Cities, Railways, and Revolutions: Drawing the Links

In the late-Tsarist period, an urban revolution hit Russia. Major cities exploded in size. The population of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital, trebled from just over 500,000 in 1864 to 1,500,000 in 1900, rising to 2,500,000 by 1917.

It wasn’t just Russia’s capital city that was on the rise. By 1917, approximately 20 percent of the population of the entire empire lived in cities. Some of the most remarkable examples of city growth took place in Siberia, a traditionally underpopulated (by Slavic Russians, at least) region of the empire. And it was here, especially, that another factor came into play. Transportation.

Of Gods, Demons, and Devils: Popular Religion and Church Power in Imperial Russia

When Belarussian-born US journalist, Maurice Hindus visited the USSR in 1929-30, he expressed his amazement at the transformation of peasants’ beliefs. After interviewing young people in one village, he noted, dumbstruck, that “peasant boys and girls should not even know what a rusalka was!”

Hindus’ account, given in his memoir Red Bread (1931), can be read as an attempt to explain how the Russian revolution was transforming the Russian peasant from a superstitious, pre-modern being rooted in backward beliefs into an enlightened citizen. Yet the reference to rusalkas – water-nymphs long believed to inhabit rural rivers, lakes, and ponds – can be read in a rather different way. In revealing the non-belief in these magical creatures of local youth, Hindus was also offering a glimpse into the recent past of what might be called Russia’s “popular religion”.

Hindus recalls that “in my days, children…were afraid of the rusalkas…who were supposed to be the lost souls of drowned girls… With the very milk of our mothers we imbibed the notion that there was no resisting the rusalkas.”

The rusalkas were, in fact, only one rather strange and surprising aspect of the religious world of Russian Orthodox peasants, a religious world which was (for most peasants) Orthodox Christian but which maintained its own idiosyncrasies. This world would be understood by many writers and academics at the time and afterwards to constitute one of “dual faith”, in which ancient pagan and Orthodox Christian faiths coexisted. But the idea of “dual faith” has fallen out of favour since the 1990s, as historians have begun to reconceptualise the Christianity of Russia’s peasants.

Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki (1871). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. 

In this post, I’ll consider what this peasant Christianity looked like by the early 1900s and this means for one question in our teaching of Russian history in particular: the power of the Orthodox Church in late-Imperial Russia.

Making the Political Personal: Bergelson’s Birobidzhan

Huge thanks to Ed Durbin for his feedback on an earlier draft of this post! This is another rather long read. If you’d prefer to download it and read offline, a PDF copy can be found here. A lesson text resource and PowerPoint presentation accompany this post, and can be found here.

What makes stories in History powerful?

A few weeks ago, I suggested in a post on Trotsky that the personal is political in History teaching, by which I meant that those individuals whose stories are told in our lessons are given enormous power over our narratives.

Now, I’d like to reverse the equation to suggest that we should try to make the political personal.

What I mean by this is that, rather than telling the history of politics and power through state policy and statistics, we should try to tell it through the words and experiences of individuals who lived through, were impacted by, and in their own ways helped shape it.

These stories are, I believe, powerful. They can both bring potentially dry History to life and empower people whose experiences deserve to be told, but are often overlooked. At the same time, I will argue that the power of individuals’ stories also lies in the ways we choose to narrate them.

There’s nothing particularly original in what I’m suggesting; and I’ll flag up a number of important works by other History teachers and educators to show where my thinking is really coming from.

At the same time, I also want to take the opportunity to bring to light a fascinating and almost entirely overlooked story. This is the story of the Jewish homeland no-one has heard of: Birobidzhan. And it is also the story of one of its most prominent proponents and activists, a long-forgotten Yiddish writer called David Bergelson.

Problematising Pogroms: Reassessing Antisemitic Agency in Russia, c. 1881-1921

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe. The hatred of Jews was manifested more violently and more frequently than anywhere else in the continent, through regular outbreaks of pogroms.

Why? While we might be tempted to blame an arch-reactionary, Jew-hating government under the last Tsars, we should also be wary of simplistic, monocausal explanations of Russian antisemitism and pogroms. On closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

Russian Responses to the Great War: Reconsidering Textbook Narratives

In July 1914, Russia entered the First World War. It was a momentous decision, which would ultimately seal the fate of the Tsarist government and shape the revolutionary and Soviet regimes that succeeded it.

But how did the people of the Russian Empire respond?

This post provides an explanation and outline to teaching the question of the response of Russians (and non-ethnic “Russians” and non-Russians) to the outbreak of war. Lesson resources can be found in the link here.

“Did the First World War lead to…?” Seeing War and Revolution in a Continuum

It’s straightforward to ascribe a causal significance to the First World War in leading to Russia’s revolution of 1917. Follow the steps: war led to food shortages; which led to protests; which led to revolution.

In the past 20 odd years, however, something rather strange has happened amongst some historians of the Russian Revolution. For these historians, 1917 stopped being the important date. Or rather, it stopped being the only important date. And it all has to do with war.

As Peter Holquist phrased it in his enormously influential Making War, Forging Revolution, “war and revolution […] were not two discreet events but rather points along a common continuum.” War began for Russia in the summer of 1914 with the Great War. It didn’t end until at least 1921 with the end of the Russian Civil War. The revolutionary year 1917 was nestled within, and part of, that continued period of war.

This joined-up approach to war and revolution doesn’t just call on us to rethink where each is positioned in time. It also demands we reconsider the causal relationship between war and revolution. In this post, I’ll raise three observations historians have made about the “continuum of crisis” and how it not just led to, but shaped key aspects of, the Russian Revolution and subsequent Civil War.

The life and times of Anatoly Zhelezniakov: Mapping 1917 through a story (that isn’t Lenin’s)

In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II’s government was replaced in power by a coalition of liberals and moderate socialists. In October 1917, that coalition was replaced by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

There’s a very simple narrative that’s tempting to give to students. 1917 was a story of Lenin’s growing power and the Bolshevisation of revolutionary politics. Yet many historians are now less sure about this narrative than they were before. For one, it was by no means clear in the spring of 1917 that Lenin and the Bolsheviks could have much influence over the revolution. For another, even as their power grew, they remained part of a wider constellation of left-wing groups that sought to overthrow the Provisional Government and replace it with… well, something (even if people couldn’t really agree).

This story obviously can’t be told without Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be told exclusively through them, either.

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of Russia’s changing political climate in 1917, using the story of an anarchist sailor, Anatoly Zhelezniakov.

"Ordinary People" in 1917

Revolutions are by nature popular events – typically marked by mass uprisings, protests, movements, etc. – yet portraying the “ordinary people” behind them is a complicated business. Firstly, there is the sheer scale of diversity: historians of the 1917 revolution have sought to complicate broad encompassing categories such as “worker”, “peasant”, and “soldier”, even if these may dominate textbook accounts. Secondly, there is the fact taking part in a revolution isn’t really very “ordinary” at all (something argued by historian Yanni Kotsonis in 2011)! 

Yanni Kotsonis, “Ordinary People in Russian and Soviet History”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Soviet History 12, no. 3 (2011): 739-754

The issue [of ‘ordinary people’] becomes ticklish as soon as one thinks about it – and one should – because ‘ordinary’ is neither historical nor precise. Saddled with the concept of ordinary, we risk losing sight of the category’s usefulness: to show that the people we term ordinary are in fact extraordinary when viewed through the right lens and with creative imagination on the part of the historian.

This post provides an explanation and outline of my approach to teaching the question of the Russian people and their actions and aspirations in 1917.