The Officer Corps, Professionalism, and Democracy in the Russian Revolution

Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.Russia's 'democratic' revolution of February 1917 saw all types of professions and social groups mobilize into unions and congresses to articulate their demands. Lower and middle classes dominated, but it is notable how former elite groups were quick to form bodies to defend their interests and to promote their visions of Russia's future. Historians have invariably dismissed these groups as marginal to the revolutionary process and inherently 'counter-revolutionary'. This article challenges these assumptions, using the Union of Officers, formed across the military in May 1917 to defend officers' professional interests, as a case study. The union spread quickly, published a newspaper, and agitated among politicians for greater discipline in the military. Its activities fuelled popular fears of counter-revolution, but only a few of the union's leaders actively worked against the government. General Kornilov's failed revolt in August demonstrated that most officers had doubts. Nevertheless, the union played a crucial role in mobilizing moderate and conservative forces against further reform. This exacerbated social conflict and political polarization, fatally undermining the Provisional Government and democracy in 1917.The British Academ

Recurrent Neural Networks with Top-k Gains for Session-based Recommendations

RNNs have been shown to be excellent models for sequential data and in particular for data that is generated by users in an session-based manner. The use of RNNs provides impressive performance benefits over classical methods in session-based recommendations. In this work we introduce novel ranking loss functions tailored to RNNs in the recommendation setting. The improved performance of these losses over alternatives, along with further tricks and refinements described in this work, allow for an overall improvement of up to 35% in terms of MRR and Recall@20 over previous session-based RNN solutions and up to 53% over classical collaborative filtering approaches. Unlike data augmentation-based improvements, our method does not increase training times significantly. We further demonstrate the performance gain of the RNN over baselines in an online A/B test.Comment: CIKM'18, authors' versio

Speaking to twin children: evidence against the "impoverishment" thesis

It is often claimed that parents’ talk to twins is less rich than talk to singletons and that this delays their language development. This case study suggests that talk to twins need not be impoverished. We identify highly sophisticated ways in which a mother responds to her 4-year-old twin children, both individually and jointly, as a way of ensuring an inclusive interactional environment. She uses gaze to demonstrate concurrent recipiency in response to simultaneous competition for attention from both children, and we see how the twins constantly monitor the ongoing interaction in order to appropriately position their own contributions to talk. In conclusion, we argue for the need to take twins’ interactional abilities into account when drawing linguistic comparisons between twins and singletons. Data are in Australian English

The Problems of 'Becoming Soviet': Former Nobles in Soviet Society, 1917-41

Copyright © 2008 SAGE PublicationsThere has been much new research on the extent to which the identities, beliefs and practices of ordinary citizens changed after 1917, and whether people were 'becoming Soviet'. This emphasis has tended to underplay continuities. This article uses the personal accounts of former nobles to examine levels of change and continuity in their activities and beliefs in the interwar period. There was change; many felt that they had 'become Soviet' because they obtained jobs, survived everyday challenges and endured the regime. Becoming 'workers', however, was not the same as 'becoming Soviet'. Strong continuities in other areas helped nobles to maintain a distinct identity in terms of practices and mentality (if not their material position). Rather than 'becoming Soviet', many former nobles tried to remain themselves. Many were surprisingly successful, suggesting that continuities played a significant role in early Soviet society

Mercy Amid Terror? The Role of Amnesties during Russia's Civil War

ArticleThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from MHRA via the DOI in this record.Russia's Civil War was a period of escalating violence as the Bolsheviks struggled to retain power, yet it was also a period of numerous amnesties. This article analyses the nature and impact of these amnesties, and explores their value to the Bolsheviks. These amnesties were not a sign of mercy; they never admitted mistakes or granted innocence, but excused or underplayed crimes and their significance. Instead, amnesties had a range of practical and political functions for the state, not least of which was to act as a ‘safety valve’ to release burgeoning pressures on the fledgling justice system and tensions between state and society.The majority of the research for this article was funded by a research fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust and I am very grateful for their support. Additional research emerged from a related project funded by the British Academy to whom I am also very grateful

Forging a Revolutionary Army: The All-Russian Military Union in 1917

© The Author(s) 2012The Russian military was deeply divided after the February Revolution of 1917, but if Russia was to emerge victorious from the First World War, it needed to forge a unified revolutionary army. This article examines the only serious attempt to foster unity, the All-Russian Military Union. While the union was not successful, a study of its activities emphasizes that divisions existed within social groups in the military as well as between them, which were exacerbated by the authorities. It also sheds light on the role of unions in the military and across Russia in 1917