These are challenging times.  My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine at this difficult hour.  

That said, I'm going to try to post a little more often in the coming months.  In part this is because I am planning to teach a course in the Russian Revolution, and that course starts next week.  The book I've assigned for this course is Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution, edited by Todd Chretien.  The book does a reasonably good job of stringing primary sources together to describe both the bourgeois and Bolshevik phases of the unrest of 1917.  However, the book is clearly intended to describe the October Revolution from a pro-Bolshevik standpoint.  It relies very heavily on Bolshevik sources, or sources friendly to Lenin's general line of thinking.  It fails to provide readers with many alternative perspectives. For me, it was interesting to hear how Leftist historians might interpret each phase of the Revolution, but for students without much historical context the selected sources might prove misleading. Still, I'm hopeful that I can use the pro-Bolshevik sources as a counterpoint to my own views about the meaning of events.

As preparation for online presentations, I looked at some of the Very Short Introduction books related to the general context of the Russian Revolution.  All of these were fairly good.  The most relevant of these books was S.A. Smith's Russian Revolution, but I used Stephen Lowell's book, The Soviet Union, to help me think about how the Revolution fits into the overall trajectory of the USSR, and Michael Newman's book, Socialism, to place the Bolsheviks into a broader socialist tradition.  I also relied on the introductory chapters of Jack Goldstone's Revolutions, if only to remind me of some basic questions students should think about when they come to the study of social unrest for the first time.  (See my earlier post on this book) I do think that book should be tempered by Hannah Arendt's On Revolution is better, however, in that it tries to explain that revolutions aren't really an ahistorical phenomenon, as Goldstone seems to contend.  In other words, the term Revolution, as we understand it today, has very little to do with premodern forms of social unrest, revolt, and armed resistance.

While discussing Russian books in this series, I should conclude by saying that earlier, I also read and liked Catriona Kelly's Russian Literature.  And I hope to read the books on Marx and the Russian Economy soon. 

S.A. Smith's The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

As one might expect from the author's expertise, S.A. Smith's The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction is a very informed account of the Russian Revolution and its influence up until the 1930s.  The book provides readers a concise account of revolutionary events but tries to introduce readers to some of the major areas of research into the revolution and its immediate aftermath.  Smith seems particularly interested in issues related to nationalism and ethnic minorities in the Revolution and in the Soviet Union.  He touches on issues related to gender, the arts, modernization, etc.  One might do better to read his relatively recent Russia in Revolution, however, since this book does feel caught somewhere between a high school text and a grad school preliminary exam preparation book.  And perhaps the issue is that Smith attempted to cover the narrative but also the historiography, and that might be too hard to do in A Very Short Introduction, even though I recall liking Catriona Kelly's Russian literature book in this series fairly well.

Everyday St. Petersburg

I’m scheduled to go to return to return to St. Petersburg in about a month.  If all goes accordingly to plan, my two-week administrative Fulbright will take me to Kaliningrad, Archangelsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.  As some of my readers may know, I am not conversant in Russian and have only been to Russia once in my life.  On my single visit to Russia I stayed in St. Petersburg, which quickly became my favorite place in the world.  To a large extent, my love of the city is predicated on my fascination with what Solomon Volkov called “the myth of St. Petersburg,” which focuses on a long series of interconnecting legends of monarchical power, aesthetic and political inventiveness, and resistance to Nazi (and even Stalinist) totalitarianism.  The power of the St. Petersburg myth rests on the firm foundations of dozens of brilliant historical and quintessentially modern actors, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, and Anna Ahkmatova, as well as on Leningrad’s 900 day siege.  As I walked up and down the Nevsky Prospect, or took a boat tour of the city’s famed canals, I hardly needed to interact with the “real” St. Petersburg at all.   At first, I thought that the St. Petersburg I visited two years ago was oddly historical.  Only interacting with people when I needed to order a sandwich or ask for the way to a hidden museum entrance, I was the archetypal tourist, staring at the city’s bridges, cathedrals, and palaces—many of which were utterly impervious to time.  But perhaps my second visit to St. Petersburg will allow me, or force me, to catch at least a glimpse of life beyond the myth.    This is of course easier said than done.  I have encountered St. Petersburg many times, but always through the lens of literature.  These encounters, and even those which are mediated by the work of literary theorists, are in a sense of a form of concentrated mythology.  The house museums in St. Petersburg are a case in point.  My first visit to St. Petersburg put me in one writer’s flat after another.  Genius (the genius of Blok, Ahkmatova, Pushkin, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky—I never could locate Leskov’s pad) permeated the city. 

If there’s any academic anecdote to the myth of St. Petersburg, it is certainly Catriona Kelly’s recent book, St. Petersburg:  Shadows of the Past.  In this book, Kelly does her best to circumvent the city’s legacy of aesthetic and political brilliance.  Instead, she takes an almost anthropological tour of the city, explaining how ordinary Russian and Soviet citizens lived everyday life.  Kelly’s tour de horizon of Leningrad/St. Petersburg takes us into the most quotidian aspects of the city’s existence.  Relying on insights from scholars in the field of cultural studies and related fields, Kelly breaks city life down into its simplest parts.  Where did people live?  How did they make use of their shared and private space?  What did they eat?  How did they get to work or move around the city?  What entertainment did they seek out?  The value of Kelly’s work is immense, especially in light of the fact that the city has been subjected to so many one-sided treatments in the past.  St. Petersburg’s denizens did not (and do not) spend their lives at the ballet; nor do they always fret about politics.  More often than not, men and women are navigating complex rituals related to their kitchens, television sets, and recreational activities.  Kelly’s treatment of everyday life in St. Petersburg is encyclopedic, although it deliberately deemphasizes those aspects of city life that have already been documented, including work as well as politics and art.  While Kelly, a scholar of language, is intimately familiar with St. Petersburg’s poetry scene, she only quotes specific poems to illustrate some detail of the people’s most banal experiences.  One downside of Kelly’s approach to her subject matter, is that St. Petersburg often seems to be the mirror image of every major, modern city.  Although Kelly explores many of the city’s peculiarities, one is left with the overall impression of urban sameness.  If you take away the political and artistic myths, and spend no time admiring the city’s famed Bronzed Horseman, you might be anywhere.  Her argument might be summed up this way:  if you live in Chicago, how much time do you really spend dwelling on the significance of the lion sculptures that adorn the Art Institute?  As somebody who recently left the city to take up residence in a distant suburb, located in what one scholar labeled “the geography of nowhere,” I can’t fully embrace her line of thinking.  Cities are more than the sum of their parts.  While it’s interesting to note that the citizens of St. Petersburg rarely actually use its famed canals in the service of business interests, the canals have been, and remain, vitally if ineffably linked to what it means to inhabit (as well as visit) this special place.