Suchergebnisse

The compelling trope of 'Russia and the West,' or to be more precise, 'Russia Under Western Eyes,' has produced a vast and significant body of literature. This has helped in the political framing of the twentieth century as a world divided between the democratic and market-based nations of the West, and the dictatorial and state controlled countries in the Soviet East. Simultaneously, it has served to bury, blunt, and otherwise obscure perspectives from the colonized world on the East–West dichotomy. An analysis of the travel writings of two important Indian visitors to the Soviet Union, M.N. Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, shows that Europe's imperial subjects filtered their impressions of Soviet authoritarianism through their own experiences of repressive Western imperialism, thus charting a new global map of political freedom. Roy and Tagore's writings, powered by both their colonial and Soviet experiences, make a significant contribution to the twentieth-century intellectual debates on moral freedom, individualism, and authoritarianism.

Based on a comparison of the prison experiences of Ekaterina Breshko- Breshkovskaia, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, revolutionary and Hindu fundamentalist, I ask two central questions: How did Breshkovskaia's story about exile and punishment help establish the tsarist genealogy of the gulag in the western consciousness, while the suffering of political prisoners in British India, as exemplified by Savarkar, were completely occluded? How and why did the specificity of incarceration in the Russian empire eclipse systems of punishment designed by other European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this article, I argue that the penumbra of modernity was darkened not only by the savagery of the Holocaust and the gulag but also by the brutal violence of western imperialism. Placing the Russian prison and exile system in comparative global perspective opens up new avenues of research in a field that has relied excessively on the intellectual binaries of a repressive Russia and a liberal western Europe.

I met Gabriela Macias a few months ago in an undergraduate class in history that I teach to prospective high school teachers. A diminutive middle-aged woman, Gabriela was watchful in class and seemed indifferent to my attempts to reach through her stony silences. But a couple of weeks into the class, I made a breakthrough. We had been discussing the role of passion in education. I had started the discussion by insisting that unless teachers feel a real sense of commitment to the student body and feel passionate about empowering students with knowledge and ideas, they have no business being in the classroom. In retrospect, my statements seemed a little extreme, but it is hard to entice students to enter the teaching profession by the prospect of tests, more state-administered tests, and even more standardized examinations! When Gabriela started speaking, the class fell silent. But it was not her eloquence that silenced us; it was her accent. Her accent was impenetrable! I am troubled by this public admission and even considered omitting this sentence from this essay. As an immigrant from India, I find people often have trouble understanding the stubborn Indian cadences that litter my superficially Americanized speech. But that day we all strained to understand Gabriela.

In this essay, I analyze the discourses that American women generated on the subject of the Russian Revolution of 1917, a body of works that has for the most part escaped critical scrutiny. While the First World War slowed tourist traffic to Russia, by 1917 there was a substantial contingent of American women in Petrograd reporting on the revolution. Unlike male narratives of the revolution, women's literature avoids diagnosing the Russian condition, or expertly summing up the Russian character. These correspondents, rather than focusing on abstract political philosophies and political events, recorded the intimate ways that individuals experienced class warfare, political instability, and economic dislocations. I argue that this technique of vivid impressionism was perhaps a more suitable method to represent the revolution than as a coherent, logical, and transparent narrative. In this essay, I analyze the gendered travel narratives of the Russian Revolution, a genre that is unique as it is under-theorized, and reveal an unknown dimension to Russian-American relations.

Scholars of Russian-American relations in the late nineteenth century have long been concerned with the personalities and writings of university-based experts, journalists, diplomats, and political activists. We are well acquainted with the observations of various American commentators on the backward state of Russian state, society, economy, and politics. While the activities of prominent men such as George Kennan have effortlessly dominated the historical agenda, the negative discourses that they produced about Russia have subsumed other important American representations of the country. Since the period of early modern history, European travelers had seen Russia as a barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasions of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar. Subsequently, Larry Wolff has shown that Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophers created images of a despotic and backward Eastern Europe in order to validate the idea of a progressive, enlightened, and civilized Western Europe.

In these original essays on long-term patterns of everyday life in prerevolutionary, Soviet, and contemporary Russia, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized daily existence for Russians through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the