NEW SCIENTIFIC WORKS ON THE MODERN BELARUSIAN AND POLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE HISTORY OF THE LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET STATE

Author(s):  
Oksana Babenko ◽  

The review presents new publications on the Belarusian and the Polish historiographies of the history of the late Imperial Russia and the Soviet State. Such problems as the number and conditions of detention of foreign prisoners of war in the Belarusian territories of the Russian Empire during the First World War, the influence of the military conflicts of 1914-1921 on the identity of the inhabitants of the Belarusian lands, the initial stage of the formation of academic science in the BSSR, the question of the «invasion» of Poland by the Red Army in September 1939 are highlighted.

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
Boris Valentinovich Petelin ◽  
Vladilena Vadimovna Vorobeva

In the political circles of European countries attempts to reformat the history of World War II has been continuing. Poland is particularly active; there at the official level, as well as in the articles and in the speeches of politicians, political scientists and historians crude attacks against Russia for its commitment to objective assessments of the military past are allowed. Though, as the authors of this article mention, Russian politicians have not always been consistent in evaluation of Soviet-Polish relationships, hoping to reach a certain compromise. If there were any objections, they were mostly unconvincing. Obviously, as the article points, some statements and speeches are not without emotional colouring that is characteristic, when expressing mutual claims. However, the deliberate falsification of historical facts and evidence, from whatever side it occurs, does not meet the interests of the Polish and Russian peoples, in whose memory the heroes of the Red Army and the Polish Resistance have lived and will live. The authors point in the conclusions that it is hard to achieve mutual respect to key problems of World War II because of the overlay of the 18th – 19th centuries, connected with the “partitions of Poland”, the existence of the “Kingdom of Poland” as part of the Russian Empire, Soviet-Polish War of 1920. There can be only one way out, as many Russian and Polish scientists believe – to understand the complex twists and turns of Russo-Polish history, relying on the documents. Otherwise, the number of pseudoscientific, dishonest interpretations will grow.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 1189-1201
Author(s):  
M. D. Bukharin

The territorial expansion of the Russian Empire in the 18th–19th cent. resulted in urgent need to study both the peoples of the newly acquired Eastern territories, which becameRussiaas well as and their neighbours. A special role in this process was played by the military servicemen who stationed on the borders. Since the second half of the 18th century in the Russian military schools was developed a system of teaching Oriental languages. In his recent monograph “The History of the Study of Oriental Languages in the Russian Imperial Army” (St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoria; 2018) the author M. K. Baskhanov provides a detailed description of the history and teaching process in 24 Russian military schools where the cadettes were taught Oriental languages. M. K. Baskhanov outlines strengths and weaknesses of the teaching curricula, as well as the results gained by the Russian servicemen subject to this training. The author pays special attention to prospected plans in Orientalist training, which have never been implemented. The summary of M. K. Baskhanov’s research is that in spite of significant intellectual potential of the military specialists in Eastern countries their knowledge and experience were not used in full ‒ either in Imperial Russia or during the Soviet time. The monograph by M. K. Baskhanov is a remarkable piece of modern historical studies, which will be a reference book for many years to come for those who studyRussia’s foreign policy in 18th–20th cent.


Slavic Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Plamper

This article provides an analysis of the locus of fear in military psychology in late imperial Russia. After the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, the debate coalesced around two poles: “realists” (such as the military psychiatrist Grigorii Shumkov) argued that fear was natural, while “romantics” upheld the image of constitutionally fearless soldiers. Jan Plamper begins by identifying the advent of modern warfare (foreshadowed by the Crimean War) and its engendering of more and different fears as a key cause for a dramatic increase in fear-talk among Russia's soldiers. He links these fears to literature, which offered—most prominentiy in Lev Tolstoi's Sevastopol Sketches (1855)—some of the vocabulary soldiers could use to express their fears. Mikhail Dragomirov's fear-centered military theory during the Great Reforms was the next milestone. Plamper closes by sketching the history of fear after World War I, from Iosif Stalin's penal battalions to the rehabilitation of military psychology under Nikita Khrushchev and beyond.


2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 901-925 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Borisova

Researchers of the history of late imperial Russia quite often base their studies on the texts of laws as recorded in the official edition: the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire (Polnoe Sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii). The laws were published there in chronological order for purposes of conducting inquiries; it was specifically the Complete Collection in which the original text of a decree approved by the emperor could generally be found.


Author(s):  
Oleksandr Bezarov

The assassination attempt on the life of P. A. Stolypin, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire, on September 1, 1911 in Kyiv, made by D. G. Bogrov, a former member of the Kyivan organization of anarchists-communist and secret agent of the Kyiv Security Section of the Police Department, can be considered one of the most mysterious events in the history of late imperial Russia. Despite a large number of published archival documents on the history of this case, in modern historical science there is no unambiguous answer to the questions about the true motives that pushed D. G. Bogrov to commit this violent murder. According to the author, in the motives of the assassination of P. A. Stolypin by D. G. Bogrov, the factor of nationality of the terrorist played some role. D. G. Bogrov, a typical representative of the assimilated Russian-Jewish intellectuals did not become a convinced revolutionary; instead he lacked public recognition of his personal ambitions to satisfy which having the status of a Jewish citizen appeared to be not so simple. Public suicide in the form of an assassination attempt on the life of the famous Russian reformer became for D. G. Bogrov a tragic finale in his painful processes of finding ways to overcome the crisis of identity. Keywords: D. G. Bogrov, P. A. Stolypin, Kyiv, Jews, Russian empire, terrorism, anarchism


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-682
Author(s):  
Alfrid Bustanov

AbstractThis article explores the practices of private communication of Muslims at the eclipse of the Russian empire. The correspondence of a young Kazan mullah with his family and friends lays the ground for an analysis of subjectivity at the intersection of literary models and personal experience. In personal writings, individuals selected from a repertoire of available tools for self-fashioning, be that the usage of notebooks, the Russian or Muslim calendar, or peculiarities of situational language use. Letters carried the emotions of their writers as well as evoking emotions in their readers. While still having access to the Persianate models of the self, practiced by previous generations of Tatar students in Bukhara, the new generation prioritized another type of scholarly persona, based on the mastery of Arabic, the study of the Qur’an and the hadith, as well as social activism.


Author(s):  
Jörg Baberowski

This chapter examines the aftermath of the Bolsheviks' victory over both the Whites, or counterrevolutionaries, and all rival socialists. The Bolsheviks broke the military resistance of the Whites, crushed the unrest and strikes of the peasants, and even restored the multiethnic empire, which, in the early months of revolution, had largely fallen apart. In spring 1921, when the Red Army marched into Georgia, the Civil War was officially over. For the Bolsheviks, however, military victory was not the end but rather the beginning of a mission, not simply to shake the world but to transform it. Although weapons may have decided the war in favor of the revolutionaries they had not settled the question of power. This chapter considers Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) that would implement economic reforms, the Bolsheviks' failure to carry power into villages, and the dictatorship's lack of support from the proletariat. It also describes the nationalization of the Russian empire and Joseph Stalin's rise to power.


Author(s):  
Steven A. Barnes

This chapter focuses on the Gulag during the Armageddon of the Great Patriotic War. It shows how the institutions, practices, and identities of the Gulag shifted in accord with the demands of total war. The war was an era of mass release on an unprecedented scale side by side with the highest mortality rates in the history of the Gulag system. After four years of brutal, exhausting warfare and a disastrous initial stage, the Soviet Union emerged from its Armageddon victorious. The early postwar period offered no indication that the Gulag would cease to be a mass social phenomenon within fifteen years. Rather, the Gulag remained a pillar in the reestablishment of the Soviet system, following the Red Army into liberated territories, so that every liberated district received its own corrective labor colony. By 1944, the camp and colony population began to grow again.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document