Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
Comrade Kerensky
BY BORIS KOLONITSKII. Polity, 2020, 450 pp.
For a few months following the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, Alexander Kerensky, the minister of justice and then the military minister of the provisional government, was extolled as “the Leader of the People,” “the Minister of People’s Truth,” “the Champion of Freedom,” and “the Hero of the Revolution.” His public speeches attracted huge audiences that greeted him with standing ovations. Women threw flowers at him; soldiers and officers gave him their medals and jubilantly lifted him in the air. Kolonitskii examines Kerensky’s brief but cultish popularity through his speeches and contemporary accounts. Kerensky was a savvy politician and indefatigable coalition builder, but Kolonitskii credits his skill as a newsmaker to his keen sense of popular moods and his talent as a public speaker. The book’s narrative ends before the Bolshevik takeover in late 1917 and Kerensky’s subsequent escape from Russia. But the “cult” of Kerensky, Kolonitskii argues, provided a useful model for those who later created—and forcefully inculcated—the cults of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin.
Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent
BY TETYANA LOKOT. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, 160 pp.
Based on her research on the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine and the mass rallies against corruption that took place in 2017 in Russia, Lokot writes about the opportunities and limitations of digital technologies for protest movements and emphasizes the close entanglement of offline and online spaces. The book draws on state-of-theart literature on the social role of digital technology and is academic in style but still a lively read, thanks to the numerous quotes from interviews that Lokot conducted with protesters. Digital communications were central in coordinating logistics at the protests in Kyiv, such as providing information on the availability of basic necessities, from toilets to WiFi to firewood. Livestreaming, tweeting, and blogging turned witnessing the protests into a form of participation. Countless videos recording the activities in the protest camp (cooking, singing, delivering lectures) created a public history of the uprising. Unlike in Ukraine, where the Internet is generally free, in Russia,
the government has developed sophisticated technological means aimed at controlling the digital public sphere. It continues to adopt and enforce draconian regulations against activism, drawing no distinction between online and offline activities.
White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia
BY SHEILA FITZPATRICK. Routledge, 2021, 384 pp.
Fitzpatrick, one of the most prominent historians of the Soviet Union, traces the travails of the waves of Russian and Soviet refugees who arrived in her native Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Her enthralling historical narrative is interspersed with dozens of individual stories of people uprooted by wars and revolutions. One wave consisted of prisoners of war and others the Nazis had deported from the territories they occupied in Poland and the Soviet Union to use as forced laborers in Germany. As the Cold War set in, Western organizations were eager to help those who sought to escape repatriation to the Soviet Union and increasingly regarded them as victims of communism rather than of Nazism. This meant looking the other way at false statements or forged identities, which often concealed histories of collaboration with the Germans. The other wave of immigrants were the White Russians who had settled in
China after their defeat by the Reds in the Russian Civil War and who were forced to flee again in the late 1940s after the communist takeover of China. Australian authorities showed little kindness to Russian immigrants. They selected those who were young and healthy, separated men from women (making no exceptions for married couples), and required them to do hard manual labor for two years before starting on their own in their new country.
Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia BY ELENA CHEBANKOVA. McGillQueen’s University Press, 2020, 376 pp.
Chebankova characterizes her work as a “theoretical study of Russia’s ideological foundations,” and the scope of the academic literature she cites is quite impressive. Unfortunately, the book’s description of the current scene in
Russia has numerous inaccuracies, such as outdated affiliations of political and other figures and the mischaracterization of their current public standing. A more serious shortcoming is that Chebankova’s account of the Russian ideological and discursive environment is divorced from the social context: her analysis of the production of ideas does not differentiate dominant figures from marginal ones. Quotes from professional philosophers and political thinkers appear side by side with statements made by communications professionals, journalists, political commentators, filmmakers, and even pop culture figures. The author also disregards the political dynamics of the present day: for instance, although liberal ideas were fairly prominent in public discourse in the 1990s, in the 2010s, the Kremlin adopted a conservative discourse and radically marginalized its liberal opponents, smearing their reputations, jailing them, and forcing them out of Russia. The most striking example is the political activist Alexei Navalny, whom Chebankova identifies as belonging to a category she
dubs “pluralist liberals.” The fact that Navalny (now imprisoned) was harassed for years goes unmentioned.
Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland
BY JULIANE FÜRST. Oxford University Press, 2021, 496 pp.
In the late 1960s, a countercultural hippie movement began to emerge in the Soviet Union. Early Soviet hippies were inspired by the aesthetics of their Western counterparts, as well as their message of peace, love, and rock-androll. Within a few years, a network of hippies had evolved across the country. The communist state consistently eradicated independent social organization, and the hippies were no exception: the police and operatives of the Komsomol, a communist youth organization, persecuted them. The authorities often confined hippies to psychiatric hospitals. Fürst’s exhaustive history is based on
135 interviews with surviving hippies, as well as memoirs and personal archives. It is filled with colorful characters; documents their travels, gatherings, and spiritual quests; and boasts an amazing collection of photos. The book also includes tragic stories of drug abuse and dying young. Soviet hippies may have shared the antimaterialistic creed of Western hippies and rejected Soviet norms and values, but they were just as engaged as their “normal” Soviet contemporaries in procuring the coveted and expensive Western items that were missing in the Soviet economy (in their case, primarily blue jeans and music records). Fürst emphasizes that despite the hippies’ stubborn otherness, they were part of an increasingly complex late socialist society in which a broad range of “others” lived side by side with people deemed “normal.”