Economakis analyses the processes of proletarianization and urbanization undergone by St. Petersburg's industrial working class from its inception in the early nineteenth century up until 1914. Attention is given to the severing of workers' ties to the village and the land. The book examines local conditions in sending areas and traces the history of factory work in St. Petersburg by workers from different provinces. Economakis finds that a majority of the factory workforce was objectively proletarianized by 1914.
Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary masterpieces. What they overlook is the vast uncharted territory in between. In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler traces the evolution of Russia's onetime capital from a "conceptual hierarchy" to a living cultural system--a topography expressed not only by the city's physical structures but also by the literary texts that have helped create it. By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg--with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives--to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning. We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices--all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.
The long decade from the October Revolution to 1930 was the beginning of a great experiment to create a socialist society. Throughout these years, socialist trade unions attempted to transform the Russian worker into a productive and enthusiastic participant in this new order. How did the workers themselves react to these efforts? To what extent were they and their culture transformed into the ideal forms proclaimed in the official ideology? In Republic of Labor, Diane P. Koenker illuminates the lived experience of Russia's printers, workers who differed from their comrades because of their skill and higher wages, but who shared the same challenges of economic hardship and dangerous conditions. Paying close attention to the links between work, politics, and the everyday, the author focuses on workers' efforts to define their place in socialist society. Gender issues are also emphasized, and here we see the persistence of a masculinist working-class culture counterposed to an official culture promoting gender equality. Through this engaging narrative, Koenker develops a highly original discourse about class in Soviet society that will interest all students of Russian history as well as those readers who wish to reinvigorate class as a historical and sociological tool of analysis.
This volume offers a detailed examination of the stability of the late imperial regime in Russia. Students and scholars will appreciate the lively summaries of the latest scholarship in political, economic, social, cultural, and international history. Accessible yet insightful, contributions cover the historiography of complex topics such as peasants, workers, revolutionaries, foreign relations, and Nicholas II. In addition, there are original studies of some of the leading intellectuals of the time. The late imperial economy is examined through the writings of Tugan-Baranovsky. There is an account of M. N. Pokrovskii’s radical interpretation of late imperial Russia’s historical path of development. The state of the Russian theatre is studied through the lives of theatrical impresarios. Each chapter also highlights a unique interpretation, suggesting new lines of inquiry and research. This book will be compulsory reading for students of Russian and European history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking to better understand why Tsarism collapsed in 1917.
The architects of the Soviet Union intended not merely to remake their society--they also had an ambitious plan to remake the citizenry physically, with the goal of perfecting the socialist ideal of man. As Euphoria and Exhaustionshows, the Soviet leadership used sport as one of the primary arenas in which to deploy and test their efforts to mechanize and perfect the human body, drawing on knowledge from physiology, biology, medicine, and hygiene. At the same time, however, such efforts, like any form of social control, could easily lead to discontent--and thus, the editors show, a study of changes in public attitude towards sport can offer insight into overall levels of integration, dissatisfaction, and social exhaustion in the Soviet Union.
Whether voluntary or coerced, hopeful or desperate, people moved in unprecedented numbers across Russia's vast territory during the twentieth century. Broad Is My Native Land is the first history of late imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russia through the lens of migration. Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch tell the stories of Russians on the move, capturing the rich variety of their experiences by distinguishing among categories of migrants—settlers, seasonal workers, migrants to the city, career and military migrants, evacuees and refugees, deportees, and itinerants. So vast and diverse was Russian political space that in their journeys, migrants often crossed multiple cultural, linguistic, and administrative borders. By comparing the institutions and experiences of migration across the century and placing Russia in an international context, Siegelbaum and Moch have made a magisterial contribution to both the history of Russia and the study of global migration.The authors draw on three kinds of sources: letters to authorities (typically appeals for assistance); the myriad forms employed in communication about the provision of transportation, food, accommodation, and employment for migrants; and interviews with and memoirs by people who moved or were moved, often under the most harrowing of circumstances. Taken together, these sources reveal the complex relationship between the regimes of state control that sought to regulate internal movement and the tactical repertoires employed by the migrants themselves in their often successful attempts to manipulate, resist, and survive these official directives.
A unique comparative account of the roots of Communist revolution in Russia and China. Steve Smith examines the changing social identities of peasants who settled in St Petersburg from the 1880s to 1917 and in Shanghai from the 1900s to the 1940s. Russia and China, though very different societies, were both dynastic empires with backward agrarian economies that suddenly experienced the impact of capitalist modernity. This book argues that far more happened to these migrants than simply being transformed from peasants into workers. It explores the migrants' identification with their native homes; how they acquired new understandings of themselves as individuals and new gender and national identities. It asks how these identity transformations fed into the wider political, social and cultural processes that culminated in the revolutionary crises in Russia and China, and how the Communist regimes that emerged viewed these transformations in the working classes they claimed to represent.
The volume contains ten new essays on Russian literature and thought of the classical age (roughly 1820-1880). The essays are based on papers delivered at the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies held at Harrogate in July 1990. It strikes a balance between fresh work on major authors (Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky), important work on hitherto neglected minor authors (Marlinsky, Pisemsky and Boborykin), and studies that relate to thinkers of the period (Chaadaev, Herzen and Bakunin).
This account of the St. Petersburg labor movement during the First Russian Revolution focuses on the sources and meaning of the extraordinary explosion of labor militancy in 1905 - a year that saw more striking workers than ever before in Russian history, almost a quarter of them in the capital. In contrast to earlier works, which have explained this militancy by stressing the political leadership of the Social Democratic party, the author offers a more complex and balanced picture that takes account of not only the moderate sectors of the opposition, but the initiative of the workers themselves. Situating the labor movement within the social and political ferment of early-twentieth-century Russia, he analyses the reshuffling of relations between workers and the intelligentsia that stood at the gateway of the entire revolutionary period. The result is an account of the revolution that takes a fresh look at the interaction of workers, the educated opposition, and the revolutionary parties, yielding a new appreciation of the role of each. The analytical narrative on 1905 is preceded by several chapters establishing the precedents for the mass strikes that erupted in that year and documenting the long- and short-term reasons for the workers' rapid turn to political protest. The study treats both the indispensable contribution of the revolutionary parties to the political education of the Petersburg labor force and their failure to reach the vast majority of workers. The great events of 1905 itself are framed and elucidated from a number of vantage points in detailed studies of strike actions and worker leaders, factory and union organizing initiatives, liberal overtures to the labor movement, and the incipient and actual breakdown of public order in the capital. The narrative culminates in the October General Strike, when workers organized the first Soviet of Workers' Deputies, a unique fusion of their own autonomous militancy with the ideas and leadership of their socialist and liberal allies.
St. Petersburg: from space of representation to embattled public sphere -- Nihilism: self-fashioning and subculture in the city -- Underground pioneers -- To the people and back -- City synergy -- Organized troglodytes: building up the underground -- Battleground Petersburg -- The armor of our invisibility: underground terror and the illusion of power
