Peter Holquist

Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence, 1905-21

The events of the [Russian] revolution present us with a twofold historical aspect. First, the crisis was one of the numerous European revolutions that emerged out of the Great War.... But it would be wrong to assume that the war, with all its enormous difficulties, could explain, in and of itself, the Russian catastrophe.... At the same time, and to an even greater degree, the Russian Revolution was the product of a certain domestic condition.... In short, the two aspects of this concrete historical situation are but two different sides of one and the same sociological reality. Boris Nol¢de, L’Ancien regime et la revolution russes2

From the Editors: Journées d'études internationales

The “human sciences,” which encompass the social sciences and humanities, are a category that allows for consideration of disciplines frequently separated in today’s scholarly landscape. Historically, they very much belong together; the human sciences can be defined at their origins as the “science whose subject is ‘man.’ ” In this sense, their roots can be located in early modern Europe, where after 1600 there emerged a “substantial and profound literature on the subject ‘man,’ a subject that was later studied in ways driven primarily by a secular rather than a theological interest.” But in Western and Central Europe, the great period of ferment and disciplinary formation—what Reinhard Koselleck called the Sattelzeit, or period of makeover and accelerated change—came in the decades on either side of 1800. In European history, then, the “epistemic shifts” of the period 1750–1850 constituted a “great intellectual transformation” that marked the transition from general frameworks such as natural law and moral philosophy to modern disciplines like economics and anthropology. Yet Russia’s own Sattelzeit, of course, came significantly later, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: it was made possible by the rapid growth of the academic intelligentsia and intensive European exchange ushered in by the Great Reforms. Indeed, this is one reason the chronological emphasis of the current special issue of Kritika lies precisely here. To say that the history of the human sciences in Russia is intimately connected with the classic question of Russia’s relationship with Europe is only to gesture at the most general parameters of the issue. As in so many other areas,

The Russian Revolution as Continuum and Context and Yes,—as Revolution. Reflections on Recent Anglophone Scholarship of the Russian Revolution

The author reviews recent English‑language works on the Russian Revolution, with particular attention to those works emphasizing the roles of war and violence. The review essay highlights the recent trends to present the Revolution as a part of a larger continuum, and to contextualize the period of war and revolution as compared to other societies. The recent focus on: 1) the role of the First World War; and, 2) on the role of empire in Imperial Russia’s deluge, is a very welcome development. Yet, the essay argues, we should not lose sight of the dynamics examined in an earlier literature on the Revolution, such as labor and agrarian unrest in European Russia.

From the Editors: Post-Post Historiography, or the Trends of the "Naughts"

With this number of Kritika we complete our fifth volume of the journal and stand at the midpoint of the first decade of the 21st century. Although such landmarks often provide grounds for stocktaking, some of it useful, we have always been a bit skeptical of jubilees, anniversaries, institutional histories, and the other celebratory accessories of the historians’ craft. In these columns we have also tilted against the “fetishization of the decade as the default chronological unit of analysis” and historians’ congenital reluctance to transcend conventional chronological boundaries. It is possible, however, that our skepticism has been less than rigorous when it comes to historiography. Like many others, we have often thought in terms of the literature of “the 1970s and the 1980s,” the post-Soviet historiography of the “1990s,” and so on, even though it is clear that many subtle and not-so-subtle continuities often underlie the much-ballyhooed paradigm shifts in the field. Now we would like to take the occasion to raise another question, one that, for a change, is framed by scholarly silence rather than prescriptive proclamations. Why, halfway through the new decade, has no one begun to discuss the historiographical characteristics of the 2000s? Is it simply because, as much remarked in the popular press, no accepted name for the new decade has taken hold? Some refer to the “double-ohs,” the “naughts,” and even more contrived appellations, but the more formal “first decade of the 21st century” and the “two-thousands” seem a bit too clunky to generate pithy prognostications. We suspect that this nameless decade’s anomalous status—that is, the societywide pattern of talking less about the cultural styles of the 2000s than about those of the decades that preceded it—has something to do with the lack of discussion in our area about how it is distinguishing itself from the 1990s. In addition, two years or so of the new decade were effectively lost to the pundits with the flurry of scholarly anniversaries of the first ten years of post-Soviet historiography, which took place