Academic literature on the topic 'Russian revolution - 1917-1921'

Nicholas II. Emperor of all the Russias. By D. Lieven. London: Pimlico, 1995. Pp. 292. ISBN 0-719-54994-9. £10.00.The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921: a short history. By J. D. White. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pp. 312. ISBN 0-340-53910-0. £12.99.The origins of the Russian civil war. By G. Swain. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. 296. ISBN 0-582-05968-2. £13.99.Behind the front lines of the civil war: political parties and social movements in Russia, 1918–1922. By V. N. Brovkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. 455. ISBN 0-691-03278-5. £40.00.America's secret war against Bolshevism: U.S. intervention in the Russian civil war, 1917–1920. By D. S. Foglesong. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina University Press, 1995. Pp. 386. ISBN 0-807-82228-0. $45–00.

Attention is drawn to the fact of the rejection of the term “Ukrainian revolution” (1917−1921) by modern Russian and some Westerners historians. A natural question arises about the scientific nature of this term, about its logical content. The historiographical approaches to the use of this term, as well as the concept of «national liberation movement» are considered. A formal logical and concrete historical analysis of the term “Ukrainian Revolution” is carried out, which covers the complex of events of 1917−1921 in the Ukraine. It is shown that both the contemporaries of the events and the researchers of this period rightly use the term “revolution”. It is proved that the term cannot be considered an empty concept, because it reflects a completely objective historical reality. In the context of identifying its essential features, the events and processes that define the Ukrainian revolution as a concrete historical phenomenon, although akin to the Russian revolution, are generally self-sufficient, are analyzed. The national and socio-economic components of the Ukrainian revolution, the number and nature of its driving forces, and the geographical features of the political processes of that time are taken into account. When comparing the complex of processes and events related to Ukraine, their peculiarities and differences from what was happening in Russia are obvious. There are clear differences in the palette of political forces, their program goals and ways to achieve them, the nature of their influence on the masses, as well as the reaction of the latter to the policies of a particular political regime. Claims by Russian historians to the concept of the “Ukrainian revolution” developed by Ukrainian researchers should be considered groundless and unscientific. There is reason to believe that in its attitude to the Ukrainian revolution of 1917−1921 Russian researchers are too dependent on the assessments of their own political leadership of modern Ukraine.

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996 (reviewed in Pimlico edition, 1997), 923 pp., ISBN 0–150–24364–X.Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Russian Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 455 pp., ISBN 0–691–03278–5.Edward Acton, William G. Rosenberg and Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution 1914–1921 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 782 pp., ISBN 0–340–61454–4.Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 269 pp., ISBN 0–415–12437–9.André Liebich. From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 476 pp., ISBN 0–674–32517–6.Over eighty years after it occurred, the Russian Revolution continues to engender debate among professional historians as well as the interested public. If the French Revolution is any guide, this interest is very likely to continue indefinitely. Causes and consequences, the meaning and significance of individual component events, the interplay of social forces, and cultural, political, intellectual, economic and a myriad of other aspects have and will continue to be examined and sifted through. Last year – the eightieth anniversary – produced a number of important works on the revolution and its consequences. Those under review here, including an older one from 1994, represent a range of approaches, from introductory accounts for the general reader to summations of the state of knowledge to histories of the revolution's ‘losers’.

The article examines Gorky’s special, negatively distrustful attitude towards the Russian peasantry, whose political and spiritual conservatism could prevent, in the writer’s opinion, the realization of the socialist ideals of the revolution. During the 1917 revolution and the Civil War, it seemed to Gorky that it was the Russian “peasant” who could ruin the revolution and that the revolution itself was inexorably turning into a brutal struggle between town and village, workers and intellectuals on the one hand and peasants on the other. The result of the writer ‘s intense reflections in 1917–1921. Gorky’s artistic and journalistic article “On the Russian Peasantry” (1922) was about the fate of his native people and its role in the revolution, which became his first major public appearance in the press after leaving Russia for Europe. Based on Gorky’s negative attitude towards the Russian peasantry, it seems quite natural that the writer at the turn of the 1920–30s supported the Bolshevik policy of universal collectivization of the village. Moreover, it was the radical breaking of the foundations of village life that made him believe in the “truly socialist character” of the October Revolution.

After the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the former nations of the Russian Empire searched for the possibility of forming their own independent countries. The situation was the same with three nations of Transcaucasia, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. After the separatist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed on the 3rd of March 1918), Bolshevik Russia in practice gave away the Transcaucasia region to Germany and Turkey. Especially Turkey assumed an aggressive and annexationist stance at the time. And it was the Armenians who mainly put up the resistance. Armenia, together with Azerbaijan and Georgia, first created the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. However, the state was short-lived and it soon collapsed due to different approaches to preserving independence by the three countries. Azerbaijan tried to unite with Turkey, Georgia with Germany,while Armenia counted on the White movement Russians (led by General Denikin). Each of the three countries formed separate independent republics and one of them was the First Republic of Armenia. Germany and Turkey lost the First World War soon after but Caucasia was first attacked from the north by the White General Anton Denikin, who was supported by England and France. And later (in 1920) the country was invaded by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks, thanks to the military might of the Red Army, overthrew the independent governments of those republics one by one. Subsequently, they introduced their own governments and annexed the countries into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The RSFSR signed the Treaty of Brotherhood with Turkey on the 16th of March 1921, which was mainly directed against Great Britain and France. In order to realize this alliance, Russia and Turkey divided between themselves the Armenianlands.

The paper analyses the revolutionary events of XX–XXI centuries in Ukraine, in particular, the prerequisites, causes, and consequences of social, political and economic nature, the historical, political and legal experience of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the Dignity Revolution of 2014. By carrying out a comparative legal analysis the author comes to the conclusion that the above mentioned processes are characterized not only by the same goal, the basis of which is the idea of social and national liberation, but also by such concepts as human centrism, their anti-imperial, national, and state orientations. On the other hand, attention is also focused on the distinctive features of the revolutions mentioned, such as different external and internal political circumstances behind them and the international legal reaction to the revolutionary events that took place in our country. Thus, the article outlines the challenges of today's Ukrainian humanities through the prism of an average human being's role in the revolutionary process in Soviet times, identifies the impact of these phenomena on the individual, makes an attempt to find common features of political and legal reaction to such events from both Ukrainian society and the ruling circles of some neighboring states. The paper proves the complete scientific inability of a number of Russian imperial myths, namely the desire to present Russian-Ukrainian conflicts as "civil wars", the attempts of Russian historiography to "incorporate" the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 into the all-Russian revolutionary process, the desire to characterize the 2014 Revolution of Dignity as a "coup d'etat", etc. On the basis of the comparative analysis, the author explains why the Ukrainian state as a geopolitical reality could not happen during the revolution in the beginning of twentieth century, in contrast to the events of presence, when modern post-revolutionary Ukraine managed to withstand the struggle against the Russian occupation forces and once again avoided the tragic consequences that came to our land after the occupation.

Japan did not maintain a stable relationship with the Ukrainian governments during the revolutionary years. We can only speak of isolated instances where both sides showed interest in each other. It was the Japanese side that initiated the initial contact. In the summer of 1917, Hitoshi Ashida, an attaché of the Japanese Embassy in the Russian Empire, and in the autumn, Takayanagi Yasutaro, a military observer in the Russian Empire’s army, visited Kyiv. However, any official contact between Kyiv and Tokyo became impossible after the signing of the Brest- Litovsk Treaty. In the following year, Borys Voblyy attempted to serve as a representative of Ukraine in Japan. During this period, the White Army garnered significant attention from Japan, and a Japanese representative was present in Crimea and Odesa between 1919 and 1920. Despite this, they did not engage in direct communication with Ukrainian political forces. However, a representative from Sevastopol sent various reports to the Japanese capital, including information about Ukrainian events. The Tokyo government diligently researched all events and conflicts between different political forces but refrained from active participation. In the years 1920–1921, Ukrainian diplomats sought to use Japan as an intermediary to bolster their foreign policy position. They transmitted several diplomatic notes to the Tokyo government through the Japanese embassy in Rome. Regrettably, these efforts did not yield any tangible results. This situation was closely tied to the primary foreign policy objectives of both governments. Japan’s focus was primarily on the Far Eastern region, and it refrained from active involvement in European affairs. Meanwhile, Ukrainian governments were primarily concerned with establishing relations with Eastern countries.

This thesis examines the experiences of the overseas Chinese in the Russian Far East during the revolutionary and Civil War period from 1917 to 1920, as well as their responses to the upheaval. Bucking the current trend towards transcultural history, the thesis argues that Chinese identity and nationalist language were of prime importance to this community. By concentrating on Chinese-language sources, the thesis re-privileges the community's internal discourses and highlights the prevalence of nationalist rhetoric across the Sino-Russian border. It also sites the Chinese community's use of nationalist language within the context of the global diaspora, for which questions of national weakness and revival were also pressing. Going further, the thesis postulates the presence of "Chinese nationalism with Russian characteristics", in which the issues surrounding Chinese nationalism as a whole were heightened. It shows that the rhetoric of 'national humiliation' and victimhood were particularly immediate to the community in the Russian Far East, since it was located at one of the epicentres of imperial contestation. In practice, this led to a modus vivendi with the Reds and a decisive turn against the Whites. Furthermore, the chaos of the revolutions and Civil War imbued this nationalism with an opportunistic quality. The collapse of Russian state power became the 'opportunity of a thousand years' for China to redress past wrongs. This allowed the overseas community to work closely with local authorities and the Beijing government to achieve shared goals. New civil society organisations with community-wide aims were formed. Beijing extended its diplomatic reach in the form of new Far Eastern consulates. Finally, common nationalist rhetoric underpinned China's successful attempt to re-establish its civilian and military presence on the Amur River. "Chinese nationalism with Russian characteristics" could be effectively harnessed to secure multi-level and cross-border cooperation.

This study concerns the sources of the revolutionary Bolshevik elite's social and ethnic origins in Late Imperial Russia. The key finding is that the Bolshevik leadership of the revolutionary years 1917--1924 was highly ethnically diverse in origin with non-Russians---Jews, Latvians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians---constituting nearly two-thirds of the elite. The 'Russian' Revolution was led primarily by elites of the empire's non-Russian national minorities. This thesis therefore considers the sources of their radicalism in the peripheries of the multinational empire.
Although the 'class' language of socialism has dominated accounts not only of the causes of the Revolution but also of the sources of Bolshevik socialism, in my view the Bolsheviks were more a response to a variety of cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic social identities than they were a response to class conflict. The appeal of a theory about class conflict does not necessarily mean that it was class conflict to which the Bolsheviks were responding; they were much more a product of the tensions of a multi-ethnic imperial state than of the alienating 'class' effects of an industrializing Russian state.
How 'peripherals' of the imperial borderlands came to espouse an ideology of the imperial 'center' is the empirical focus. Five substantive chapters on Jews, Poles and Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Transcaucasians, and Latvians, consider the sources of their radicalism by contextualizing their biographies in regional ethnopolitics and in relationships to the Tsarist state. A great attraction of Russian (Bolshevik) socialism was in what it meant for ethnopolitics in the multi-ethnic borderlands: much of the appeal lay in its secularism, its 'ecumenical' political vision, its universalism, its anti-nationalism, and in its implied commitment to "the good imperial ideal". The 'elective affinities' between individuals of different ethnic strata and Russian socialism varied across ethnic groups, and often within them. One of the key themes, therefore, is how a social and political identity is worked out within the context of a multinational empire, invoking social processes such as nationalism, assimilation, Russification, social mobility, access to provincial and imperial 'civil societies', linguistic and cultural choices, and ethnopolitical relationships.

This dissertation is a quantitative study with elements of qualitative analysis. The purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate WHAT was written about Ukraine's independence 1917 in Swedish press 1917–1918. The qualitative part of the survey was intended to answer the question if the newspaper's political attitude influenced the news reports during the chosen period. The exact periodization was determined to be between March 1, 1917 and June 30, 1918. This periodization was chosen because of the March Revolution in 1917, which triggered independence declarations in a number of countries oppressed by Moscow, who now saw their chance of freedom. June 1918 became the end of the investigation because it was just when the peace agreement between Ukraine and the Soviet Union was signed. The source material has been chosen to represent a multitude of ideological orientations. It was liberal, moderate, conservative, liberal and left-wing orientations. The source material consisted of newspaper articles from the following newspapers: Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Göteborgs Aftonblad, Svenska Dagbladet, Dalpilen, Kalmar Tidning and Norrskensflamman. Quantitative methodology was used on the source material. This method consisted of a reviewing of newspaper articles in searching of news reports from Ukraine or articles which had something to do with the events in Ukraine. Every newspaper was searched day after day. The crawled material was presented in two chapters representing different periods. The first chapter of the results presented the results from 1917, and more precisely from March to December 1917. The second chapter presented the results from 1918, but also from December 1917, that is, the result from December 1917 through June 1918. The whole result was then discussed in a separate chapter where the qualitative analysis was also discussed. The result of the quantitative analysis showed that it has been written relatively sparcely about Ukraine's independence although the volume of articles increased from December 1917 and even more in 1918. Sometimes there were articles on the first page. But for the most part, the articles with Ukraine issues were placed among other foreign articles. It was also found in the survey that it was the first World War that drew attention to the newspapers, even though the events in Petrograd and then in Ukraine took more space. This survey also showed that what was written about Ukraine's independence was also what appears in the reference literature. The news reports reported how Ukraine proclaimed independence in March 1917 and later on proclaimed an independent republic in November 1917 when the Bolsheviks conducted their coup d'état in Petrograd. The newspapers also wrote how the Russian Communists sent a declaration of war to Ukraine in December 1917 and about the war that followed. The articles also tell us how negotiations on Ukraine Peace went on in Brest-Litovsk, and how they ended up with alliance between Germany and Ukraine with the campaign against the communists. It was told how the German army marched into Ukraine to free it from the bolsheviks. Until May 1918 there were battles between the German-Ukrainian Army and the Communists. In June 1918 the peace agreement was signed and this survey’s investigation ended. The survey showed that it was written about Ukraine's independence in all newspapers. Dagens Nyheter had the most news articles linked to the survey. Although the number of articles was not subject for analysis in this survey. The qualitative analysis was based on using Höjelid's theoretical concepts "positive sound" and "negative sound" on the quantitative analysis material. The qualitative analysis’ result showed that it was almost impossible to see the differences between the newspapers because the articles were traded between the newspapers, i.e. the content was copied straight away. It should be noted that not all content was the subject of copying between the newspapers. Copying occurred to a greater extent, but there were still original articles derived from the respective newspaper. Most of the articles were also direct telegrams that were communicated abroad to the newspaper's editors. A lot of these telegrammic articles were sent with a purpose to mislead society. These angled articles were published without further examination in Swedish press. There were articles from, for example, Dagens Nyheter whose editors noted the "strange Petrograd reports" and informed about it for the purpose of enlightening the public. However, as most newspapers were occupied with World War I, as was shown in the source material, the newspaper editorial office was less interested in other foreign events. Therefore, such angled articles could be found in Swedish press on a larger scale.
Denna avhandling är en kvantitativ studie med inslag av kvalitativ analys. Syftet med denna kvantitativa studien var att undersöka VAD som skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet 1917 i svensk press 1917–1918. Den kvalitativa delen av undersökningen ämnade att besvara frågan om tidningens politiska hållningen påverkade nyhetsrapporteringen under den valda perioden. Den exakta periodiseringen fastställdes att vara mellan den 1 mars 1917 och den 30 juni 1918. Denna periodisering valdes på grund av marsrevolutionen 1917 som utlöste självständighets-förklaringar i en rad länder som var förtryckta av Moskovitien och som nu såg sin chans till frihet. Juni 1918 blev slutpunkten i undersökningen därför att det var just då som fredsavtalet mellan Ukrajina och Sovjet undertecknades. Källmaterialet har valts att representera en mångfald ideologiska inriktningar. Det var liberal, moderat, konservativ, frisinnad samt vänstersocial inriktningar. Källmaterialet bestod av tidningsartiklar från följande tidningar: Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet, Göteborgs Aftonblad, Svenska Dagbladet, Dalpilen, Kalmar tidning och Norrskensflamman. Det användes kvantitativ metod på källmaterialet som bestod i en genomsökning av tidningsartiklarna efter nyhetsrapporter från Ukrajina eller som hade något med händelserna i Ukrajina att göra. Varje tidning genomsöktes dag för dag. Det genomsökta materialet presenterades i två kapitel som representerade olika perioder. Det första resultatkapitlet presenterade resultatet från år 1917, och mer exakt från mars till december 1917. Det andra kapitlet presenterade resultatet från år 1918, men även från december 1917, det vill säga resultatet från och med december 1917 till och med juni 1918. Det hela resultatet diskuterades sedan i ett eget kapitel där även den kvalitativa analysen diskuterades. Resultatet från den kvantitativa analysen visade att det har skrivits relativt sparsmakat om Ukrajinas självständighet även om artikelmängden ökade från december 1917 och ännu mer under 1918. Ibland förekom det artiklar på första sidan. Men för det mesta placerades artiklarna med Ukrajina-frågor bland andra utlandsartiklar. Det framgick också i undersökningen att det var mest första världskriget som upptog tidningarnas uppmärksamhet, även om händelserna i Petrograd och sedan i Ukrajina tog allt mer plats allt eftersom. Denna undersökning visade också att det som skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet var också det som förekommer i referenslitteraturen. Nyhetsrapporterna berättade hur Ukrajina utropat sin självständighet i mars 1917 tills landet proklamerat en oberoende republik i november 1917 när bolsjevikerna genomförde sin statskupp i Petrograd. Tidningarna skrev också hur de ryska kommunisterna skickade krigsförklaring till Ukrajina i december 1917 och om det kriget som följde efter det. Artiklarna berättar även om hur förhandlingarna för Ukrajinafreden gick till i Brest-Litovsk samt hur dessa avslutades med att Tyskland allierade sig med Ukrajina i kampen mot kommunisterna. Det berättades hur den tyska armén marscherade in i Ukrajina för att befria det från bolsjevikerna. Fram till maj 1918 pågick det strider mellan tysk-ukrajinska armén och kommunisterna. I juni 1918 undertecknades fredsavtalet och där slutade undersökningen.  Undersökningen visade att det skrevs om Ukrajinas självständighet i samtliga tidningar. Dagens Nyheter hade flest nyhetsartiklar kopplade till undersökningen. Även om antalet artiklar ej var i syfte att analysera i denna undersökning. Den kvalitativa analysen gick ut på att använda Höjelids teoretiska begrepp ”positiv klang” och ”negativ klang” på den kvantitativa analysens resultatmaterial. Det kvalitativa resultatet visade att det var nästintill omöjligt att se skillnad mellan de olika tidningarna eftersom artiklarna traderades mellan tidningarna, det vill säga innehållet kopierades rakt av. Det bör påpekas att inte allt innehåll var ämne för kopiering mellan tidningarna. Kopieringen förekom i större utsträckning men det fanns ändå originella artiklar som härstammade från respektive tidning. De flesta av artiklarna var dessutom direkta telegram som kommunicerades i utlandet till tidningens redaktioner. En hel del av dessa telegraferade artiklar skickades med ett givet syfte att vilseleda samhällsopinionen. Dessa vinklade artiklar publicerades utan vidare granskning i svensk press. Det förekom artiklar från exempelvis Dagens Nyheter vars redaktion uppmärksammat de ”märkliga Petrogradrapporter” och informerat om det i möjligt syfte att upplysa allmänheten. Men eftersom de flesta tidningarna var upptagna med första världskriget, som det visades i källmaterialet, var tidningsredaktionerna mindre intresserade av andra utländska händelser. Därför kunde sådana vinklade artiklar förekomma i svensk press i en större omfattning.

L'exploration des rapports entre propagande, nationalismes et guerre fait émerger plus de problèmes que de réponses. De plus, au cours de la Grande Guerre, on assiste à une féroce guerre des images. Dans l'analyse qualitative (dépouillement des principaux organes de presse occidentaux) et quantitative (décompte d'articles, mesures de ces analyses et pourcentages), on sent trois grands courants. En premier lieu, les presses austro-allemandes adoptent la même attitude relativement optimiste par rapport à la situation sur le front oriental. La propagande austro-allemande souligne l'union contre-nature des démocraties occidentales avec l'autocratie qui va, à terme, développer des rivalités. Le second groupe est constitué par la presse de l'Entente qui se montre très confiante au début de la guerre. L'alliance avec l'Empire russe est indispensable, mais représente une gêne pour la propagande, puisqu'elle ne correspond pas à l'image que l'on veut donner de son camp. La censure va donc œuvrer afin de taire les fautes et les crises russes. Les sentiments de prudence, puis de doutes et enfin d'inquiétudes provoquent un véritable changement d'attitude et d'optique vis-à-vis de la Russie. La France qui se montrait la plus confiante pendant la période tsariste, se sent également la plus trahie sous le régime bolchevique Le dernier groupe est constitué par la presse suisse qui se montre divisée. La presse romande adopte un comportement proche de la presse de l'Entente, notamment sous la période bolchevique. Moins engagée dans le conflit, elle se montre plus prudente que ses confrères de l'Entente. Il en est un peu de même pour la presse alémanique. Si elle est proche des puissances centrales, son enthousiasme face aux réussites de ce camp n'est pas démonstratif. La réalité politique russe est finalement fort mal connue en Occident, ce qui explique également l'âpreté des débats et les dissensions à propos de la Russie d'autant plus que le pays n'est analysé qu'en fonction des intérêts propres de chaque pays. La défection russe entraîne rapidement de multiples conséquences pour le front occidental. La fin du front oriental démontre par omission l'importance de l'effort russe. Les Alliés doivent donc pallier cette " trahison " en essayant de maintenir un second front contre les puissances centrales car la victoire finale n'a pas encore choisi son camp.

Women have been part of modern revolutions since the American Revolution against Great Britain. Most descriptions and analyses of revolution relegate women to a supporting role, or make no mention of women's involvement at all. This work differs from prior efforts in that it will explore one possible explanation for the successes of three revolutions based upon the levels of women's support for those revolutions. An analysis of the three cases (Ireland, Russia, and Nicaragua) suggests a series of hypotheses about women's participation in revolution and its importance to revolutions' success.

This dissertation explores the ethical and aesthetic stakes of readers’ judgments by analyzing mock trials of literary characters that were performed in Soviet Russia and abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Literary trials were part of a larger craze for public mock trials in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Mock trials functioned as a participatory and educational form of entertainment. Fictional defendants included Lenin, invented characters accused of drunkenness and hooliganism, and the Bible. At the same time as increasingly propagandistic mock trials were being performed, intellectuals staged trials of characters from nineteenth-century and contemporary Russian literature. In émigré communities such as Berlin, Paris, and Prague, literary trials were popular as entertainment and fundraisers through the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis focuses on mock trials of characters from works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels proved especially popular for mock trial adaptations in the 1920 and 1930s. I also consider Nabokov’s participation in a mock trial based on The Kreutzer Sonata as a bridge between Tolstoy’s novella and Nabokov’s later novel Lolita. I read back and forth between the literary works and their mock trial adaptations in order to explore both how trial participants interpreted the texts and how the texts respond to the kinds of judgment at work in the trials. The challenges that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s fiction pose to readers became the central questions of mock trial adaptations: What is the relationship between interpretation and truth? Do we have the right to judge others? Does narrative have the power to redeem? I argue that while Soviet and émigré literary trials offer selective, politically motivated readings of the original works, they also enter into dialogue with the works’ major ethical questions and offer new ways of thinking about how truth, judgment, and redemption operate in them. As a result, the mock trials bring together two approaches to literature: a reader-centric approach that interprets the text in order to reveal something about the reader’s current reality, and a text-centric approach that aims to uncover the original meaning. While some of the literary trial interpretations and judgments appear to be misreadings, or bad readings, of the original works, I argue that this kind of reading, which closely attends to textual details while asking the text to speak to the readers’ present, offers a model for an ethically engaged approach to literature.

Soviet Russia and Poland concluded the Peace of Riga in March 1921: Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine, but could keep Eastern Galicia and Western Volhynia. With this, the “Ukrainian revolution” ended, and the Peace of Riga buried Ukrainian aspirations for independence. This meant that the situation developed after the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667 was repeated, since the Poles and the Russians – ignoring the interests of the Ukrainians – once again divided Ukraine between themselves. Ukrainian “revolutions” and Ukrainian efforts to establish statehood thus ended in failure. Between 1917–1920, the Ukrainians temporarily created sovereign “state initiatives,” but the territory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was not precisely defined and was decreased gradually due to the constant attacks of the Red Army. It included only a part of Eastern Galicia with its capital, without Lviv (Lemberg). The successive governments were in power only for a short time, so they could not consolidate their government system. The fact that the national identity of the Eastern Ukrainians was weaker made it more difficult to achieve independence, which is why a unified position regarding the nature of the Ukrainian state could not be formed in the individual Ukrainian regions and among political parties. The military superiority of Poland and Soviet Russia, as well as the disinterest of the victorious Allies in the existence of a sovereign Ukraine during the First World War also contributed to all of this. In the end, just like in the 17–18th centuries, the development of the Ukrainian nation from 1921 again took place in the bonds of two states: within the Soviet Union and in the reborn Poland. The civil war finally confirmed the federal character of Ukraine, but in the end, in a “Soviet-style”.

Abstract The years separating the outbreak of war in 1914 and the announcement of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921 form a critical watershed in modern Russian history. The revolutions of 1917, while not an unbridgeable caesura, fundamentally transformed the polity and social order. This era also had a profound impact on the ‘bourgeois’ West, which in the coming decades had to contend with the spectre of a socialist Prometheus in the East.

Abstract The years separating the outbreak of war in 1914 and the announcement of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in 1921 form a critical watershed in modern Russian history. The revolutions of 1917, while not an unbridgeable caesura, fundamentally transformed the polity and social order. This era also had a profound impact on the ‘bourgeois’ West, which in the coming decades had to contend with the spectre of a socialist Prometheus in the East. In a memorandum of February 1914 P. N. Durnovo, a former Minister of Internal Affairs, implored the emperor to avoid war with Germany.

Abstract American class and ethnic tensions had already been unleashed by wartime jingoism, which culminated in the Palmer Raids and Red Scare of 1917—20. America’s civil liberties record was permanently scarred when nonconformists were harassed, and in some cases deported, on the bases of ethnic background or political conviction. American leftists and radicals found their organizations on the defensive following the political repression at home, despite the fact that 900,000 Americans voted for Socialist party candidate Eugene Debs in 1920. Similarly, American labor began the decade with a wave of strike activity-including the Seattle General Strike in support of the Russian evolution in 1918—but by the end of the 1920s, labor union membership fell from about 5 million in 1921 to less than 3.5 million in 1929. Returning veterans joined the ranks of the unemployed as demobilization slowed down the economy immediately following the war. American race relations exploded in a series of urban riots stretching from East St. Louis in July 1917 through Charleston, S.C., Longview, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, in the “Red Summer” of 1919. In all cases, racial violence was fueled by the competition for jobs between returning war veterans and black workers who had replaced them during the war.

The first reports of widespread and sometimes fatal cases of influenza appeared in Russia in August 1918, as part of the global wave known as the ‘Spanish’ influenza. Over the next three years, however, a series of cascading political, social and health crises overwhelmed Russia, thus overshadowing the impact of the Ispanka, a truncated combination of the Russian terms, Ispanskii gripp, or ‘Spanish influenza’. Given that the total number of Russian deaths in the period from the 1917 Revolution to the famine of 1921 may have exceeded 10 million, the Ispanka was seemingly absorbed into the broader crises of these years, which in turn has contributed to the omission of Russia from most global histories of the epidemic. This history of the Ispanka concludes that the influenza epidemic confirmed the priority assigned to public health by Russian physicians and the Soviet government, even as the conditions of war, revolution, civil war and dictatorship placed increasing burdens on society that exacerbated the spread of all types of disease. Even as the Russian experience with the ‘Spanish’ influenza has been omitted from most histories of the early Soviet period and the global epidemic, this chapter discusses how this experience led Soviet scientists to make important contributions to global research on this disease in the decades that followed.

Abstract The expression ‘administration of legality’ is used in a special sense in this chapter to refer both to State and non-State bodies directly concerned in the Russian Federation with the application and enforcement of the law, excluding the advocates and jurisconsults, who have been discussed previously (see Chapter 5 above). The Russian ministries of justice in their present or past forms have no precise analogy in Britain or North America. The first RSFSR People’s Commissariat of Justice created the day after the 1917 October Revolution included among its functions the investigation of offences, the administration of prisons and camps, the administration of the separation of Church from State, and the codification of legislation, among others. In 1921 these functions were broadened to include supreme judicial control and in 1922 to embrace the Procuracy. The repeated reorganizations of the ministries need not detain us here, except to note that from 1963 to 1970 they were abolished completely and their functions dispersed among other agencies. On 31 August 1970 the USSR Ministry of Justice was formed as a union-republic ministry and the Statute on the Ministry confirmed on 21 March 1972.

In the frame of transnational history the article examines the connection between the Russian revolution, 1917 with Civil war in Siberia and the Mongolian revolution, 1921. Along with it, the article reveals cooperation of Bolshevik party, Comintern and leaders of Buryat national movement with Mongolian leaders of national liberation movement for introduction of revolutionary ideas in Mongolia. The special attention is given to the ideologists and leaders of the Mongolian revolution, and Mongolian-Tibetan department in the section of Asian peoples.