Social Identities In Revolutionary Russia

This volume explores the crisis of identity that faced Russia during and after the Revolution. The essays discuss how a re-evaluation of national identity challenged traditional institutions and ideas, having a direct bearing upon personal identity. Topics include the Stolypin agrarian reform, the fracturing of the Intelligentsia and Church reform. Also included in this volume is Khlebinkov's manifesto An Indo-Russian Union published here in Russian with a new English translation.

At the end of Febraury 1917 the tsarist government of Russia collapsed in a whirlwind of demonstrations by the workers and soldier of Petrograd. Ziva Galili tells how the moderate socialists, or Mensheviks, then attempted to prevent the conflicts between the newly formed liberal Provisional Government (the "bourgeois" camp) and the Petrograd Soviet (the "democractic" camp) from escalating into civil war--and how, in October of that same year, they finally failed. Placing narrative history in a broad social and political context, she creates an absorbing study of idealists who tried in vain to reflect as well as to contain the unfolding revolutionary process. Galili focuses on the Menshevik Revolutionary Defensists who became the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet and of the all-Russian network of soviets. She examines Menshevik political strategy as well as the three-way interaction between Mnesheviks (both in the Soviet and the Provisional Government), workers, and indsutrialists. She emphasizes the perpceptual and interactive aspects of the analysis of revolutions: the relations between social realities, perceptions of realities, and the formulation of political strategies; the roles of rhetorics and societal conflict in shaping social identities; and the impact of political authority and state institutions on the terms of social interaction. Ziva Galili is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is coeditor and annotator of The Making of Three Russian Revolutionsaries: Voice from the Menshevik Past (Cambridge). Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

1. Moscow and Its Hinterland -- 2. The Process of In-migration -- 3. The Formation of the Urban Workforce -- 4. The Workplace as Contested Space -- 5. The Urban Environment and Living Standards -- 6. Official Culture and Peasant Culture -- 7. Social Identity and Labor Politics -- Appendix I. Workers in Moscow's Economic Sectors -- Appendix II. The 1932 Trade Union Census.

This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities - Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews, and others - this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire's diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks' social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant "imperial" imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.

This book offers a comparative analysis of value and identity changes in several post-Soviet countries. In light of the tremendous economic, social and political changes in former communist states, the authors compare the values, attitudes and identities of different generations and cultural groups. Based on extensive empirical data, using quantitative and qualitative methods to study complex social identities, this book examines how intergenerational value and identity changes are linked to socio-economic and political development. Topics include the rise of nationalist sentiments, identity formation of ethnic and religious groups and minorities, youth identity formation and intergenerational value conflicts.

How did enlightened Russians of the eighteenth century understand society? And how did they reconcile their professed ideals of equality and justice with the authoritarian political structures in which they lived? Historian Elise Wirtschafter turns to literary plays to reconstruct the social thinking of the past and to discover how Enlightenment Russians understood themselves. Opening with an illuminating discussion of the development of theater in eighteenth-century Russia, Wirtschafter goes on to explore dramatic representations of key social questions. Based on an examination of nearly 300 secular plays written during the last half of the century, she shows how dramas for the stage represented and debated important public issues--such as the nature of the common good, the structure of the patriarchal household, the duty of monarchs, and the role of the individual in society. Wirtschafter presents a striking reconstruction of the way educated Russians conceptualized a society beyond the immediate spheres of household and locality. Seeking to highlight problems of "social consciousness," she asks what Enlightenment Russians thought about social experience--and how their ideas related to actual social relationships in a society organized around serfdom and absolute monarchy. She portrays Russian Enlightenment culture on its own terms, while at the same time shedding light on broader problems of social order and political authority in imperial Russia.

Combining concepts and methodologies from anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, music, cultural studies, and film studies, this collection of ten original essays addresses issues crucial to gender and national identity in Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 to the present. Collectively, these interdisciplinary essays explore how traditional gender inequities influenced the social processes of nation building in Russia and how men and women responded to those developments. Available in both clothbound and paperback editions, Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture offers fresh insights to students and scholars in the fields of gender studies, nationhood studies, and Russian history, literature, and culture.