InA Minor Apocalypse, Robert Blobaum explores the social and cultural history of Warsaw's "forgotten war" of 1914-1918. Beginning with the bank panic that accompanied the outbreak of the Great War, ...Blobaum guides his readers through spy scares, bombardments, mass migratory movements, and the Russian evacuation of 1915. Industrial collapse marked only the opening phase of Warsaw's wartime economic crisis, which grew steadily worse during the German occupation. Requisitioning and strict control of supplies entering the city resulted in scarcity amid growing corruption, rapidly declining living standards, and major public health emergencies.Blobaum shows how conflicts over distribution of and access to resources led to social divisions, a sharp deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations, and general distrust in public institutions. Women's public visibility, demands for political representation, and perceived threats to the patriarchal order during the war years sustained one arena of cultural debate. New modes of popular entertainment, including cinema, cabaret, and variety shows, created another, particularly as they challenged elite notions of propriety. Blobaum presents these themes in comparative context, not only with other major European cities during the Great War but also with Warsaw under Nazi German occupation a generation later.
The revolution of 1905 in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland marked the consolidation of major new influences on the political scene. As he examines the emergence of a mass political culture in ...Poland, Robert E. Blobaum offers the first history in any Western language of this watershed period. Drawing on extensive archival research to explore the history of Poland's revolutionary upheavals, Blobaum departs from traditional interpretations of these events as peripheral to an essentially Russian movement that reached a climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He demonstrates that, although Polish independence was not formally recognized until after World War I, the social and political conditions necessary for nationhood were established in the years around 1905.
The revolution of 1905 in the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland marked the consolidation of major new influences on the political scene. As he examines the emergence of a mass political culture in ...Poland, Robert E. Blobaum offers the first history in any Western language of this watershed period. Drawing on extensive archival research to explore the history of Poland's revolutionary upheavals, Blobaum departs from traditional interpretations of these events as peripheral to an essentially Russian movement that reached a climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He demonstrates that, although Polish independence was not formally recognized until after World War I, the social and political conditions necessary for nationhood were established in the years around 1905.
By 1900 partitioned Poland and especially its territories under Russian rule had experienced the initial phase of fundamental economic and social transformation from the agrarian to the industrial ...age. The uneasy transition gave rise to a number of burning "questions" that dominated intellectual and political discourse up to the First World War. This article places the "woman question" within the context of the dynamic change then affecting Poland and in relationship to other important issues of the day. That a "woman question" was even posed indicates that women were at the center rather than periphery of Poland's transformation. How the "woman question" was posed obviously depended on those who posed it. Consequently there were a number of woman questions and envisioned solutions to them. Since the terrain of the "woman question" was contested, this article outlines the positions staked out by a variety of actors, including that of the first generation of Polish feminists. The article concludes with a discussion of the significance of the "woman question" in the larger context of modern Polish history. In particular, it attempts to explain why the "woman question" disappeared from Polish discourse after the Great War, only to resurface at century's end.
Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of ...the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.
During the first ten months of 1905, the government responded to the various manifestations of upheaval in the Kingdom of Poland with both concessions and measures of repression. The carrot-and-stick ...approach, however, was the result not of a carefully considered policy but of inconsistent attitudes within the government about how best to deal with the crisis in the Polish provinces. Generally, the central government in St. Petersburg inclined toward compromise in the linguistic, cultural, and religious spheres, a tendency that, if realized in full, could have satisfied the national aspirations of most politically conscious Poles. The provincial bureaucracy in the
For the Roman Catholic Church—the only traditional “Polish” institution to survive successive nineteenth-century insurrections and subsequent waves of Russian repression—adjusting to the demands of ...the modern era and the new postrevolution political culture proved especially troublesome. With its independence compromised, its finances controlled, its practices closely scrutinized, and its official ties with Rome forcibly severed by the Russian autocracy after the January Insurrection of 1863, the Polish Church had, by the turn of the century, already found it increasingly difficult to satisfy the spiritual needs of its rapidly growing and changing flock. Although Russian state policies did much
Already on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, students in the Kingdom’s institutions of higher and secondary education formed the most politicized social group in the country. Although divided by ...ideological differences, party sympathies, and ethnicity, students had been prepared by established traditions of self-organization and political protest for the role of an avant-garde in the antiwar and antimobilization movements of 1904. Incidents inside the schools multiplied, and by the end of the year rumors of a nationwide student strike were rife.
Preparations for some sort of broad student action were still in the planning stage, however, when industrial workers
Beginning with Bloody Sunday, the infamous massacre of working-class demonstrators in St. Petersburg on January 22, industrial labor played an undeniably significant role in the Revolution of 1905 in ...European Russia. The outrage after Bloody Sunday, expressed in massive strikes and demonstrations throughout the empire, indeed became the spark that ignited Russia’s subsequent bourgeois-democratic revolution. In October, Russian workers intervened directly in that revolution by means of a statewide general strike to force a recalcitrant autocracy to accede to the demands of a temporarily united political opposition for democratic freedoms and a constitutional restructuring of the old political order. Between
