Russians Abroad

"This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues—one with the emerging Soviet Union, and one with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book’s chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today’s broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.

Russians Abroad

"This book presents an array of perspectives on the vivid cultural and literary politics that marked the period immediately after the October Revolution of 1917, when Russian writers had to relocate to Berlin and Paris under harsh conditions. Divided amongst themselves and uncertain about the political and artistic directions of life in the diaspora, these writers carried on two simultaneous literary dialogues—one with the emerging Soviet Union, and one with the dizzying world of European modernism that surrounded them in the West. The book’s chapters address generational differences, literary polemics and experimentation, the heritage of pre-October Russian modernism, and the fate of individual writers and critics, offering a sweeping view of how exiles created a literary diaspora. The discussion moves beyond Russian studies to contribute to today’s broad, cross-cultural study of the creative side of political and cultural displacement.

Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory

This study in the anthropology of religion examines the relationship between Kazak ethnicity and religion, exploring how the collective memory is mediating Muslim values in Kazak culture in the 1990s. Ethnographic field research was conducted in the Kazak language from 1992 to 1998 in the city of Turkistan (Turkestan) in southern Kazakstan (Kazakhstan). Turkistan is the site of the Timurid shrine of Ahmet Yasawi (Ahmed Yasavi), a key figure in the Turkic Sufism of Central Asia. Today it is also a cultural center of the new Pan-Turkism and the site of a Kazak-Turkish international university. The findings of the study are that Kazak religion in Turkistan is affectively experienced as five elements: (1) an ethnic identity that is conceived as a Muslim identity, because the Kazak steppe has been sacralized by Muslim architectural landscapes; (2) normative Islam idealized as the pure way, which the Kazak elders and Qojas (khojas), a religious honor group with roots in the Sufi tradition, are expected to practice as surrogates for the Kazak community; (3) an ancestor cult energized by dreams and dream-visions and expressed in domestic and neighborhood rites that reflect the Islamic cycle of funerary meals; (4) pilgrimage (ziyarat) to the tomb of Ahmet Yasawi and the peripheral shrines of other Muslim saints, whose spirits are associated with the spirits of the Kazak ancestors; and (5) folk medicine associated with Muslim therapeutic values, the blessing (baraka) of Muslim saints, and the healer\u27s ancestor-spirits. In five descriptive chapters these elements are substantiated with verbatim interview data in Kazak, with English translations. The problem of normative and popular Islam (folk Islam), the lslamization of Inner Asia, the syncretic interpretation of Turko-Mongolian shamanism, and the semantic fields of Kazak religious discourse are explored. The persistence of Kazak religion in the Soviet Union is accounted for by the strength of the contextualization of Islam in the nomadic period and the capacity of the collective memory to store religious values in attenuated ritual forms. The study concludes that religion identified with sacred habitus and ethnic identity will persist in the collective memory even under severe deculturative pressure

The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions

Occult and esoteric ideas became deeply embedded in Russian culture long before the Bolshevik Revolution. After the Revolution, occult ideas were manifested in literature, the humanities and the sciences as well. Although the Soviet government discouraged and eventually prohibited metaphysical speculation, that same government used the Occult for its own purposes and even funded research on it. In Stalin's time, occultism disappeared from public view, but it revived clandestinely in the post-Stalin Thaw and became a truly popular phenomenon in post-Soviet Russia. From cosmism to shamanism, from space exploration to Kabbalah, from neo-paganism to science fiction, the field is wide. Everyone interested in the occult and esoteric will appreciate this book, because it documents their continued importance in Russia and raises new issues for research and discussion. www.new-age-of-russia.co

Constructing identity : Kaliningrad and the appropriation of place

In 1945, the Red Army marched into Königsberg, beginning the process of it becoming the Soviet city of Kaliningrad. Seventy years later, the contemporary resonance surrounding Russia’s sphere of influence, coupled with the recent centenary of the Russian revolution, has led to a renewed interest in Soviet studies. Yet, Kaliningrad remains largely unexplored, and virtually unknown outside a narrow field of specialists. This thesis thus considers critically how Soviet manipulation of public space was employed in an attempt to ease the complex transition of East Prussia from Königsberg to Kaliningrad. In a departure from current approaches in the field, the thesis places Kaliningrad in the broader Baltic context and provides an examination of the actual ‘spatial’ aspect of this history. In particular, it provides an analysis of how Soviet city planners envisaged the city being ‘embodied’ by citizens - how they were to interact, engage and move within it - to demonstrate that this was just as important as what the built space itself was supposed to represent in terms of its symbolism at the Soviet Union’s westernmost frontier. The thesis further documents how Soviet placemaking techniques - first adopted by the Bolsheviks in their attempt to encourage the new Soviet settlers to assimilate to their new homeland - have continued to hold resonance in contemporary Kaliningrad. In turn, it demonstrates that the Soviet project - although left unfinished - has had a significant and lasting impact on the region and its inhabitants

NAVIGATING THE PLANNED ECONOMY: ACCOMODATION AND SURVIVAL IN MOSCOW’S POST-WAR ‘SOVIET JEWISH PALE’

This dissertation presents an anthropological case study of Jewish engagement in the Soviet “planned economy,” or the “economy of shortage,” in a specific geographic setting of Moscow Jewish suburbs in the first decades after World War II. Due to a range of socio-political, economic and demographic developments Moscow’s suburban settlements with their dense pattern of Jewish residence, unparalleled in Soviet history, turned into what may be called a “Soviet Jewish pale” – a distinctive socio-cultural Jewish environment sustaining a specific configuration of Soviet Jewishness, not fully coinciding with that of the former shtetl, yet different from that characteristic of large urban settings. The study focuses on one particular sphere constitutive of the suburban Jewish collective identity, that is, the economic practices where Jewishness played a vital role in creating channels for obtaining production resources, organizing production and devising distribution strategies. It demonstrates that the prohibition of private entrepreneurship on the part of the socialist state, largely ideological rather than economic in nature, called forth a likewise not purely economic response from below – ethnic mobilization in certain spheres of the formal socialist economy. In particular, the dissertation addresses three Jewish economic “niches” – small-scale artel production, trade and the Soviet version of junk-yards, and explores the question of their “embeddedness” in Jewish economic and social traditions. As a part of a wider debate on the nature of socialist production, the dissertation provides a locally-informed understanding of the role that ethnic actors played in production and distribution at the intersection of the “first” and the “second” Soviet economies. As cultural anthropology, it examines the complex relationships between social tradition, belief and accommodation in the urban-rural nexus of the country’s capital. By focusing on an ethnic group subjected to open and covert discrimination that curbed its members’ professional choices, this work involves an historically grounded sociocultural analysis of inequality and socio-political adaptation. As economic anthropology, it makes the first systematic attempt at narrating Soviet Jewish economic history after World War II.Doctor of Philosoph