The article explores the problem of the influence of epidemics on the state of trade between Russia and the East and of navigation in the Caspian Sea basin in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, as well as the views of Astrakhan Gubernia authorities and practical steps that were taken in Astrakhan to ease the quarantine regime for merchants and shipowners in order to develop Russia’s foreign trade.
During the spring of 1915, at the height of Russia’s grueling battles on the fields of World War I, there was another event unfolding in the remote southern borderlands of the Romanov Empire that at first glance might seem insignificant. On Easter night, March 22, 1915, Turkmen armed militias besieged the capital of the Khanate of Khiva, which had been a de facto protectorate of the Russian Empire since 1873. At the head of the Turkmen detachments was a certain Muhammet-Kurban Serdar, who later became widely known as Junaid Khan. For the first time since the Russian conquest, the Turkmen groups of Khorezm dared to attack the capital of the khanate, threatening Isfandiiar Khan, who ruled “at the gracious pleasure of the Great White Tsar” (1910–1918). Previously, the presence of the Russian garrison at the fort of Petro-Aleksandrovsk, the administrative center of the Amu Darya Department (ADO), was enough to protect the power of the Khivan ruler from challenges by his subjects. The memory of the cruel “lessons” that were taught to the wayward Turkmen tribes during the conquest of the khanate in 1873 and 1876 helped the representatives of the colonial administration to keep the Turkmen leaders subservient simply through “indoctrination.” This time, too, the intervention of the new head of the ADO, Colonel V. P. Kolosovskii, who sent a Cossack sotnia to Khiva, was sufficient to restore order. According to a participant in this small expedition, “the authority of the Russians in Khiva was so great that the arrival of a detachment to Khiva was sufficient to restore the peace.” The siege was lifted, and the Turkmen militias returned to their nomad camps. Despite the bloodless resolution of the crisis, this episode marked the beginning of much more dramatic events. Less than a year later, the
The surrounding natural environment, the nature of service, and the way that war was conducted in the Caucasus—everything helped inculcate a spirit of independence and personal courage in the soldier along with those fighting traits that set him apart. . . . He had to know in advance what to do if the enemy suddenly appeared nearby with sword drawn, or how to take cover from a shot if he saw a rifle sticking out into a forest clearing. . . . He knew how to fend for himself if he was left a day or two without provisions. In general, whether with a full belly or an empty one, dodging a bullet or taking one, resting by the fireside on straw on a cold winter night or tossing and turning on the bare snow, his fate depended solely on him, and in his case necessity was the mother of invention. And he would never stop adapting to his circumstances throughout the entire year. 1
Russia’s entrance into its modern period, at the turn of the seventeenth century, sped up the country’s inclusion into the European economic space. At that point, Russian economic policy began a significant reorientation toward the economy of Western Europe that would align it with the latter’s leading developmental tendencies. Scholars have identified mercantilism, liberalism, and neo-protectionism as the directions taken by European economies in modern times. European mercantilism, which dates to the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, was a time of original capital accumulation. The essence of mercantilism as an economic policy lies in the state’s operative interference in the country’s economic life, and a focus on a positive foreign trade balance and the promotion of domestically produced goods. Late-mercantilist policy is associated with active protectionism, support for the expansion of commercial capital, and the comprehensive encouragement of domestic industrial development, especially in manufacturing. In the latter third of the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution, which was just then beginning in Great Britain, ousted mercantilism in favor of liberalism (laissezfaire, governmental noninterference in private entrepreneurial activities, freedom of trade). After the [financial] crisis of 1873, the ideas of free trade definitively lost the popularity they had once had, and the leading Western countries embarked instead on the protectionist path. This third stage saw a resurgence of protectionist tariffs and state interference in the economy, but under a different understanding than before. Neoprotectionism entailed state-imposed restrictions on international trade to supplement the traditional limitations on undesirable imports. The task of
The Battle for Akhulgo was one the largest military operations of the Caucasian War, carried out in Dagestan by the Chechen detachment of the Caucasian army under the command of Lieutenant General P.H. Grabbe from June, 12 to August, 29, 1839. It is known that the parties made numerous attempts to end this bloody confrontation by negotiations: according to Russian sources – the negotiations on surrender, according to local ones – on peace agreement.The paper presents the points of view of the both parties, dynamics and subject of the negotiating process, its connection to different stages of the siege. The author introduces a new source, an official document, a detailed chronicle of the siege of Akhulgo – military journals of the detachment from June 12 to August 30, 1839, which was filled daily by the commander of the expeditionary detachment Lieutenant General P.H. Grabbe. The negotiations, which were carried out in the second half of August, according to local and Russian sources, ended ambiguously – with the release of the imam’s son as a hostage (“amanate”) and the siege of Akhulgo. The parties accused each other of violating their obligations or failure to fulfill them.According to official Russian sources, the solution of the tasks of “suppressing Dagestan” in 1839, set by Emperor Nicholas I before the Caucasian command, implied “the destruction of the fortified home of Shamil on the Akhulgo Rock” and “the elimination of Shamil”. The ultimate goal of solving these problems excluded the conclusion of peace agreements with the mountaineers. Nevertheless, according to local sources (Muhammad-Tahir al-Karakhi, Abdurahman al-Gazigumuki, Haji Ali, H. Genichutlinsky) the "failed peace talks" were remembered as a story of "deception and break of the Russian promises".
This article uncovers the roles played by Tatar translators, interpreters and clerks during the Kazakh steppe’s political integration into the Russian empire. It reveals their role in the Russian administration’s diplomatic negotiations with Kazakh khans and sultans and their role in gathering essential information about events on the Kazakh steppe and the attitudes of influential members of the Kazakh nomadic elite.
The Black Hundreds unions positioned themselves as committed champions and defenders of Russian Orthodoxy. The Black Hundreds’ ideology was based on the three-part formula of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationhood,” formulated by S.S. Uvarov and M.P. Pogodin during the reign of Nicholas I. The ideologues of the extreme right emphasized that the Russian people were tied by indestructible bonds to Orthodoxy—“the sole true, apostolic, and paternalistic church.” The monarchists conducted their processions under gonfalons, every branch had icons, and meetings and rallies began with prayers. Congresses of “Russians” were accompanied by ceremonial prayer services. The extreme rightists’ close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church were so obvious that Soviet historiography equated the Orthodox clergy with the Black Hundreds. Up to the end of the 1920s, a good number of articles and pamphlets were published about the ties between the Black Hundreds and the Church that had a sharply anticlerical tone. These works treated the Orthodox Church as a reactionary force that was the main pillar of the Black Hundreds movement. Paradoxically, the concept of total identification of the extreme right with the Orthodox clergy still exists today, but it has merely replaced a negative assessment with a solely positive one. Works published by the Institute of Russian Civilization present the “holy Black Hundreds,” consisting of zealots and martyrs who gave their lives for the Orthodox faith during the revolution and the Civil War. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the entire Orthodox clergy during the prerevolutionary period supported the extreme right. By the same token, one cannot say that the extreme right relied solely on Orthodox clergymen. The Black Hundreds did not shun cooperation with other religions. The Union of the Russian People in its “Founding Principles,” a kind of symbol of faith, stated that “non-Orthodox and
International travel from the USSR began to show a marked increase in the mid-1950s. One of the key screeners for this flow was the Commission for Travel Abroad, whose activities have yet to be the focus of a separate study. Initially there was no single agency that controlled travel abroad by citizens. It was handled by the foreign departments attached to executive committees and by agencies of the OGPU [Joint State Political Directorate]. In the 1920s the functions were transferred to commissions that were almost immediately subordinated to the Bolshevik party’s Central Committee. After several reorganizations—in June 1947—the Bureau for Travel Abroad and Entry into the USSR emerged, and it became part of the Information Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers, which consisted of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate of the MGB [Ministry of State Security] of the USSR and the Main Intelligence Directorate [GRU] of the Soviet Army’s General Staff. The Bureau’s functions as spelled out in a special statute were to consider and resolve questions regarding travel abroad by citizens to full-time work at Soviet institutions, on temporary business trips, and on personal matters; regarding travel abroad by political emigrants and their family members; and regarding entry into the USSR on personal matters by foreigners and Soviet citizens who were full-time residents abroad. In the process, the emphasis was placed on three aspects: evaluation of the political reliability of Soviet citizens who were to travel abroad to work, evaluation of the validity and advisability of personal applications for travel out of the USSR and entries into it, and clarification “to every Soviet citizen who was to go abroad” of the rules for their conduct abroad and receiving the relevant pledge in writing from them “against their personal signature.”
The article examines how the issue of a muftiate on the Kazakh Steppe was connected to imperial transformations and the Kazakhs’ ability to adapt to these changes. It discusses why local communities did not develop a uniform or consolidated position on their religious administration.
Two generations of Russian scholars and public intellectuals have established the importance of the study of the political right (a loose umbrella term covering the ideologies of conservatism, nationalism, monarchism, and the populist radical right), not only for its time and place, but also for its enduring resonance in Russian political culture. The recent scholarly study of the political right has been a mix of detached, balanced discovery of a piece of Russia’s political heritage and a sympathetic rehabilitation of ideas and personages long vilified or sent to scholarly oblivion. This issue of our journal features the work of contemporary Russian historians on the politics and ideology of the prerevolutionary political right. Coupled with our previous issue on Russian conservatism, the purpose of the present issue is to capture an important historiographical and political moment in the early 2000s in post-Soviet Russia. Initially, scholars and pundits alike focused on rediscovering political ideas and movements that had been denigrated or ignored for generations, thereby making the study of the political right “normal.” Beginning in the 1990s, when many political organizations and parties, as well as politicians, sprouted in post-Soviet Russia, important monographs on conservative organizations and political parties as well as biographies of leading figures of the political right deepened an understanding of the place of the right in Russian political and intellectual life and social movements. Along the way came several valuable collections of documents, republication of writings of the leading conservative ideologues, anthologies of sources, and useful reference works. Finally, making extensive use of local archives and the local press, regional research has given spatial specificity to right-wing movements. Beginning in roughly 2000, historians, political scientists, philosophers, and pundits built an infrastructure for the research and dissemination of conservative views consisting of centers, serial publications, and websites with varying degrees of activity and regularity, thereby expanding the reach of the study of the political right. Several websites combine nonacademic RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY 2021, VOL. 59, NOS. 1–2, 1–9 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611983.2021.1956271
This article was born out of an interest in two problems, each of which is worthy of a separate exploration. The first one is the aggressive anti-Semitism in the regions of the late Russian Empire outside the Pale of Jewish Settlement, which exploded in mass pogroms in October 1905. The second is the serious and reverential attitude toward imperial emblems and ecclesiastical symbols on the part of ultraconservative Russian patriots who coalesced during the First Russian Revolution into radical rightist associations. I was intrigued by the notion of combining the two problems by posing the following questions. What did antiSemitism signify in a region without Jews? How did the language of symbols and rituals of the “Black Hundreds” function? Were ethnic markers an instrument for constructing the concepts of “us” and “them,” or did ethnic categories obscure other social hierarchies and conflicts? To answer these questions, it seems reasonable to take the following steps: first, illustrate both problems in the case of the 1905 pogroms and the activities of the rightist monarchists in the Urals— one of the regions without Jews; then, secondly, try to interpret the Black Hundreds’ symbolization and ritualization in terms of the sociology of communications. The third step is to ascertain how signs and ritualized communications made it possible to lay down the boundaries between what was near and dear and what was hostile by using ethnonyms in a metonymic manner, as symbols of political and social processes and problems. The subsequent structure of the text is in keeping with the above steps.
The nineteenth century had seen the entrenchment of the parliamentary system in Western civilization. The geographical placement and close contacts between Russia and Europe ensured that parliamentary ideas would also find their way into the Russian Empire, which is why the ideological struggle over the creation of a representative body in Russia was joined long before the tsar’s manifestos of August 6 and October 17, 1905. As far back as 1896, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, was arguing that popular sovereignty [narodovlastie] was among “the most dishonest political principles” since in reality that power belongs not to the people but to their representatives, whose voters are no more than a “herd” that constitutes their “capital, the foundation of their might and eminence in society” (as if they were “wealthy nomads”). This thesis of Pobedonostsev’s became a key part of the rightists’ ideological constructs and was further developed in works written early in the twentieth century. Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov was of the opinion that in parliamentary democracies, the people have no representation of their own; it has only the representatives of the parties that rule over the people.” Anton Semenovich Budilovich, the famous Slavist and member of the Russian Assembly monarchist group, also “held that nowhere in the constitutional world do we encounter the representation of the entire people, only of ‘classes and interests,’ e.g., of the upper, wealthier, and more unmannerly strata of the population.” Professor Andrei Sergeevich Viazigin, chairman of the Khar’kov division of the Russian Assembly and future leader of the rightist faction in the Third Duma, was of the same mind, asserting that in democratic states, “‘Freedom, equality, fraternity’ have proved to be only a fine-sounding battle-cry, whereas the peoples have fallen into an even worse dependency, having become slaves to a heartless and pitiless
The article analyzes OGPU materials to provide insight into the causes, nature and driving forces of the massive uprisings in Kazakhstan during the period 1929-1931.
Research on the history of international tourism in the USSR, which consisted of inbound (from foreign countries) and outbound (to foreign countries) tourism, is not one of the major areas of Russian historiography, yet the interest in this subject is obvious. The Soviet Union’s tourist ties with other countries are regarded by Russian and foreign scholars as part of cultural or public diplomacy, which on the one hand depended on the political realities of the times and, on the other, exerted a certain influence on them itself. Soviet historians mostly focused attention on the overall trends in the development of outbound tourism and on the legal issues of incoming tourism. Concrete historical studies for the most part concentrated on trips by Soviet tourists through trade unions and to a lesser extent on foreigners’ visits to the USSR. It was commonplace in all of the historical studies for the authors to pay close attention to ideological objectives and methods of working both with Soviet and with foreign tourists. Perestroika and the ensuing breakup of the USSR, the abandonment of the “only correct” ideology, and the “archival revolution” of the 1990s marked the start of a new stage in the historiography of this problem. The access to declassified documents significantly expanded the source base for research. The absence of censorship and the newly acquired opportunity to read the principal works of foreign colleagues (in particular, the monographs and articles of Prof. Michael David-Fox, the sociologist Paul Hollander, Prof. Ann E. Gorsuch, and others) have facilitated the formulation of new questions, including methodological ones. Similar processes have developed in some former Union republics that became independent countries. There is no debate among historians about the Soviet state’s regulatory role in prewar and postwar international tourism. In addition, most researchers do not confine themselves to studying the ideological and
The current state of scholarly literature on the prerevolutionary Russian right-wing parties is highly impressive, expressing as it does a variety of viewpoints on that phenomenon in Russia’s political life. This topic, which was at one point virtually off limits and was for quite a long time thereafter treated simplistically and with bias, began in the 1990s to attract the close attention of scholars who by now have studied the most important story lines in the history of the rightist movement. Despite the persistent lacunae, contemporary historiography and the corpus of accessible sources do allow for a number of generalizations and narrower observations to be made on the subject. Rather than professing that the scope of this article could possibly encompass all the aspects of the topic set forth in the title, I will touch here on just a few features that in my view present the greatest interest.
Trips by Ukrainian Americans and Canadians to Ukraine during the period after World War II remain in the margins of current historiography of international relations in the Cold War. This applies both to the motivation of tourists and to the role of political and public organizations, particularly the Communist parties of Canada (CPC) and the United States, the League of American Ukrainians (LAU), the Lemko Association, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), and the Workers’ Benevolent Association (RZT in Ukrainian). These organizations maintained ties between the Ukrainian community in North America and its historical homeland and made a significant contribution to arranging ethnic, or nostalgic as they are also called, tours for compatriots who were searching in Ukraine for the roots of their national identity. As is well known, there were a substantial number of potential tourists from the ranks of the Ukrainian diaspora: the population censuses in Canada reported 395,000 (2.8 percent of the population) in 1951; 473,300 (2.6 percent) in 1961; 580,300 (2.7 percent) in 1971; and 529,600 (2.2 percent) in 1981. According to official 1979 statistics, the United States had more than 730,000 citizens of Ukrainian origin. Most of the Ukrainians emigrated to those and a number of other countries from the western regions of Ukraine, the present-day IvanoFrankovsk, Lvov, Ternopol, Rovno, and Chernovtsy oblasts. Before World War I the emigration consisted of workers, whereas in the interwar period it already had not only socioeconomic but also political reasons, and after World War II it was mainly political in nature. The interwar period accounted for about 60,000 emigrants. The second wave of emigrants, in
