Russian History Blog

Karl Qualls Associate Professor of Russian History at Dickinson College and author of From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Soviet Sevastopol after World War II (Cornell, 2009) has just launched Teaching History, a new blog that will focus heavily on teaching Russian history among other topics. Karl plans to invite guest posts from specialists to discuss their approaches to teaching particular topics in Russian history.

The first topic discussion is devoted to teaching the Gulag. The two invited specialists are myself and Wilson Bell, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Dickinson and a participant in our blog conversation on Gulag Boss here at Russian History Blog. Wilson and I will be sharing our thoughts on teaching the Gulag to undergraduate survey courses, topical seminars, and junior high/high school courses. Our first posts are now up. I have shared some of my goals when teaching the Gulag and will follow that up with posts that share audio-visual and print resources that I find particularly useful. (Obviously, my Gulag history website, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, will be prominently featured.) I hope you’ll join this particular conversation and follow Karl’s new blog on a regular basis. I also hope you’ll consider how you too might contribute to the open access conversation on Russian history.

My name is Matt Romaniello, and I’m excited to be joining the Russian History Blog.  I’m an assistant professor of history at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and the associate editor of The Journal of World History. I specialize in the Russian Empire, and comparative empires more generally.  While my research has focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I’ve followed the history of the Russian Empire into the post-Soviet era to see how relations between Russia and its non-Russian subjects have, or have not, changed.

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This short blog is just to share what was – for me at least! -  a fascinating intersection of different research interests. A number of years ago, when I was researching my PhD on the impact of de-Stalinisation, I worked with files from the archive of the ‘thick’ journal Novyi mir. I found readers’ letters in response to the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a particularly rich window through which to explore popular attitudes towards the Gulag, the terror, and the processes of release and rehabilitation which had been under way since Stalin’s death in 1953, and wrote an article using them. Continue reading →

Where did you first hear Putin’s party, United Russia, called the “party of swindlers and thieves” (partiia zhulikov i vorov)?  On a blog? On TV? Here, just now?  Here’s an example (see image below).  One of the things historians of the future will have to work out, when thinking about politics today, is how various media forms and forces combined to propagate such important political memes.  The immediate instinct is to credit everything to new and social media; but having just spent a lot of the past month watching very official television, I’m not sure.

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Here’s an animated short that takes as its subject the so-called ‘legend of the Valdai bells.’ Variously told, the legend goes something like this. In the 1470s, Prince Ivan III of Moscow ordered the great bell of Novgorod—used to summon the city assembly, or veche—pulled down and brought to Moscow, to hang there among the bells of the other Russian lands, brought under Ivan’s authority. But the Novgorod bell did not survive the journey. Instead, it fell and broke, near a town called Valdai; and from the pieces that were left behind the local people began to make sleigh bells, for which Valdai became famous.

Valdai Bells / Валдайские колокольчики from Zoya Kharakoz on Vimeo.

I rediscovered it recently while researching sleigh bells (more about that later). It occurs to me it might make for a good classroom discussion, on the interplay between legend and history (and between multiple legends and multiple histories) in contemporary Russian life. Anyway, long story short: I like it. What do you think?

One of the areas that I study is why soldiers behave the way that they do, especially in the period of World War I and the Russian Civil War.  This has led me repeatedly to the question of atrocity.  Why do atrocities occur? How do witnesses respond? How do outsiders react?

Americans have been thinking about this same set of questions over the past week.  Pennsylvania State University, the flagship public university of my home state, was rocked by the arrest of a former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, on multiple counts of sexually abusing children.  It soon developed that several of these assaults had taken place in the expansive football facilities of the school.  On one occasion, in 2002, a graduate assistant named Mike McQueary had walked in on Sandusky raping a ten year old boy.  McQueary, a former quarterback on Penn State’s team, fled the scene without stopping the felony or calling the police.  The following day, he told head coach Joe Paterno, who in turn reported the offense up the Penn State chain of command.  No one ever called the authorities, and no one thought to ask why not.  For nine more years, Sandusky continued to abuse children. Continue reading →