prison camp complexes in the Soviet Union. But Vorkuta was not just a camp; it was also a Soviet city, with a substantial non-prisoner population and urban spaces. This book questions the idea that the Gulag was an “archipelago” separated from Soviet society at large. Instead, it examines camp and city together, looking at the interrelationships between them. It demonstrates that borders between the inside and outside of the camp were permeable and contested, and a web of personal connections linked camp and city together. Such connections continued to play an important role during the post-Stalin period in Vorkuta, as they allowed ex-prisoners to navigate their transition to civilian life by relying on social networks that they had established while imprisoned. Based on archival research and oral history, Gulag Town, Company Town offers new interpretations of the relationship between the Gulag and Soviet society, and of the enduring legacy of forced labor in the Soviet Union.Less