The Bolsheviks and the Russian Empire

Abstract

This comparative historical sociology of the Bolshevik revolutionaries offers a reinterpretation of political radicalization in the last years of the Russian Empire. Finding that two-thirds of the Bolshevik leadership were ethnic minorities-Ukrainians, Latvians, Georgians, Jews, and others-this book examines the shared experiences of assimilation and socioethnic exclusion that underlay their class universalism. It suggests that imperial policies toward the Empire's diversity radicalized class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences, creating an assimilated but excluded elite: lower-class Russians and middle-class minorities universalized particular exclusions as they disproportionately sustained the economic and political burdens of maintaining the multiethnic Russian Empire. Political exclusions and quasi-assimilated social worlds enabled reinventions, as the Bolsheviks' social identities and routes to revolutionary radicalism show especially how a class-universalist politics was appealing to those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics in which ethnic and geopolitical insecurities were exclusionary, and a tolerant "imperial" imaginary where Russification and illiberal repressions were most keenly felt.

Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution

“…In their youth, Jewish revolutionaries encountered state antisemitism, quotas in education and employment, and blocked mobility paths, all of which were integral to their political radicalization. 23 The revolution of 1917 was Russian Jewry's moment of emancipation. In opening up the state and announcing the total transformation of social relations, the Bolsheviks gave life to a revolution that had been building within Jewish social, cultural and political life over the previous century.…”

Lithuanian nationhood theatre through post-colonial gaze

“…Nepaisant to, į lingvistinių procesų ir tapatybės formavimo sąveikos problemą iki šiol buvo žvelgiama bemaž vien per nacionalizmo ir tautiškumo prizmę. " 23 Pasak autoriaus, analizuojant lingvistinę situaciją imperiniame kontekste, reikia atsižvelgti į keletą svarbių dalykų. Visų pirma -į ypatingą sąveiką tarp sprendimų priėmimo centro ir tų periferinių bendruomenių, kurių kalbinė sritis yra reguliuojama.…”

The USSR as a multinational state from the revolution to the death of Stalin: western scholarship since 1991

“…The result is a far messier but ultimately more compelling picture of how the Bolsheviks prevailed against their enemies across much of Russia's former imperial space. Scholarship since 1991 has also done much to examine the Bolsheviks and other actors of the revolutionary era as "people of empire" -that is, as individuals whose political subcultures and worldviews were shaped in myriad ways by the diverse multicultural environments of the tsarist state [Riga 2014;Jones 2005;Sunderland 2014;Rieber 2001Rieber , p. 1677Rieber -1691Suny 2012, p. 243-252;Hallez 2014, p. 119-134]. Still other studies have underscored the influence of tsarist-era "empire specialists, " such as Orientalist scholars, ethnographers, missionaries, and colonization experts, on early Soviet institutions Cadiot 2007;Tolz 2011;Siegelbaum, Moch 2014, p. 32-48;Graber, Murray 2015, p. 127-152].…”