Peopling the Russian Periphery

Peopling the Russian Periphery PDF Author: Nicholas B. Breyfogle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Emigration and immigration
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Peopling the Russian Periphery

Peopling the Russian Periphery PDF Author: Nicholas B. Breyfogle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Emigration and immigration
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description


Taming the Wild Field

Taming the Wild Field PDF Author: Willard Sunderland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.

Peopling the Russian Periphery

Peopling the Russian Periphery PDF Author: Nicholas Breyfogle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134112882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Though usually forgotten in general surveys of European colonization, the Russians were among the greatest colonizers of the Old World, eventually settling across most of the immense expanse of Northern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic and the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the Eurasian past by examining the policies, practices, cultural representations, and daily-life experiences of Slavic settlement in non-Russian regions of Eurasia from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the nuclear era. The movement of tens of millions of Slavic settlers was a central component of Russian empire-building, and of the everyday life of numerous social and ethnic groups and remains a crucial regional security issue today, yet it remains relatively understudied. Peopling the Russian Periphery redresses this omission through a detailed exploration of the varied meanings and dynamics of Slavic settlement from the sixteenth century to the 1960s. Providing an account of the different approaches of settlement and expansion that were adopted in different periods of history, it includes detailed case studies of particular episodes of migration. Written by upcoming and established experts in Russian history, with exceptional geographical and chronological breadth, this book provides a thorough examination of the history of Slavic settlement and migration from the Muscovite to the Soviet era. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian history, comparative history of colonization, migration, interethnic contact, environmental history and European Imperialism.

The Baron's Cloak

The Baron's Cloak PDF Author: Willard Sunderland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471079
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire s final decades through the arc of the life of Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia."

Heretics and Colonizers

Heretics and Colonizers PDF Author: Nicholas B. Breyfogle
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801463564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
In Heretics and Colonizers, Nicholas B. Breyfogle explores the dynamic intersection of Russian borderland colonization and popular religious culture. He reconstructs the story of the religious sectarians (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) who settled, either voluntarily or by force, in the newly conquered lands of Transcaucasia in the nineteenth century. By ordering this migration in 1830, Nicholas I attempted at once to cleanse Russian Orthodoxy of heresies and to populate the newly annexed lands with ethnic Slavs who would shoulder the burden of imperial construction. Breyfogle focuses throughout on the lives of the peasant settlers, their interactions with the peoples and environment of the South Caucasus, and their evolving relations with Russian state power. He draws on a wide variety of archival sources, including a large collection of previously unexamined letters, memoirs, and other documents produced by the sectarians that allow him unprecedented insight into the experiences of colonization and religious life. Although the settlers suffered greatly in their early years in hostile surroundings, they in time proved to be not only model Russian colonists but also among the most prosperous of the Empire's peasants. Banished to the empire's periphery, the sectarians ironically came to play indispensable roles in the tsarist imperial agenda. The book culminates with the dramatic events of the Dukhobor pacifist rebellion, a movement that shocked the tsarist government and received international attention. In the early twentieth century, as the Russian state sought to replace the sectarians with Orthodox settlers, thousands of Molokans and Dukhobors immigrated to North America, where their descendants remain to this day.

Eurasian Environments

Eurasian Environments PDF Author: Nicholas Breyfogle
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.

The Baron’s Cloak

The Baron’s Cloak PDF Author: Willard Sunderland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801452708
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Willard Sunderland tells the epic story of the Russian Empire's final decades through the arc of the life of Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, which spanned the vast reaches of Eurasia.

Kodiak Kreol

Kodiak Kreol PDF Author: Gwenn A. Miller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia's only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed "kreol" community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia's modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people. In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia's North Pacific venture. Although Russia's Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the "discovery" and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia's Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller's attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

The Nature of Soviet Power

The Nature of Soviet Power PDF Author: Andy Bruno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714471X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.

Evacuee Encounters on the Soviet Home Front During the Second World War

Evacuee Encounters on the Soviet Home Front During the Second World War PDF Author: Natalie Belsky
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003831974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This study is the first to examine the experiences of the millions of Soviet civilians evacuated to the interior of the country during the Second World War in the context of their encounters and relations with local communities and populations across Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Urals. The book considers the impact of this episode of massive population displacement across Eurasia on individuals, communities, and society more broadly. It explores how the challenges associated with wartime displacement gave rise to tensions between evacuees and local residents. These frictions, in turn, forced individuals to interrogate the meaning, terms, and limitations of citizenship and belonging in the Soviet Union. Evacuation thus played a critical role in the changing relationship between citizens and the Soviet state in the war and postwar periods. Furthermore, this study pays particular attention to the plight of Soviet Jewish evacuees, who constitute the largest contingent of Holocaust survivors in Europe, and the rise of anti-Semitism on the Soviet home front during the war. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the Second World War, migration and displacement, the Holocaust, Soviet Jewish history, and the Soviet experience more broadly.