5. By Deeds Alone: Origins of Individualization in Soviet Russia

Individualization of the population under the Stalinist regime is a relatively well established topic in Russian studies. Researchers of the two formerly dominant schools in interpreting Soviet historical experience – the totalitarians and the revisionists – seem to agree on this point, even if they contradict each other on most other points. Thus, Raymond Bauer, echoing Hannah Arendt’s thesis that totalitarianism was based on atomization of the masses, stated in his classic 1952 study that t..

Speech [by Oleg Kharkhordin, Rector, European University at St. Petersburg]

This contribution was delivered on the occasion of the EUI State of the Union in Florence on 9 May 201

The Materiality of Res Publica. How to Do Things with Publics

For the last 100 years, political science has traditionally concentrated on the publica part of the expression res publica, conceiving this notion as a form of government opposed to, say, monarchy. However, the Ancients and citizens of Renaissance republics were just as attentive to the res part of the expression. The goal of this richly illustrated volume—containing 94 images—is to draw attention to this res, things and affairs that bring people together. The book first focuses on the central role played by the Rialto Bridge in Venice and by the main bridge in Novgorod the Great in the lives of the respective republics. It includes studies of res in other res publicae: an analysis of the republican icon of a woman crowned with ramparts found in three European cities; and a detailed study of iconography figuring Hobbes’ theory of res publica

The collective and the individual in Russia: a study of practices

Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals - which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them - had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather than the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity. He also finds that objectification of the individual in Russia relied on practices of mutual surveillance among peers, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West. The implications of this book expand well beyond its brilliant analysis of the connection between Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodoxy to shed light on many questions about the nature of Russian society and culture

What is new in the world and why does it matter for the EU?

This contribution was delivered on the occasion of the EUI State of the Union in Florence on 9 May 201

Dangerous modernities: innovative technologies and the unsettling of agriculture in rural Poland

This article is concerned with the way people understood socialist modernity in different regions of Poland, and with their responses to the collapse of socialism and with it the unsettling of employment, work and economy generally. The article focuses on stories told in central and southern Poland about technologies and progress associated with socialist industrialization and infrastructure development, and on later stories of technologies and danger associated with the demise of socialism and the advent of capitalism. It considers the way that trains and other technologies may become heavily weighted symbols for both development and unsettlement, in stories which refer obliquely to the fragility of kinship and the state, and to anxiety connected to change