Interpreting History: Meaning Production for the Russian Revolution

Adaptation ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick H. White
Keyword(s):  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Meaning Production

Economic Views of L. Trotsky

2004 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov ◽  
S. Dzarasov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Russian History ◽  
History Of

The paper written in the light of 125th birth anniversary of L. Trotsky analyzes the life and ideas of one of the most prominent figures in the Russian history of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in its Bolshevik period, worked with V. Lenin and played a significant role in the Civil War. Rejected by the party bureaucracy L. Trotsky led uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, defending his own understanding of the revolutionary ideals. The authors try to explain these events in historical perspective, avoiding biases of both Stalinism and anticommunism.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Private letters of Siberian exiles about the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: 1908–1912

2018 ◽  
pp. 508-521
Author(s):  
Dmitrii A. Baksht ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Police Department ◽  
General System ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
State Management ◽  
Management Institutions

The article studies the Turukhansk region as a territory with distinct climatic conditions and, consequently, with distinctive state management institutions and does so in the context of modernization processes of late 19th – early 20th century. This part of the Yenisei gubernia having become a region of mass exile after the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, its integration into a general system of management slowed down. Private letters of exiles are an important historical source, they reveal many aspects of the daily life of the persons under supervising in the inter-revolutionary period. The ‘Turukhansk revolt’ in the winter of 1908/09 revealed not only the ineffectiveness of exile as a penal measure, but also severel major problems of the region: archaic and scanty management institutions, lack of transport communication with southern uezds of the gubernia, underpopulation, and also gubernia and metropolitan officials’ ignorance of local affairs. The agencies of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs expanded the practice of perlustration as involvement in the revolutionary movement grew. Siberian exiles had their correspondence routinely inspected, and yet in most cases they were inexperienced enough not to encrypt their messages. Surviving perlustration materials offer an ambivalent picture of the ‘Turukhansk revolt’: there were both approval and condemnation of the participants’ actions. The documents tell a tale of extreme cruelty of the punitive detachments even towards those who were not involved in the resistance. The subject of the Siberian exile of the early 20th century has research potential. There is virtually no scholarship on the exiles’ self-reflection concerning the ‘common violence’ of both anti-governmental groups and state punitive agencies. Diversification in political/party or social/class affiliation is not enough. The new materials have revealed a significant gap between several ‘streams’ of exiles: those banished to Siberia in midst of the First Russian Revolution differed from those exiled in 1910s. The article concludes that, having departed from the previous approach to studying the exile, ego-sources cease to be of lesser importance than other types of historical sources. Their subjectivity becomes an advantage for a high-quality text analysis.

Writing Women into the Russian Revolution of 1917

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-231
Author(s):  
Adele Lindenmeyr
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
Women’S History ◽  
The Revolution

Abstract While scholarship on Russian women’s history has flourished in recent decades, the participation of women in the 1917 Revolution continues to be under-researched and poorly understood. This article explores various reasons for the marginalization of women in studies of the revolution. It reviews promising recent research that recovers women’s experiences and voices, including work on women in the wartime labor force and soldiers’ wives, and argues for the usefulness of a feminist and gendered approach to studying 1917.

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