Ines Garcia de la Puente, “What Route Does the Povest’ vremennykh let Really Describe?”
The present article reviews our understanding of the “Route from the Varangians to the Greeks,” a route that is presumably described in the introductory part of the Povest’ vremennykh let. An analysis of the passage of the PVL that contains what is traditionally considered the description of the Route will show not only that the description appears in an order inverted to the one we would expect, but that the route described is not a linear one. Putting the relevant passage its wider context, namely, all the pre-852 part of the PVL, and discussing its ties to Saint Andrew’s legend will allow us to see how the route’s description fits in its literary context. Ultimately, a syntactical analysis of the relevant passage of the PVL will lead us to interpret the Route from the Varangians to the Greeks as well as its presumed description from a new perspective.
Aaron J. Cohen, “Long Ago and Far Away: War Monuments, Public Relations, and the Memory of the Russo-Japanese War in Russia, 1907-14”
The Russo-Japanese War has a special place in the history of Russian memorial culture: it was a costly defeat whose public commemoration in a time of social, political, and cultural change helped alter, at least for a short time, the meaning and depiction of war. One might presume that the imperial Russian government, let alone ordinary people, would have preferred to forget one of the greatest military and political fiascos in the country's modem history. Yet by 1913 the government had constructed several monuments in the environs of St. Petersburg and organized a commission to bring order to combat sites in Manchuria. This remembrance had several goals: to reinforce the official ideal that the people were at one with tsar and fatherland, to uphold the reputation of a military in disgrace, and to win public support for controversial rearmament policies in the more open political environment that existed after 1905. But the fallen lay in foreign lands or under distant seas, the tsarist government had little public credibility or popular support, and new institutions and audiences proved unreceptive to the traditional memorial practices of the autocratic state. The promoters of official memory therefore tried to reduce the space between the population and the war: they used memorials to bring the fighting closer to home, focused on the experiences of ordinary soldiers and sailors to encourage sympathy for the rank-and-file in the broad public, and promoted a more plebeian war narrative that obscured the role of autocracy in the disaster. War remembrance strategies after 1907 thus show a pattern of innovation in public relations that historians have rarely associated with the often backward-looking or out-of-touch official culture that prevailed in the reign of Nicholas II.
Michael Melancon, “Trial Run for Soviet Food Requisitioning: The Expedition to Orel Province, Fall 1918”
This study utilizes a collection in the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi ekonomicheskii arkhiv to examine the komandirovka of the entire Commissariat of Agriculture, under Agriculture Commissar Sereda’s leadership, to Elets district, Orel Province, between August and December 1918. The Sereda Expedition turned put to be the testing ground for the Soviet Union’s new grain requisitioning program (prodrazverstka) introduced by decree in early 1919. Surprisingly, English language sources and most Soviet ones fail to notice, much less analyze the Elets mission, in part because almost all historical commentary has assumed that only the Commissariat of Food Supply played a significant role in food collection. In reality, only in the Agriculturel Commissariat’s expedition were all the aspects of prodrazverstka applied and only there occurred the various adjustments that came to characterize the actual decree. Close analysis of the Elets Expedition’s experience is deeply revealing about the motivations and orientations that led to the fateful prodrazverstka program, which ultimately led to famine and vast peasant uprisings, which together almost brought down the new government. Beyond that, the expedition’s records are deeply revealing about the Leninist government’s decision making and priorities. They also shed a direct light on internal government discourse all the way from the village and volost level up to Lenin at a formative period in the construction of the new soviet state. The study’s findings confirm the new government’s disdain for market mechanisms but also suggest its inclination to utilize force in lieu of viable alternatives to the market. The government’s harsh early policies reflected more than the exigencies of revolution and civil war.
Anita Kondoyanidi, “The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps”
Once the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht to the border of Eastern Europe in 1944, the majority of seasoned soldiers expected the war to end. The military press and the Main Political Department of the Army now faced the gargantuan task of persuading reluctant soldiers to continue fighting. Soviet newspapers described Nazi crimes on a regular basis, but neither the Soviet Information Bureau nor the army’s political departments could invent a better piece of propaganda than the death camps that the Nazis had left behind in Poland. Since June 22, 1941, Red army soldiers had witnessed the mass extermination of Soviet citizens on their own land, but they had not encountered crimes committed on such a concentrated and well-organized scale until they liberated Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945. The Soviet government began to use this to encourage its soldiers to fight until Berlin.
Baktygul Aliev, “Desacralizing the Idyll: Chekhov’s Transformation of the Pastoral”
Anton Chekhov’s short story “The Teacher of Literature” and his play “The Cherry Orchard” illustrate one of the underlying principles of Chekhov’s use of the pastoral genre. Critics have tended to interpret pastoral images in Chekhov’s works in opposition to “anti-pastoral” and “progress.” This paper argues that Chekhov builds continuity between the worlds of pastoral and progress by showing how both worldviews are based on automation and how the idea of mechanism is implicit in the seemingly opposite worldviews. Both the short story and the play use pastoral tropes explicitly and therefore ask to be analyzed from the standpoint of the pastoral genre. In my interpretation of the pastoral, I interpret the idea of a pastoral Golden Age as a dividing point between the sacred and profane mythological domains.
Keith Livers, “The Tower or the Labyrinth: Conspiracy, Occult, and Empire-Nostalgia in the Work of Viktor Pelevin and Aleksandr Prokhanov”
The two decades since George Bush, Sr.’s, proclamation of a new world order following the fall of communism have produced, among others, an upsurge in the quantity and popularity of various kinds of conspiracy narratives, according to Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Transparency And Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order [2003]). Meanwhile, the first decade of the twenty-first century seems to be particularly keen on viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens, as attested to in the Russian context by the tremendous popularity of the genre among contemporary writers—from Sergei Luk’ianenko’s Night/Day Watch series to Pelevin’s Generation P and Empire V (or the Sorokin Ice trilogy) and, finally, Prokhanov’s Gospodin Geksogen. At first glance, it would seem to be a stretch to consider the elusive postmodernist, Pelevin, and the ultraconservative neo-Stalinist and anti-Semite, Prokhanov, in the same breath. Yet closer examination reveals a common interest in conspiracy/occult, as well as a distinct nostalgic strain (obviously quite unabashed in Prokhanov’s case) that appears to mirror a broader cultural landscape. What these two modes have in common is their yearning (implicit or explicit) for a metanarrative to replace the “desert ... of history” that shadowed the former empire throughout the 1990s. Drawing on a growing body of critical literature that deals with the subject, this essay proceeds from the assumption that a postmodern crisis of agency has spurred the growth of conspiracy/occult narratives in contemporary Russian literature, even as it fuels a growing nostalgia for the grand narratives of empire and imperial power. Pelevin and Prokhanov—though miles apart politically and aesthetically—function as our guides to this unusual hybrid genre.