The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I ...and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Middle East. Shattering Empires draws on extensive research in the Ottoman and Russian archives to tell the story of the rivalry and collapse of two great empires. Overturning accounts that portray their clash as one of conflicting nationalisms, this pioneering study argues that geopolitical competition and the emergence of a new global interstate order provide the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the twentieth century. It will appeal to those interested in Middle Eastern, Russian, and Eurasian history, international relations, ethnic conflict, and World War I.
Renovating Russiais a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years ...liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics.
In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering. Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization.Renovating Russiathus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917 is the most comprehensive book on the epic uprising that toppled the tsarist monarchy and ushered in the next stage of the Russian Revolution.
In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local ...Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
This collection of essays addresses the challenge of modern nationalism to the tsarist Russian Empire. First appearing on the empire’s western periphery, this challenge was most prevalent in twelve ...provinces extending from Ukrainian lands in the south to the Baltic provinces in the north, and to the Kingdom of Poland. At issue is whether the late Russian Empire entered World War I as a multiethnic state with many of its age-old mechanisms run by a multiethnic elite, or as a Russian state predominantly managed by ethnic Russians. The tsarist vision of prioritizing loyalty among all subjects over privileging ethnic Russians and discriminating against non-Russians faced a fundamental problem: as soon as the opportunity presented itself, non-Russians would increase their demands and become increasingly separatist. The authors found that although the imperial government did not really identify with popular Russian nationalism, it sometimes ended up implementing policies promoted by Russian nationalist proponents. Matters addressed include native language education, interconfessional rivalry, the “Jewish question,” the origins of mass tourism in the western provinces, and the emergence of Russian nationalist attitudes in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution.
This biography examines the long life of the traveller and author Stephen Graham. Graham walked across large parts of the Tsarist Empire in the years before 1917, describing his adventures in a ...series of books and articles that helped to shape attitudes towards Russia in Britain and the United States. In later years he travelled widely across Europe and North America, meeting some of the best known writers of the twentieth century, including H.G.Wells and Ernest Hemingway. Graham also wrote numerous novels and biographies that won him a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic. This book traces Graham’s career as a world traveller, and provides a rich portrait of English, Russian and American literary life in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines how many aspects of his life and writing coincide with contemporary concerns, including the development of New Age spirituality and the rise of environmental awareness. Beyond Holy Russia is based on extensive research in archives of private papers in Britain and the USA and on the many works of Graham himself. The author describes with admirable tact and clarity Graham’s heterodox and convoluted spiritual quest. The result is a fascinating portrait of a man who was for many years a significant literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic.
March 1917 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr; Schwartz, Marian
11/2017
eBook
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution,
the University of Notre Dame Press is proud to publish Nobel
Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic work March
1917 , Node III, ...Book 1, of The Red Wheel .
The Red Wheel is Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus about the
Russian Revolution. Solzhenitsyn tells this story in the form of a
meticulously researched historical novel, supplemented by newspaper
headlines of the day, fragments of street action, cinematic
screenplay, and historical overview. The first two nodes- August
1914 and November 1916 -focus on Russia's crises and
recovery, on revolutionary terrorism and its suppression, on the
missed opportunity of Pyotr Stolypin's reforms, and how the surge
of patriotism in August 1914 soured as Russia bled in World War
I.
March 1917 -the third node-tells the story of the
Russian Revolution itself, during which not only does the Imperial
government melt in the face of the mob, but the leaders of the
opposition prove utterly incapable of controlling the course of
events. The action of book 1 (of four) of March 1917 is
set during March 8-12. The absorbing narrative tells the stories of
more than fifty characters during the days when the Russian Empire
begins to crumble. Bread riots in the capital, Petrograd, go
unchecked at first, and the police are beaten and killed by mobs.
Efforts to put down the violence using the army trigger a mutiny in
the numerous reserve regiments housed in the city, who kill their
officers and rampage. The anti-Tsarist bourgeois opposition,
horrified by the violence, scrambles to declare that it is
provisionally taking power, while socialists immediately create a
Soviet alternative to undermine it. Meanwhile, Emperor Nikolai II
is away at military headquarters and his wife Aleksandra is
isolated outside Petrograd, caring for their sick children.
Suddenly, the viability of the Russian state itself is called into
question.
The Red Wheel has been compared to Tolstoy's War
and Peace , for each work aims to narrate the story of an era
in a way that elevates its universal significance. In much the same
way as Homer's Iliad became the representative account of
the Greek world and therefore the basis for Greek civilization,
these historical epics perform a parallel role for our modern
world.
Featuring a number of distinguished essays by internationally known Russian cultural historians Boris Uspenskij and Victor Zhivov, this collection encompasses various ground-breaking works appearing ...in English for the first time. Focusing on several of the most interesting and problematic aspects of Russia’s cultural development, these essays examine the survival and reconceptualization of Russia’s past in later systems, and some of the key transformations of Russian cultural consciousness. This volume contains important examples of cultural semiotics and indispensable contributions to the history of Russian civilization.
"Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million "excess deaths" as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population ...transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and crafted new identities. In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954, George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine's boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today's Ukraine. A landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe's bloodlands, Liber's book will transform our understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany, and East Central Europe in the twentieth century."--
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