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Ethnic Modernity and the Russian Empire: Russian Ethnographers and Caucasian Mountaineers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Austin Lee Jersild*
Affiliation:
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia

Extract

Late Imperial Russian society experienced a time of profound social and cultural change in spite of the fact that aristocratic privilege and monarchical power endured until 1917. Contemporary writers bear witness to an emerging working-class consciousness in the cities, a peasant culture increasingly in contact with the wider world of the city and beyond, and a literary culture shaped by the latest currents in the experimental modernism of the West.1 Scholars have long explored the Russian variant of interest group politics that emerged in the wake of the Great Reforms, such as technological innovation and the Russian Navy, the development of a legal consciousness, new cultural expectations about the city and the process of urbanization, the modern aspirations and ambitions of a thriving popular culture, and even an emerging modern set of assumptions about individual sexual autonomy.2

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Zelnik, Reginald E., trans. and ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, 1986); Cathy Frierson, trans. and ed., Aleksandr Nikolaevich Engelgardt's Letters from the Country, 1872-1887 (New York, 1993); David L. Ransel, ed., Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia by Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, trans. David L. Ransel with Michael Levine (Bloomington, 1993); Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. and introd. Robert Maguire, A. and Malmstad, John E. (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).Google Scholar

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35. , Volkova, Etnicheskii sostav, p. 245.Google Scholar

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38. Ibid., February 8, 1884, 1. 38. Also see RGIA, f. 1276, op. 21, 1895-1897, d. 45, Delo “Materialy o Chernomorskom naberezh'i Kavkaza,” Memorandum, 11. 1-10. (This RGIA file is mistakenly dated 1917.)Google Scholar

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41. On Soviet ideas and Soviet policies, see Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 414-452; and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993).Google Scholar