AbstractThe article offers a detailed analysis of the debates at the All-Russian Democratic Conference and in the Provisional Council of the Russian Republic (the Pre-Parliament), which followed the proclamation of the republic on September 1, 1917, and predated the Bolshevik-led insurgency on October 25. The two assemblies were supposed to help resolve the multilayered political, economic, and military crises of the First World War and the Revolution by consolidating a Russian postimperial political community and establishing a solid government. The debates demonstrated that grievances and antagonism, which were articulated in terms of class and nationality, made the idea of a broad nationalist coalition unpopular, since it would halt agrarian and other reforms and continue the negligence of non-Russian groups. Furthermore, those who still called for all-Russian national or civic unity split on the issue of community-building. The top-down, homogenizing and bottom-up, composite approaches proved irreconcilable and precluded a compromise between non-socialist and moderate socialist groups. The two assemblies hence failed to ensure a peaceful continuation of the postimperial transformation and did not lead to a broad coalition against right and left radicalism. The divisions, which were articulated in the two assemblies, translated into the main rifts of the Russian Civil War.
Abstract This article explores how the Islamic elegiac genre of marthiya can shed new light on the social and cultural history of the Muslims of Russia's Volga-Ural region in the late imperial period (1870s-1917). The marthiyas enjoyed great popularity across geographical, ethnic, and factional lines as a medium for asserting and affirming social bonds and expressing collective identities. Volga-Ural marthiyas reveal the links between Sufism and Tatar national history-writing, demonstrate the interrelation between Sufi literature and Muslim revolutionary culture, and point to historical figures and groups that were left out of the evolving Tatar national historiography.