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The Defiant Life of Vera Figner by Lynne Ann Hartnett Pdf
A “riveting” biography of a Russian noblewoman turned revolutionary terrorist and accomplice in the assassination of a tsar (The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review). Born in 1852 in the last years of serfdom, Vera Figner came of age as Imperial Russian society was being rocked by the massive upheaval that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. At first a champion of populist causes and women’s higher education, which she herself pursued as a medical student in Zurich, Figner later became a leader of the terrorist party the People’s Will—and was an accomplice in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Drawing on extensive archival research and careful reading of Figner’s copious memoirs, Lynne Ann Hartnett reveals how Figner survived the Bolshevik revolution and Stalin's Great Purges and died a lionized revolutionary legend as the Nazis bore down on Moscow in 1942.
Author : Kevin Grant Publisher : University of California Press Page : 230 pages File Size : 45,6 Mb Release : 2019-06-18 Category : History ISBN : 9780520301009
Last Weapons explains how the use of hunger strikes and fasts in political protest became a global phenomenon. Exploring the proliferation of hunger as a form of protest between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Kevin Grant traces this radical tactic as it spread through trans-imperial networks among revolutionaries and civil-rights activists from Russia to Britain to Ireland to India and beyond. He shows how the significance of hunger strikes and fasts refracted across political and cultural boundaries, and how prisoners experienced and understood their own starvation, which was then poorly explained by medical research. Prison staff and political officials struggled to manage this challenge not only to their authority, but to society’s faith in the justice of liberal governance. Whether starving for the vote or national liberation, prisoners embodied proof of their own assertions that the rule of law enforced injustices that required redress and reform. Drawing upon deep archival research, the author offers a highly original examination of the role of hunger in contesting an imperial world, a tactic that still resonates today.
Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography’s poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself.
A Prison Without Walls? presents a snapshot of daily life for exiles and their dependents in eastern Siberia during the very last years of the Tsarist regime, from the 1905 revolution to the collapse of the Tsarist regime in 1917. This was an extraordinary period in Siberia's history as a place of punishment. There was an unprecedented rise of Siberia's penal use in this fifteen-year window, and a dramatic increase in the number of exiles punished for political offences. This work focuses on the region of Eastern Siberia, taking the regions of Irkutsk and Yakutsk in north-eastern Siberia as its focal points. Siberian exile was the antithesis of Foucault's modern prison. The State did not observe, monitor, and control its exiles closely; often not even knowing where the exiles were. Exiles were free to govern their daily lives; free of fences and free from close observation and supervision, but despite these freedoms, Siberian exile represented one of Russia's most feared punishments. In this volume, Sarah Badcock seeks to humanise the individuals who made up the mass of exiles, and the men, women, and children who followed them voluntarily into exile. A Prison Without Walls? is structured in a broad narrative arc that moves from travel to exile, life and communities in exile, work and escape, and finally illness in exile. The book gives a personal, human, empathetic insight into what exilic experience entailed, and allows us to comprehend why eastern Siberia was regarded as a terrible punishment, despite its apparent freedoms.
A Generation of Revolutionaries by Ben Eklof,Tatiana Saburova Pdf
“Anyone interested in digging deeper into some of the less-examined facets of late imperial and early Soviet Russia will be well rewarded.” —American Historical Review Nikolai Charushin’s memoirs of his experience as a member of the revolutionary populist movement in Russia are familiar to historians, but A Generation of Revolutionaries provides a broader and more engaging look at the lives and relationships beyond these memoirs. It shows how, after years of incarceration, Charushin and friends thrived in Siberian exile, raising children and contributing to science and culture there. While Charushin’s memoirs end with his return to European Russia, this sweeping biography follows this group as they engaged in Russia’s fin de siècle society, took part in the 1917 revolution, and struggled in its aftermath. A Generation of Revolutionaries provides vibrant and deeply personal insights into the turbulent history of Russia from the Great Reforms to the era of Stalinism and beyond. In doing so, it tells the story of a remarkable circle of friends whose lives balanced love, family, and career with exile, imprisonment, and revolution.
Russian populism, the belief that the peasantry embodied authentic Russian identity and once liberated from their poverty would lead the country to a brighter future, has animated Russian thought across the political spectrum and inspired much of Russia's world-historical literature, music and art in the 19th century. This book offers the fullest and most authoritative account of the rise, proliferation and influence of populist values and ideology in modern Russia to date. Christopher Ely explores the complete story of Russian populism. Starting from the cursed question of how to reconnect the popular masses with the Europeanized elite, he examines the populist obsession with the peasant commune as a model for a future socialist Russia. He shows how the desire for revolution led Russian radicals to flood into the countryside and later to pioneer terrorism as a form of political action. He delves into those artists influenced by populist ideals, and he tells the story of the collapse of populist optimism and its rebirth among the Socialist Revolutionary neo-populists. The book demonstrates that populism existed in forms ranging from radical socialist to religious conservative. Blending lively theoretical analysis with a wealth of primary sources and illustrations, Russian Populism provides a highly engaging overview of this complex phenomenon; it is invaluable reading for anyone interested in the momentous final decades of the Russian Empire.
Russia in the late nineteenth century may have been an autocracy, but it was far from silent. In the 1860s, new venues for public speech sprang up: local and municipal assemblies, the courtroom, and universities and learned societies. Theatre became more lively and vernacular, while the Orthodox Church exhorted its priests to become better preachers. Although the tsarist government attempted to restrain Russia's emerging orators, the empire was entering an era of vigorous modern politics. All the while, the spoken word was amplified by the written: the new institutions of the 1860s brought with them the adoption of stenography. Russian political culture reached a new peak of intensity with the 1905 revolution and the creation of a parliament, the State Duma, whose debates were printed in the major newspapers. Sometimes considered a failure as a legislative body, the Duma was a formidable school of modern political rhetoric. It was followed by the cacophonous freedom of 1917, when Aleksandr Kerensky, dubbed Russia's 'persuader-in-chief', emerged as Russia's leading orator only to see his charisma wane. The Bolsheviks could boast charismatic orators of their own, but after the October Revolution they also turned public speaking into a core ritual of Soviet 'democracy'. The Party's own gatherings remained vigorous (if also sometimes vicious) throughout the 1920s; and here again, the stenographer was in attendance to disseminate proceedings to a public of newspaper readers or Party functionaries. How Russia Learned to Talk offers an entirely new perspective on Russian political culture, showing that the era from Alexander II's Great Reforms to early Stalinism can usefully be seen as a single 'stenographic age'. All Russia's rulers, whether tsars or Bolsheviks, were grappling with the challenges and opportunities of mass politics and modern communications. In the process, they gave a new lease of life to the age-old rhetorical technique of oratory.
Vladimir Il'ich Iokhelson: Personal Memoirs from Siberia by Michael Knüppel,Oleg Pakhomov Pdf
In this book, texts by the important Russian ethnologist / anthropologist, linguist and archaeologist Vladimir Il'ich Iokhel'son (1855-1937), which he wrote down as a draft of his memoirs and whose manuscripts are now in the holdings of the Collections of the Manuscript and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, are published in a critical edition with an introduction and notes by the editors as well as various appendices.
In 1884, the first of 68 prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St Petersburg. The regime of indeterminate sentences in isolation caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, over half of whom died. But the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates’ living conditions. The memoirs many survivors wrote enshrined their story in revolutionary mythology, and acted as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy’s loss of moral authority. Writing Resistance features three of these memoirs, all translated into English for the first time. They show the process of transforming the regime as a collaborative endeavour that resulted in flourishing allotments, workshops and intellectual culture – and in the inmates running many of the prison’s everyday functions. Sarah J. Young’s introductory essay analyses the Shlissel´burg memoirs’ construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance and renewal. It uses distant reading techniques to explore the communal values they inscribe, their adoption of a powerful group identity, and emphasis on overcoming the physical and psychological barriers of the prison. The first extended study of Shlissel´burg’s revolutionary inmates in English, Writing Resistance uncovers an episode in the history of political imprisonment that bears comparison with the inmates of Robben Island in South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Maze Prison in Belfast during the Troubles. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviours, and prison and life writing.
Siberian Exile and the Invention of Revolutionary Russia, 1825–1917 by Ben Phillips Pdf
Over the course of the nineteenth century Siberia developed a fearsome reputation as a place of exile, often imagined as a vast penal colony and seen as a symbol of the iniquities of autocratic and totalitarian Tsarist rule. This book examines how Siberia’s reputation came about and discusses the effects of this reputation in turning opinion, especially in Western countries, against the Tsarist regime and in giving rise to considerable sympathy for Russian radicals and revolutionaries. It considers the writings and propaganda of a large number of different émigré groups, explores American and British journalists’ investigations and exposé press articles and charts the rise of the idea of Russian political prisoners as revolutionary and reformist heroes. Overall, the book demonstrates how important representations of Siberian exile were in shaping Western responses to the Russian Revolution.
To Break Russia's Chains by Vladimir Alexandrov Pdf
A brilliant examination of the enigmatic Russian revolutionary about whom Winston Churchill said "few men tried more, gave more, dared more and suffered more for the Russian people," and who remains a legendary and controversial figure in his homeland today. Although now largely forgotten outside Russia, Boris Savinkov was famous, and notorious, both at home and abroad during his lifetime, which spans the end of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Soviet Union. A complex and conflicted individual, he was a paradoxically moral revolutionary terrorist, a scandalous novelist, a friend of epoch-defining artists like Modigliani and Diego Rivera, a government minister, a tireless fighter against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and an advisor to Churchill. At the end of his life, Savinkov conspired to be captured by the Soviet secret police, and as the country’s most prized political prisoner made headlines around the world when he claimed that he accepted the Bolshevik state. But as this book argues, this was Savinkov’s final play as a gambler and he had staked his life on a secret plan to strike one last blow against the tyrannical regime. Neither a "Red" nor a "White," Savinkov lived an epic life that challenges many popular myths about the Russian Revolution, which was arguably the most important catalyst of twentieth-century world history. All of Savinkov’s efforts were directed at transforming his homeland into a uniquely democratic, humane and enlightened state. There are aspects of his violent legacy that will, and should, remain frozen in the past as part of the historical record. But the support he received from many of his countrymen suggests that the paths Russia took during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries--the tyranny of communism, the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime--were not the only ones written in her historical destiny. Savinkov's goals remain a poignant reminder of how things in Russia could have been, and how, perhaps, they may still become someday. Written with novelistic verve and filled with the triumphs, disasters, dramatic twists and contradictions that defined Savinkov's life, this book shines a light on an extraordinary man who tried to change Russian and world history.
A fundamentally new interpretation of the emergence of modern terrorism, arguing that it formed in the Russian literary imagination well before any shot was fired or bomb exploded.
Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1870–1940 by Katy Turton Pdf
This book explores the role played by families in the Russian revolutionary movement and the first decades of the Soviet regime. While revolutionaries were expected to sever all family ties or at the very least put political concerns before personal ones, in practice this was rarely achieved. In the underground, revolutionaries of all stripes, from populists to social-democrats, relied on siblings, spouses, children and parents to help them conduct party tasks, with the appearance of domesticity regularly thwarting police interference. Family networks were also vital when the worst happened and revolutionaries were imprisoned or exiled. After the revolution, these family networks continued to function in the building of the new Soviet regime and amongst the socialist opponents who tried to resist the Bolsheviks. As the Party persecuted its socialist enemies and eventually turned on threats perceived within its ranks, it deliberately included the spouses and relatives of its opponents in an attempt to destroy family networks for good.
The evolution of leadership into a widely accepted concept occurred without any shared understanding and acceptance of its meaning and relevance in contemporary society. Why do some people become leaders? What is the source and legitimacy of leadership power? This book journeys into the heart of the relationship between leaders and followers, the social space and the arena where both contest and collaboration take place and leadership itself is played out. In the book, Morgen Witzel moves beyond traditional traits and skills framing, offering a fresh, historical analysis that involves many different actors with different motives and needs. By analysing the evolution of power relationships, the book analyses the interactions around how power is used and control is bargained for to illuminate the centrepiece of leadership. A wide-ranging history of a slippery subject, this book provides students, scholars and reflective practitioners with an empirical, historical base on which to test their own ideas and experiences.