Taming The Wild Field

Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Drawing on sources and archival materials in Russian and Turkic languages, Russia's Steppe Frontier presents a complex picture of the encounter between indigenous peoples and the Russians. It is an original and invaluable resource for understanding Russia's imperial experience. Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.

From a 1994 conference (U. of California, Berkeley), Borderlands Research Group participants present their findings based on unprecedented access to the hinterlands of what is the now the CIS. Fourteen contributors provide context for the current self- deterministic ethnic turmoil in Chechyna and elsewhere far from the Kremlin, via discussions of tsarist colonial policies and historical, heartland majority attitudes toward the "ignoble savages and unfaithful subjects" (read Muslim) of Russia's diverse Orient. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.

"Animal Metropolis includes a diverse array of work on the historical study of human-animal relations in Canada. In doing so, it aims to create a starting point for an ongoing conversation about the place of animals in historical analysis and, in turn, about the way issues regarding animals fit into Canada's political, social, cultural, economic, environmental and ethical landscapes. One of the most striking aspects of this collection is its capacity to present a wide variety of topics, sources and methodologies within a tightly focused theme. The sources employed in these articles cover a broad spectrum, from state and legal documents to the popular press, from corporate records and NGO reports to personal diaries, and from materials on industrial agriculture to those of the tourism industry. Even more compelling than the sources are the methodological issues that the collection raises. One of our key objectives is to highlight the sheer diversity of approaches historians are employing in their efforts to analyze non-human subjects that do not produce documentary records of their own. By focusing explicitly on urban contexts the book aims deliberately to cleave from a more obvious focus on wild animals and the wilderness environment that are so iconic to Canada. Readers will be impressed by the range of creatures, both domestic and wild: from horses and dogs to beavers and wolves to whales, fish, polar bears and captive elephants. Covering small and larger regions, and in some instances the nation as a whole, the collection offers impressive breadth in scope. Varying widely in the lenses through which human-animal relations are viewed, it brings to the forefront the contemporary as well as the historical dimensions of the issues it raises."--

This book explores the multicultural world of historical Russia through the life stories of 31 individuals that exemplify the cross-cultural exchanges in the country from the late 1500s to post-Soviet Russia.

An examination of how land became a measured entitlement in Russia.