Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery

Abstract. After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.

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Living with Commercial Sex

Policing Prostitution ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198837916.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 149-180

Author(s):

Siobhán Hearne

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Urban Landscape ◽

Negative Impact ◽

Lower Class ◽

Urban Life ◽

Commercial Sex ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Period ◽

Residency Restrictions ◽

Imperial State

This chapter focuses on the experience of living in towns and cities in the late imperial period, when prostitution was a visible component of urban life. It examines the different unsuccessful policies employed by the imperial state to enforce the spatial segregation of registered prostitutes and attempts to render brothels invisible on the urban landscape. Official efforts to push lower-class sexuality to the spatial margins are also addressed, particularly policies of zoning and brothel ranking. Some landlords frequently complained to the police about the negative impact of nearby brothels on their rental prices, whereas others helped women who sold sex to resist some of the residency restrictions placed upon them by the police. Ultimately, officialdom’s attempts to limit the visibility of prostitution were spectacularly unsuccessful, as commercial sex was visible everywhere across the Empire’s towns and cities at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Policing Prostitution

10.1093/oso/9780198837916.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Siobhán Hearne

Keyword(s):

Urban Communities ◽

Social History ◽

Russian Empire ◽

Commercial Sex ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Period ◽

Urban Problem ◽

History Of ◽

The Russian Empire ◽

Imperial State

Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the final two decades of the Russian Empire before its collapse in 1917. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical-police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. Official interest in prostitution generated a mass of documentation, which allows us to glimpse the lives and challenges of various groups of the Empire’s urban lower classes, including women who sold sex, their clients, brothel madams, police, and wider urban communities. In the late imperial period, prostitution was not just an urban ‘problem’ to be controlled and contained, but also a lucrative commodity due to the formal and informal financial relationships forged between brothel madams, registered prostitutes, and the police. This study is a social history of prostitution, drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. It focuses on how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted in various urban centres in the northwest of the Russian Empire, and how everyday experiences of regulation varied widely from place to place. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

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New Perspectives on China’s Late Imperial Period

10.3726/b15540 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Patrick Leung

Keyword(s):

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Period

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Economic Institutions and the State in Historical Perspective

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.2175185 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Henning Hillmann

Keyword(s):

Historical Perspective ◽

The State ◽

Economic Institutions

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Party and Democracy

10.1093/oso/9780198735854.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Piero Ignazi

Keyword(s):

Political Parties ◽

Organizational Development ◽

Interwar Period ◽

Historical Perspective ◽

The State ◽

Societal Change ◽

Contemporary Society ◽

Mass Public ◽

Post War ◽

Totalitarian Regimes

The book integrates philosophical, historical, and empirical analyses in order to highlight the profound roots of the limited legitimation of parties in contemporary society. Political parties’ long attempts to gain legitimacy are analysed from a philosophical–historical perspective pinpointing crucial passages in their theoretical and empirical acceptance. The book illustrates the process through which parties first emerged and then achieved full legitimacy in the early twentieth century. It shows how, paradoxically, their role became absolute in the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period when the party became hyper-powerful. In the post-war period, parties shifted from a golden age of positive reception and organizational development towards a more difficult relationship with society as it moved into post-industrialism. Parties were unable to master societal change and favoured the state to recover resources they were no longer able to extract from their constituencies. Parties have become richer and more powerful, but they have ‘paid’ for their pervasive presence in society and the state with a declining legitimacy. The party today is caught in a dramatic contradiction. It has become a sort of Leviathan with clay feet: very powerful thanks to the resources it gets from the state and to its control of societal and state spheres due to an extension of clientelistic and patronage practices; but very weak in terms of legitimacy and confidence in the eyes of the mass public. However, it is argued that there is still no alternative to the party, and some hypotheses to enhance party democracy are advanced.

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The Trafficking Panic in Late Imperial Austria

10.1093/oso/9780198801658.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Nancy M. Wingfield

Keyword(s):

The State ◽

Turn Of The Century ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Anti Semitism ◽

Mass Migration ◽

Women And Girls ◽

The Relationship ◽

Reform Organizations ◽

The Way

This chapter explores a variety of issues central to the turn-of-the-century Austrian panic over trafficking. They include anti-Semitism, Jews as protagonists and victims, and mass migration in an urbanizing world, as well as why particular Austrian cities were associated with the trade in women. The chapter analyzes the government’s domestic and international efforts to combat trafficking, as well as the role bourgeois reform organizations played. It explores the relationship between the trafficker and the trafficked, arguing that these women and girls were not simply victims, but sometimes willing participants, or something in between, in order to sketch a more nuanced picture of turn-of-the-century “white slaving.” The term “trafficker” is employed to reflect the way sources (the state, journalists, reform groups) viewed the issue, not because it can be proved that the problem was as widespread as they claimed.

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Viktor Vasnetsov’s New Icons

Experiment ◽

10.1163/2211730x-12341334 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 131-144

Author(s):

Wendy Salmond

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Popular Culture ◽

National Culture ◽

Russian Society ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial Period ◽

Paris Exposition ◽

The Many ◽

Modern Orthodox ◽

Human Hands

Abstract This essay examines Russian artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s search for a new kind of prayer icon in the closing decades of the nineteenth century: a hybrid of icon and painting that would reconcile Russia’s historic contradictions and launch a renaissance of national culture and faith. Beginning with his icons for the Spas nerukotvornyi [Savior Not Made by Human Hands] Church at Abramtsevo in 1880-81, for two decades Vasnetsov was hailed as an innovator, the four icons he sent to the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900 marking the culmination of his vision. After 1900, his religious painting polarized elite Russian society and was bitterly attacked in advanced art circles. Yet Vasnetsov’s new icons were increasingly linked with popular culture and the many copies made of them in the late Imperial period suggest that his hybrid image spoke to a generation seeking a resolution to the dilemma of how modern Orthodox worshippers should pray.

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