Extending the Borders of Russian History

Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber
ISBN: 
978-963-9241-36-7
cloth
Out of print
Publication date: 
2003
568 pages. 7 tables, 3 figures

The borders of Russian history, whether chronological, geographical, political or intellectual, have always been patrolled, have sometimes been evaded, but have never been invisible. This volume attempts to extend those borders in several ways. The articles stress continuity rather than ruptures and their organization emphasizes persistent factors over time, particularly across the 1917 divide. Geographical dimensions are explored not through conquest but through regional responses to the center: local variants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial policies in the Caucasus and Turkestan are complemented by Central Asian petitions for citizenship in the 1930s and Siberian healing in the 1990s. Ukrainian aspirations take a special focus, from Kyivan Rus’ to Ruthenian dreams.

Politically, of course, Marxist–Leninist ideology attempted to extend its own frontiers of Russian history. Several studies here attempt to assess the meaning of the Soviet period in terms of ideology, practices, processes and memory. It is fitting too that the now accepted boundaries of the Soviet era—the revolutionary decade and the first decade of transition—are subject to detailed attention and analysis. The intellectual borders of Russian and Soviet history, long policed from within and without, have been breached by the creative and wide-ranging use of newly accessible archival sources that form the basis for these articles. The sense of community exhibited by this collection, however, is not artificial nor is it wholly imagined. It derives from the honoree, whose scholarly life has exhibited the blurring of traditional boundaries, whether disciplinary, generational, or national, that is represented by the contributors to this volume. 

List of Tables and Figures
Transliteration and Abbreviations
Preface

I Narrating Russia

Agency and Process in Russian and Soviet History, Moshe Lewin
A Dynastic or Ethno-Dynastic Tsardom? Two Early Modern Concepts of Russia, Zenon E. Kohut
Spectacles of Subversion: Sexualized Scenarios, Gendered Discourses and Social Breakdown in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Abby M. Schrade
National Narratives in the Representation of Nineteenth-Century Russian Monarchy, Richard S. Wortman

II Imperial Russia: A Multicultural Society and its Borderlands
Precarious Existences: Middling Households in Moscow and the Fire of 1812, Alexander M. Martin
The Rise of Male Secondary Education in Provincial Russia: D.A. Tolstoi’s Ministry Revisited, Marina Loskoutova
Ruslan, Bohdan and Myron: Three Constructed Identities among Galician Ruthenians/Ukrainians, 1830–1914, Iaroslav Hrytsak
From Elisavetgrad to Broadway: The Strange Odyssey of Iakov Gordon, John Klier
Colonial Frontiers in Eighteenth-Century Russia: From the North Caucasus to Central Asia, Michael Khodarkovsky
Colonization by Contract: Russian Settlers, South Caucasian Elites and the Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century Tsarist Imperialism, Nicholas B. Breyfogle
Russian Colonization of Caucasian Azerbaijan, 1830-1905, Firouzeh Mostashari
Diamond in the Rough: The State, Entrepreneurs and Turkestan's Hidden Resources in Late Imperial Russia, Muriel Joffe

III The Revolutionary Decade
Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870s to What is to Be Done? Reginald E. Zelnik 205
The Political Evolution of Moscow’s Kupechestvo in Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Observations and Reflections, Leopold H. Haimson
A Testament of the All-Russian Idea: Foreign Ministry Memoranda to the Imperial, Provisional and Bolshevik Governments, Alexei Miller
The Day before the Downfall of the Old Regime: 26 February 1917 in Petrograd, Rafail Sh. Ganelin
Unusual Comrades: Red Planning for the August 1919 Counter Offensive in the Russian Civil War, Curtis S. King
Wartime Entrepreneur: Mikhail Riabushinskii’s Banking Business, 1914-1919, Boris V. Anan’ich
Russia's First World War: Forgetting, Remembering, Forgetting, Peter Gatrell

IV The Soviet Experience
The Political Police and the Study of History in the USSR, Viktor M. Paneiakh
The Internal Soviet Passport: Workers and Free Movement, Wendy Zeva Goldman
Class and Nation at the Borderlands: Pleas for Soviet Citizenship during the Great Terror, Lesley A. Rimmel
The Soviet Position at Munich Reappraised: The Romanian Enigma, Hugh Ragsdale
Brief Alliance: US-Soviet Film Exchange and the Battle of Russia, Marsha Siefert
Khrushchev and the End of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Alexandr A. Fursenko
Belief and Disbelief in the Soviet Union, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

V Persistent Factors in Russian History
The Contemporary Russian Transformation in Historical Context, Vladimir Sogrin
Intelligentsia, Intellectuals and Elites in Transition: A Critical Discourse at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, Boris Firsov
Public-Private Partnership in Russian Education: Historical Models and Lessons, Harley D. Balzer
Dynamic Ethnics: Socio-Religious Movements in Siberia, Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer
The United States and Russia: From Rivalry to Reconciliation, Alvin Z. Rubinstein
The Democratic Experience in Transitional Russia, William G. Rosenberg

Bibliography and Chronology of Alfred J. Rieber
List of Contributors
Index