Long overlooked in the established literature, historical investigations of Russian Science, Technology, Environment, and Medicine (STEM) have recently benefitted from newfound interest among academic specialists. Informed by a broad range of innovative methodological and theoretical approaches, historians from the US, Europe, and Russian Federation have turned their attention to exploring the myriad political, cultural, social, and economic factors that shaped (and were shaped by) developments in these fields. This installment of the series Russia's Great War and Revolution aims to promote further understanding of Russia's unique contributions to STEM-related fields by documenting and analyzing the complex transformations occasioned by the country's “continuum of crisis” during the years c. 1914–24. In addition to introducing English-speaking audiences to important but otherwise little-known figures and events from the Russian past, this volume's 16 chapters shed new light on longstanding debates regarding the country’s path to modernization; the contributions of its technical and scientific experts; and the extent to which the institutions and methods adopted by Soviet leaders were built upon foundations established by their imperial predecessors. The collection makes significant contributions to multiple fields of inquiry; its authors’ findings and perspectives can be expected to influence scholarly agendas and public understanding for years to come.

This volume brings together the work of researchers in North America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Turkey, who are generating important, archivally based scholarship in their respective fields, languages, and nations of study. The larger goal of this volume is to sit in conversation with the others in this series that directly deal with Russia and its Great War and Revolution. Therefore, the volume provides an entry point for scholars who need a quick assessment of recent historiographic perspectives from the “other side of the hill.” The aim is to introduce readers to the myriad ways that the populations of the Central Powers nations both perceived and encountered Russia’s Great War and Revolution. The volume has been organized around four key areas in order to give the reader a glimpse into new lines of research on the war experience of the Central Powers. The first section looks at the ways in which Russia appeared in the eyes of others. The Central Powers went to war against Russia with their own preconceived notions. How those notions changed when put in the pressure cooker of violence, invasion, and occupation forms a crucial point for understanding Russia in the imagination of the people and elites in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The war also brought peoples into direct contact. The second section examines the variety of borderland encounters: positive, negative, and ambiguous. Ethnic violence and atrocity is certainly one aspect of those encounters which needs telling. But the war also opened up new spaces for economic exploitation and fraternization that colored and shaped the experiences of the soldiers and civilians. Section 3 focuses on the big-picture mechanics of strategy and policy. Armies in this new era of warfare increasingly functioned as administrators—of occupation regimes, veteran programs, and as quartermasters of the entire war economy. The chapters here explore the facets of military policy toward the end of the formal fighting in the war. And finally, the fourth section speaks to the transformation of the war in the East and its legacy for the continuum of violence that succeeded formal hostilities.

John Deak, Heather R. Perry, and Emre Sencer, Introduction: Russia’s Great War and Revolution, the Central Powers
https://doi.org/10.52500/GTGF8954

Stephan Lehnstaedt, Pride and Prejudice: The Central Powers’ Images of Poles and Jews, 1915–18
https://doi.org/10.52500/SOLK9863

Troy R. E. Paddock, The Threat from the East
https://doi.org/10.52500/UETZ5795

Alexander Will, Beating Russia in the Periphery: Austria-Hungary in the Middle East, 1914–18
https://doi.org/10.52500/DVQV1447

Yiğit Akın, “The Greatest Enemy of the Ottomans and Muslims”: The Russians in Ottoman Propaganda during the First World War
https://doi.org/10.52500/VQDG4021

Elke Hartmann, Dashed Hopes: Perspectives of Ottoman-Armenian Elites on Russia
https://doi.org/10.52500/HBBQ9929

Jesse Kauffman, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Occupation in the Shatterzone of Empires: Russia’s Western Frontier, 1905–18
https://doi.org/10.52500/JNKT6627

Christian Westerhoff, New Forms of Recruitment? German Labor Policy in the Occupied Territories of the Russian Empire, 1917–18
https://doi.org/10.52500/KZHA9650

Candan Badem, Rethinking Russian Influence: Religious and Ethnic Violence in the Southwest Caucasus in World War I
https://doi.org/10.52500/IAPC7337

Yücel Yanıkdağ, Flirting with the Enemy: Ottoman Prisoners of War and Russian Women during the Great War
https://doi.org/10.52500/YRAO5709

David Hamlin, Economic War and Economic Peace: Germany Reconstructs an Economic Order in Ukraine and Romania, 1918
https://doi.org/10.52500/KSZQ5982

Peter Lieb, German Politics in the East between Brest-Litovsk and Versailles
https://doi.org/10.52500/ZAJC4248

Robert L. Nelson and Justin Fantauzzo, Soldiers as Settlers in East Central Europe during and in the Wake of the Great War
https://doi.org/10.52500/RTJW4131

Verena Moritz and Hannes Leidinger, The Influence of the Russian Revolutions on the POWs in Austria-Hungary and Russia
https://doi.org/10.52500/OIVG4816

Wolfram Dornik, Between Military Pragmatism and Colonial Fantasies: Intervention and Occupation in Eastern Europe, 1914–19
https://doi.org/10.52500/NXOW5580

Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because he addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a Russian priest, a doctor, a teacher, and a mill owner who offer a perspective not normally seen in this history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Poole's own views and those of the people he visited provide a fascinating account of the revolutionary era that helps readers a century later understand the complexity of this fascinating time.
 

Here is the story of Vasily’s Island, the largest of the islands that make up St. Petersburg. While small in size, it has played a substantial role in several aspects of the city’s life since its founding in 1703, becoming above all its intellectual and educational center. Although little more than a glorified sandbar in the early eighteenth century, Vasily’s Island is where Peter the Great decided to locate his newly created Imperial Academy of Sciences. It also became home to the university, the naval academy, and a multitude of colleges, institutes, libraries, and museums. The Academy of Arts fostered a bohemian atmosphere that attracted Russia’s leading writers and composers as well as artists, forming a stark contrast to the island’s staid German community. As the arts blossomed on the east side, industry bloomed along the periphery, producing giants in shipbuilding, armaments, electronics, tobacco processing, and piano making. Spiritual life flowered as well. Along with numerous churches, the cluster of shrines and graveyards in the middle of the island have made it the spiritual heart of Peter’s town; St. Ksenia’s chapel, one of the holiest spots in Russian Orthodoxy, still draws pilgrims from afar. But despite its prominence, Vasily’s Island is also a place where ordinary people live. The quiet neighborhoods of its residential west side reflect the struggles and accomplishments typical of urban Russia as a whole. The pearl that lies in the shell of St. Petersburg resembles a self-sufficient miniature country, especially when the drawbridges go up at night to let the big ships through, and may be viewed as a microcosm of the nation to which it belongs.

This book is the first interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the most original and controversial turn-of-the-century Russian writer and thinker, Vasily Rozanov. Once described as the Russian Freud, Rozanov developed a unique methodology for his writing, a methodology based on the interpretation of cultural history through the lens of sexuality. As such, he can be viewed as a Russian Foucault who wrote his own original history of sexuality in application to the main Russian classical writers of the nineteenth century. The focus of this book is on the constructs of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality which Rozanov used to explicate the political, social, and artistic narratives of the “great five” of Russian literature: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Further, it explores how Rozanov applied the concept of “impure” blood in order to demonize writers and important cultural personalities from the democratic camp, thus setting a trend in Russian culture to fight an ideological enemy by exposing his or her often invented “racial” alterity. Forbidden for publication in the Soviet Union because of his political views, Rozanov enjoys an immense popularity in contemporary Russia, where his paradoxical and controversial statements have been incorporated into the propaganda employed by Russian nationalists of various denominations. In a rigorous and yet engaging manner, Mondry offers the most thought-provoking interpretation of this influential Russian thinker’s views and exposes the manipulation of his antisemitic and right-wing opinions by members of contemporary Russian political and cultural elites. About the author: Henrietta Mondry is Professor in Russian at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Fellow of the New Zealand Royal Society. Her latest books include Pure, Strong and Sexless: The Peasant Woman's Body and Gleb Uspensky (2006) and Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, since the 1880s (2009). This book is recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.

From the introduction: The rituals of wedding, delivery, and funeral provide us with an insight into how multiple strains of Russian culture from the October Revolution to the present have managed to coexist and evolve. All three rituals exhibit traces of the nineteenth-century rural folk behaviors considered to be essential for proper transition into a new social status. In addition, they feature Soviet practices, some of which have continued to the present day despite significant social changes since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Finally, they show how ideas and behaviors from Western Europe and America were adopted into the Soviet and post-Soviet belief system. This trend had already begun in the nineteenth century in cities, but became a significant social issue within the context of Soviet socialist ideology and again after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The material borrowed from the Western tradition varies widely and cannot always be pinpointed to a single source; nor can it be categorized as a single type of material. The borrowings relevant to our discussion include: ritual behaviors commonly found in Europe and the United States; capitalist or consumerist ideology; and finally science and technology. In sum, these rituals provide a microcosm of the social influences that every Russian faced throughout Soviet history and now faces in the post-Soviet world. As one would expect, the meanings about family life and social roles contained within these various belief systems are not always consonant with each other. Nevertheless, they were melded into a series of rituals which form what I will call the Soviet ritual complex. In addition, this study examines how rituals are changing in the post-Soviet world in response to the crisis engendered by socio-political upheaval. As the rituals change, we can see evidence of different attitudes in the society toward what it means to be a member and what values are most important at a given juncture in history. Village Values is the first book to examine the trends in the development and practice of urban Russian life-cycle rituals from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Rituals were a source of contention for theorists from the earliest decades of the Soviet Union because of their connection to religion and to outmoded patriarchal views of the family. Drawing upon extensive interviews with ritual participants and state celebrants, Rouhier-Willoughby examines developments in the Soviet ritual complex from the post-WWII years to the present day, with a particular emphasis on the heyday of ritual creation, the 1970s and 1980s. This book will be of great interest to specialists on Russia and on ritual as well as to a general audience interested in Russian culture. This book is recommended for library collections at four-year colleges and research universities.

This omnibus volume collects under a single cover the entire oeuvre of writings by Jan Louis Perkowski on the vampire theme in mythology and folklore, including his three previously published monographs (Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches Among the Ontario Kashubs, 1972; Vampires of the Slavs, 1976; and The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism, 1989), in addition to 18 previously uncollected articles on the subject, one newly written for this volume.

As Bruce McClelland notes in his Preface to the volume, in the folklore of the Slavs, the vampire plays a specific role in a broader system of folk belief. Where in the West, the vampire is utterly monstrous, the symbol of pure evil and darkness that is nevertheless romanticized and eroticized, its moral status is more nuanced and ambiguous in the Slavic conception. Yet the ancient Slavic folkloric vampire represents the historical basis of the pop cultural vampire about which movies, television shows, and video games are still being profitably made. Some of the materials here are enormously useful because they reveal historical stages in the conception of the vampire that are quite different from what most would know about the vampire who are familiar only with the Western literary tradition. This corrective aspect of Perkowski’s Vampires, which exposes a tradition directly linked to Balkan or at any rate Slavic folklore that follows a path that is quite independent of the 19th-century literary/metaphoric notions of the vampire, has had a difficult time getting traction in popular consciousness in the West, which suggests an entrenchment of the Romantic and Gothic traditions, and a concomitant resistance to correction by legitimate ethnographic research.

Hugolin Gavlovic's Valaska Skola (The Shepherd's School), written in 1755 in the Slovak language before its codification in the late 1780s, will be of great interest to linguists as well as to specialists in Slovak literature and of the Slavic Baroque in general. Gavlovic (1712-87), a Franciscan priest, combined devotional poetry with an indignant social satire and broad range of secular topics. Indeed, some of this text, even eighty years after its composition, was not deemed passable by the censor. The only previous edition which was allegedly "complete" (1830-31) had a radically corrupt and somewhat incomplete text. Modern editions have had altered texts and were substantially (as much as fifty percent) abridged. This diplomatic edition is the first authentic, unabridged edition. It also publishes all the original illustrations incorporated by Gavlovic, most for the first time anywhere. A poetic form peculiar to Gavlovic, which he called a koncept, is found in Valaska Skola. It consists of twelve verses or six rhymed couplets; each verse has fourteen syllables with a caesura-like pause after the eighth syllable. Usually, some rhymed couplets of varying length are related to a koncept. The Skola comprises nearly eighteen thousand verses of fourteen syllables, and some twenty-four hundred verses of varying length for the couplet-mottos. Fifty-nine such konceptforms comprise a division called a nota by Gavlovic. Each nota is introduced by a Biblical shepherd. In the view of Professor Durovic, Valaska Skola is situated temporally as well as linguistically between the system of Pavel Dolezhal and the codification of "cultural West Slovak" by Bernolak in the 1780s. Durovic's aim in this study has been to demonstrate Gavlovic's position in relation to the two fundamental printed works, i.e., Dolezhal's and Bernolak's, within the development toward a codified and generally accepted national literary Slovak. Commentary and annotation by Professors Sabo and Durovic provide the literary, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which to appreciate this extensive text of eighteenth-century Slovak literature. "...impresses with the quality of its scholarship and the sheer importance of the project." (SEEJ).