Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914
... Though genuinely dangerous and frightening, hooliganism was creative in its own way.(p.191) Portrayed as "a motley lot"(quoted in Neuberger (1993):61) they remain mostly voiceless, though a hooligan song gives some insight into their swaggering art of manliness: ...
... We've been around We've seen it all… Let'em broil us and roast us We're the boys who steal from everyone Even the cops don't really scare us A spell in jail will be just fine… Oh you, switch-blade of mine, This road leads to hard labor Where a bold lad Will suffer for you a little…(quoted in Neuberger (1993):273) A cartoon at the time showed a hooligan and a hobo seated together with arms linked and the hooligan saying "You and me -we're two of a kind"(see p.30), but Neuberger (1993) drew a more convincing kinship with contemporary Futurists, artists who identified with a polemical avant-garde movement, both collectives displaying a cultural aesthetics that was "rebellious, confrontational, selfconsciously crude or "anticultured", and unabashedly self-promoting"(p.142). Moreover: ...
... We've been around We've seen it all… Let'em broil us and roast us We're the boys who steal from everyone Even the cops don't really scare us A spell in jail will be just fine… Oh you, switch-blade of mine, This road leads to hard labor Where a bold lad Will suffer for you a little…(quoted in Neuberger (1993):273) A cartoon at the time showed a hooligan and a hobo seated together with arms linked and the hooligan saying "You and me -we're two of a kind"(see p.30), but Neuberger (1993) drew a more convincing kinship with contemporary Futurists, artists who identified with a polemical avant-garde movement, both collectives displaying a cultural aesthetics that was "rebellious, confrontational, selfconsciously crude or "anticultured", and unabashedly self-promoting"(p.142). Moreover: ...
Do it yourself, you say? In this study I want to say DI not Y but WHO (With the
Help of Others) and suggest that the adjusted saying expresses an oft uncredited
dynamic of social life. Of course meritocrats won’t have a bar of it, for people are
to be judged on their own merits, so how about helping yourself.
... 59 Hooliganism was manifested in physical acts, but it was defined as moral transgression, a violation of socially accepted definitions of normalcy, decency, reason, and culture, one of too many signs of decadent values from the past that had not yet been overcome. 60 Surprisingly often, journalists wrote of hooligans as veselye-having fun, pleasure, amusement. They described "hooligan" gangs as a veselaia kompaniia ("fun crowd"), as people with а veselyi nrav ("fun character"), as veselye rebiata ("fun guys"). ...
Moral storytelling about urban public life in Odesa in the 1920s is at the center of attention. A key social space is in focus: streets and corners as spaces and as concepts. And a particular storyteller is central: the well-known and yet biographically mysterious feuilletonist for the city's evening newspaper, “Al. Svetlov.” Soviet journalists, like Soviet reality, were expected to offer ideological clarity: a morally unambiguous and teleologically straight story about the death of the past and the birth of a bright and healthy new world. But such temporal and moral (and thus political) consistency was elusive—in the urban spaces where “vestiges” of the old persisted, and in their telling, as observers found it difficult to sustain an unwavering and unambiguous moral orientation. The article asks also how minor and subordinated individuals understood their own lives, suggesting an orientation other than delinquency and pathology.
... И в дореволюционной России, и в СССР императивы мужской уличной культуры, ритуалы уличной жизни и различные территориальные практики насилия оставались в значительной степени вне поля зрения государственных чиновников, полиции и педагогов. В конце XIX -начале XX века в царской России и на протяжении всего советского периода уличная жизнь подростков и юношей в своих многочисленных проявлениях -групповой досуг, драки, приставания к прохожим и разнообразные криминальные действия -рассматривалась преимущественно сквозь призму всеобъемлющей категории «хулиганства», причем считалось, что наиболее склонны к такому поведению выходцы из рабочей среды (Neuberger 1993;Ципурский 2008;Fürst 2010; laPierre 2012). С первых дней советской власти государство рассматривало уличных хулиганов как агентов сопротивления режиму, которые разлагали молодежь и уводили ее от пионерии и комсомола. ...
Книга посвящена российским уличным преступным группировкам. Центральное место в ней занимают казанские группировки, их история, моральный кодекс ("пацанские понятия"), экономическая деятельность и трансформация этих организаций с конца 1970-х годов по 2000-е включительно. Помимо казанских группировок в книге анализируются имеющиеся данные по группировкам в других регионах России. Используя тексты углубленных интервью с участниками группировок, работниками правоохранительных органов и местными жителями, автор рассматривает практики насилия в группировках, взаимодействие между "реальными пацанами" и их родителями, учителями, соседями, работниками органов власти. Показано также влияние культуры группировок на массовую культуру и политический дискурс.
... The popular newspaper was part of what we might think of as a modern mass culture that transcended national boundaries. Tracking what Dan Vyleta calls the ''radically modern phenomenon'' of sensational and human-interest crime reporting, for example, historians including Jessie Ramey, Dominique Kalifa, Joan Neuberger and Todd Herzog have identified shared preoccupations, forms and narratives in newspapers in the United States, France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Vyleta 2007, 2;Neuberger 1993;Kalifa 2005;Herzog 2009;Ramey 2004). ...
This conversation took place over three recorded sessions between Carol Adlam and Claire Whitehead in St Andrews and Nottingham between April and May 2023, to mark the culmination of the first four-year stage of a multi-media crime fiction-adaptation project, ‘Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media’ (funded by the University of St Andrews’ Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fund, led by Whitehead). Bringing together Whitehead’s research specialism in early Russian crime fiction and Adlam’s expertise in visual and textual adaptation, the aim of the Lost Detectives project is to draw on a large body of neglected works of early Russian crime fiction (1860–1917) as a corrective to the prevailing, canonical understanding of Russian literary culture, contributing deep historical perspective to the new and unfolding public socio-cultural and political discourse around ways in which Russian culture may take a proportionate place in our shared human legacy. From 2019 to 2023 Adlam made five cross-media adaptations, as follows: (1) The Bobrov Affair (2019): exhibition and proof-of-concept graphic material adapting Semyon Panov’s novella Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala (Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball; 1876); (2) ‘Spade and Sand’ (2019): libretto adaptation of Nikolai Timofeev’s short story ‘Ubiistvo i samoubiistvo’ (Murder and Suicide; 1872); (3) Today in 1864 (2020): 45-minute audio-drama adaptation of Nikolai Timofeev’s Zapiski sledovatelia (Notes of an Investigator; 1872); (4) Curare (2021): 45-minute audio-drama adaptation of Aleksandr Shkliarevskii’s ‘Sekretnoe sledstvie’ (A Secret Investigation; 1881); and (5) The Russian Detective, a 120-pp. graphic novel (Jonathan Cape, 2024). An eponymous podcast documents the project. The discussion has been edited for clarity.
This article investigates the changing uses of urban space by socialists in the Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk between 1895 and 1905. Drawing on the memoirs of participants and contemporary police and newspaper reports, it reveals a shift in the ‘spatial tactics’ used by socialists, from clandestine ‘circles’ towards open gatherings and protests. These open actions constituted a key part of local revolutionary events in the summer and autumn of 1905 as socialist party activists, joined by workers from the railway workshops, sought to upturn the established political and economic order in the city by seizing and transforming prominent local places. However, at key moments space could be seized back by local authorities and anti-revolutionary groups, forcing socialists to reconsider and further improvise their spatial tactics. The article further highlights the role of the Krasnoiarsk Soviet that was established in December 1905, demonstrating that it contributed to socialists’ efforts to secure access to public space but did not, as previously suggested by some historians, seize outright power in the city.
In 1908, thunderous blasts and blazing fires from the sky descended upon the desolate Tunguska territory of Siberia. The explosion knocked down an area of forest larger than London and was powerful enough to obliterate Manhattan. The mysterious nature of the event has prompted a wide array of speculation and investigation, including from those who suspected that aliens from outer space had been involved. In this deeply researched account of the Tunguska explosion and its legacy in Russian society, culture, and the environment, Andy Bruno recounts the intriguing history of the disaster and researchers' attempts to understand it. Taking readers inside the numerous expeditions and investigations that have long occupied scientists, he foregrounds the significance of mystery in environmental history. His engaging and accessible account shows how the explosion has shaped the treatment of the landscape, how uncertainty allowed unusual ideas to enter scientific conversations, and how cosmic disasters have influenced the past and might affect the future.
The article is devoted to as relevant as ever today the problem of unemployment and explores a little-known national experience of solving problems of employment in St. Petersburg in the early XX century associated with activity of the famous social Democrat and economist W. S. Woytinsky. The reaction of the government and society to the problem of unemployment is studied. There are noted the first experience of registering the unemployed in the history of Russia, and there are shown the unique nature of the first Public Works for the unemployed in Russia and the largest in Europe at that time, organized jointly by the workers ' organization — the St. Petersburg Council of the Unemployed — and the St. Petersburg City Duma. There are noted negative impact of unemployment on the general situation in the capital during the First Russian revolution, as well as on the condition of the personality of factory worker. The research perspective of the problems raised in the article is outlined.
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 pochta after right-wing candidates swept the election. This conflict sheds light on the divide among Russian progressives between politics as ongoing pragmatic compromise and politics as a clash of group interests. As Russians explored how to interact with new institutions like the Duma, ideas of democracy and representation intersected with class and other forms of identity in uncertain and unstable ways. Although the language of class identity often dominated, it was also used to express support for representative democracy and pragmatic coalition-building politics. Russians found more than one way to interpret democracy, and many chose to interpret it through the lens of parliamentary politics, even if they expressed those politics in class terms.
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 by the new regime in an attempt to re-educate its incarcerated population. This article examines a number of prisoner publications from the Secret Police Camps of the 1920s in order to highlight shifting penal hierarchies and the persistence of the political/criminal binary in the early years of the Soviet state.
In the nineteenth century, a once highly successful formula for expansion had turned from a motor of imperial growth to a brake on the development of Russia's power. As the history of the twentieth century becomes less and less Eurocentric, historians have started to understand the Russo‐Japanese war as the major conflict of this terrible epoch: “World War Zero”, as one pithy formulation has it. Critics of autocracy had multiplied since the middle of the nineteenth century; Russian army were joined by others unhappy about their living conditions, their working lives, their access to land, or the status of their national group within the Tsarist multinational empire. Some historians have constructed a straight line from the dual polarization after 1905 to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917: given the failed liberal revolution, more radical upheaval was inevitable.
This paper explores queer sexual policing in late Imperial St. Petersburg (c.1900–1917). The focus is on the street-level constables who bore the principal responsibility for policing male homosexual offences in the city’s public and semi-public spaces. This emphasis on the street-level policing of homosexuality contrasts with other discussions of gay urban history and the oppression of queer men by the authorities. The paper draws on new evidence from precinct-level police archives to complement and challenge previous discussions of queer sexual policing in the Imperial capital. By taking the fate of queer men in a autocratic city, this paper refines our understanding of the ways in which homosexual practices and identities emerged in modern times. Specifically, it builds on Michel Foucault’s descriptions of constables as ‘arbiters of illegalities’, where the term ‘arbiter’ suggests rule-based and yet discretionary coercion. Here, the influential model of disciplinary policing of sexuality is complemented by an emphasis on the role of discretionary power in the history of homosexuality.
This article extends the existing research on the relationship between alcohol and homicide in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods by examining this relationship in the latter years of the tsarist regime. A cross-sectional study of the 50 provinces of “European” Russia in the years 1909–1911 was undertaken using regional data on homicide, alcohol consumption, population, and structural factors gathered from official state statistical publications. There was a positive and significant association between alcohol consumption and homicide, indicating higher homicide rates in regions with higher alcohol consumption. When this association was examined while controlling for other structural variables, it was still positive and significant. The findings from this study, when taken together with evidence from other studies, suggest that alcohol consumption was an important factor in regional variation in homicide rates in Russia across the course of the 20th century. This was despite the huge social, political and economic changes the country underwent, as well as the changing trends and regional variations in alcohol consumption that were observed at the aggregate level across the period. When trying to explain this association, it is necessary to focus on what did not change across the course of the 20th century and may therefore have been important in this context: the Russian drinking “culture.”
Alan M. Ball, And Now My Soul Is Hardened. Abandoned Children in the Soviet Russia, 1918-1930, Berkeley-Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994, XX, 335 p. - Volume 52 Issue 3 - Dorena Caroli
For almost a month in 1877, the Russian public was engrossed in one of the largest nonpolitical trials in the history of Russian law. An alleged criminal organization dubbed the “Jacks of Hearts Club” ( Klub chervonnykh valetov ) involved 48 defendants in addition to several who had died or managed to escape, as well as more than 300 witnesses. The charges included dozens of episodes of fraud and forgery committed between 1866 and 1875, in addition to one murder and one count of sacrilege. Even more sensational was the fact that the group of defendants belonged to “respectable” society, among them wealthy merchants, landowning nobles, and even a member of the aristocratic Dolgorukov family. In the Russian popular lexicon, a “Jack of Hearts” became enduring shorthand for a personable young swindler of upper-class origins. Over the years, the story grew in the telling, with some of the legends travelling from author to author, such as the story of Pavel Speier, the alleged leader of the club who supposedly tricked a naïve English tourist into “buying” the official residence of the Moscow governor general on Tverskaia Street.
The disintegrating discourse about youth during the perestroika period conveyed the fading legitimacy of the Soviet political order. During that era (1985–1991), media reports about young people’s discontent and political disillusionment questioned the very legitimacy of the Soviet system. Youth took to the streets early, contributing to the conditions needed to conceive of a possible failure of the USSR. This research uses a recent methodological development in text analysis—discourse network analysis—which allows for an analysis of the shifting paradigms of speaking about youth. I draw on a sample of newspaper articles to capture the variation of the heterogeneous Soviet discourse.
Informed by Didier Fassin’s concept of humanitarian government, this article reveals a distinct pattern of secret care provisions imposed under Stalin by the secret police and its successor agencies (NKVD, MVD) first to the peasant children displaced by class war and the famine of 1932–33, and then to the children made homeless by the Great Terror and the 1940s’ national deportations. The article also identifies the under-researched reception centres as crucial sites for both administering emergency assistance and establishing the social classification necessary to apply these discriminatory measures. Affected by the decreasing faith in their possible socialist rehabilitation and lack of any official display of compassion, these children’s lives appeared even less worthy of saving in the course of major emergencies. These findings challenge the official Soviet view of the existence of a universal childhood worth protecting, which guided the first socialist country’s intervention to save other children nationally and internationally.
With the Goondas Act of 1923, Calcutta conferred on its police executive powers of deporting virtually any man from the city without a trial under the pretext that he was a violent criminal of migrant origin. The Act deliberately did not define the goonda, as it was ‘known’ to all in the city who he was. Fear of violence by the migrant poor was felt in Calcutta earlier, but since 1920 the goondas assumed special significance, as a new and commonly accepted social image. From this year, the goonda was invented through : the Marwari traders’ search for higher social status ; the demands by the police for powers to subdue the migrant poor who constituted the mass ; and the Bengali Hindu English-educated gentlefolk’s perceived necessity to retain an honest an idealist political self-image at the time of tumultuous mass politics.
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 of necessity, but reformers in the late Imperial period had made earlier attempts to transform the space, using hygienic concerns as justification. This article traces debates over the space of the kitchen across the long revolutionary period, examining how plans to re-design it highlight deep similarities between liberal reformers of the late Imperial period and Soviet activists.
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 1905, shook the city and presented a serious challenge to local authorities, which sought to maintain order and safety. Based on research in Ekaterinburg’s archives and libraries, this article investigates the varying reactions to the violence, with consideration of both official and popular perspectives. What emerges is a rich picture of the events of the Revolution of 1905 in the provinces, which illuminates how city institutions and residents formed a united front to denounce the violence and local representatives of the autocracy.
The revolutions of 1917 tore through the established coordinates of cultural life as thoroughly as they tore through every aspect of social life. While aestheticism had made the content of works of art its own distance from the ‘means-end rationality of the bourgeois everyday’, revolution now ripped apart the bourgeois everyday itself. The end of this life-praxis, which aestheticism had rejected, now appeared to present the possibility of what Peter Bürger calls a Hegelian sublation of art, its transferral ‘to the praxis of life, where it would be preserved, albeit in a changed form’. Art could become a base for ‘an attempt to organize a new life-praxis from a basis in art’.1 Just as the events of 1905 had shaken the mystical complacency of the Symbolist Movement, turning several towards an activist aesthetic, 1917 transformed the most radical elements of the cultural scene into workers for the artistic transformation of the social world. The strategy involved an iconoclastic attack on Croce’s ‘aristocratic club’, art as an autonomous realm, and an affirmation of art as the conscious fashioning of all of social life. As Mayakovsky declared at the end of 1918: ‘we do not need a dead mausoleum of art where dead works are worshipped, but a living factory of the human spirit — in the streets, in the tramways, in the factories, workshops and workers’ homes.’2
Since the mid-1990s I have been engaged in research on organised crime in Estonia and particularly in Russia from the Finnish point of view. The focus has been on the perceptions of threat, on actual crimes, but also on unrealistic fears of crime. The research material consists of roughly a hundred thematic interviews with police officers in Russia, Estonia and Finland. I have asked them the same question: how much of crime perception is exaggerated, and how much evidence can we find about the proliferation of dangerous, organised crime? What is the real threat? In addition I have closely acquainted myself with the discussions in the media and debates among scholars and experts.
The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”
The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the two Russian wars in Chechnya were the longest, most protracted conflicts of the USSR and Russia after WWII. Both were conducted under conditions of unprecedented violence in peripheral territories. Despite their distance in time and space, both wars are closely linked to each other on the level of cultural representations in contemporary Russia. This paper analyses how the conflicts were represented in a key Soviet and Russian newspaper as the wars unfolded. It analyses the textual and visual coverage of the wars in the Krasnaia zvezda (1980–1986; 2000–2003), in order to disclose changing interpretations of violence and the Other. The paper argues, first, that Krasnaia zvezda told the story of two different types of violence prevailing in each conflict. The Afghan case was presented as one that put the social and cultural transformation of the population at the center of its attention – violence was hence not only physical and excessive but also cultural, as it aimed at the social fabric of society. The Chechen case focused on the recapture of territory and the restoration of sovereignty. Therefore, physical violence appeared more bluntly in the coverage of the conflict. Second, the paper shows that these two different types of violence implied two different visions of the Other. In Afghanistan, the Other was represented as becoming more and more similar to the socialist Self. This dynamic is visually underscored by numerous images of Afghans who have embarked on the path to Soviet modernity. In Chechnya, in contrast, the Other was presented as traditional, backward, and immutable. The Other was usually reduced to complete cultural difference and depicted a dehumanized fashion. This orientalization of the Other was a precondition for the use of excessive physical violence.
The rise of Russian progressive education in the 1910s and 1920s and its violent repudiation in the 1930s and after constitute some of the most dramatic episodes in the modern history of education. Prevailing explanations for the “failure” of Russian progressivism have emphasized either its inhererent Utopian impracticality and/or the rejection of its egalitarian and libertarian values by the increasingly conservative and repressive Stalinist regime.
The thesis of this article is that an important aspect of the repudiation of Russian educational progressivism lay in the perceived “crisis” of Soviet youth subcultures that erupted in the mid-1930s. Unable or unwilling to admit that regime policies were contributing to social problems such as child abandonment and delinquency, rival factions of professional educators and their party-state patrons were forced to play out their power struggles through artificially narrow discussions of curricula and instruction. Hard-line Stalinist educators and party officials blamed the escalating “disorders”, “corruption” and “opposition” among Soviet youth on the Western petty-bourgeois idealism and lack of discipline that was said to characterize Dewey a progressive pedagogy.
These attacks resulted in the emergence of a distinctive “Stalinist pedagogy” and youth policy that was intensely conservative in its curricular and instructional principles and statist, patriarchal and imperialist in its values. While the new educational practices were undeniably popular with many Soviet teachers and parents, this article concludes with an analysis of the costs and consequences of this traditionalist restoration.
A micro-history essay pertaining to the history of the German colony in Sankt-Petersburg, focussed on the episode of the German Embassy building. Built by Peter Behrens, one of the outstanding architects of the monumental neo-classical Modern, the Embassy building was opened in 1913 and devastated by an anti-german mob at the night of the 3rd of August 1914. In this short span of time, it had however ignited debates as to symbolic forms of the State power and of international relationships.
Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) - former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates - in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945.
In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common Urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.
In his 1913 guide to the city, Grigorii Moskvich wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessan” was to strike it rich and immediately acquire a house, a carriage, and everything else he needed in order to “transform himself (by appearance, of course) into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the remade Odessan was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés, on the boulevard or in the park,” the Odessan was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.” “Odessans are proud of themselves (not without foundation), flaunting their ability to dress as well as any purebred Parisian or Viennese.” Women, too, were always well turned out, “no husband carrying the expenses of his wife's toilette as uncomplainingly as the Odessan… . This passion for fashion, the desire to impress by external appearances, penetrates all of Odessa society, from the counts to the cooks,” the writer declared.
The Russian revolution was intended to remove all limits to women's equality. Collective organizations were to take over the kinds of tasks–childcare, cooking, and cleaning–that had traditionally restricted women and limited their full participation in economic life, while legislative actions mandated equal economic, marital, and civil rights. Accompanying these changes was a "sexual revolution" (preached most famously by Aleksandra Kollontai) that encouraged equality in love and sex as well as in economics and politics.
This article examines how small groups of artistic elites and amateurs attempted to re-contextualise the cultural importance of the Russian country estate in the early twentieth century, a period of formative nation-building, modernisation and industrialisation. The ‘myth’ of the estate was used as a tool to spur preservationist rhetoric in a society without an effective instrument to preserve its built heritage. The principal avenue used by preservationists to advance their agenda was the artistic journal.
Ever since the official promulgation of the judicial reform statutes of 1864 in late imperial Russia, a scholarly commonplace has been the reform's contribution to the remarkable emergence of several generations of brilliant Russian trial lawyers and an internationally famous tradition of outstanding judicial oratory during the half-century preceding the Bolshevik revolution. This impressive display of judicial learning and courtroom artistry occurred in the context of Western-style trial by jury, the reform's most daring innovation. Introduced in 1866 after two years of energetic preparation, Russia's system of trial by jury bequeathed to scholars the most powerful emblem of the post-1864 Russian legal order: the courtroom confrontation between the defense attorney ( zashchitnik ) and the state's prosecutorial agent, the procurator ( prokuror ). In this judicial clash, the defense counsel has represented the eloquent, keen-witted, Western-educated champion of the individual and even the “defender of public interests.” The procuratorial representative has come to embody the interests of a regime whose relentless and often undisguised statism belied the reform statutes' open proclamation of the principles of legality and the “rule of law.”
Um die Straße als politischen Aktionsraum in der Spät- oder Postmoderne begreifen zu können, so scheint mir, ist eine Beschäftigung
mit der Straße als einer zentralen politischen Arena der Moderne unerlässlich. Die Vergegenwärtigung der Straßenraumnutzung
der Moderne kann als Kontrastmittel der Forschungspraxis eine produktive Verfremdung des heutigen Straßenraumes ermöglichen,
die der Analyse aktueller Funktionen und Praktiken dienlich ist.
Three-dimensional theatrical space is often taken for granted as a precondition of dance. Already in 1912, the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky provoked much discussion with a work that seemingly turned the performance into a moving, two-dimensional picture. L'Après-midi d'un Faune has achieved notoriety because of the objections some contemporary critics raised against the 'immoral' behaviour of the principal character, but I argue the style of the work brought about an important shift in how dancing was conceptualised as something composed by a choreographic author.
In this article, Susan Morrissey examines the relationship between national identity, nationalism and the traditions of radicalism among students in Petersburg/Petrograd between 1905 and 1917. Having long been associated with revolutionary politics and having played a key role in the urban revolution of 1905, studenchestvo condemned nationalism and downplayed the role of national difference within the student community. This situation would change after 1905, and by 1914, a clear majority of students supported the war against Germany in the name of patriotism. This article traces this shift and finds that students sought to reconcile their radical traditions with the new‐found patriotism.
One of the best ways to address the problem of the prospect for a ‘single research community’ of Russian and Western historians is to compare the central approaches, methods and theoretical concepts developed in both Western and Russian historiographies in the study of a single historical topic. An appropriate topic for such a discussion, from both a heuristic and epistemological point of view, is the history of the post‐emancipation Russian peasantry. The present article is concerned with four methodological tools (comparison, models, macro‐ and micro‐history, and the new cultural history) and their use in the Russian and Western historiography of the post‐emancipation Russian peasantry, and with four groups of problems which are central to the study of the subject in both historiographies: peasant production and consumption; communal forms; family and household structures; and cultural conflict between the lower and educated classes in late Imperial Russia.
Using the writings of Lev N. Tolstoy and Jane Addams on Moscow and Chicago the essay explores the development of the idea of non-violent social change that was developed by both protagonists as a reaction to the social problems they encountered. It shows that central ideas about civility were developed on the periphery of the Western world – for example, in the Russian Empire – and had a strong impact in distant places where they were taken up and adopted to the local circumstances – in this case in Chicago. It argues that the development of these doctrines of non-violent social change were inspired by unorthodox religious belief, as a reaction to the slums of the modernising city, and in opposition to the political violence that marred the late nineteenth century in Russia and the United States. It was the lack of civility, the persistence of violence and desperation in the expanding cities that triggered an international drive for non-violent social change that became globally important, yet at the same time marginal, in an age dominated by violence and mass killing.
This article analyses one of the first extensive ‘acculturation’ projects undertaken by the Soviet leadership, the construction of Gorky Park, Moscow, between its inception in 1921 and the 1930s. It undertakes a close reading of the developing conceptualization of Gorky Park as, to borrow Timothy Colton's phrase, a ‘fairground for “building the new man”’ and the practical limits of this ambition.(Online publication June 22 2011)
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