What's in a Name? Of Dog-Killers, Jews and Rasputin

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1046-1070 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Verner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Russian Empire

Russians have long been preoccupied with surnames, particularly a distinction between so-called "good" and "bad" surnames, in ways that may be hard to understand by a nation of immigrants whose ancestral names were often mutilated by immigration authorities or anglicized by their bearers with a stroke of the pen. In the Russian Empire, such changes required the personal permission of the ruler and were exceedingly rare until the end of the nineteenth century.

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

scholarly journals Visual Stereotypes of Tatars in the Finnish Press from the 1880s to the 1910s

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Grand Duchy

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.

Fugitives, Vagrants, and Found Dead Bodies: Identifying the Individual in Tsarist Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 366-388
Author(s):  
Alison K. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
Individual Subject ◽  
Eye Color ◽  
Physical Measurements ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Identification Practices

AbstractIn the middle of the nineteenth century, in the Russian Empire, a new set of state-sponsored provincial newspapers began to include notices seeking fugitives and trying to identify arrested vagrants and found dead bodies. The notices were part of a larger effort to match individuals with specific legal identities based in social estate (soslovie). In principle, every individual subject of the Russian Empire belonged to a specific owner (in the case of serfs) or to a specific soslovie society (in the case of nearly everyone else). The notices were an effort to link people who had left their proper place to their “real” identity. To accomplish this, the notices also made use of a kind of simple biometrics or anthropometrics in order to move beyond an individual's telling of his or her own identity. By listing height, hair and eye color, the shape of nose, mouth, and chin, and other identifying features, the notices were intended to allow for more exact identification. This version of identification developed out of previous practices grounded in the documentary requirements of the tsarist state, and they were slightly ahead of their time in the context of nineteenth-century developments in the sphere of identification practices. They were also distinct from other kinds of anthropometric practices of classification developed at the same time or soon thereafter—where many sought to use physical measurements to classify people by race or by inclination to criminality, the Russian system had no such goals.

Reflective Colonization: Domination, Consent, and the Self in Imperial Russia

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Fournier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Russian Politics ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Historical Periods

Historians have pointed out that as a terrestrial rather than an overseas empire, the Russian empire has had to grapple with a blurry boundary between imperial center and periphery. Ektind goes a step further to show that the Russian empire was the stage for intensive colonization of the imperial core itself and the attendant processes of self-orientalization and self-alienation. The review identifies and explores three dimensions of the process of internal colonization. In the first, colonization by consent, Russian historical writers’ interpretations of the origins of the state in terms of consent to (foreign) domination are contextualized by drawing on colonizers’ fantasy of consent across contexts and historical periods, and by pointing to resistance as an important aspect of the relation between Russian imperial elites and the colonized. The second dimension is the idea of colonizing “one’s own,” whereby elites not only coerced people of the imperial core into various practices, but also viewed them through an orientalizing lens, and this, from the beginnings of serfdom through the nineteenth-century populists’ efforts at rapprochement (the perceived divide between rulers and ruled is, it is argued, still salient in Russian politics). The last dimension, strangers to ourselves, deals with the “splitting of the self” from a postcolonial studies perspective but it is pointed out that the use of psychoanalytic frameworks and literary theory may reproduce orientalist interpretations of the Russian imperial self. Instead, it is argued that self-orientalizing discourses in the Russian context may serve to divert attention away from one’s actual power.

scholarly journals Pomiędzy relacyjnością a ambiwalentnością. Rozwój idei własności i wolności w warunkach politycznych samodzierżawia rosyjskiego w XIX wieku jako lejtmotyw w twórczości naukowej Richarda Pipesa

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-169
Author(s):  
Mikołaj Tarkowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The article illustrates that property rights, including in particular property and the relationship between property rights and the category of freedom in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, was one of the most important areas of scientific activity of Richard Pipes. For centuries, both the institution of freedom and property were highly politicised. Based on Richard Pipes’ findings, it can be concluded that the relationship between ownership and freedom manifested itself in the feature of relativity or ambivalence, depending on the time and individual parts of the Russian Empire. In the 19th century, the former mainly influenced the development of the monetary economy, while the latter strengthened the idea of samoderzhavyie in the political system. Richard Pipes noticed the sources of the antinomy between the idea of freedom and property in nineteenth-century Russia in the dynamically developing economic life and the “stillness” of the autocratic political power system. Following this concept, the article presents the doubts appearing among the St Petersburg ruling elite as well as provincial officials related to establishing the personal freedom of peasants in Russia, which finally took place in 1861. The system of tsarist autocracy in Russia, which was developing throughout history, noticed significant links between property and freedom. A good example of this process was the confiscation of land property. In this regard, the article mentions political premises, the impact of the phenomenon of “paradox and tragedy,ˮ as well as the socio-economic calculations carried out in the field of confiscating private property in the western governorates of the Russian Empire, after the January Uprising of 1863.

scholarly journals Socio-political life of the Ukrainian lands in the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century.

10.33287/1193 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
І. В. Довжук
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
The West ◽  
Significant Component ◽  
Social Organizations ◽  
The Russian Empire

The policy of Russian Empire’s government which had been realized on Ukrainian lands in the middle of ХІХ century is scrutinized. It is pointed that in that time there was an increasing of Empire’s regime on the territory of Ukraine, centralization increased, there was an ignorance of peculiarities of regions, social organizations were pursued. The policy of the tsarist government towards the Ukrainians was especially repressive com-pared to his attitude to other peoples of the Russian Empire. After the Polish uprising of 1830–1831, there is a sharp turning point in the «politics of nationalities» in the west of the Russian Empire. The traditional policy of cooperation with the national elite here has been defeated and replaced by the policy of forced integration. Ukrainians, who for many years were under Polish domination, were perceived by the Russian government as part of the Polish rebels. In the 40 years of the ХІХ century, the crisis of the imperial feudal-feudal system deepened, manifested in the mass peasant uprisings, the decline of the landed economy, the awareness of the need for the liquidation of serfdom by representatives of all sectors of the population. In our opinion, it is precisely at the origins of this crisis that one should look for the reasons for the rise of the Ukrainian national revival and its politicization in the middle of the ХІХ century. Socio-political life at that time was concentrated around the struggle for the elimination of serfdom, and national harassment was a significant component of this struggle. Without the liquidation of serfdom and the democratization of political life, Ukrainian national revival had no prospects.

scholarly journals PANTELEIMON KULISH AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION" IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-66
Author(s):  
Victor Dotsenko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Great Writer

The author attempts to analyze the views of Panteleimon Kulish on the history, culture and everyday life of Jews who lived along with Ukrainians in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire, to determine what factors and stereotypes formed the outlook of the great writer and his attitude to the Russian imperial project of resolving the "Jewish question". With the growing of Russian imperial messianism and chauvinism, Ukrainian intellectuals appeared in a difficult situation. The tsar held assimilation policies towards both Jews and Ukrainians. At the same time, Jews additionallly suffered from manifestations of state anti-Semitism. Engagement of Ukrainian Christians in anti-Semitic actions has intensified the position of Russifikators of Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian elite aimed to stop these manifestations of anti-Semitism by its actions. Obviously, the Ukrainian protest did not condemn anti-Semitism without reservations, because its authors suggested that Jews should partly share responsibility for anti-Semitism. The idea of protesting Ukrainian intellectuals coincided with ideas of Russian liberals who offered to consider Russian Jews as carriers of "civil autonomy and moral independence," and urged them to abandon their national-religious prejudices. While supporting the civil rights of Jews, Kulish at the same time realized that the Ukrainians themselves belonged to the oppressed nations in the Russian Empire, where, in general, social and national rights and freedoms were much less than in the constitutional states of Western Europe. Therefore, he found it impractical to move from there to Russian blindly a practice of artificial support for only Jewish nationality, because in imperial terms this meant only a change in the configuration of national unequal, and not the elimination of it at all. P. Kulish's views on the "Jewish question" of the mid-nineteenth century corresponded to the conceptions of Russian liberal intellectuals regarding the modernization of Russian society. He supports the proclaimed liberal ideas of the need to integrate Jews into imperial life. Jews must be the most interested in destroying of the traditional world of the Jewish town. Giving the Jews of secular education, adopting by them the modern values could lead to the elimination of intolerance and manifestations of anti-Semitism in the society. The Jews himself, according to P. Kulish had to go towards society and change their social mood.

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