Imperial Incarcerations: Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, Vinayak Savarkar, and the Original Sins of Modernity

Slavic Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choi Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
British India ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Revolutionary Party ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire

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.

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

scholarly journals Visual Stereotypes of Tatars in the Finnish Press from the 1880s to the 1910s

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Ainur Elmgren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Grand Duchy

Visual stereotypes constitute a set of tropes through which the Other is described and depicted to anaudience, who perhaps never will encounter the individuals that those tropes purport to represent.Upon the arrival of Muslim Tatar traders in Finland in the late nineteenth century, newspapers andsatirical journals utilized visual stereotypes to identify the new arrivals and draw demarcation linesbetween them and what was considered “Finnish”. The Tatars arrived during a time of tension inthe relationship between the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland and the Russian Empire, withthe Finnish intelligentsia divided along political and language lines. Stereotypical images of Tatarpedlars were used as insults against political opponents within Finland and as covert criticism ofthe policies of the Russian Empire. Stereotypes about ethnic and religious minorities like the Tatarsfulfilled a political need for substitute enemy images; after Finland became independent in 1917,these visual stereotypes almost disappeared.

For Science or Tourism?

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Alan D. Roe
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
National Park ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Game Management ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Geographical Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Us National Parks

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many countries embraced the national park concept as a way of showcasing their scenic landscapes and developing internal tourism. Many members of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society called for a system of parks in the Russian Empire. However, following the Great October Revolution of 1917, Russian conservationists and game management professionals instead pushed the state to establish zapovedniki dedicated to scientific research as well as some that served as game preserves. As “science for science’s sake” came under more suspicion in the 1930s, many supporters of the zapovedniki promoted tourism in them to make them seem more “useful” to government officials. By the late 1930s, tens of thousands of tourists entered the zapovedniki every year. Even in a climate of fear and xenophobia, some tourism promoters used the example of US national parks as they argued that zapovedniki should accommodate still more tourists.

The Population Ecology of Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700–1914

Slavic Review ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 807-826 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas C. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Population Ecology ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
Far East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Corporate Development ◽  
The Far East ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Russian Empire

In investigations of the evolution of the corporation in Europe, North America, and the Far East, historians have illuminated variations in the structure of large enterprises in different times and places and investigated responses to legal environments. In tsarist Russia as well, the development of corporations on the national, regional, and sectoral levels was influenced by legal and economic institutions. Data on Russian corporations, however, have been inadequate for the complex statistical tests applied to the European and North American economies. This article offers a preliminary overview of trends in Russian corporate development from 1700 to 1914 in light of a new database and the recently articulated theory of organizational ecology. Although the theory provides stimulating approaches to the history of Russian corporations, it also appears unduly specific in some respects to the history of western Europe and the United States.

Gramsci, the Via Italiana, and the Classical Marxist‐Leninist Approach to Revolution

1979 ◽  
Vol 14 (01) ◽  
pp. 66-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph V. Femia
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Antonio Gramsci ◽  
Marxist Approach ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Advanced Capitalist ◽  
The Revolution

IT IS NOW COMMON (AND QUITE CORRECT) TO PRAISE ANTONIO Gramsci as the first Marxist theorist to understand that the revolution in Western Europe must deviate sharply from the strategic path taken by the Bolsheviks in Russia. With characteristic disdain for old and rigid formulae, he pointed to the crucial differences between advanced capitalist countries and the Russian Empire of 1917, and he attempted in his prison notebooks (Quaderni) to develop criteria of orientation and action appropriate to modern circumstances. What he offered was a new What is to be done? for the developed West, a fundamental reassessment and revision of the accepted Marxist approach to revolution. The nature of this enterprise has prompted many – critics and admirers alike – to lay emphasis on the tie between Gramsci and Togliatti-ism. Gramsci put forward ideas, it is claimed, whose logic is manifest in the ‘Italian (read “constitutional”, “parliamentary”, “democratic”, “pacific”) road to socialism’. It is now casually assumed in many circles that he was the ideological progenitor of what has come to be known as Eurocommunism, the increasingly influential body of doctrines that purports to marry liberalism and Marxism. In the following pages, this assumption, and other related ones, will be closely examined and evaluated.

scholarly journals PANTELEIMON KULISH AND THE "JEWISH QUESTION" IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

2019 ◽  
pp. 60-66
Author(s):  
Victor Dotsenko
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Great Writer

The author attempts to analyze the views of Panteleimon Kulish on the history, culture and everyday life of Jews who lived along with Ukrainians in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire, to determine what factors and stereotypes formed the outlook of the great writer and his attitude to the Russian imperial project of resolving the "Jewish question". With the growing of Russian imperial messianism and chauvinism, Ukrainian intellectuals appeared in a difficult situation. The tsar held assimilation policies towards both Jews and Ukrainians. At the same time, Jews additionallly suffered from manifestations of state anti-Semitism. Engagement of Ukrainian Christians in anti-Semitic actions has intensified the position of Russifikators of Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian elite aimed to stop these manifestations of anti-Semitism by its actions. Obviously, the Ukrainian protest did not condemn anti-Semitism without reservations, because its authors suggested that Jews should partly share responsibility for anti-Semitism. The idea of protesting Ukrainian intellectuals coincided with ideas of Russian liberals who offered to consider Russian Jews as carriers of "civil autonomy and moral independence," and urged them to abandon their national-religious prejudices. While supporting the civil rights of Jews, Kulish at the same time realized that the Ukrainians themselves belonged to the oppressed nations in the Russian Empire, where, in general, social and national rights and freedoms were much less than in the constitutional states of Western Europe. Therefore, he found it impractical to move from there to Russian blindly a practice of artificial support for only Jewish nationality, because in imperial terms this meant only a change in the configuration of national unequal, and not the elimination of it at all. P. Kulish's views on the "Jewish question" of the mid-nineteenth century corresponded to the conceptions of Russian liberal intellectuals regarding the modernization of Russian society. He supports the proclaimed liberal ideas of the need to integrate Jews into imperial life. Jews must be the most interested in destroying of the traditional world of the Jewish town. Giving the Jews of secular education, adopting by them the modern values could lead to the elimination of intolerance and manifestations of anti-Semitism in the society. The Jews himself, according to P. Kulish had to go towards society and change their social mood.

scholarly journals Ioannites - the course of the chiliastic-eschatological orientation of Orthodox origin

2006 ◽  
pp. 145-153
Author(s):  
Liudmyla M. Shuhayeva
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Southern Russia ◽  
Kingdom Of Christ ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The One ◽  
Xix Century

In the first decades of the XIX century. the territory of the Russian Empire from Western Europe is beginning to penetrate chiliastic ideas. The term "chiliism" refers to the well-known doctrine of the millennial kingdom of Icyca Christ on earth, dating to the first centuries of Christianity. The ideas of chilias became especially popular during the reign of Alexander I, who himself was sympathetic to the mystical-chiliatic teachings. Chilias in the Russian Empire spread in two ways. On the one hand, chiliastic ideas penetrated with the works of German mystics of the late eighteenth - early twentieth centuries. On the other hand, in anticipation of the fast approaching of the millennial kingdom of Christ, the German cultists of the Hiliists moved large parties across southern Russia to the Caucasus, thereby facilitating the spread of their ideas. The religious formations of the Orthodox sectarianism of the chiliastic-eschatological orientation are represented by the Jehovah-Hlinists ("Right Brotherhood"), the Ioannites, and the Malavans.

“But I Have No Wish to Be Discharged”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Kenney
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
State Prisons ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Opposition Movements ◽  
Political Imprisonment

Political imprisonment originated in the mid-nineteenth century, as European states turned away from the use of exile (to places such as Australia or Siberia) and increasingly placed opponents in state prisons for lengthy periods. At the same time, opposition movements became more organized around coherent ideologies and developed the capability of celebrating and publicizing their imprisoned comrades. This era would see the first concentration camps, the first genocides, and the first civilian refugees. It is not surprising that political prisoners would take their place on stage at the same time. The Fenian movement in Ireland, the socialists in the Russian Empire (especially in Poland), the British suffragettes, and Gandhi’s satyagraha resisters in British South Africa are the primary examples used.

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