Search results for ""Author Reginald E. Zelnik""

Semën Kanatchikov, born in a central Russian village in 1879, was one of the thousands of peasants who made the transition from traditional village life to the life of an urban factory worker in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century. Unlike the others, however, he recorded his personal and political experiences (up to the even of the 1905 Revolution) in an autobiography. First published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this memoir gives us the richest and most thoughtful firsthand account we have of life among the urban lower classes in Imperial Russia. We follow this shy but determined peasant youth's painful metamorphosis into a self-educated, skilled patternmaker, his politicization in the factories and workers' circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and his close but troubled relations with members of the liberal and radical intelligentsia. Kanatchikov was an exceptionally sensitive and honest observer, and we learn much from his memoirs about the day-to-day life of villagers and urban workers, including such personal matters as religious beliefs, family tensions, and male-female relationships. We also learn about conditions in the Russian prisons, exile life in the Russian Far North, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik split as seen from the workers' point of view.

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Renowned Russian historian Reginald E. Zelnik’s final manuscript is a biography of Anna Pankratova, a woman from Odessa who became a leading labor historian and academic administrator in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to her death in 1957. Drawing upon archival materials once inaccessible to Western scholars, as well as memoirs published since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Zelnik conceptualized his study as one of "constrained dissent," in the sense that Pankratova, a Communist scholar loyal to the Party, nevertheless courageously sought to protect her colleagues, students, and friends from disaster. Portraying Pankratova as both "victim" and "victimizer," Zelnik treats in evocative detail several revealing episodes in her career as "the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union’s history profession." These episodes include her husband’s arrest, her own exile, and the ruin of many scholarly colleagues during the Stalinist purges. One particularly interesting part of Pankratova’s life was her experience during World War II in Kazakhstan, in Soviet Central Asia, which led her to champion the “national rights” of the Kazakhs. Zelnik’s last monograph marks his first examination of issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the Soviet period, and in the Central Asian context in particular. Five essays that address Zelnik’s scholarship as a labor historian who approached the central question of class formation through his investigation of participants’ personal experience, as well as his teaching and citizenship, accompany the monograph. Contributors include Laura Engelstein, David A. Hollinger, Benjamin Nathans, Yuri Slezkine, and Glennys Young. The volume also encompasses excerpts from two Soviet texts, including Pankratova’s historic 1956 speech on the menace of Stalinist legacies in history and historiography. For more information on the Treadgold Papers visit: http://www.jsis.washington.edu/ellison/outreach_treadgold.shtml

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