The study of globalization has become an increasingly popular topic among Western scholars. Empires, in particular, provide scholars with opportunities to understand the complex mechanisms that shaped the movement of capital, people, and culture, on a massive scale. The picture that often arises is of a single system of connection--through capital and information networks--that produced greater levels of social and economic integration. This study attempts to understand the limits of global networks by analyzing extreme instances of anti-Semitic violence in the port city of Odessa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, I argue that the economic, social, and cultural forces that initiated Odessa's rise as a cosmopolitan hub provided the perfect environment for ethnic and religious conflict. / text

My thesis investigates Ivan Kramskoi's well-known work Unknown Woman (1883). In reviewing the criticism concerning Unknown Woman written in the wake of the eleventh peredvizhniki exhibition in which it was first shown, Kramskoi's painting attracted praise, perplexity, and condemnation. One of the major interpretations (though not commonly discussed) was that this work was meant to allude to female sexuality or prostitution in Russian society. The purpose of my thesis is to reinstate the pertinence of this reading, one which has been obfuscated or ignored in the majority of ensuing twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship. The second purpose of this work is to explore some of the ambiguities and complexities inherent in this work in order to better understand some of the complexities facing modernizing Russian society. It is perhaps impossible to state Kramskoi's motivations for painting this work or his attitude towards his subject concretely, but as I will suggest, he experienced both attraction toward and apprehension of the sexuality of his subject. However, this anxiety was also combined with a desire to invoke recognition if not empathy for the plight of the individual prostitute, a desire which can be found in other artistic productions of the age. In addition to Kramskoi's motivations in creating this work, I look at the way this work indicates the social issues of late nineteenth-century Russia. This was a time where ideas of national identity, class, and gender roles were in flux due to the developments of modernity. Unknown Woman encapsulates the complexity of this social milieu, and I examine the largely overlooked elements of the woman's gaze, wardrobe and physical location in order to better understand the questions and persuasions that existed in this period of late nineteenth-century Russian modernity.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / History / Michael Krysko / David R. Stone / This dissertation examines the shifting patterns of naval reform and the implementation of foreign technology in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union from Alexander III’s ascension to the Imperial throne in 1881 up to the outset of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. During this period, neither the Russian Imperial Fleet nor the Red Navy had a coherent, overall strategic plan. Instead, the expansion and modernization of the fleet was left largely to the whims of the ruler or his chosen representative. The Russian Imperial period, prior to the Russo-Japanese War, was characterized by the overbearing influence of General Admiral Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, who haphazardly directed acquisition efforts and systematically opposed efforts to deal with the potential threat that Japan posed. The Russo-Japanese War and subsequent downfall of the Grand Duke forced Emperor Nicholas II to assert his own opinions, which vacillated between a coastal defense navy and a powerful battleship-centered navy superior to the one at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. In the Soviet era, the dominant trend was benign neglect, as the Red Navy enjoyed relative autonomy for most of the 1920s, even as the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921 ended the Red Navy’s independence from the Red Army. M. V. Frunze, the People’s Commissar of the Army of Navy for eighteen months in 1925 and 1926, shifted the navy from the vaguely Mahanian theoretical traditions of the past to a modern, proletarian vision of a navy devoted to joint actions with the army and a fleet composed mainly of submarines and light surface vessels. As in the Imperial period, these were general guidelines rather than an all-encompassing policy. The pattern of benign neglect was shattered only in 1935, when Stalin unilaterally imposed his own designs for a mighty offensive fleet on the Soviet military, a plan that was only interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.

Le but de mon projet de recherche est de contribuer à l'histoire des relations politiques, géopolitiques et diplomatiques entre le Royaume de Naples et l'Empire russe de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle à l'unification de l'Italie. Aujourd'hui, il est possible d'analyser ce sujet à partir des nouvelles tendances historiographiques et de l'aborder dans une vision multipolaire et dynamique de l'histoire italienne et européenne. En approfondissant les relations entre ces deux États, il est possible de se concentrer sur la recherche des rapports entre des macro-zones (par exemple entre la Méditerranée et la Mer Noire, ou entre l'Europe Méditerranéenne et l'Europe Orientale) pour les considérer comme de véritables laboratoires d'identités et de liaisons politiques, sociales, économiques et culturelles qui ont eu une influence importante sur les institutions, les religions et les cultures dans les siècles. / This research aims to understand the perception of socio-cultural diversity in the context of diplomatic relations between European and non-European powers, which unfolded in the Mediterranean from the second half of the XVIII century to the early XIV century. Examining the relations between the Kingdom of Naples and the Russian Empire will give us the chance to study the relationships between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, as well as between Mediterranean Europe and Eastern Europe. It is interesting to compare these single regions within different contexts, since they represented complex attempts to create national identities, as well as political, social, economic, and cultural ties, which involved institutions, religions, and cultures over the centuries. Moreover, this research aims to contribute to the history of political, geopolitical, and diplomatic relations between the Kingdom of Naples and the Russian Empire.

Up until now the discipline of history has most often used maps as a convenient tool for illustration. Scholars have thus touched only briefly upon the development of maps and their role in the processes underlying the formation of national territories and the establishment of ethnic boundaries. It is against this backdrop that the present study focuses on the use of maps and their significance during the construction of the Lithuanian ethnic/national territories in the period prior to 1914. The work employs a wide spatial and contextual perspective. One of its main arguments is that at the beginning of the 20th century the Russian Empire could be perceived as a multi-ethnic and regional state. Although the imperial authorities and wider public may have rejected this notion or found it problematic to accept, it was a fact which was clearly evident in the research of Russian scholars. To demonstrate this, I focus on two processes: the gradual formation of the Lithuanian ethnic space on maps, and its transformation from an ethnographical concept to an ethnic and national territory. The attempt to introduce a rational and optimal form of territorial governance in the Russian Empire depended on an increased level of geographical and statistical knowledge of the land and its peoples. Various investigations started in the early 18th century. A geographical perception was largely dependent on the mapping of the country, and from this perspective it can be argued that the Empire only really started to become visible in detail in around 1840, with the establishment of a stable administrative-territorial system. From this time onwards, Russian ethnographers, geographers, cartographers and statisticians started to investigate the state’s western borderlands, collecting, scrutinising and presenting information about the peoples that lived there. However, while the imperial authorities envisioned Russia as a solid “Russian” state, the work of scientists revealed that the Empire was not just regional, but also multi-ethnic. In the case of the Lithuanians the separation of their ethnic territory occurred most clearly after the 1863-1864 uprising, and the growth and spread of propagandistic ethnic cartography that took place in its wake, which had as its goal the Russification and de-Polonisation of the western borderlands. Although the imperial authorities were able to identify the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic North Western provinces as a result of this process, at the same time it enabled the educated and nationalistically inclined local population to begin to perceive its own ethnic space. Therefore, every ethnic line placed on a map during this period not only allowed these peoples to be ethnographically separated, but also allowed the territory to be simultaneously disassociated in a nationalistic sense from its “other” neighbours. For the Lithuanian nationalists the imperial maps and other data acted as the springboard from which they produced their own cartographic responses designed to counter the Russian and Polish points of view. The specificity of the Lithuanian maps was that even though they claimed to depict either ethnographic, or ethno-linguistic Lithuanian territory, they nonetheless emphasised Lithuania in geo-political terms, thus undermining the claims of other ethnic groups living in the border areas. The methods employed in this study can also be used in other contexts to undertake similar investigations on other ethnic groups, thus opening the possibility to obtain a better understanding of the evolution of particular territorial constructions, territorial conflicts, border disputes and so on. Moreover, although much work still remains to be done in developing this approach, the present study nevertheless points to the way in which a fusion of the history of cartography, historical geography and other related disciplines offers the historian a new way of understanding the past.

This dissertation concentrates on the history of frontiers, borderlands, and empires in Eastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. While the existing literature examines mainly ideological and political competitions among the empires for land, resources, and the stateless population; I explore more physical and material spheres of rivalry such as border security, economy and public health. This dissertation explores the politics of the Russian Empire in these spheres in the eighteenth century. It argues that the policies of improvement in migration control, border infrastructure, and health care promoted by the government of Catherine II allowed the empire to incorporate its borderland with Poland-Lithuania and attract the local population more swiftly and effectively than did political repressions, ideological propaganda, or forced cultural assimilation. / History

This dissertation began with a question: what does it mean to say or grasp "the economy"? This dissertation examines it examines on-the-ground trading, mining, and money lending between Russian and Qing subjects in Qing Mongolian territories and southeastern Siberia, primarily, though not exclusively, during the years 1860 - 1911. This dissertation uses archival records from Mongolia, the Russian Federation, and the People's Republic of China, in addition to travel accounts, economic surveys, gazetteers, and periodicals. Combining Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Russian primary sources, it provides a trans-imperial examination of both how quotidian trade was carried out as well as the broader intellectual and political contexts that shaped the parameters of economic life. A bourgeoning labor market developed in Mongolia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The legalization of Russian trade provided new labor opportunities for Mongolians and Russian alike, particularly in working in transportation, wool washing, and mining. In addition to the transportation industry examines cases of gold-mining, Russian-Mongolian debt, and Buddhist monasteries' roles in facilitating trade.

The dissertation examines the interrelationship between professional and public discourses on Jewish health and the politics of citizenship in Russia across the revolutionary divides of the early twentieth century. In Russia, like in other countries of the time, medical consensus held that Jews exhibited different rates of various diseases compared to Gentiles, such as a higher incidence of diabetes and a lower rate of syphilis. The validity of such data aside, the production and interpretation of these statistics reveal how the criteria of civil enfranchisement and group identity changed over the period in question. Debates about Jewish health at the time addressed two major themes: whether Jews could be full-fledged citizens and whether they constituted a particular ethnic/"racial" group. However, as the dissertation argues, it was concepts of citizenship that generated racial discourse and nationalist ideologies, in this case, and not the other way around. Two concepts of race coexisted in Russian professional and public discourses during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one historical-cultural and the other biological. This dissertation demonstrates that the former was much more politically and intellectually productive than the latter. Biological concepts of race had limited currency at the time and, as a rule, were subordinated to the discourse of ethnicity. At the same time, notions of civilization and the autonomous personality were crucial for debates about Jewish health, Jewish civil status, and the politics of formal and informal citizenship in Russia before 1917. After the Bolshevik revolution, these concepts continued to affect the state's social policies, even though they became divorced from the formal criteria of citizenship. Since the Russian empire and, in a different manner, the early Bolshevik state did not have universal and uniform citizenship based on the idea of natural rights, this study offers useful comparative material for the history of citizenship in general, and the politics of citizenship in empires and composite states in particular. It also offers a contextual, underdeterministic interpretation of the political significance of "race" which departs from established teleological and deterministic narratives of the history of racial thought. / History

The aim of the thesis is the analysis of russian educated society - the intelligentsia without difference in the origin - in the period when gained its own identity, delimited its ideological grounds and imperatives and had fragmentary tendentions to create the civil society. By institutionals and individuals examples from noble- and raznochintsy intelligentsia is analyzed at the first private and then public socializing. It is related to describe of the creation of beginnigs of the public space and related public opinion. The thesis is therefore concerned with particulars social platforms, in which russian intelligentsia was engaged at that time, especially masonic lodges, salons and clubs. The result of thesis should be the analysis of the development of the educated russian society in the time before Decembrists uprising, the analysis of intellectual potential of this society, its mental emancipation and its diverse activities. The thesis draw from unpublished archival sources, editions and from the latest specialized literature. Methodologicaly, the thesis is based on concepts of social, cultural and intellectual history on background of biographical method and with marginal use of concepts of history of mentalities and gender history. Key words The Russian Empire, intelligentsia, civil...