A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies)

A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I (Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies)
Peter Gatrell | 2005-03-18 00:00:00 | Indiana University Press | 336 | World War I

"... a signal contribution to a growing literature on a phenomenon that has become tragically pervasive in the 20th century.... This highly original account combines exemplary empirical research with the judicious application of diverse methods to explore the far-reaching ramifications of 'a whole empire walking.'" -- Vucinich Prize citation

"An important contribution not only to modern Russian history but also to an ongoing repositioning of Russia in broader European and world historical processes.... elegantly written... highly innovative." -- Europe-Asia Studies

Drawing on previously unused archival material in Russia, Latvia, and Armenia and on insights from social and critical theory, Peter Gatrell considers the origins of displacement and its political implications and provides a close analysis of humanitarian initiatives and the relationships between refugees and the communities in which they settled.

Reviews
CITATION FOR WAYNE S. VUCINICH BOOK PRIZE for an outstanding monograph in Russian, Eurasian, or East European studies in any discipline of the humanities co-funded by AAASS and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford University awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)

This study offers a history of the refugee population from the western borderlands that swamped the administration and inhabitants of central Russia during the Great War. Adducing an impressive array of archival funds and contemporary accounts about and by the refugees themselves, Gatrell traces the story of the people displaced, by German and Russian forces alike, from the ethnically and religiously diverse territories of western Russia. He also considers the perspective of those charged with accommodating them: overburdened bureaucrats, charitable societies, and everyday townspeople and peasants in whose midst the refugees settled. Gatrell draws on theoretical perspectives, ranging from the work of Michel Foucault to recent studies of refugees in the late twentieth century, to examine the various ways in which refugeedom evolved as a set of discourses incorporating gender and nationhood, among other categories. The resulting study lends yet more depth and nuance to our understanding of the autocracy's unraveling, as well as to our understanding of the successor states that emerged from its wreckage. Equally, Gatrell makes a signal contribution to a growing literature on a phenomenon that has became tragically pervasive in the twentieth century, from Russia to India to Rwanda to the Balkans. This highly original account combines exemplary empirical research with the judicious application of diverse methods to explore the far-reaching ramifications of "a whole empire walking."

HONOURABLE MENTION John E. Malmstad, Professor of Slavic Languages, Harvard University and Nikolay Bogomolov, Professor of Russian Literature, University of Moscow for: Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art published by Harvard University Press

This collaborative study is a result of a sustained interest in one of the seminal figures of Russian Modernism, Mikhail Kuzmin, that spans the last twenty-five year period in Russian Studies. The slow progress of research and publications, first of John Malmstad (1977), followed by subsequent collaboration with Nikolai Bogomolov (1996, 1999), reflects the widening possibilities in the research of pre-revolutionary modernism that has become possible since perestroika and the gradual availability of archival materials.

The collaboration of two major scholars of Russian modernism has finally produced an authoritative biography of Mikhail Kuzmin, one of the most versatile artists of the so-called Silver Age, whose homosexuality (for long unmentionable in either Russian or western scholarship) made the story of his life particularly challenging. It also made the story dependent on the writer's personal diaries, unavailable until the eighties. Indeed, the painstakingly gathered new information enables the authors of this magisterial study to fill in many lacunae in the chronology of Kuzmin's life and work, and also to document more precisely his complex relationships to prominent contemporary writers and artists of his time. The book is an invaluable contribution to the greater context of pre-revolutionary modernism and avant-garde in Russsian culture, whose history still remains to be written. And since Kuzmin died in 1936, the biography spans the years following the revolution and the Stalinist era, shedding new light on cultural politics of this turbulent period.

(The award was presented on November 11, 2000 at the AAASS 32nd National Convention in Denver, Colorado).

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