Download or read book Renovating Russia written by Daniel Beer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renovating Russia is a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics. In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering. Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization. Renovating Russia thus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
Download or read book The Restoration of Agriculture in the Famine Area of Russia written by Russian S.F.S.R. and published by . This book was released on 1922 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cultivating the Masses written by David L. Hoffmann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
Download or read book Russia s Own Orient written by Vera Tolz and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia's own Orient examines how intellectuals in early twentieth-century Russia offered a new and radical critique of the ways in which Oriental cultures were understood at the time. Out of the ferment of revolution and war, a group of scholars in St. Petersburg articulated fresh ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge, and about Europe and Asia as mere political and cultural constructs. Their ideas anticipated the work of Edward Said and post-colonial scholarship by half a century. The similarities between the two groups were, in fact, genealogical. Said was indebted, via Arab intellectuals of the 1960s who studied in the Soviet Union, to the revisionist ideas of Russian Orientologists of the fin de siècle. But why did this body of Russian scholarship of the early twentieth century turn out to be so innovative? Should we agree with a popular claim of the Russian elites about their country's particular affinity with the 'Orient'? There is no single answer to this question. The early twentieth century was a period when all over Europe a fascination with things 'Oriental' engendered the questioning of many nineteenth-century assumptions and prejudices. In that sense, the revisionism of Russian Orientologists was part of a pan-European trend. And yet, Tolz also argues that a set of political, social, and cultural factors, which were specific to Russia, allowed its imperial scholars to engage in an unusual dialogue with representatives of the empire's non-European minorities. It is together that they were able to articulate a powerful long-lasting critique of modern imperialism and colonialism, and to shape ethnic politics in Russia across the divide of the 1917 revolutions.
Download or read book Russia s Turn to Persia written by Denis V. Volkov and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on recently declassified and unpublished sources to provide an original and in-depth analysis of Russian and Soviet Iranian studies.
Download or read book Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe written by Mark D. Steinberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together important new work by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe approaches emotions as a phenomenon complexly intertwined with society, culture, politics, and history. The stories in this book involve sensitive aristocrats, committed revolutionaries, aggressive nationalists, political leaders, female victims of sexual violence, perpetrators and victims of Stalinist terror, citizens in the former Yugoslavia in the wake of war, workers in post-socialist Romania, Balkan Romani "Gypsy" musicians, and veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. These essays explore emotional perception and expression not only as private, inward feeling but also as a way of interpreting and judging a troubled world, acting in it, and perhaps changing it. Essential reading for those interested in new perspectives on the study of Russia and Eastern Europe, past and present, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities who are seeking new and deeper approaches to understanding human experience, thought, and feeling.
Download or read book The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia written by George Gilbert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary movements in late tsarist Russia inspired a reaction by groups on the right. Although these groups were ostensibly defending the status quo, they were in fact, as this book argues, very radical in many ways. This book discusses these radical rightist groups, showing how they developed considerable popular appeal across the whole Russian Empire, securing support from a wide cross-section of society. The book considers the nature and organisation of the groups, their ideologies and polices on particular issues and how they changed over time. The book concludes by examining how and why the groups lost momentum and support in the years immediately before the First World War, and briefly explores how far present day rightist groups in Russia are connected to this earlier movement.
Download or read book Thinking Russia s History Environmentally written by Catherine Evtuhov and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2023 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of Russia were relative latecomers to the field of environmental history. Yet, in the past decade, the exploration of Russian environmental history has burgeoned. Thinking Russia's History Environmentally showcases collaboration amongst an international set of scholars who focus on the contribution that the study of Russian environments makes to the global environmental field. Through discerning analysis of natural resources, the environment as a factor in historical processes such as industrialization, and more recent human-animal interactions, this volume challenges stereotypes of Russian history and inso doing, highlights the unexpected importance of Russian environments across a time framewell beyond the ecological catastrophes of the Soviet period.
Download or read book Homo Imperii written by Marina Mogilner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely assumed that the "nonclassical" nature of the Russian empire and its equally "nonclassical" modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States. Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire, Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism. Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.
Download or read book Russians in Iran written by Rudi Matthee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russians in Iran seeks to challenge the traditional narrative regarding Russian involvement Iran and to show that whilst Russia's historical involvement in Iran is longstanding it is nonetheless much misunderstood. Russia's influence in Iran between 1800 and the middle of the twentieth century is not simply a story of inexorable intrusion and domination: rather, it is a complex and interactive process of mostly indirect control and constructive engagement. Drawing on fresh archival material, the contributors provide a window into the power and influence wielded in Iran not just by the Russian government through it traditional representatives but by Russian nationals operating in Iran in a variety of capacities, including individuals, bankers, and entrepreneurs. Russians in Iran reveals the multifaceted role that Russians have played in Iranian history and provides an original and important contribution to the history and international relations of Iran, Russia and the Middle East.
Download or read book The Russian Medical Humanities written by Melissa L. Miller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in English, The Russian Medical Humanities: Past and Present argues that the medical humanities is a vibrant and emerging field in Post-Soviet Russia. In a unique collaboration that brings together diverse experts from both Russia and America, this volume showcases the Russian medical humanities as an interdisciplinary project that combines insights from philosophy, bioethics, anthropology, history, and literature in order to provide more compassionate medical care to patients in the twenty-first century. The chapters in this volume explore past and present humanistic trends in Russian medical training, as well as examine how Russian authors and cultural figures, some physician-writers, some without professional background in medicine of any kind, have positioned healthy and ailing bodies in their creative work. This volume’s contributors, who range from literary scholars, educators, translators and poets to medical historians, librarians, museum curators, and social workers, provide empathetic insight into the experience of medical encounters which all cultures grapple with. Their work will prove useful not only to current and future health practitioners, but also to a broader audience of readers who are seeking to make compassionate and informed decisions about healthcare for their loved ones and for themselves.
Download or read book In Search of Russian Modernism written by Leonid Livak and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical reexamination of Russian modernist cultural historiography. Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures by the Modern Language Association The writing and teaching of Russian literary and cultural history have changed little since the 1980s. In Search of Russian Modernism challenges the basic premises of Russian modernist studies, removing the aura of certainty surrounding the analytical tools at our disposal and suggesting audacious alternatives to the conventional ways of thinking and speaking about Russian and transnational modernism. Drawing on methodological breakthroughs in Anglo-American new modernist studies, Leonid Livak explores Russian and transnational modernism as a story of a self-identified and self-conscious interpretive community that bestows a range of meanings on human experience. Livak's approach opens modernist studies to integrative and interdisciplinary analysis, including the extension of scholarly inquiry beyond traditional artistic media in order to account for modernism's socioeconomic and institutional history. Writing with a student audience in mind, Livak presents Russian modernism as a minority culture coexisting with other cultural formations while addressing thorny issues that regularly come up when discussing modernist artifacts. Aiming to open an overdue debate about the academic fields of Russian and transnational modernist studies, this book is also intended for an audience of scholars in comparative literary and cultural studies, specialists in Russian and transnational modernism, and researchers engaged with European cultural historiography.
Download or read book Lost to the Collective written by Kenneth M. Pinnow and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an act of unbridled individualism, suicide confronted the Bolshevik regime with a dilemma that challenged both its theory and its practice and helped give rise to a social science state whose primary purpose was the comprehensive and rational care of the population. Labeled a social illness and represented as a vestige of prerevolutionary culture, suicide in the 1920s raised troubling questions about individual health and agency in a socialist society, provided a catalyst for the development of new social bonds and subjective outlooks, and became a marker of the country's incomplete move toward a collectivist society. Determined to eradicate the scourge of self-destruction, the regime created a number of institutions and commissions to identify pockets of disease and foster an integrated social order. The Soviet confrontation with suicide reveals with particular force the regime's anxieties about the relationship between the state and the individual. In Lost to the Collective, Kenneth M. Pinnow suggests the compatibility of the social sciences with Bolshevik dictatorship and highlights their illusory promises of control over the everyday life of groups and individuals. The book traces the creation of national statistical studies, the course of medical debates about causation and expert knowledge, and the formation of a distinct set of practices in the Bolshevik Party and Red Army that aimed to identify the suicidal individual and establish his or her significance for the rest of society. Arguing that the Soviet regime represents a particular response to the pressures and challenges of modernity, the book examines Soviet socialism—from its intense concern with the individual to its quest to build an integrated society—as one response to the larger question of human unity.
Download or read book Beyond the Monastery Walls written by Patrick Lally Michelson and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the cultural and ideological foundations of imperial Russia were threatened by forces of modernity, an array of Orthodox churchmen, theologians, and lay thinkers turned to asceticism, hoping to ensure the coming Kingdom of God promised to the Russian nation.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine written by Mark Jackson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.
Download or read book Bolshevik Sexual Forensics written by Dan Healey and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an effort to modernize criminal and civil investigations, early Bolsheviks gave forensic doctors—most of whom had been trained under the tsarist regime—new authority over issues of sexuality. Revolutionaries believed that forensic medicine could provide scientific and objective solutions to sexual disorder in the new society. Bolshevik Sexual Forensics explores the institutional history of Russian and Soviet forensic medicine and examines the effects of its authority when confronting sexual disorder. Healey compares sex crime investigations from Petrograd and Sverdlovsk in the 1920s to the numerous publications by forensic doctors and psychiatrists of the prerevolutionary and early Soviet periods to illustrate the role that these specialists played. In addition, Healey presents a fascinating look at how doctors diagnosed and treated hermaphroditism, showing how Soviet physicians revolutionized the standard scientific view in these cases by taking into account individual desire. This study sheds light on unexplored radical and reactionary forces that shaped the Bolshevik "sexual revolution" as lawmakers defined new ways of seeing sexual crime and disorder. Forensic doctors struggled to interpret the replacement of the age of consent with a standard of "sexual maturity," a designation that made female sexuality a collective "resource," not part of an individual's personality. "Innocence," "experience," and virginity played a major role in the expertise doctors furnished in rape and abuse trials. Psychiatrists recoiled from the language of sexual psychology in their investigations of sex criminals. Yet in the clinic, Soviet physicians probed the desires of the two-sexed citizen, whose psychology served as the basis for a distinctly modern approach to the "erasure" of the hermaphrodite. Healey concludes that the vision of men and women as equals after a "sexual revolution" was undermined from the outset of the Soviet experiment. Law and medicine failed to protect women and girls from violence, and Soviet medicine's physiological and biological model of sexual citizenship erased the vision of sexual self-expression, especially for women. This groundbreaking study will appeal to Soviet historians and those interested in gender studies, sexuality, medicine, and forensics.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Orphans written by Rebecca Mitchell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prevailing belief among Russia’s cultural elite in the early twentieth century was that the music of composers such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Nikolai Medtner could forge a shared identity for the Russian people across social and economic divides. In this illuminating study of competing artistic and ideological visions at the close of Russia’s “Silver Age,” author Rebecca Mitchell interweaves cultural history, music, and philosophy to explore how “Nietzsche’s orphans” strove to find in music a means to overcome the disunity of modern life in the final tumultuous years before World War I and the Communist Revolution.
