Abstract This article examines Soviet pedology not only as a contested doctrine of child development, but as a diagnostic infrastructure that linked school performance and bodily pathology to the material conditions of childhood. It argues that the July 1936 liquidation of pedology did not end Soviet measurement of children, schooling, or welfare. Rather, it delegitimized a specific causal chain through which housing density, nutrition, illness history, family mortality, and school failure could be read together as evidence of material deprivation and its developmental effects. The article uses the concept of “biopolitics of scarcity” in a narrow institutional sense: a historical configuration in which normative demands on child development were intensified while the material infrastructure required to sustain those demands remained chronically inadequate. Pedology made this configuration measurable; its liquidation narrowed the institutional space in which material deprivation could be registered as pedagogically significant evidence. The article traces three phases: the optimist phase of 1921–1929, when pedology functioned as an instrument of revolutionary social engineering; the audit phase of 1929–1935, when its measurements began to place pressure on official explanatory frameworks; and the liquidation of 1936, which delegitimized one specific diagnostic chain connecting bodily pathology to material causation. The primary object of analysis is the diagnostic apparatus concentrated in Moscow, treated not as a demographic average for the Soviet Union but as a maximum-visibility case: what the system could register when trained personnel and measurement infrastructure were fully concentrated in one place.
Abstract In November 1941, German soldiers tortured and executed eighteen-year-old partisan, Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia. Two months later, Petr Lidov published her story, sparking a level of country-wide admiration unparalleled to other Soviet female participants of World War II ( WWII ). Kosmodem’ianskaia continued to be commemorated in post-Soviet Russia, on both the grassroots and state level. Like the overall repurposing of WWII , she became a point of Russian nationalism, particularly after Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, where her narrative worked to legitimate Putin 2.0 policies. This article examines three “sites of memory” created after 2012 and before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Zurab Tsereteli’s statue erected in 2013, the Zoia Museum Complex built in 2020, and the film Zoia (2021). Using the framework of Svetlana Boym’s restorative and reflective nostalgia, this article explores how state-supported narratives, like Russia’s “special path,” can be both supported and limited by personal memory.
This article discusses government action with regard to Russian Church reform at the turn of the 17th-18th centuries (the beginning of Petrine church reform). Its particular foci are church land ownership, the financial and administrative institutions of the Russian Church and its upper management systems. The research is based upon more than a dozen inventories of church buildings and property, various bishopric's census books (perepis'nye knigi of the Patriarchate; of the Velikii Ustiug, Vologda, Kolomna, Tobol'sk bishoprics and others), as well as records that arose out of the organization of descriptions of church possessions in 1701-1703. Many of the documents used have recently appeared in print for the first time. Analyzing such an extensive group of sources allows us to demonstrate the scale of government activities at the beginning of the 18th century; this was when the secular authorities began updating socio-economic information about the Russian Church in order to obtain a new source of income in connection with the outbreak of the Northern War. A second issue broached here is an analysis not only of Peter is decrees about the church but also of internal church documents (in particular, the texts of the episcopal oath, ordination promises); these illustrate changes to church administration that took place simultaneously with the beginning of the Revision of church possessions. The authorities quickly abandoned the idea of appointing a new patriarch and replaced his canonical authority with an appeal to the eastern patriarchs; Russian Church matters on the territory of the Moscow Patriarchate were transferred to the locum tenens on the patriarchal throne. For the first time in Russian history, the head of the Russian Church (albeit a locum tenens) was thus deprived of financial and judicial opportunities. These functions were transferred to the Monastery Chancellery, and the patriarchal chancelleries were effectively eliminated. For several years, government imposed its control over the previously independent economic, judicial and administrative activities of all ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the country, including the Patriarchate. Describing patriarchal possessions and reforming patriarchal chancelleries, as shown here, represented innovations in church-state relations.
This article examines the 1783 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Empire as a critical inflection point in the development of Russian imperial strategy and foreign policy. Moving beyond interpretations that situate the annexation primarily within the bilateral logic of Russo-Ottoman rivalry, this article argues that it was shaped by the American Revolution, shifting European alliances, and the evolving norms of international law. Drawing on Russian, American, and British diplomatic correspondence as well as recent scholarship in imperial and diplomatic history, the article argues that the methods employed in Crimea - installing client rulers, invoking legal treaties, framing expansion as humanitarian protection - became templates for subsequent Russian imperial practice. It further contends that the Crimean annexation inaugurated a durable geopolitical logic that reverberates into the present, whose resonance has been reactivated by Russia's 2014 annexation of the peninsula. By tracing the continuities between eighteenth-century statecraft and contemporary geopolitical crises, this study contributes to current debates on empire, sovereignty, and the longue dur & eacute;e of Russian foreign policy.
Peter's the Great's replacement of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Holy Synod is only part of story of religion in his reign. He also sponsored changes in religious practice, particularly the increased emphasis on preaching and the deemphasis on monasteries as centers of devotion. These changes began in the reign of his father Tsar Aleksei, but he radically accelerated them. To cany them out he promoted the Ukrainian clergy, Stefan Iavorskii and Feofan Prokopovich. Peter himself had views on religion: he thought that Russians put too much emphasis on liturgy, fasts, and the construction of churches, not enough on the teachings of the faith and on love. Peter himself attended church services more or less weekly and took communion several times during Easter Week and on other occasions. In all this an important but largely unstudied role was played by his spiritual fathers, also mostly Ukrainians, who even accompanied him on his travels. Historians need to distinguish between his own views and practices and those of the bishops that found useful to run the church. There were many features in common, but they were not identical.
