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{"id":9235,"date":"2022-05-30T19:36:39","date_gmt":"2022-05-30T19:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lossi36.com\/?p=9235"},"modified":"2023-09-08T15:24:06","modified_gmt":"2023-09-08T15:24:06","slug":"intersectional-and-transnational-reviewing-russia-in-world-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lossi36.com\/2022\/05\/30\/intersectional-and-transnational-reviewing-russia-in-world-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Intersectional and Transnational: reviewing Russia in World History"},"content":{"rendered":"Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. This is Chatterjee\u2019s seventh work on Russian history and arguably her most personal and bravest.<\/span><\/p>\n Deeply intimate, <\/span>Russia in World History<\/span><\/i> weaves vignettes from important figures in Chatterjee\u2019s own life with the objective research of key historical figures in Russian and worldwide political movements. She opens up with a timely anecdote made possible by her sweet relationship with her mother, a self-critical Indian nationalist, who first brought her on the trip to The Cellular Jail. Later on, she mentions her great-great-grandfather, editor of an influential English news journal in India with indirect connections to some of the thinkers and activists she writes about in her book. People in her own life are unlikely mentors in shaping her perception of Russian history, politics, and culture.<\/span><\/p>\n In the introduction, Chatterjee reflects on her surprise upon visiting The Cellular Jail in Port Blair, an ocean-based gulag of the British Empire that housed and killed many political prisoners from British India. She notices parallels in the architecture and history with the infamous Trubetskoi Bastion Prison in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. This got her thinking about the numerous connections in ideology that led to the construction of the international carceral state as a whole. However, scholarship about worldwide incarceration is typically centered on gulags in Soviet Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of Russia as the pathological outlier in the evolution of European nations from monarchy to representative government not only dominates the entire field of Slavic Studies in the West but has also been voiced by many generations of Russian intellectuals,\u201d Chatterjee puts into words the feeling of a growing section of Russian studies, \u201cif the Siberian prison and exile system, which we had long believed to be a uniquely Russian phenomenon, was but a variation on imperial prison systems developed by other European Empires, could the same be true of other episodes of Russian history?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Russia in World History<\/span><\/i> does a brilliant job of uncovering answers to the aforementioned question. Chaterjee applies a two-pronged historical approach: structural and biographical. She compares writings of Leo Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore; Ekaterine Breshko-Breshkovskaia and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar; Vasily Klychevski and G. M. Trevelyan; Emma Goldman and M. N. Roy; Mukhamet Shayakhmetov and Wangari Maathail Zainab Al-Ghazali and Urszula Dudziak; Arundhati Roy, Anna Politkovskaya, and Lisa Kirschenbaum – by magnifying their individual impacts in imperial and modernizing systems. These comparisons cover a range of different movements in each icon\u2019s respective countries where they lived and had an impact. Rarely have these individuals met their counterpart, but the philosophical connections Chaterjee draws between them is unquestionable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Why does Chatterjee take this unconventional approach of centering on biographies? She writes, \u201cthe field of world history excels in uncovering global processes, networks, and connections, but individuals are sometimes ignored in the vast abstractions used in this field.\u201d This is not unlike the strategy of Barbara Martin in <\/span>Dissident Histories in the Soviet Union: From De-Stalinization to Perestroika<\/b><\/a> and Roger Moorehouse in<\/span> Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II<\/b><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cInstead of thinking about the nation and the world in binary terms, we are better served when we think about these interrelated concepts in an intellectual continuum,\u201d are the fighting words Chatterjee uses in her introduction to the next seven chapters.<\/span><\/p>\n Leo Tolstoy and <\/span>Rabindranath Tagore<\/b><\/a> never developed a personal relationship but intellectually reached \u201csimilar conclusions about politics and statecraft, self and universality, and nature and modernity,\u201d both arguing that politics must transcend rigid categories to include our connection to self, the community, and ecology in a single continuum.<\/span><\/p>\n Vasily Klyuchevsky<\/b><\/a> and <\/span>G. M. Trevelyan<\/b><\/a> came to similar conclusions weaving the natural earth with geopolitical identity, also having never crossed paths. Their deep love for the nature of their respective homelands, whether the visceral intimacy of Northumberland or the \u201clazy rivers\u201d of Russia impacted their respective histories. Both hoped their political theory would elicit critical inquiry, inculcate a sense of belonging, and inspire an emotional and physical attachment to the land and its people for their followers.<\/span><\/p>\n Emma Goldman<\/b><\/a> and <\/span>M. N. Roy<\/b><\/a> take a similar approach to political theory, creating \u201ca compelling vision of a sovereign individual, who would neither rule nor consent to being ruled, and who aspired to build a society based on a framework of radical equality.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia<\/b><\/a> and <\/span>Vinayak Damodar Savarkar<\/b><\/a> were both repressed dissident writers, spearheading movements in regimes that were not unique in the way they oppressed the populace, reflective of a common imperial practice used widely by colonizers in the modern world. The writings of these influential figures are spiritually aligned with many of the thinkers before and after and Chaterjee makes a convincing argument that the Russian and British imperial experiences are more similar than previously acknowledged.<\/span><\/p>\n While historical memories often seem \u201cplotted on a recognizable storyline,\u201d Chatterjee writes that nation-making is more a \u201cprocess of internal state formation as it offers an identity, a position, and a mode by which one could interact with each other as well as with the outer world.\u201d This is the key point why her perspective is so important in that it opens previously unopened doors.<\/span><\/p>\n Russia in World History<\/span><\/i> is the product of a writer who has spent years studying the Russian Empire while living in the United States, with a background in British imperialism in India. Chatterjee captures her existence eloquently: \u201cWhen you have lived your life at the intersection of three empires and have traveled on many, many sub-imperial roads, it engenders a certain kind of perspective, a certain approach to history.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As a reader, I first met Dr. Chatterjee in a Zoom event put together by the <\/span>Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies<\/b><\/a> through their two-year pilot program, the <\/span>ASEEES Initiative for Diversity, and Inclusion<\/b><\/a>. As another scholar of color continually asked to think about my own identity and what this means to the research I conduct, Chatterjee\u2019s words are a spiritual compass. It\u2019s a charted waters for someone who feels like an imposter to this work as I often do. I was excited to be some of the first people to read this work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFamily as academic mentors\u00a0<\/b><\/h5>\n
Connections in Russian history<\/b><\/h5>\n
Academic, yet personal<\/b><\/h5>\n
More similarities than differences<\/b><\/h5>\n
Identity at the intersection<\/b><\/h5>\n
Centering the scholar<\/b><\/h5>\n