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Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian
space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development
over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to
Russian studies and the "new spatial history." It considers aspects
of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the
local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through
the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, "What is a
Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in
Russia"; Mark Bassin, "Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie:
Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism"; John Randolph,
"Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road,
1700-1800"; Richard Stites, "On the Dance Floor: Royal Power,
Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia"; Patricia Herlihy, "Ab
Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central
Asia"; Robert Argenbright, "Soviet Agitational Vehicles:
Colonization from Place to Place"; Christopher Ely, "Street Space
and Political Culture under Alexander II"; Sergei Zhuk, "Unmaking
the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism,
Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian
Borderlands of the late Russian Empire"; Cathy A. Frierson,
"Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity"; and Lisa
A, "Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity:
Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg."
This book discusses the return of geopolitical ideas and doctrines
to the post-Soviet space with special focus on the new phenomenon
of digital geopolitics, which is an overarching term for different
political practices including dissemination of geopolitical ideas
online, using the internet by political figures and diplomats for
legitimation and outreach activity, and viral spread of
geopolitical memes. Different chapters explore the new
possibilities and threats associated with this digitalization of
geopolitical knowledge and practice. Our authors consider new
spatial sensibilities and new identities of global as well as local
Selves, the emergence of which is facilitated by the internet. They
explore recent reconfigurations of the traditional imperial
conundrum of center versus periphery. Developing Manuel Castells'
argument that social activism in the digital era is organized
around cultural values, the essays discuss new geopolitical
ideologies which aim to reinforce Russia's spiritual sovereignty as
a unique civilization, while at the same time seeking to rebrand
Russia as a greater soft power by utilizing the Russian-speaking
diaspora or employing traditionalist rhetoric. Great Power imagery,
enemy-making, and visual mappings of Russia's future territorial
expansion are traditional means for the manipulation of imperial
pleasures and geopolitical fears. In the age of new media, however,
this is being done with greater subtlety by mobilizing the
grassroots, contracting private information channels, and
de-politicizing geopolitics. Given the political events of recent
years, it is logical that the Ukrainian crisis should provide the
thematic backdrop for most of the authors.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the
historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev
(1912-1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and
beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, Nikolai
Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in
Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained
officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of
perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and
he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his
highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the
meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the
dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of
admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public
intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely
compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell
millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in
Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are
named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent
thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President
Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep
appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important
foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly
inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples
formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin
presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates
the complex structure of Gumilev's theories, revealing how they
reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as
political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his
authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The
themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev's complicated web of
influence are critical to understanding the political,
intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from
the age of Stalin to the present day.
This book discusses the return of geopolitical ideas and doctrines
to the post-Soviet space with special focus on the new phenomenon
of digital geopolitics, which is an overarching term for different
political practices including dissemination of geopolitical ideas
online, using the internet by political figures and diplomats for
legitimation and outreach activity, and viral spread of
geopolitical memes. Different chapters explore the new
possibilities and threats associated with this digitalization of
geopolitical knowledge and practice. Our authors consider new
spatial sensibilities and new identities of global as well as local
Selves, the emergence of which is facilitated by the internet. They
explore recent reconfigurations of the traditional imperial
conundrum of center versus periphery. Developing Manuel Castells'
argument that social activism in the digital era is organized
around cultural values, the essays discuss new geopolitical
ideologies which aim to reinforce Russia's spiritual sovereignty as
a unique civilization, while at the same time seeking to rebrand
Russia as a greater soft power by utilizing the Russian-speaking
diaspora or employing traditionalist rhetoric. Great Power imagery,
enemy-making, and visual mappings of Russia's future territorial
expansion are traditional means for the manipulation of imperial
pleasures and geopolitical fears. In the age of new media, however,
this is being done with greater subtlety by mobilizing the
grassroots, contracting private information channels, and
de-politicizing geopolitics. Given the political events of recent
years, it is logical that the Ukrainian crisis should provide the
thematic backdrop for most of the authors.
In the course of Vladimir Putin's third presidential term, many of
the doctrines and ideas associated with Eurasianism have moved to
the center of public political discourses in Russia. Eurasianism,
both Russian and non-Russian, is politically active -influential
and contested- in debates about identity, popular culture or
foreign policy narratives. Deploying a variety of theoretical
frameworks and perspectives, the essays in this volume work
together to shed light on both Eurasianism's plasticity and
contemporary weight, and examine how its tropes and discourses are
appropriated, interpreted, modulated and deployed politically, by
national groups, oppositional forces (left or right), prominent
intellectuals, artists, and last but not least, government elites.
In doing so, this collection addresses essential themes and
questions currently shaping the Post-Soviet world and beyond.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity
have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the
countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection
examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV,
cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions
and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to
language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of
political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths,
institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national
identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the
attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a
variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights
about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous
photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an
accessible and lively way.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the legacy of the
historian, ethnographer, and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev
(1912-1992) has attracted extraordinary interest in Russia and
beyond. The son of two of modern Russia's greatest poets, Nikolai
Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev spent thirteen years in
Stalinist prison camps, and after his release in 1956 remained
officially outcast and professionally shunned. Out of the tumult of
perestroika, however, his writings began to attract attention and
he himself became a well-known and popular figure. Despite his
highly controversial (and often contradictory) views about the
meaning of Russian history, the nature of ethnicity, and the
dynamics of interethnic relations, Gumilev now enjoys a degree of
admiration and adulation matched by few if any other public
intellectual figures in the former Soviet Union. He is freely
compared to Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, and his works today sell
millions of copies and have been adopted as official textbooks in
Russian high schools. Universities and mountain peaks alike are
named in his honor, and a statue of him adorns a prominent
thoroughfare in a major city. Leading politicians, President
Vladimir Putin very much included, are unstinting in their deep
appreciation for his legacy, and one of the most important
foreign-policy projects of the Russian government today is clearly
inspired by his particular vision of how the Eurasian peoples
formed a historical community. In The Gumilev Mystique, Mark Bassin
presents an analysis of this remarkable phenomenon. He investigates
the complex structure of Gumilev's theories, revealing how they
reflected and helped shape a variety of academic as well as
political and social discourses in the USSR, and he traces how his
authority has grown yet greater across the former Soviet Union. The
themes he highlights while untangling Gumilev's complicated web of
influence are critical to understanding the political,
intellectual, and ethno-national dynamics of Russian society from
the age of Stalin to the present day.
Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of
Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence
of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former
Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical
roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife
of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first
study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the
twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual
entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography,
this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia. The
Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of
Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In
reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and
revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian
connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western
individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a
non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's
role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism
was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became
one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in
Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the
concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve
its present form.
Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity
have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the
countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection
examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV,
cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions
and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to
language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of
political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths,
institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national
identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the
attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a
variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights
about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous
photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an
accessible and lively way.
Exploring the creation, transformation, and imagination of Russian
space as a lens through which to understand Russia's development
over the centuries, this volume makes an important contribution to
Russian studies and the "new spatial history." It considers aspects
of the relationship between place and power in Russia from the
local level to the national and from the eighteenth century through
the present. Essays include: Melissa K. Stockdale, "What is a
Fatherland? Changing Notions of Duty, Rights and Belonging in
Russia"; Mark Bassin, "Nationhood, Natural Regions, Mestorazvitie:
Environmental Discourses in Classic Eurasianism"; John Randolph,
"Russian Route: The Politics of the Petersburg-Moscow Road,
1700-1800"; Richard Stites, "On the Dance Floor: Royal Power,
Class, and Nationality in Servile Russia"; Patricia Herlihy, "Ab
Oriente ad Ultimum Oriente: Eugen Scuyler, Russia and Central
Asia"; Robert Argenbright, "Soviet Agitational Vehicles:
Colonization from Place to Place"; Christopher Ely, "Street Space
and Political Culture under Alexander II"; Sergei Zhuk, "Unmaking
the Sacred Landscape of Orthodox Russia: Religious Pluralism,
Identity Crisis, and Religious Politics on the Ukrainian
Borderlands of the late Russian Empire"; Cathy A. Frierson,
"Filling in the Map for Vologda's Post-Soviet Identity"; and Lisa
A, "Kirschenbaum, Place, Memory and the Politics of Identity:
Historical Buildings and Street Names in Leningrad-St. Petersburg."
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire made a
dramatic advance on the Pacific by annexing the vast regions of the
Amur and Ussuri rivers. Although this remote realm was a virtual
terra incognita for the Russian educated public, the acquisition of
an 'Asian Mississippi' attracted great attention nonetheless, even
stirring the dreams of Russia's most outstanding visionaries.
Within a decade of its acquisition, however, the dreams were gone
and the Amur region largely abandoned and forgotten. In an
innovative examination of Russia's perceptions of the new
territories in the Far East, Mark Bassin sets the Amur enigma
squarely in the context of the Zeitgeist in Russia at the time.
Imperial Visions demonstrates the fundamental importance of
geographical imagination in the mentalite of imperial Russia. This
1999 work offers a truly novel perspective on the complex and
ambivalent ideological relationship between Russian nationalism,
geographical identity and imperial expansion.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Amur region had been a virtual terra incognita for the Russian public. However, the region's annexation succeeded in stirring the dreams of the country's most outstanding social and political visionaries, who declared it "civilization's most important step forward." A decade later, this enthrallment and optimism had evaporated. Mark Bassin examines Russia's perceptions of the new territories, placing the Amur enigma in the context of Russian Zeitgeist mid-century, and offers a new perspective on the relationship among Russian nationalism, geographical identity and imperial expansion.
In the course of Vladimir Putin's third presidential term, many of
the doctrines and ideas associated with Eurasianism have moved to
the center of public political discourses in Russia. Eurasianism,
both Russian and non-Russian, is politically active -influential
and contested- in debates about identity, popular culture or
foreign policy narratives. Deploying a variety of theoretical
frameworks and perspectives, the essays in this volume work
together to shed light on both Eurasianism's plasticity and
contemporary weight, and examine how its tropes and discourses are
appropriated, interpreted, modulated and deployed politically, by
national groups, oppositional forces (left or right), prominent
intellectuals, artists, and last but not least, government elites.
In doing so, this collection addresses essential themes and
questions currently shaping the Post-Soviet world and beyond.
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