Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My work challenges conventional histories of the 1905 Revolution by analyzing the very production of the historical evidence on which they are based. Previous studies, whether focusing on workers, intellectuals, or state agents, have rarely considered the creation of the revolution’s historical testimony as an essential part of the revolutionary process itself. This process did not end in the revolution’s aftermath; it was only completed in the early 1920s, when Istpart published key evidence from its participants. The 1905 revolution continued to live and reverberate after—and thanks to—the far better-known 1917 Revolution.
Focusing on the 1920s Soviet historians’ attempts to appropriate the history of 1905 as part of the new state’s legacy highlights both the novelty of the Bolshevik project of history writing—one of the earliest attempts to ground history in the oral testimony of the people—and the political pressures and technological shortcomings that prevented this project from realizing its full potential.
I argue that the very process of collecting, transcribing, and publishing these stories—a process I term “primitive socialist archival accumulation”—inadvertently transformed fluid, collective, and dialogic storytelling into reified, authored documents. This transformation was anchored in a modern division of labor and a material media apparatus that Bolshevik intellectuals could not immediately overcome. Their political and technical mediation, intended to celebrate the subaltern voice, ultimately subjected it to the positivist frameworks of the party-state, obscuring the revolutionary experience it sought to preserve.
What drives your interest in this research?
Two key aspects drive my investment in this topic. First, I am fascinated by the general ways people communicate significant events orally—the specific means by which novelty and otherness are conveyed to an audience that did not witness the event. I am interested in how sharing wonders that challenge conventional thinking shapes the intimacy of daily interaction, and how this intimacy can be alienated by technological media. In a global landscape shaped by digital media capitalism—where storytelling is often reduced to an advertising device and an instrument of cognitive control, creating only simulacra of community—I find it imperative to return to the study of real communities of memory, which were created through the circulation of oral stories as gifts, not commodities.
Second, my interest is driven by the specificity of memory politics in the contemporary Russian state. Its recent attempts at commemorating the 1917 revolution have reduced the event to a mere insignificant interruption within the long duration of an allegedly everlasting statehood, a narrative that denies its impact on the lives of the population. The 1905 Revolution is scarcely mentioned at all in this state-centered narrative. By examining how the early Soviet state collected, published, and reified these personal stories in its archives, I intend to reopen the history of 1905 as a transformative collective experience. At the same time, I trace the reification of popular revolutionary history back to the unintended consequences of early Soviet historiographic practices—practices that helped pave the way for today’s state-imposed oblivion of Russia’s revolutionary past.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
The fellowship seminar has done a fabulous job of bringing brilliant minds from across disciplines to work together. The organizers were so effective at matching participants that everyone felt a sense of support and understanding, despite our different backgrounds. This sense of common interest helped me feel the relevance of my own perspective, which was further enriched by the advice and suggestions of my fellow seminar participants.
This effect was reinforced by Story & Place-themed lectures from invited scholars, which revealed multiple angles from which to interrogate storytelling, community, media, and historical imagination. The seminar created an opportunity for me to contribute to others’ groundbreaking research by bringing my expertise to the table, while also presenting my own ideas to the supportive and productive criticism of the fellows’ community. I cannot imagine finding so many insightful suggestions for improving and sharpening my argument anywhere else. As such, my answers in this blog testify to how useful my engagement with the research seminar has been.