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"Mark D. Steinberg explores the work of individuals he recognizes as utopians during the most dramatic period in Russian and Soviet history. It has long been a cliché to argue that Russian revolutionary movements have been inspired by varieties of 'utopian dreaming' - claims which, although not wrong, are too often used uncritically. For the first time, Russian Utopian digs deeper and asks what utopians meant at the level of ideas, emotions, and lived experience. Despite the fact that many would have resisted the 'utopian' label at the time because of its dismissive meanings, Steinberg's comprehensive approach sees him take in political leaders, intellectuals, writers, and artists (visual, material, and musical), as well as workers, peasants, soldiers, students and others. Ideologically, the figures discussed range from reactionaries to anarchists, nationalists (including non-Russians) to feminists, both religious believers and 'the militant godless'. This innovative text dissects the very notion of the Russian utopian and examines its significance in its various fascinating contexts"--

This is a new history of Russia's revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire (Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered, ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice and freedom

"The queen of lofty thoughts" : the cult of melancholy in Russian sentimentalism / Ilya Vinitsky -- Leaving your family in 1797 : two identities of Mikhail Muravʹev / Andrei Zorin -- Radicals and feelings : the 1860s / Victoria Frede -- Shame and modern subjectivities : the rape of Elizaveta Cheremnova / Alexandra Oberländer -- Thinking about feelings : affective dispositions and emotional ties in imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire / Ronald Grigor Suny -- Bolsheviks and emotional hermeneutics : the great purges, Bukharin, and the February-March Plenum of 1937 / Glennys Young -- Breaking the silence : Iurii Bondarev's quietness between the "sincerity" and "civic emotion" of the thaw / Polly Jones -- Emplaced and displaced : theorizing the emotions of space in the former Yugoslavia / Judith Pintar -- A genealogy of working-class anger : history, emotions, and political economy in Romania's Jiu Valley / Jack Friedman -- Music, emotion, and the "other" : Balkan Roma and the negotiation of exoticism / Carol Silverman -- Emotional blueprints : war songs as an affective medium / Serguei Alex. Oushakine

Printers are a compelling subject for the close study of social relationships and values during the years of deepening change and crisis in Russia from the 1860s to the aftermath of the 1905 revolution. Class relations among printers underwent a dramatic transformation as the industry evolved from a small handicraft producing mainly for the state and the church to a large and technologically developed capitalist industry. Occupational involvement in the spread of knowledge and ideas and contact with official efforts to control these made printers more than usually sensitive to the country's contentious civic life.

Moral storytelling about urban public life in Odesa in the 1920s is at the center of attention. A key social space is in focus: streets and corners as spaces and as concepts. And a particular storyteller is central: the well-known and yet biographically mysterious feuilletonist for the city's evening newspaper, "Al. Svetlov." Soviet journalists, like Soviet reality, were expected to offer ideological clarity: a morally unambiguous and teleologically straight story about the death of the past and the birth of a bright and healthy new world. But such temporal and moral (and thus political) consistency was elusive—in the urban spaces where "vestiges" of the old persisted, and in their telling, as observers found it difficult to sustain an unwavering and unambiguous moral orientation. The article asks also how minor and subordinated individuals understood their own lives, suggesting an orientation other than delinquency and pathology.