Author: John Randolph

Amidst all the craziness of this past … forever … I’m pleased to say that the Summer Research Laboratory at Illinois continues strong.  We have a great program this coming summer, and excellent fellowship support available for scholars.  (In addition to housing and travel grants for up to two weeks work in our fabulous library collections, we are able to offer $1000 grants in support of other expenses.)

So if you have a work you’ve been dying to finish, or are mulling over a new project but haven’t quite been able to lay out a plan, consider joining us!  We have everything you need to get things done.  The deadline for full consideration is March 15.  I’m always happy to answer questions about the program.

Among our featured workshops this summer:

• The Eurasian Migration System: A Sponsored Summer Workshop for Researchers (June 11-15, 2018), led by Cynthia Buckley (University of Illinois), Andrei Korobkov (Middle Tennessee State University), and Laura  Dean (Milikin University)
• Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Workshop on Gender and Women in Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922 (June 21-24, 2018), led by Adele Lindenmeyr (Villanova University) and Melissa Stockdale (Oklahoma University)
• Ralph T. Fisher Workshop: The Caucasus and Central Asia in Conversation: The Importance of Stories and Archives from the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periphery (June 15-16, 2018), led by Eva Rogaar (Illinois) and Ben Bamberger (Illinois)

So the NY Times is proclaiming that Obama is thinking about creating an ‘Ebola Czar‘.  One of the oddities of the modern American world, indeed, is a love of the idea of a “czar”: almost any time a major public issue arises (war, drugs, health care, urban policy, Katrina, Ferguson) there are calls, often completely unironic and bi-partisan in nature, to create a ‘czar’ to govern that issue.

Why does a putatively democratic, constitutional, secular order–which generally celebrates itself as the republican Rechtsstaat incarnate–feel the need to constantly call for the invention of a figure who by definition rises above all representative institutions and laws, and does so by “God’s grace”?  I have always found this odd but insistent echo of Russian history in U.S. life to be baffling.

How do Americans understand the concept “czar”?  Does it match what we, as historians, think about the meaning of the concept? (And here I recognize that not everyone may agree with what I just said about tsars, to use the more standard scholarly spelling.)  What explains the particular hold the image of “the czar” has on the modern American political imaginary?

I thought I would open a thread here on this question.  Any thoughts and discussion?

There may be a few teachers out there working on syllabi, as well as students and other researchers considering topics in Russian history.  For decades, the great Anthony Cross has helped scholars discover the corpus of English-language testimonies about Russia and the Soviet Union.  I’m pleased to note that his latest, comprehensive bibliography has just appeared, under the title In the Land of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613-1917), from Open Book Publishers in Cambridge.  The entire text is freely available on-line, in a Wiki edition.  Paper copies can also be purchased on demand.

Authoritative and well-annotated, it provides a huge body of accessible sources for teachers and students to mine.  Thank you, and congratulations, Professor Cross!

Just a quick follow-up to my earlier post about Scalar, an open source web authoring tool produced by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, of which the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities is a member.

We’re trying out teaching with it this term in the History Department, and are creating a tutorial–“Scalar for Historians”–to aid with these efforts.  Feel free to use it, and I’d love to hear any suggestions or about other experiments with Scalar.

Are we hosting the Summer Research Lab this year at Illinois? You bet!  As in each of the previous forty years, we look forward to seeing researchers of all disciplines and career stages here in Champaign-Urbana, to participate in workshops, consult with our famed Slavic Reference Service, and work in our fantastic library collections.  Have a project you want to start (or finish), but don’t have the money to go to Russia, East Europe, or the FSU?  Or have the money to go to abroad, but actually want to get some work done?  Join us!  Here’s the CFP: more info below the jump.

Alright, I admit that title was a mouthful.  Basically, I just wanted to alert readers who may not have heard of it that there’s a new, web-based digital authoring tool called Scalar that they may find useful.  It’s an open-source application built by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC.  Unlike many authoring tools, it was designed by scholars for scholars, and more particularly by new media scholars for the new media environment.

As a footnote to last month’s discussion on access, I wanted to put in a plug for our annual Summer Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

Obviously, nothing is as cheap or convenient as reading on your own computer screen; at the other extreme, nothing says “I’m a Russian historian” like a photograph in front of the Kremlin. Yet in the end, I suppose, most scholars still want something in between. And nothing can really get a project moving—or get it finally done—as well as some concentrated time in a great research library: a place with big broad tables and collections to match, where you can find 25 rare items, spread them out on a surface all open at once, and begin to make (or finally tie up) a whole series of connections. If the library is filled with other scholars and specialists—people you’d like to meet and discuss ideas with—so much the better.

To return to a theme from my previous post, I thought I’d mention that the University of Illinois’s Brittle Books Project–a long term initiative meant to save books subject to slow fire and other maladies–has taken a digital turn.  Some of our rare collections in Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies are now being digitized and made available in downloadable, .pdf form (as well as in some other formats).  The focus is on books from the 1900-1950s.  So, for example, if you want the first five numbers of the Evraziiskii vremennik, published in the 1920s, please to the table! And if there’s some text or other you think we might have, and maybe digitized, this is another place to look. I hope that our editions are reliable: at least you know where we are.

Digital publishing and distribution are creating a whole new host of issues for historians to deal with, in the realm of source use, authentication, and citation. Obviously, that’s been true for some time now: we’re gradually getting up to speed on how to cite websites properly, for example. Working with scanned .pdfs or images of printed material—such as those provided by JSTOR, Google Books, or the Russian National Library’s Dokusfera project—raises other questions, but I think those are likewise being solved. If nothing else, the credibility of these known organizations can serve as a reference point for believing that the materials they provide are legit and can be legitimately used. (And if one or the other acquires a bad reputation, well then their identity is stable enough that this bad reputation will be useful to scholars, in evaluating whether to use them.)

A third category of questions, it seems to me, arises from the rapidly growing world of BitTorrent scans of major publications, available for download from peer to peer servers and produced by individuals with names like “jbjc2”.

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.

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?

The Imperial Russian government produced an immense volume of paperwork. In a recent article on the Russian “Graphosphere” (that is to say, the world of writing) in the early 19^th century, Simon Franklin notes that as many as 30 million documents were being generated, per year, by the Ministry of Internal Affairs alone.

In my first post, I promised to blog about life on Russia’s roads in the eighteenth-century, and also about the “after-life” of the Russian Empire, as it is finding expression in the digital realm. Here’s something that combines a little of both.  Let me preface it by saying that this hasn’t been peer-reviewed, it’s based on what I understand as of now, and as such I look forward to your thoughts and corrections.

Hello, everyone! My name is John Randolph, I’ll be blogging here for the coming year (at least), and I’m grateful to Steven Barnes and colleagues for getting this blog rolling. I’m an Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, and specialize in the intellectual and cultural history of the early Russian Empire, roughly 1650-1850.

My first book, published in 2007, was a biography of the Bakunin family. In it, I tried to rethink the making of a few Imperial Russian intellectual traditions through the prism of family life. Right now, I’m studying the history of the Imperial Russian post-horse relay system. This was a giant network of obligated communities, whose residents ferried officials, things, and information (up to and including letter post) from place to place to place across most of Russian Eurasia. I’ll have a lot more to say about this practice—known in Russian as ямская гоньба (iamskaia gon’ba)—in the future.