A Memoir of Natalia Bogdanovna Korsak.pdf

Russian History, 1996

To communion I won't go. ' I The feisty young peasant woman who was the protagonist of this humororous chastushka was sui generis. A rebel in the hierarchical peasant family which prized deference from its children, she scoffed at parental authority. An atheist in a religious worlo7 she rejected the time-honored rituals that gave peasant life its color and sense of community. A member of the Komsomol (acronym for VLKSM, or the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League), she was a politicized woman entering the exclusively male public domain. Though she constituted part of a minuscule minority of peasant youth, nonetheless, she was a common feature of Communist popular culture in the 1920s. The Communist youth movement emerged in 1917 as an urban, male phenomenon. In the mid-1920s the Komsomol expanded very rapidly in the countryside, despite almost universal parental opposition, and * Research for this article was made possible by a Ford Foundation Fellowship for Minority Scholars, the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, support from my institution, William Paterson College, and an IREX short-term travel grant. It is based on research done in the Komsomol's Central Archive (now the Tsentr khraneniia dokumentov molodezhnykh organizatsii, or TsKhDMO), in particular on materials from the Central Committee plenary sessions and its rural commission, including stenographic accounts of bureau plenaries and Komsomol conferences and meetings, letters to the secretariat, weekly and monthly reports by local organizations, and drafts of articles, theses and other official pronouncements. It also draws on Zhenotdel materials from the Central Party Archive (now the Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii, or RTsKhIDNI). 1. I am indebted to the historian Viktor P. Danilov for this peasant chastushka and subsequent ones in this article. They come from the Riazanskii istoricheskii-arkhitektumyi muzeizapovedeniia. Nauchnyi arkhiv (hereafter, OIRK), Kn. 20, no. 490, list 119 (1929). Chastushki are short, humorous folk songs or ditties that enlivened all youth gatherings.

The First World War period was marked by active transformations in all spheres of Russian society. The war was accompanied by breaches in labour practices and deformation of people's mode of life. Family relationships were broken up. People's mentality, behaviour and survival strategies both at the front lines and deep inside the country were changed. The number of people in need of help increased by many times. The masses faced real disaster when the ruble collapsed during the war. By the beginning of 1917, the value of a ruble had decreased to 60 kopecks, and by the end of 1917 it was a mere 31 kopecks -less than a third of its former value. The resultant high price of all consumer goods knocked the financial circumstances of the typical citizen to below the level of minimum subsistence. 1 During World War I, the idea that social assistance for citizens in need was the responsibility of state and society appeared in Russia. Various organisations were created all over the country to help war victims. Their activity, from the viewpoint of social necessities and interests, remains insufficiently studied due to the extensive and multi-aspect character of this topic. At the same time, the existence and level of maturity of civil society institutions in the political system of pre-revolutionary Russia is a highly debatable question in historical studies. The status of modern views on the problems of civil society and the public sphere in Russia is clearly illustrated in the works of

Институт Первой Леди в опыте восточной Славии, 2016

Статья посвящена рассмотрению опыта развития института Первой Леди на территории современной восточной Славии. Сравниваются примеры гендерной репрезентации конца советской эпохи и гендерное «поражение» на высшем уровне в отдельных постсоветских государствах. Самопрезентация Первой Леди и ее восприятие – своеобразный индикатор демократических перемен в стране. Накопленный опыт отражает реальное состояние непопулярности гендерного вопроса в государствах восточной Славии и свидетельствует о том, что демократическая система власти в России, Беларуси и Украине делает только первые шаги. Рассмотренная парадигма свидетельствует также о снижении престижа института семьи. The article analyzes the First Lady Institute experience in modern eastern Slavia. The examples of gender representation from the late Soviet era and the highest level gender “defeat” in some post-Soviet states are compared. The First Lady’s presentation and self-presentation are seen as an indicator of democratic changes in the state. The accumulated experience reflects the real condition of gender issue unpopularity among some leaders of Eastern Slavonic states, so it proves the immaturity of governmental democratic systems in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The analyzed paradigm also reflects the decline of the family institution prestige.

Unpublished MA thesis, University of Bergen, 1995

Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2000

Research for this study began about ten years ago, and a book will appear this fall titled Village Mothers: Three Generations a/Change in Russia and Tataria (Indiana University Press, 2000). The first two chapters of the book trace the entry of Western medical discourse on reproduction into Russia from the eighteenth century onward and its transmittal to villages during the late imperial and Soviet periods. The remainder of the book follows the reception of the new ideas and practices by three generations of Russian and Tatar village women in the twentieth century. Their oral testimony was collected in 100 interviews conducted in the spring and summer of 1990 and summers of 1993 and 1994. The principal interview sites were in Novgorod, Smolensk, Moscow, Tambov, UI'ianovsk, and Sverdlovsk provinces. I did many of the interviews myself; Russian and Tatar collaborators conducted many others using my questionnaire. The chapters based on the oral interviews cover courtship and marriage, abortion and other means of birth limitation, birthing, baptism (and equivalent Muslim rites), coping with infant death, and early child care, including feeding, swaddling, and herbal and magical medical practices. What follows is an excerpt from the concluding chapter and constitutes a summary of the experience and stance of each of the three generations.

2004

THE UNLIKELY PRIZE CAI'IDlDATE Among the works included in Ihe shortlisL for Ihe prestigious Russian Booker lilCrdrY aw,trd in 1998, one appeared particularly surprising with regard LQ genre, author and content. The jury had llllanimously agreed to include the alilOhiograpbicaJ Ie Xl of AleksanUla Chjstiakova, an elderly woman from the Siberian !Own of Kemerovo. This life history had been puhlislH~d with ,b,: title Nt mT'logo Ii dlin. odnoi?-'Enmlgh lor one'~'-by tbe juurnal Den' i Noch' (Day and Night), published in Krasl1oiarsl. The hook was r,diJrd by the jlJurllalisl Vladimir Shiriaev. I The CXlf.llt of' Shiri,\('v's involvement remains unc1e;l'I~ Tlw rext appealS to be d''awil from diary excerpt.s, as suggested by the opening ~entence-'1 decided Lo k"ep a diary. BUL Grstl wiU describe my lift, SI) far. I am a1rr.ady twenty-four years old ... ' and tht Ja~t. page-'Now it is <lJreJdy wintCf and New Yl',;l" j~ ilppmaching ... This i,; bow we live, the two of us, Step,ul and J. l'ouay I C3mf: from visiLing my mother, where 1 WtIS for two days. He is sleeping 1J(l\\~ lhe rugs ~lIT rolled away ... Wh~n he insulls me, 1 no longer want to live. I will for the rest of' my lire be disappointed with my faIC.' Shiriaev is said to havt: 'n:cordcd' the ttxt (the verb lIsed is ;:,apisa/., which can be undclstood to mcan both 'to record', as in recording an interview, amI 'to wrile duwn'). IL is possible thaI he selected and transcribed the diary excerpts, or that Chistiakova read them to him. Tie d.lso iULervicweJ bel' directly La complement the entries. He may indeed have chosen the \.itlc and added the very last sentences, whir.h are botb mort> abstractly reOrdive than Lhe main text. bmguage correaions may also have modified the original lang1lagr. of the clJary. This publishcd versiun of Chistiakova's tife-history text has none of the frequent spdling (lLld punctuation errors found in other working-cla~s 'COMING TO ST,\ND ON fIRM GROUND' women's autobiographies of the same generation.'2 Chistiakova tells us that sh was never very good in Rus.,ian <It :;L:hool, but that she loved writjug poems. Her

2003

... INTRODUCTION There is nothing in Russian history darker than the fate of Viatka and her land. --Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov, nineteenth-century historian.1 ... Some authors, such as Nikolai Vasil&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;evich Chaikovskii, saw Viatka&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#x27;s unspoiled nature as paradise. Other writers ...

International Review of Social History, 2004

Examining the different monographs and research done on the history of the Russian emigration, one rarely encounters the name of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tsurikov; even the most serious works only provide limited references to him as a cultural, political or literary figure. Bio and bibliographical information can be found in the works of L. Foster, V. Bulgakov, Gleb Struve's Literaturnaia entsiklopediia russkogo zarubezh'ia 1 , at times he is mentioned in archival reference works 2. Selected passages of his correspondence with Petr Struve appear in Richard Pipes' biography of the latter, and more recently, Lazar Fleishman discusses his role in the Trest affair of the 1930s 3 while Paul Robinson sheds light on Tsurikov's broader activities within the structure of ROVS 4. While Marc Raeff's Russia Abroad does not manage to encompass all areas of émigré activities, it is more surprising that E. Andreeva and I. Savitskii fail to even mention Tsurikov in their narrow focus on the Prague based Russian émigré community focusing on the years 1918-1938 5. Among the rare exceptions are Baroness M.D. Wrangel's collection of émigré autobiographies (edited by Irina Shevelenko) and N.P. Poltoratsky's Rossiia i Revoliutsiia 6. However, even at a quick glance at these accounts it becomes evident that the information offered is far from exhaustive, considering the broad activities of Nikolai Tsurikov as an important social figure in the Russian diaspora during his time. His personal archives, which have found a home at the Hoover Institution, show a lively correspondence with leading cultural, military, political and social representatives of the Russian diaspora. This paper will attempt to reconstruct Tsurikov's "persona" based on several contemporary sources 7 , and his long awaited return to his homeland, fifty-one years after his death. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tsurikov was born on July 27, 1886 in the Orlov uezd into a noble family that entered into service to the Russian rulers, presumed from Velikoe kniazhestvo litovskoe, during Ioann III's rule. According to family tradition, one of Tsurikov's ancestors participated in the battle of Kulikovo of 1380 under Dmitri Donskoi's command. Nikolai grew up in his family estate in the Chern' uezd of the Tula guberniia, where he spent the first fourteen years of his life. His father, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, was a member of the local circuit court; it was him that Leo Tolstoy sought out as a consultant when he was working on his novel Resurrection. According to N. A.Tsurikov, his father agreed with Tolstoy on many pedagogical as well as social issues, and used his textbooks for the education of his own children 8. Nikolai received his elementary education in the local peasant school, which was financed by his parents, after which he continued his education first in the Kaluzhskaia gimnaziia (1904-05) and later in the 7-aia Moskovskaia gimnaziia (1905-07).