RURAL LIFE IN RUSSIA, 1700-1919
Ben Eklof, with Nadezhda Peterson, “Laska i Poriadok: The Daily Life of the Rural School in Late Imperial Russia”
In recent decades, several studies have established that basic schooling was far more widespread in European Russia on the eve of World War I than had earlier been thought, that peasant communities, the zemstvo and the state all played a role promoting education, and that literacy and numeracy achieved in primary schools were retained by former pupils. Given the Spartan conditions and abbreviated span of this schooling, how are we to explain the apparent effectiveness of the teaching recorded in the results? This article examines the strategies pursued by educators in terms of classroom organization, learning strategies, curriculum, and methods of teaching reading and writing as well as instilling knowledge about the world outside. The study of handbooks, the records of teachers’ congresses, daily and annual reports of school visitations by district inspectors and provincial directors, memoirs, and other sources demonstrates that a combination of exigency and belief defined an approach first labeled by Baron Korf as “laska i poriadok.” A firm belief in the goodness of the child was by necessity integrated with the necessity of maintaining order and momentum in schools where teachers worked simultaneously, in daunting physical conditions, with three different grade levels. The result was a tightly structured schedule firmly controlled by the authority of the teacher, close monitoring of efforts and results, but also the virtual elimination of corporal punishment, an emphasis upon positive rewards, and a classroom experience many children later remembered with great fondness. Exceptions and violations occurred of course, but the wealth of documents available suggests a pervasive “Russian pedagogy of schooling” which produced enviable results among deprived populations, and which set an atmosphere distinct from schools elsewhere in Europe, but also from secondary schools in Russia.
Erik Landis, “Who Were the ‘Greens’? Rumor and Collective Identity in the Russian Civil War”
This article highlights the role that collective-identity claims played in the genesis and development of movements of resistance. Localized efforts to resist conscription in the Red Army grew as the Soviet state intensified the hunt for draft dodgers, and these local acts of defiance grew more elaborate and threatened to assume mass form on the strength of received information regarding the apparent organization and linkages suggested by the collective labels “green” and “green army” to describe Civil War-era neutralism. The mechanisms by which the green phenomenon spread and assumed a measure of seriousness behind the front lines of the Red Army reveals much about the structural conditions of civil war in Russia that conditioned this and other episodes of popular mobilization. Ultimately, however, the failure of the greens as a mass movement serves to indicate the importance of other factors beyond considerations of opportunity and material resources that are integral to the successful development of movements. Among these was the articulation and projection of a historically contextualized, politicized collective identity.
Boris N. Mironov, “Wages and Prices in Imperial Russia, 1703–1913”
Between 1713 and 1913, prices in St. Petersburg, as well as in Russia, rose 5.3 times. This was a true revolution in prices, influencing all aspects of life, and especially real wages. During the eighteenth century the real wages of St. Petersburg workers declined by 1.2 times; between 1801 and 1860 wages increased more than twofold; between 1861 and 1913 wages fluctuated; and in 1913 they returned to the level of 1851-60. Wages and prices in Russia’s capital and individual provinces changed in concert, although their levels differed significantly.
ARTICLES
Pål Kolstø, “‘For here we do not have an enduring city’: Tolstoy and the Strannik Tradition in Russian Culture”
Lev Tolstoy’s religious message was explicitly formulated as an alternative to the teaching of the Russian Church. Even so, in important ways he drew upon the spirituality of the Orthodox religious tradition. Several well-known informal religious institutions in Russian society presented themselves as possible media or “forms” through which Tolstoy could communicate his teaching to his contemporaries. Among those that he himself singled out as particularly important was the strannik, the Orthodox pilgrim or “wanderer.” After his break with the Church in 1881, Tolstoy set off on foot, wearing a peasant jacket, bast shoes tied with rags, a knapsack on his back and a wanderer’s staff in his hand, to visit the famed startsy at the Optina Pustyn’ monastery. Tolstoy was strongly imbued with Orthodox ways of thinking and it can be demonstrated that he incorporated many important elements of Orthodox spirituality into his own religious system. In its basic structure, however, his teaching nevertheless differed significantly from the Orthodox worldview. The elements he picked from Orthodox spirituality underwent a radical change of meaning when applied to his message. Thus, in determining the relationship of Tolstoy to the Orthodox Church we must emphasize both continuity and rupture at the same time. To say that Tolstoy was influenced by Orthodox spirituality is not the same as to say that he in any way was an Orthodox believer—clearly he was not. Rather it is a recognition that in nineteenth-century Russia the world view of the Orthodox church rubbed off even on some of its most vehement detractors.
Stephen Brain, “Stalin’s Environmentalism”
This article discusses the origin and development of Stalin’s Environmentalism—a unique variety of environmentalism, adapted to the political realities of socialist dictatorships, motivated not by aesthetic or moral concerns, but by a desire to protect the hydrological role of forests. This new form of environmentalism emerged in the early 1930s, in the wake of the Politburo’s decision to transfer authority for the nation’s forests away from the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and to the industrially-oriented Supreme Soviet of the Economy, which supported a regime of widespread concentrated cutting with little or no allowances for forest regeneration. When the undesirable results of this decision became clear, however, the Soviet government put a quick end to this arrangement; less than a year after VSNKh took control, and at Stalin’s directive, the Soviet Union’s forests were divided into two zones, the water protective zone and the forest industrial zone, and commercial logging in the former was prohibited. Over the next two decades, the authority of the bureaus administering the protected forests expanded such that by 1947—despite the resistance and even sabotage of the industrial agencies—the conservation bureaus came to oversee all of the Soviet Union’s forests. The size of the protected forests increased as well, eventually growing into the world’s largest forest area protected from commercial exploitation. The article describes the process whereby the Politburo confronted and defeated would-be industrializers of the forest, and in so doing shows what kind of environmentalism is compatible with a socialist, authoritarian dictatorship such as Stalin’s Russia.
Katy Turton, “The Revolutionary, His Wife, the Party, and the Sympathizer: The Role of Family Members and Party Supporters in the Release of Revolutionary Prisoners”
In 1908, one of the Bolsheviks’ leading members, Grigorii Evseevich Zinoviev, was arrested and imprisoned for two months. His release was obtained as a result of efforts made by his wife and comrade, Zlata Lilina, the St. Petersburg Party Committee, the Bolshevik Elena Stasova and her father, Dmitrii, and the prominent Jewish aristocrat, Baron David Gintsburg. Evidence for their involvement can be found in an autobiographical account by Zinoviev, Gintsburg’s private correspondence and the petitions which Lilina, Zinoviev and Gintsburg sent to the tsarist authorities. Examining similar sources relating to other Russian revolutionaries demonstrates that Zinoviev’s experience was by no means rare, and that many party agents had family members and sympathetic friends (who were often related to other revolutionaries) on whom they could rely for help. This article explores the types of support revolutionaries received while in prison and exile, as well as some of the tactical ways in which revolutionaries could exploit traditional conceptions of family life to obtain special consideration or even release from tsarist officials. The Zinoviev case and the countless others like it suggest that revolutionaries and their parties cannot be studied in isolation and that instead, the support provided by family members and sympathizers must be taken into account if the life of the revolutionary and the operation of the movement are to be fully understood.