Author: Francine Hirsch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.
Empire of Nations
Author: Francine Hirsch
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they set themselves the task of building socialism in the vast landscape of the former Russian Empire, a territory populated by hundreds of different peoples belonging to a multitude of linguistic, religious, and ethnic groups. Before 1917, the Bolsheviks had called for the national self-determination of all peoples and had condemned all forms of colonization as exploitative. After attaining power, however, they began to express concern that it would not be possible for Soviet Russia to survive without the cotton of Turkestan and the oil of the Caucasus. In an effort to reconcile their anti-imperialist position with their desire to hold on to as much territory as possible, the Bolsheviks integrated the national idea into the administrative-territorial structure of the new Soviet state. In Empire of Nations, Francine Hirsch examines the ways in which former imperial ethnographers and local elites provided the Bolsheviks with ethnographic knowledge that shaped the very formation of the new Soviet Union. The ethnographers—who drew inspiration from the Western European colonial context—produced all-union censuses, assisted government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR's internal borders, led expeditions to study "the human being as a productive force," and created ethnographic exhibits about the "Peoples of the USSR." In the 1930s, they would lead the Soviet campaign against Nazi race theories . Hirsch illuminates the pervasive tension between the colonial-economic and ethnographic definitions of Soviet territory; this tension informed Soviet social, economic, and administrative structures. A major contribution to the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Empire of Nations also offers new insights into the connection between ethnography and empire.
Imperial Desert Dreams
Author: Julia Obertreis
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 9783847107866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Officials, engineers and scientists in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union envisaged the expansion and modernization of irrigation systems and cotton growing in Central Asia. Focusing on the region of today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, this book highlights the continuities in discourse and policies beyond the historical divide of 1917. One of the central topoi was the transformation of 'dead' lands into 'blossoming oases'. High modernism policies hit their peak in the post-war decades. From the 1970s, an ecological critique evolved which gained momentum in the Perestroika period. Ultimately, the grave ecological, economic and social consequences of the growth-fixated modernization contributed to the downfall of the Communist regime.
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 9783847107866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Officials, engineers and scientists in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union envisaged the expansion and modernization of irrigation systems and cotton growing in Central Asia. Focusing on the region of today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, this book highlights the continuities in discourse and policies beyond the historical divide of 1917. One of the central topoi was the transformation of 'dead' lands into 'blossoming oases'. High modernism policies hit their peak in the post-war decades. From the 1970s, an ecological critique evolved which gained momentum in the Perestroika period. Ultimately, the grave ecological, economic and social consequences of the growth-fixated modernization contributed to the downfall of the Communist regime.
Round the World with Cotton
Author: United States. Agricultural Adjustment Administration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cotton growing
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cotton growing
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Empire of Cotton
Author: Sven Beckert
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375713964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642
Book Description
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375713964
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 642
Book Description
WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.
Russian Journal
Author: Andrea Lee
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030749036X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
“A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030749036X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
“A subtly crafted reflection of both the bleak and golden shadings of Russian life . . . Its tones belong more to the realm of poetry than journalism.” –The New York Times Book Review At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters–and the book that launched Lee’s career as a writer–Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic. “[Lee] takes us wherever she is, conveying a feeling of place and atmosphere that is the mark of real talent.” –The Washington Post Book World “A book of very great charm . . . [Lee] records what she saw and heard with unassuming delicacy and exactness.” –Newsweek
Soviet Union
Author: Raymond E. Zickel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 1182
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Russia
Languages : en
Pages : 1182
Book Description
Soviet Union Review
Veiled Empire
Author: Douglas T. Northrop
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.