The Baron’s Cloak: A Study in Dynamic Continuity?

In my previous post, I made the case for a more dynamic understanding of historical continuity. Having tried to illustrate what this might look like in practice, I now want to turn to one story in particular. That story is told in Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak.

This brilliant book details the extraordinary and troubling life of Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, an eccentric mystic, reactionary nationalist, and ruthlessly violent Russian nobleman of Germanic origins. It follows Ungern’s life, from his birth in Graz to his family’s settling in Estland (modern-day Estonia) via Georgia, through his stuttering induction into the Russian army before the Great War to his career as a military commander in the anti-Bolshevik White movement during the Russian Civil War.

The book can be read in a several different ways: as a riveting story in its own right, as a tale of competing nationalism and radicalisms, as an exploration of huge upheaval and change. In Sunderland’s own words, it is “a study of the Russian Empire told through Ungern’s life” (p. 5), especially in its final years, as it collapsed and was then (partially) reconstituted by a new Soviet state.

However, reading this book, I found it to provide a highly stimulating narrative of dynamic historical continuity.

Here, using several short excerpts, I’ll retell key parts of the narrative in order to draw out some of the examples of continuity it seems to reveal. As I go, I’ll return to the diagrams of historical “paths” which I provided in my previous post, illustrating how I think the excerpts illustrate these.

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.

The "Spontaneous" and "Leaderless" Revolution: Two Myths of February 1917

In a matter of days at the end of February 1917 (dated to the "old-style" Julian calendar), the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty was suddenly and spectacularly overthrown. The February Revolution set in motion a series of fundamental transformations which would shape Russian, European, and wider world history for decades to come. It would also develop its own mythology, key elements of which survive today in standard textbook retellings of the events.

Crowds in Petrograd burn the Tsarist royal insignia during the February Revolution. Credit: Karl Karlovitch Bulla (1853 - 1929), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Myths have their uses in History, in particular to reveal the biases and beliefs of the societies in which they are found. But myth telling (and retelling) itself rarely makes for good History.

This post examines and appraises two enduring myths of the 1917 February Revolution: that it was "spontaneous" and that it was "leaderless". Both have long pasts in different historiographical trends. Both contain a seed of truth. And both are fundamentally misleading as to the actual events of February 1917.

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.

Spoken Dictionary and Pronunciation Guide

“Saying it right” is a particular challenge for teachers of Russian and Soviet History.

However familiar we are with the content and concepts of this area of study, the language – from people and places to the names of individuals and organisations, belief systems, and ideas – can often seem alien.

The purpose of this spoken dictionary and pronunciation guide is to provide teachers with accessible and accurate pronunciations for that language.

It comprises over 200 words, giving a brief definition and anglicised and Russian pronunciations for each.

We Need to Talk About Leon: Trotsky and the Dilemmas of Representation

A huge thanks to Claire Holliss for her thorough and careful critique of an earlier draft of this post. This draft is certainly fuller, and better, for her thoughts! It is also very long – if you would prefer to download it as a PDF and read offline, a copy can be accessed here.

 

As the feminist slogan goes, “the personal is political”. This strikes me as doubly true when thinking of representation in History teaching.

Firstly, our personal decision, as teachers, about who we give representation to in our teaching grants certain groups and individuals from the past the power and right to be seen and heard. This is of course not only political in a sense of abstract interpersonal power relations, but also in that it has become highly politicised, by groups and campaigns today who actively contest over which people should be included in the History curriculum.

Secondly, and more directly relevant here, when we select individuals to represent a wider group from the past in our History lessons, we grant those individuals remarkable power. Think about it for a moment: almost always posthumously, and certainly without their knowledge, these individuals in effect are authorised to speak, and even act as proxy, for others whose experiences we consider similar to theirs.

This means that we need to talk about representation. Beyond just which groups we encounter in History teaching (which is certainly important), whom we empower as representatives of those groups by giving weight and voice to their life stories and identities really matters. (What I mean by “representation” and “identity” is explained in a short post-script at the bottom of this blog post.)

For this reason, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the prominence of one individual in our course textbooks.