In 1921, at the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP), V.I. Lenin pointed to the timber industry of the North as a promising opportunity for cooperation with Western interests and the Soviet state soon introduced timber concessions. However, these concessions were not particularly profitable and ended up as a short-lived experiment. This article analyses why timber concessions failed to make a

This article explores how Russians in the Duma period (1905–17) understood issues of democratic politics and representation through a microhistory of the 1912 Duma election in Odessa. It focuses on conflict between two Odessa newspapers, Odesskaia pochta and Iuzhnaia mysl’, over whether to support the ‘progressive’ candidate or the ‘workers’’ candidate, and on a workers’ boycott organized against Odesskaia

(2020). Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 276-277.

(2020). Samoderzhavie i konstitutsiia: politicheskaia povsednevnost' v Rossii v 1906–1917 godakh. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 271-273.

(2020). Rossiiskaia istoriografiia gosudarstvennogo terrora v strane 1917–1953. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 284-285.

This article sets the context for and the motivation behind the Bolshevik action to suppress the Moscow Anarchists on 11–12 April 1918. It explores the Anarchist view that in October 1917 a tactical alliance between Anarchists and Bolsheviks was essential to move the revolution forward, but that such an alliance was only temporary and would simply be a precursor to a genuinely popular third revolution

(2020). The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 274-275.

(2020). Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917–1921. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 278-280.

(2020). Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 282-284.

The Civil War’s denouement into separate Bolshevik and White émigré memorial spaces meant that its monuments served to represent conflict between still-hostile sides, not promote reconciliation between victors and vanquished. Both sides worked inside a public space infused with the political and cultural mobilization for a continuing civil war. The Soviet and émigré populations were also separated

(2020). Red Hamlet. The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 280-282.

In the spring of 1917, the Provisional Government headed by the liberals faced an unexpected challenge from Kiev, where local liberals supported the idea of an autonomous Ukraine within Russia. While the St Petersburg liberals did not dismiss the idea of Ukrainian autonomy entirely, they viewed this position as premature. Using internal Kadet party documents, this article argues that the central committee

This article is the first detailed examination of the relationship between the political parties of the ‘broad centrist coalition’ and the first Provisional Government. It challenges the historiography that issues from P. N. Miliukov and A. I. Guchkov that the Provisional Government could not rule because of dual power, in which the executive lacked any support and was a prisoner of the Petrograd Soviet

Based on archival materials from Russia and the United States, this article uses the experience of P. P. Batolin (1880–1939), a member of tsarist Russia's business elite, to investigate U.S.-Russian relations during Russia's revolution and civil war. Focusing on Batolin's campaign in the autumn of 1918 to persuade the Wilson administration to utilize economic assistance to Russia to weaken the Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks had their work cut out for them in Kazakhstan. The Kazakh Steppe was notorious for its poverty and lack of infrastructure. Many of its people were nomads. Their pastoralist economy r...

This essay responds to Jonathan Smele's exercise in counterfactual history, which makes the case that no other contender for power had sufficient organizational capacity or popular appeal to present a viable challenge to Bolshevik victory in the civil war. The Bolsheviks indeed enjoyed various structural and strategic advantages, but they faced powerful opposition. This essay presents the ‘counterfactual’

As Jonathan Smele reminds us in this both entertaining and thought-provoking article, counter-factual history can be fun and, as its supporters have suggested, it can provide interesting contingenc...

Historians of Russia have been blessed by a plethora of centenary commemorations; starting many years ago now with reassessments of 1905, attention moved on to the First World War and, recently, the February and October Revolutions. Numerous exhibitions, conferences and publications in 2017 served to review and, in some cases, reassess our understanding of the key year in the Russian Revolution. Although

First of all, of course, I must thank the commentators on my article for considering and writing about it so seriously. That was not meant to happen. When I was invited by the editors of Revolution...

The ‘Three Colours of Truth’ (Tri tsveta pravdy) exhibition was held at the Museum of Contemporary History in Moscow from 30 May to 9 September 2018 to mark the centenary of the Civil War in Russia. As reflected in the title, the exhibition emphasized the contested nature of memories of the Civil War. The walls and floors of the exhibition space were painted starkly in the colours of three main movements

The ‘political' vs. ‘criminal’ divide is a familiar one to readers well-versed in Russian penality. Beginning in nineteenth-century texts by eminent writers such as Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky, this dichotomy continued in places of incarceration after the revolutionary events of 1917. In particular it could be seen through prisoner newspapers, one of the cultural-educational initiatives launched

The intent to totally reconstruct society and human identity was a basic notion of the Soviet project. Funerals and the death care industry were no exception. The Decree on Funerals and Cemeteries on 7 December 1918 stated the need to construct a new funeral rite based on a new death care industry: the radical escape from Orthodox ritual tradition, an ‘equal’ funeral rite for every citizen, new ‘un-religious’

Russia’s state and society are still coming to terms with the legacy of 1917. An underlying fear of revolutions exists due to their perceived chaos and instability. The centenary coincided with revisions of national history education under the presidencies of Vladimir Putin. These revisions are designed to project an image of a united country and strong sovereign state under the banner of patriotism

A much-circulated trope amongst post-Revolutionary refugees from Bolshevik Russia stated that upon emigration, ‘Russia’ became reconstituted ‘outside Russia’. This narrative became central to how subsequent émigrés imagined their journeys abroad, simultaneously asserting historical continuity with other ‘waves’ of Russian emigration and defining their own migration trajectory in opposition to them

The Russian Revolutions of 1917 ushered in an era of change and upheaval in Russian political and civil society. The Russian Orthodox Church was not removed from the new social and political context in which old certainties were being undermined and new systems imagined. In the heady days of October, the Church underwent its own ‘revolution’ as it elected a patriarch to lead it for the first time in

In many senses, cinema ought to have been a key medium of communication for the Soviet propaganda state. Already a central element of urban mass culture in bourgeois society on the eve of the 1917 ...

The ten-year anniversary of the October Revolution in 1927 was celebrated across Soviet society, but scholarship on the anniversary lacks detailed analysis of the literary contributions to the celebration. This article presents analysis of Nikolai Aseev’s 1927 poema (narrative poem) Semën Proskakov in terms of its relation to the anniversary and ongoing attempts to formulate memory of the revolutionary

This article outlines the main events and introduces the political options considered by North Caucasians during the first phase of the North Caucasians’ Russian Revolution, from March 1917 until the temporary eclipse of this first round of Caucasian self-government approximately one year later. The article analyses the North Caucasian outcome, compares it with cases in other Russian borderlands and

This article examines the global legacy of the Russian Revolution by making comparisons with revolutions dating back to the sixteenth century. It finds similarities in how communications, counterrevolutions, and national liberation movements formed the legacies of both the Russian Revolution and its antecedents in both Europe and the wider world. While the Revolution was vital in shaping the political

turn-around in 1938 extends far into the realms of the politburo and the party administration. This book’s focus lies on the trials, and in this regard, the author maximizes the ‘yield’ from the source material available. On the one hand, one might expect a more comprehensive view on the court proceedings, since the book is about perpetrators on trial. Verdicts only play a marginal role in this reading

[On 22 September 2018, Carter Elwood, a Distinguished Research Professor at Carleton University, died of complications in Ottawa following an accident. Professor Elwood was born in Chicago in 1936, raised in Rochester, and educated at the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., Dartmouth College, the University of Edinburgh, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in Russian history in 1969. He

In The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Yuri Slezkine offers an account of the Russian Revolution by focusing on the history of ‘The House of Government’, a Moscow apartment building built to house the revolutionary elite. While unconvinced by the book’s conclusion and some of its more meandering detours, this remains a vast, theoretically bold and innovative piece of scholarship

Today’s Russo-Ukrainian border is a product of territorialization processes in the early years of the Soviet state. Documents of relevant commissions in the Russian and Ukrainian State Archives (GARF and TsDAVOU) clearly indicate that its creation was not a means to divide and rule the population, but rather a strategy of managing the diversity of the Soviet space. Whereas the party leadership provided

The article deals with the topic of how Russian liberal parties of the early twentieth century - the Party of the Constitutional Democrats (the Kadets), the Octobrist Party (the Octobrists) and the Progressive Party (the Progressives) - interpreted the range of issues associated with the foreign policy of the Russian Empire, such as imperialism, militarism, colonial policy, nationalism and pacifism

This article argues that, since the majority of Russians in 1917 belonged to the Orthodox Church, it is impossible to gain a full picture of the experience of the Revolution without taking into account the fate of Orthodoxy during the Revolution. Nevertheless, there has been no serious reassessment of the Orthodox Church in 1917–18 in English, and as a result most English-language scholars tend to

Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) 2016 Russian and East European History Graduate Certificate in Russian and East European Studies Dissertation: “Claiming the Caucasus: Russia’s Imperial Encounter with Armenians, 1801-1894” M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2012 Department of History Thesis: “Empirical Empire: Russian Geographical Explorations in the 1880s” B

During the October Revolution and ensuing civil war, a small number of Russian women journalists attempted to shape the outcome of the conflicts through both their journalism and active participation. Drawing on the case studies of the young Bolshevik writer Larisa Reisner and the anti-Bolshevik journalist and politician Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, this article examines the dual roles women journalists

Given the remarkable endurance and central position the spontaneity–leadership question occupies in the centenary discourse, this article examines how this question shaped the development of contemporary Russian historiography on the February Revolution. It examines primarily the works focusing on the revolutionary events in Petrograd in February–March 1917, for these events have been at the heart

Synthesizing ten decades of scholarship by Russian historians and sociologists, this article traces the major developments in the history of women and the women’s movement in Russia shortly before and during the Russian Revolution. Studies between 1917 and 2017 of the ‘women’s issue’ around the turn of the twentieth century demonstrate that in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia the struggle to recognize

Studies on Soviet culture have treated the aesthetics of the sublime predominantly in terms of the Soviet sublime as manifested in Stalinist culture. This article will argue that the sublime cannot, in its impact on Soviet aesthetics, be delimited to imperial representations. The aesthetics of the sublime in Romanticism and its continuation into modernism in European Literatures arose from a problematization

Cutting across the divide of 1917 and surveying the relevant recent scholarship on women and gender, this essay explores the gendered nature and consequences of the Russian Revolution. It suggests that while the relative weakness of a cult of domesticity in Russia helped prepare the way for Bolshevik policies, other elements of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary culture worked in the opposite direction

Ukraine holds a special place in the history of the Russian Empire's era of war and revolution in the early twentieth century. Sharing in much of the disruption caused by the First World War, and t...

So far this year, the response to the centenary of 1917 in Russia has been underwhelming. Faced with an event that does not fit neatly into the positive, patriotic and unifying version of Russian history promoted in recent years, and fearing that commemorating a revolution might encourage the opposition movement, President Vladimir Putin and his government have done relatively little to mark one of

The article considers the dealings between M. V. Rodzianko, the chairman of the Provisional Committee of the State Duma, and Prince G. E. L′vov, the prime minister of the Provisional Government, in spring and summer 1917. The aims are to establish the degree to which the chairman of the Duma Committee was involved in the business of the Provisional Government, to identify what issues the two men discussed

This article re-evaluates the strategic importance of the Russo-Ottoman conflict in tsarist Russia’s Great War between 1914 and the February Revolution, and by extension in the First World War as a whole. Encompassing the Ottoman closure of the Turkish Straits from 1914 and the associated Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16, it argues that this conflict broadly defined had a crippling impact on the logistics

In 1917, Chernov intended to introduce a revolutionary land law proposal for the Constituent Assembly. As a corollary measure, he argued for a proposal to suspend all transactions on land backdated to 1 March 1917. Accordingly, Chernov strongly argued for the rapid convocation of the Constituent Assembly to be convened in late September or early October. During July Crisis, he got cabinet approval

Prostitution flourished during Russia's First World War. Mass mobilisation and the displacement of millions of the empire's population challenged the tsarist state's ability to control both the movement and bodies of those buying and selling sex. In light of this, military and medical authorities shifted their attention more directly onto regulating men's bodies. Wartime social turmoil also increased

This article examines migration by the intelligentsia during the Civil War to Russia’s Far East. It analyses how they quickly adjusted to the new surroundings. The intelligentsia worked diligently in science, education, and culture and made significant institutional and scientific advances in the Far East, despite harsh local conditions.

The development of living standards in Russia before the First World War and the relationship of this to the interpretation of the cause(s) of the 1917 Russian Revolution are controversial. This paper analyses one piece of evidence which has been cited in support of the ‘optimistic’ interpretation. This is the anthropometric data. The paper investigates the anthropometric data showing that it is more

General Boldyrev was a more important figure than has been generally appreciated. He was at the heart of the five-man Directory created at the Ufa State Conference of September 1918, the only serious attempt after October 1917 to construct a democratic Russian polity deriving from the institutions of Imperial Russia. While other White generals believed that during the civil war the interim political

The early Soviet state wanted to re-shape the kitchen. Having declared it a relic of the past and a soon-to-be-casualty of the struggle to create a ‘new everyday life’ (novyi byt), Soviet officials aimed to communalise and even professionalise the space of the kitchen. These campaigns, however, obscure a much longer history of the kitchen. Not only were many urban kitchens already communalised out

This article examines a series of mutinies that occurred in 1918 and 1919 among military units in Northern Russia and how the British command responded to them. The specific incidents under consideration are the 1918 mutiny of the 1st Arkhangel'sk Regiment, the mutiny of the British-recruited Dyer’s Battalion, and the 1919 Onega mutiny. This study explores the response of the British command to these

Internationalism was a core element of early Bolshevik propaganda; despite the leadership’s growing pragmatism after the October 1917 revolution, the concept remained key to party self-representation. During the late 1930s, however, this engagement with internationalism atrophied – something traditionally explained as a sign of growing pragmatism, xenophobia and the threat of war. This article investigates

This article presents a comprehensive account of the Bolsheviks’ efforts to control Baku in 1917–18 by analyzing the reasons for their defeat. It argues that the Bolsheviks’ policy during this period in Baku was motivated by power rather than class concerns, and this ambition for power pushed them to pursue their goals even when in a desperate situation. Their defeat in Baku in 1918 demonstrates the

driven by an ‘unwritten revolutionary code of honour’ (p. 273). This fails to comprehend that Stalin did not differentiate between the personal and the political, did not separate his conception of self from the revolution whose interests he proclaimed to embody. Fitzpatrick asserts that her conception of the ‘team’ is ‘consonant with Arch Getty’s recent work, which explores the analogy between Stalin’s

On 19 October 1905, a group of protestors gathered on Ekaterinburg’s central square to rally against the recently promulgated October Manifesto of Tsar Nicholas II. They were met by a group of armed monarchist counter-demonstrators and violence quickly erupted, leading to two deaths and dozens of serious injuries. This ‘pogrom,’ part of a wider outbreak of violence across the Russian Empire in October

needed to trade and borrow in the west to rebuild its wrecked economy. The West too needed the business in a post-war recession. Better to keep workers at their benches than idle and susceptible to the attractive possibilities of Bolshevik propaganda. Everything came to a head at the Genoa conference in April 1922, where British, French and Soviet delegations discussed a settlement of claims and aid

This article examines the views and assessment of Russia’s foreign bankers and investors on the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the steps taken to subdue the disorder through the dissolution of the Second Duma in 1907. Late Imperial Russia was the foremost debtor country in Europe. The opinions of Russia’s foreign creditors and investors of Russian revolutionary activity and recovery offer insights