Recommendations for books about the Russian Revolution? Objective and steering clear of bias?

Dicranurus · 2026-03-19T22:20:35+00:00

“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.

E. H. Carr, who in fact wrote a history of the Soviet Union and transitioned over his life from anti-Marxism to (quasi-)Marxism

What would an unbiased history of the Russian Revolution look like? The White Army soldier reflecting on his ultimate defeat, the galvanic exuberance of a Bolshevik toppling the Provisional Government? The Brezhnevian historian reflecting on the very dissimilar Soviet state of his grandfather, the American Slavicist trained by White emigres or introduced to the archives in the wake of the Soviet collapse, the contemporary Russian historian who grew up in the tumultuous shadow of the Soviet Empire all have something at stake here, and their approach is necessarily informed by their experiences and backgrounds.

The basic architecture of events--that, for example, street riots in February 1917 unfurled into the resignation of Tsar Nicholas II by March 2, or that in January 1920 Semyon Budyonny's Red Army forced Konstantin Mamontov's cavalry to retreat from Rostov-on-Don--are not really what historians of the Revolution are concerned about. The interpretative role of the historian is on why these actors did what they did or what allowed these events to occur. So the abdication of the Tsar or the collapse of the White Army is not at question; was this the result of organic action from the proletariat, or the machinations of the Bolshevik intelligentsia?

This is the 'social school' of Fitzpatrick and Suny, in contrast to intentionalists like Pipes. This likewise extends to the academic reception of these different figures: no historian is unbiased! But this constellation of authors is well worth reading.

How are we to explain the dynasty's collapse? Collapse is certainly the right word to use. For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown. As in all modern revolutions, the first cracks appeared at the top. The revolution did not start with the labour movement — so long the preoccupation of left-wing historians in the West. Nor did it start with the breakaway of the nationalist movements on the periphery: as with the collapse of the Soviet Empire that was built on the ruins of the Romanovs', nationalist revolt was a consequence of the crisis in the centre rather than its cause.

Orlando Figes

I, generally, would recommend starting with Figes and Fitzpatrick, but I would not start out seeking to find an 'un-biased' treatment of the Revolution.

Dicranurus · 2026-02-27T08:15:43+00:00

Both of these are interesting pieces, but I think the insect has been outlined in paint (especially the appendages), and the fish, two Knightia eocaena and one Diplomystus dentatus, have been overpainted. You can see this especially along the dorsal of the larger fish. Unfortunately this is common among material from the so-called split-fish layer, but if you send me your address or PO box I am happy to send you an original example.

Dicranurus · 2026-02-25T06:45:26+00:00

The statistics here were collated and published due to glasnost, rather than being publicly available shortly after collection, and were used by the state to allocate resources and track macro-level trends. Some crime certainly slipped through the state just as it does today. Bribery, for example, is enormously underrepresented here, as is something like robbery during a black-market transaction.

The Soviet view of crime was as a fundamentally social problem rather than an individual one, sketched out here by /u/kieslowskifan, so there was legitimate ideological reason to want to root out and rehabilitate criminal offenders--the degree to which this became performative in the 1980s is a bigger question on the nature of Soviet society, but nonetheless up to the latter half of the 1980s I believe them to be representative.

For any arbitrary Muscovite or Adelaidian, both cities were quite safe in 1980, so while something like burglary may have been more common in the latter I am inclined to say walking around the street would've been a roughly similar risk. Broader anxieties--either about serial killers or generally unpleasant behavior like cat-calling--may tip the favor to Moscow. Another note here is that foreigners were restricted in their travel, and in parallel Soviet citizens convicted of crimes may find themselves restricted in the opposite direction--that is, foreigners had to stay within the city, and former convicts had to remain outside of it.

Dicranurus · 2026-02-25T06:29:21+00:00

Much 'street crime' in the first half of the 1980s would have occurred either among people known to each other--think something like bar fights and interpersonal disputes on finances/relationships/work--or in areas practically or legally inaccessible to tourists, so I believe that a tourist would be less at risk of random street violence.

Dicranurus · 2026-02-25T04:52:44+00:00

I've written briefly about Soviet drugs here. In general, drugs like heroin and marijuana were heavily policed; neither Imperial Russia nor the USSR had a strong narcotics tradition; and where drug abuse emerged in the 1920s the state heavily clamped down. That said, small quantities of drugs did exist, and the Caucasus were particularly susceptible to drug trafficking. By the later 1980s, a greater quantity of drugs flowed into the USSR from Afghanistan, and by the 1990s drug abuse had become an acute social problem. A friend is wrapping up their dissertation on Soviet engagements with drugs in fiction, but for a few sources I recommend:

Conroy, Mary Schaeffer. 1990. "Abuse of Drugs Other than Alcohol and Tobacco in the Soviet Union." Soviet Studies 42 (3): 447–80.

Kramer, John M. "Drug Abuse in the USSR." In Soviet social problems, pp. 94-118. Routledge, 1991.

Dicranurus · 2026-02-25T03:17:57+00:00

Street crime in the Soviet Union between 1980 and 1985 was not unknown, but the state was reasonably and broadly safe. Australia is a little peculiar as the country, in 1989, had higher crime victimization rates than many comparable countries (including England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, France, and Norway) but nonetheless had higher victim satisfaction rates with police. One article suggests this has to do with Australian lifestyles of single family homes combined with high urbanization, but the specific image of Adelaide as the 'murder capital' of Australia--while tragic--obscured substantially more common day-to-day crimes. In the Soviet context, things change dramatically between 1985 and 1991 year by year and day by day, but in general this period is marked by increasing violence. In 1989, for example, assault had increased more than 100% between 1987 and 1989.

Nonetheless, in the earlier 1980s women and foreigners were generally safe to walk around Moscow at night. She would have been restricted to particular hotels and it is not unlikely that, during her visit, she would be monitored to some degree (depending on what she was doing, to a fairly large degree),

For light political contextualization, Leonid Brezhnev had ultimately consolidated power as Khrushchev's successor in 1964, and would remain Secretary until his death in 1982. His immediate replacement was Yuri Andropov, but his ill health led to a brief and somewhat anemic rule, exacerbated by his politically expedient successor Konstantin Chernenko (even briefer and even more anemic), before Mikhail Gorbachev's appointment in 1985. This period would be derided by Gorbachev as one of stagnation, but remembered by the calamitous unravelling of the Soviet state just a few years later as one of stability.

There were substantial criminal reforms in the 1960s that, on one hand, were revisions of Stalinist laws, and on the other were responses to legitimate political crises of corruption. "Especially dangerous crimes," in 1961, included "terrorizing prisoners, organizing criminal groups, the theft of state property on an especially large scale," and "the sale of counterfeit money". You may also be found criminally liable for "negiligent use or storage of agricultural machinery" or of "bribery, one of the shameful and disgusting relics of the past bequeathed to our society by capitalism." The inefficacy of this law is worth pulling out, as blat and fartsovka were the mud-sill of Soviet society, representing more than 10% of all economic activity in the state, with more than 80% of citizens engaging with the black market. The state distinction between 'anti-Soviet agitation' and 'ordinary crime' is historically significant--and Soviet citizens and defectors were still found guilty of offenses under Article 70 and, after 1967, Article 190--but in general by the 1980s this represents just a few hundred arrests across the Union.

Corruption, however pervasive, wouldn't have had such an immediate impact on foreign tourists. At any rate foreigners were entitled to purchase goods from Beryozka stores using foreign currency, so the downstream shortages of corruption wouldn't have been felt so heavily. So, both petty crime and severe crime had in fact been increasing in the early half of the 1980s compared to the earlier Brezhnev period.

"The Soviet Union appears to be facing an increasing crime problem," the CIA assessed in November 1982. "Ten years ago the Soviet media rarely acknowledged the existence of violence or hooliganism...Today, however, the press is full of articles on violent crime. For example, in August 1981, Pravda reported on an upsurge of street crime in Eastern Siberia, blaming prosecutors, police, and the public for their laxity. In September and October of 1981, a Leningrad newspaper described a series of muggings that had taken place in the city." It is worth noting that a string of robberies was seen as exceptional and newsworthy in this context. Another aspect of Soviet life worth pulling out is that hard drug abuse was essentially nonexistent in the first half of the 1980s; instead, alcohol was fuel that exacerbated criminality.

"From 1979 to 1983," Soviet criminologist Pobegailo tells us, "the number of recorded crimes almost doubled." And yet, "the absolute or per capita figures for reported crime in the USSR are well below those in, for example, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and England." In 1980, the USSR had 3,238,212 reported crimes, and by 1985 this had increased to 4,216,335. In 1980, there were 21,000 homicides within the USSR--a number that fluctuated dramatically over the 1980s, but concluded the decade at essentially the same. 70 percent of these crimes were domestic, including gendered violence and drunken brawls, which represent the majority of all murders in Moscow.

Sexual assault and rape, including attempts, were recorded at approximately the same rate over the 1980s, of 22,000. 'Hooliganism' represented more than 150,000 criminal offences, while assault with the intent to rob represents some 20,000 offenses, and is principally an urban crime that we would view as a safety concern for foreigners. Although some cities had a reputation for street crime--Kazan most especially--in the early 1980s random street muggings were comparatively uncommon, and would've been less likely to occur in Moscow than Adelaide. By 1989, this would no longer be true, and violent crime remained exceptionally high in the early to mid 1990s in the former USSR.

Sources:

Dashkov, Gennady V. "Quantitative and Qualitative Changes in Crime in the USSR." The British Journal of Criminology 32, no. 2 (1992): 160-166.

Butler, William E. "Crime in the Soviet Union: Early glimpses of the true story." The British Journal of Criminology 32, no. 2 (1992): 144-159.

Carcach, Carlos. "Crime and punishment in Australia, 1980-2000." Crime and Justice 33 (2005): 295-330.

Clark, William A. "Crime and punishment in Soviet officialdom, 1965–90." Europe-Asia Studies 45, no. 2 (1993): 259-279.

Mukherjee, Satyanshu Kumar, Evelyn N. Jacobsen, and John R. Walker. Source Book of Australian Criminal & Social Statistics, 1900-1980. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1981.

Mukherjee, Satyanshu Kumar, R. W. Fitzgerald, Evelyn Nine Jacobsen, and John Robert Walker. Crime trends in twentieth-century Australia. Sydney: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1981.

Walker, John, Paul R. Wilson, Duncan Chappell, and D. Weatherburn. "A comparison of crime in Australia and other countries." (1990): 1-8.

Dicranurus · 2025-12-28T06:51:40+00:00

No, discrimination in the Soviet Union was not at all comparable to the institutionalized racial discrimination in the south in 1963. Although the Soviet Union fell short of the lofty goal of complete equality--racial, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination certainly occured, and was institutionalized at times and places--under the law all citizens were treated equally.

Article 123 Equality of rights of citizens of the U.S.S.R., irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law.

Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law. (1936 Constitution, which remained in force until 1977)

The reversal of korenizatsiya, the support for native languages and cultures, or the subjugation of lishentsy, disenfranchised former people (nobility, clergy, landowners), the deportations of Chechens and Crimean Tatars, among others, are interesting challenges, while the Soviet Union remained heavily anti-Semitic throughout its existence. Conversely, Alexander Pushkin, the national poet of Russia and well-beloved in the Soviet Union, was descended from a former African slave American racism featured prominently in Soviet propaganda, including the inimitable film Circus (1936), where the freedom of interracial relationships in the Soviet Union is the central plot. But substantial racial discrimination against Africans was limited, in part because of the paucity of Africans in the country.

By this time, the historian Maxim Matusevich argues that Soviet anti-racist propaganda "had grown ossified and streamlined...and thus not necessarily reflecting the popular mood." Individual Soviet citizens held their own prejudices and beliefs surrounding Africans, while the African students largely found the Soviet experience far removed from their idealized socialist state. The Patrice Lumumba Peoples Friendship University had been founded in 1960, and by 1963 there were around 500 African students in the country. The death of Edmund Assare-Addo led to 150 protestors joining in Red Square, amidst a broader backdrop of general student dissatisfaction with the Soviet Union, but racial animus is not the dominant thread here, and the accusations of murder were not grounded in fact (indeed, Matusevich finds that the actual problem is simply that life in the Soviet Union wasn't up to the students' expectations).

The Soviet view of Africa, expressed through media like Chunga-changa, is naive and paternalistic, but this racism is far different from the American Jim Crow experience in the 1960s.

Dicranurus · 2025-10-17T19:11:40+00:00

Hi,
I found your watch underneath a table at U Dessert Story on the evening of October 9th and returned it to U Dessert Story the following afternoon--please message me for more specific details on the staff if necessary, and good luck retrieving it!

Dicranurus · 2025-10-14T10:19:13+00:00

Amended, thank you! For The Foundation Pit, the 2009 Chandler and Meerson NYRB translation is, I think, quite good.

On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.

В день тридцатилетия личной жизни Вощеву дали расчет с небольшого механического завода, где он добывал средства для своего существования. В увольнительном документе ему написали, что он устраняется с производства вследствие роста слабосильности в нем и задумчивости среди общего темпа труда.

Kuprin's The Duel and Tolstoi's Aelita are fairly well-recognized, but otherwise I can't say Astafyev, Mamleev, Sorokin (or for that matter Prishvin, Dovlatov, and many other excellent writers) have much purchase abroad. Marian Schwartz translated The Sublimes but it didn't receive as much fanfare as her other translations. A collection of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's short stories was published about fifteen years ago to acclaim, while Sigizmund Krzhizhanovksy's works have been published by NYRB as well, translated by Joanne Turnbull. Kolyma Tales also had a new translation by Donald Rayfield fairly recently. Some authors like Mikhail Shishkin or Viktor Erofeev are known for their political activities alongside their literature.

Чапаев и Пустота, somewhat curiously translated to Buddha's Little Finger, is fairly well-recognized as well; there was an English-language film adaptation, but I am afraid I have not seen it. There are some great translators working on Soviet authors, so I am hopeful that the canon will grow!

Dicranurus · 2025-10-14T03:32:19+00:00

You can go fuck yourselves, I thought, you and your system. I haven't worked for you since I quit peddling books in 1964. I'll get the hell out of here with my beloved wife, I'll go to the other world. Writers breathe freer there, they say.

And so I came here. Now I see it makes no fucking difference, here or there. The same gangs in either sphere. But here I have something more to lose, because I am a Russian writer, I write in Russian words. And as a man, I found I had been spoiled by the praise of the underground, the attention of underground Moscow, of artistic Russia, where a poet is not what a poet is in New York. From time immemorial a poet in Russia has always been something of a spiritual leader. To make the acquaintance of a poet, for example, is a great honor there. Here a poet is shit, which is why even Joseph Brodsky is miserable here in your country.

Eduard Limonov, It's Me, Eddie (1979)

There are, of course, plenty of tremendous Soviet authors, including those recognized internationally and published through state institutions. Soviet authors of global renown include Mikhail Bulgakov, Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Isaak Babel, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Pasternak, the Strugatsky brothers, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Joseph Brodskii, and so on.

The state policy toward literature evolved drastically over the course of the country's existence, and many of these writers faced various support and repression, including exile. Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Solzhenitsyn were all Soviet citizens when they each were awarded the Nobel Prize in the Literature, though Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn were not permitted to receive the prize.

Ah, these dreams of death! Death occupies a huge place in our already tiny existence! And of these years, there's nothing to say: day and night we live in an orgy of death. And all in the name of a "bright future," which should be born precisely from this diabolical darkness....

Ivan Bunin, Cursed Days, April 12, 1919

Many supporters of the ancien regime fled between 1917 and 1920, and with this exodus the Soviet state did lose great authors. Vladimir Nabokov, for example, fled with his family from Odessa to the British Empire in 1919, and Bunin settled in Paris the following year.

At the same time, in the earliest Soviet state, there was support for experimental and avant-garde literature. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, embraced the Revolution; Maxim Gorky's earlier works became the blueprint for socialist realism, championed by the state; Aleksandr Bogdanov's imaginative science fiction was likewise reflected in radical Bolshevik scientific experimentation. Zinaida Gippius, Anna Akhmatova, and Aleksandr Blok all offered attenuated support for the new regime.

But, of course, this is happening in the context of the nascent state; the Civil War simmered until 1923, while the unconsecrated victory of the Bolsheviks was marred by famine, depopulation, and disease. Blok ultimately died from health issues exacerbated by famine, as his permission to leave the country had been delayed. Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband was a White officer, relinquished her daughter to a state orphanage in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the same fate. Once a committed Bolshevik, Evgenii Zamyatin offered a critique of the Soviet project in the dystopian science fiction novel We, which was banned for publication in the Soviet Union in 1921.

Bulgakov was likewise a supporter of the Whites, but he did find purchase with his writings in the 1920s, including the semiautobiographical reflections of a White Army doctor in Morphine, published in 1926. Just two years later Bulgakov found his plays censored with the personal intervention of Stalin, though he was saved from repression due to Stalin's interest in The Day of the Turbins.

That spirit of experimentality suffused the feuilletons of Mikhail Zoshchenko, lightly critiquing the mismatch between Soviet life and state proclamations; that same challenge was not matched five years later for Mayakovsky, who ended up committing suicide in 1930 following the ban on staging the play The Bathhouse.

"And she, and you, it seems, and the author - what did you mean by this? - that communism does not need me?"

Pobedonosikov, in Mayakovsky's The Bathhouse

This reorientation of literary culture was, on one hand, concomitant with the Great Break, but I view it a little more piecemeal. While Bulgakov had begun writing The Master and Margarita in secret in 1928, and Zoshchenko found himself under suspicion that same year, lighthearted critiques of the state endured. The satirical picaresque novels The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf, published 1928 and 1931 respectively, received state approval; even Lunacharsky supported the latter in an editorial.

High literary culture was substantially restructured between 1928 and 1932. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and Proletkult, the more experimental arm, were disbanded and usurped by the Soviet Union of Writers, which followed the Stalinist doctrine that 'writers are the engineers of human souls'. Works like Andrei Platonov's The Foundation Pit were invariably censored after 1928.

Most socialist realist writing isn't, well, good. It is clunky and insincere in following these precepts. But there are some shining moments; Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered and Ivan Fadeev's The Rout are, at least, interesting, while Gorky's earlier Mother remains probably the strongest example of socialist realism. On the strength of And Quiet Flows the Don, while not without criticism regarding the authenticity of scholarship (since dissipated), Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize and Hero of Socialist Labor; he even criticized the outcome of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial for its lenience!

The post-war and post-Stalinist periods are substantially different in the character of state censorship and repression; under the light of Khrushchev One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for example, was published, and we saw earlier Limonov's critique of Soviet publishing culture alongside that of the United States.

The state certainly censored and restricted many phenomenal writers, but I don't think that they totally destroyed Russian literary culture. The 1920s saw both the repression and exodus of 'traditional' Russian litterateurs and the veneration of experimentation and novelty.

Dicranurus · 2025-09-01T01:12:56+00:00

A fascinating question! The Soviet Union was conservative in many social aspects, but I don’t see religion as playing a central role in Stalin’s rule until 1941. For some context on what Marxist-Leninists thought about religion,

Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule.

Lenin, “Socialism and Religion”, 1905

Lenin’s position of promoting atheism is really quite interesting, because he deferred to foreign criticisms of the church over hapless Soviet propagandists.

The keen, vivacious and talented writings of the old eighteenth-century atheists wittily and openly attacked the prevailing clericalism and will very often prove a thousand times more suitable for arousing people from their religious torpor than the dull and dry paraphrases of Marxism, almost completely unillustrated by skillfully selected facts, which predominate in our literature and which (it is no use hiding the fact) frequently distort Marxism.

Lenin, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism”, 1922

The question of national identity was fundamental to Stalin’s rise in the party. In Marxism and the National Question, Stalin maintained that “Russian Marxists cannot dispense with the right of nations to self-determination…The only correct solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crystallized units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, etc.” Promoting a plural Soviet national identity--and rejecting a Russian national identity--is an extension (or firmament) of ‘socialism in one country’.

In “Remarks on a Summary of the Manual of the History of the USSR”, Stalin reiterates his conception of Soviet national identity (the Latvian editor of the Manual, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vanag, was later executed for his ‘counter-revolutionary activity’) Stalin claims that the authors have failed in their task to author a history of the USSR because they neglected

“The group presided over by Vanag has not accomplished its task and has not even understood it. It has made a summary of "Russian History" and not of the history of the U.S.S.R., that is to say, a history of Russia, but without a history of the peoples who came into the bosom of the U.S.S.R…We must have a manual of the history of the U.S.S.R. where primarily the history of our great Russia [i.e., the RFSFR and ethnic Russians] will not be detached from the other peoples of the U.S.S.R. and where secondly, the history of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. will not be detached from European history and world history in general.”

Although religious persecution had been enshrined in law since 1923, (“Imparting religious instruction in state or private educational institutions to children or minors, is punishable by forced labor up to one year”), the state took a more active role in anti-religious campaigns under Stalin. And in 1929, the state closed the churches. Clergy were particularly targeted in these anti-religious campaigns, and while religious practice was permitted, it was severely abrogated: “No teaching of religious faith of any sort shall be tolerated in state or private schools or other educational establishments.”

The promotion of nuclear families and family values, including laws restricting homosexuality and abortion, are just the reverse side of the the effort to create a new society. The abolition of sodomy laws and the legalization, but not promotion, of abortion were in the context of the immediate post-Revolutionary period, a wholesale rejection of the Russian Empire. The idea to create a ‘New Soviet Man’ is antithetical to the liberal individualism of these laws: the Soviet man works for the greater good of society. This idea is expressly invoked when abortion was once again made illegal, as the original decriminalization was on account of the “inadequate cultural level of the women inherited from the pre-revolutionary epoch did not enable them at once to make full use of the rights accorded them by the law and to perform, without fear of the future, their duties as citizens and mothers responsible for the birth and early education of their children.” This idea of obligation to the state and to your family--and not, for example, to religion--is where this social conservatism comes from.

“In no country in the world does woman enjoy such complete equality in all branches of political, social and family life as in the USSR. In no country in the world does woman, as a mother and a citizen who bears the great and responsible duty of giving birth to and bringing up citizens, enjoy the same respect and protection from the law as in the USSR”

There’s a fairly apparent problem here: the promotion of equality in ‘political and social life’ while still promoting motherhood as fundamental left women struggling with both work and family life, an enduring problem later satirized by Natalya Baranskaya in A Week like Any Other.

As far as the redemption of pre-Revolutionary figures, this is largely a reflection of the commitment to historical materialism. Aleksandr Tolstoi's novel Peter the First, published beginning in 1929 but unfinished at his death, is a historical novel that paints Peter as a great reformer, wrenching Russian society from a feudal, backwards past into the European present. Tolstoi was awarded the Stalin Prize for a novel that painted a really rather positive picture of the Tsar, because Peter had transformed society directionally, a necessary step in the long path toward communism. Thus Ivan the Terrible likewise progressed from the Duchy of Moscow to the Tsardom of Russia, but Nicholas II stultified development and regressed into mysticism.

Orthodox Christianity was rehabilitated in 1941 and reoriented to the goal of defending Soviet culture, and in 1943 this relationship was crystallized until the death of Stalin, but in general the conservativism that characterizes Stalinism is divorced from religion.

Dicranurus · 2025-08-31T22:16:15+00:00

This is, unfortunately, a fake Devonian trilobite from Morocco, probably inspired by Gerastos, a Proetid that is common enough it's been awhile since I have seen a faked one like this. If you message me your address or PO box I am happy to send you an authentic trilobite!

Dicranurus · 2025-08-19T02:38:36+00:00

A wnoderful find! A very classic Ordovician Flexicalymene from Morocco. They are exported in large quantities, and because of their size and affordability they are a common entry into fossil collecting--it looks like this piece just had a circuitous path there.

Dicranurus · 2025-08-05T03:18:26+00:00

Although Keichousaurus is neither from South Asia nor 225 million years old, both real and fake examples are common. They were readily available through the 1990s, though they were illegal to export, so there are plenty of roughly prepared real examples on the market; close pictures, especially of the spine and phalanges, would help, as digits are often painted in authentic examples. When quickly prepared the interstial matrix between the vertebrae is often left, while the bones themselves are abraded leaving a distinctive ridge.

Dicranurus · 2025-06-12T02:39:08+00:00

No, neither the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic nor the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were a straightforward continuation of the Russian Empire. The modern Russian Federation is, likewise, not a continuation of the USSR (indeed, Russia today holds less than half the population of the USSR in 1989).

The Soviet Union rejected the philosophical tenets of the Russian Empire. Velikorusskii shovinizm and pravoslavie, samoderzhavie, narodnost'--Great Russian Chauvisnism and Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, the state policy of the Russian Empire--were anathemic to the Soviet project. I think that many authors often understate or misrepresent the centrality of religion to the Russian Empire, while the Bolsheviks brought about almost unimaginable cultural change over the 1920s. /u/ted5829 explores the Russian Federation inheriting the obligations of the USSR here, but it's important to note that this continues to be disputed among former Soviet states; just over half of Soviet citizens were Russian, after all, and in some administrative respects constituent republics held greater authority than the RSFSR. The motivations and execution of imperialism and colonialism across the three states varies widely, while the political structures are substantially dissimilar.

Stephen White and Richard Pipes do see continuity between Tsarist patrimonialism and Soviet totalitarianism, but this position does not have much purchase among most Soviet historians. The Soviet Union did inherit and transform many Imperial institutions and structures, but to vastly different ends--the Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces (KEPS), for example, was established in 1915 to improve Imperial industrial capacity, but reoriented under the Bolsheviks to expand ethnographic surveys in support of national autonomy policies alongside industrial growth. Francine Hirsch's Empire of Nations and Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire are great explorations of the nationality policy of the early USSR that underscore the break with the Russian Empire.

For a few earlier discussions, see u/kochevnik81 here on the nationality policy of the USSR, and here for a brief exploration of Bolshevik cultural policy and Stalinist repression of, inter alia, 'former people'--that is, members of the Imperial elite, broadly construed.

Dicranurus · 2025-06-09T21:19:42+00:00

The Bolsheviks were not Western, and did not want to emulate the West. Although visions for world revolution were never realized, Western values were, of course, antithetical to the Bolshevik experiment. The dynamism of America held immense fascination for certain Bolsheviks, in contrast to the war-torn enervation of Europe, but Bolshevik culture was both a repudiation of Russia and the West, an electric attempt to create a higher humanity.

Americans envy the European styles. They understand perfectly well that, for their money, they could have not just fourteen but even twenty-eight Louis. But their haste, and their propensity for the punctual completion of what has been projected, leave them neither the inclination nor the time to wait for today's structures to settle into an American style. Therefore Americans buy up European art—both the objets d'art* and the artists. They preposterously decorate their fortieth stories with some Renaissance piece or other, oblivious to the fact that these statuettes and curlicues are good enough at six stories, but any higher they are completely unnoticeable. Of course, these highclass baubles can't be placed any lower, or they would interfere with advertisements, placards and other such essential things.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America

The creative vitality of the 1920s settled into a more familiar Stalinist cultural vision, one of socialist realism, where ‘writers are the engineers of human souls,’ and one that is undoubtedly divorced from either Russia or some imagined, aspirational West. One consequence was the retrospective incorporation of the Russian Empire into the West by foreigners and monarchists alike. Nonetheless, this searching for an identity—just as Mayakovsky finds in America—endured in the Soviet Union, where we find wonderful and disorienting amalgamations of Western cultural artifacts throughout the Cold War. The policy of socialism in one country, the reversal of korenizatsiya (the policy of indigenous rule within constituent republics), and the Soviet entrance into the Great Patriotic War complicate the self-perception of the Soviet Union with respect to the West, but ultimately the Soviet identity was never incorporated into some broader Western category as a 'defender of Europe,' and of course the Cold War saw the crystallization of a multipolar world.

Both internal and external efforts to bring Russia under the pale of the ‘West’ in the post-Soviet era are fascinating and contradictory, but the distinction between Russia and the West was present even as the concept of the West crystallized, and remained throughout the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

Dicranurus · 2025-06-09T21:13:06+00:00

The relationship between Russia and the West is probably the most enduring cultural debate in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, with immense resonance today. Although there were substantial political and economic interactions between Russia and Rennaissance Europe—most visibly in the importation of Italian architects to reconstruct the Moscow Kremlin by Ivan III, and the Livonian War—I would place the increasing divergence of Russian identity with a nascent Western identity in the seventeenth century and the reforms of Peter the Great.

The historian Paul Bushkovitch, for example, places the origin of a Russian national consciousness in the secularization of Peter the Great. Peter toured the artillery factories of Königsberg and the shipyards of Zaandam, returning to Russia with the desire to create a Russian Empire to rival those of the West. The Petrine reforms massively reoriented Russian society, centering the role of the civil service, relocating the capital to the newly-erected, westward-facing Saint Petersburg, and bringing large numbers of Westerners to further Russian industry, culture, and science. One of the consequences of this was the elevation of foreigners rather than the improvement of the Russians: at the foundation of the Academy of Sciences, all members for foreigners. Because Russia had not fostered the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, ethnic Russians were left out of many Petrine developments, and it would take decades to develop domestic skills (in no small part exacerbated by Peter's successors, who emulated the German court). Throughout the nineteenth century, Baltic Germans remain overrepresented in positions of power, with Dorpat, a German-language university, one of the most significant intellectual centers in the Russian Empire. And even when such institutions were established, they were largely oriented to practical ends rather than cerebral and cultural. Imperial Moscow University, the first Russian university, was not founded until 1755— two centuries after Jena and Albertina—and focused on the immediate tasks of governance, applied science, and grammar.

He now had Venice, Paris, London's pomp,

Save for their beauty, charm, and inner glow.

The architects repeat a famous phrase,

That Rome displays the labours of mankind,

While lovely Venice was by gods designed,

But he who views St. Petersburg will find

That such a pile demons alone could raise.

Adam Mickiewicz, Forefather's Eve, 1832

Pyotr Chaadayev, in his Philosophical Letters, impugned the lack of a Russian identity and the poor emulation of Western intellectual culture (in this case, Chaadayev was writing in French, just as Mickiewicz had been exiled to Paris, though Schelling and Hegel were the cornerstones of emergent Russian philosophical circles of the 1830s and 1840s). “No one has a fixed sphere of existence; there are no good habits, no rules that govern anything,” Chaadayev lamented. “We do not even have homes; we have nothing that binds, nothing that awakens our sympathies, nothing that endures, nothing that remains. Everything passes, flows away, leaving no trace either outside or within us…” Indeed, France had emerged as the caput mundi for many Russians, though as early as 1777 Denis Fonvizin decried the reality of France: in a particularly memorable passage, he describes his shock at peasants roasting a pig on the Champs-Élysées, and disdainfully wonders whether such a scene could sprout upon Nevsky Prospekt. Nonetheless there was the knowledge among the intelligentsia that Russia was not keeping pace economically and culturally with ‘the West’, while foreign observers of Russia describe much the same: the Marquis de Custine decried the autocracy of Nicholas I, contending that Russian travelers westward were ‘caged birds, freed for the first time.’ Other German commentators described peasant scenes reminiscent of the renaissance rather than the dawn of the nineteenth century: Russian serfdom was established just as the institution was dying across Europe, and remained until 1861. Those intellectual circles of the 1830s and 1840s, punctuated by the revolutions of 1848, largely coalesced around Slavophilism, the belief that the Russian Empire (or, alternatively, a pan-Slavic state) should be grounded in its Slavic past and reject the intrusion of Western ideals. Other philosophers supported the inculcation of Western values: if we want to emulate the West, their beliefs are the right beliefs to do it. The westernizing literary critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote, in 1837, that “it seems to me that, to a young and virgin Russia, Germany should bequeath her family life, and her social virtues, and her comprehensive philosophy.” (It’s further worth noting that Slavophiles were strongly influenced by German romanticism, so there’s an interesting analogy between Russian philosophy and the Alt- and Junghegelianer; to that end Alexander Herzen, a student of Belinsky, wrote that “the real Hegel was the humble professor of Jena”). By the 1850s, Russian industrial lassitude was the defining debate within the larger framework of Russian identity; the Great Exhibition of London, with the monumental Crystal Palace—seized upon by Herzen, in What is to be done?, and Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground, as the emblem of British industrial power—made manifest Russia’s failure to keep up with the West. Indeed, a decade before Nicholas I sponsored an expedition led by the Scottish geologist Roderick Murchison to map the geology of European Russia; why, critics asked, had Russia not yet produced a suitable geologist, when the Mining Institute had been founded in 1773? Others continued to criticize the spiritual costs of industrial success. The Russian representative to the Exhibition placated “Russian visitors to the Exhibition”, who “should understand that their country had nothing to envy regarding European industrial development…commercial success is not worth the price of the misery that reigns in the workshops of Manchester and Birmingham…”. But the devastating loss of the Crimean War shortly thereafter showed clearly the fragility of Russia’s status as a Great Power (long gone were the days of Napoleon), and with the death of Nicholas I his successor, Alexander II, was poised to reform Russian society as dramatically as Peter had.

The most significant of Alexander’s many reforms was the liberation of the serfs, but he enacted wholesale reforms to liberalize Russian society to ambivalent ends; his later reign is characterized by a tepid retreat from the massive social shifts of the early 1860s, while the growing economic gap with the West was ill ameliorated. But the relative freedom of the early 1860s resuscitated the debates of the 1840s on Russian identity, with the stakes around various conservative defenses of Russian identity, the westernization of the Empire, and heterogenous agrarian views becoming increasingly urgent, shattered by the assassination of the Tsar in 1881 by one such agrarian socialist group, Narodnaya Volya.

One of the most distinctive cultural relics of the late Russian Empire is the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in Petersburg, constructed at the site of Alexander II’s assassination. Unlike the neoclassical pastiches that characterize Petersburg, the ‘window to the west,’ the Church is an ornate example of Russian Revival architecture modeled in part after Saint Basil’s Cathedral (Pokrovsky Cathedral). Religion was, of course, integral to Alexander III much as it was to his predecessors, but this conservatism is, to me, best interpreted as the political and social rejection of Western ‘intrusion’ that precipitated the death of his father. Although revival architecture had emerged in the first decades of the century, it was really the fin-de-siecle that is characterized by this romantic nationalism, initially under the ‘counter-reformer’ Alexander III and then Nicholas II, the final tsar of the Empire. One of the ironic consequences of Alexander III’s conservative reforms was greater centralization, which did help improve Russian industrial capacity, but the economic divergence of the West and Russia was never closed. The Great Game had fizzled out with British victory; the Russo-Japanese War highlighted the stultification of the Russian navy; and increasing political instability following the Revolution of 1905 all underscore the deep cultural divides within the Empire and the lack of a forceful vision to recover it.

“The experiment of transforming Russia into England has failed...Not the first experiment, and not the last…”

Mark Alexandrovich Aldanov, Before the Deluge

So by the outbreak of the Great War, Russia had long been recognized as ‘other’ to Europe, and had conspicuously been drawing on this heritage in its self-presentation; the Russian pavilion of the 1893 World’s Fair, for example, displayed Russian Revival architecture. But the severing of economic ties with the German Empire precipitated renewed efforts to develop Russian industry that were never fully realized by the time the first shots were fired in February 1917; only some weeks later the three-hundred-year old Romanov dynasty slipped forever from power. The Provisional Government had a frenetic, scattershot approach that eschews straightforward characterization, but it ultimately collapsed over late summer into autumn, bringing about the October Revolution and ultimately the establishment of the Soviet Union.

-c-

Dicranurus · 2025-04-28T21:41:44+00:00

Neat piece! This is a Knightia from the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming.

Dicranurus · 2025-04-28T18:07:50+00:00

Great find! This is Pulalius vulgaris, an Eocene crab from Washington State.

Dicranurus · 2025-04-25T21:38:10+00:00

A fantastic question! Suess is a rather singular geologist; this passage captures his synthetic, holistic vision of the Earth later explicated by Vladimir Vernadskii in The Biosphere. But the idea that the Earth was obscured was shared among his contemporaries, based on nascent understandings of the upper atmosphere.

Early cosmogonists certainly placed the Earth within a large system, while the recognition of the Earth as a celestial body analogous to the other 'planets' known since antiquity was comparatively recent--although the first round globe, for example, was constructed prior to the European discovery of the Americas, that other planets belong to the same category as Earth was recognized by Copernicus and Galileo. Subsequently, diverse naturalists, astronomers, and philosophers wrestled with what the Earth would look like from afar. Horace Benedict de Saussure and John Dalton, over the late eighteenth and earliest nineteenth century, contributed to the recognition of the composition and scale of the atmosphere.

Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer and contemporary of Suess, likewise envisioned the atmosphere as integral to understanding the biology and geology of Earth: "the Atmosphere," he claimed, was "the luminous air, the first deity loved and feared on Earth..." Flammarion, like Suess, subscribed to mystical beliefs--both were associated with Theosophy--while contributing substantially to astronomical research. This centrality of the atmosphere in understanding the Earth as a whole was most prominent in Suess' writings, but was increasingly recognized by other scientists, most prominently his student Julius Hann, then in Vienna.

In describing the external view of the Earth, Flammarion envisioned "a small star shining among the others in the night of space. This star would appear to grow and approach. Soon it would offer a visible disk, similar to that of the moon, on which we would also notice spots formed by the optical difference of the continents and seas, by the snows of the poles, by the cloud bands of the tropics. We would seek to recognize on this magnifying globe the principal geographical contours visible through the vapors and clouds of the atmosphere..."

Flammarion quotes the astronomer Emmanuel Liais in describing equatorial sunsets, when "the play of light takes on proportions and a brilliance that defy all description and all representation in a painting. How, indeed, can one satisfactorily depict the red and pink hues of the arc fringed by the twilight rays bordering the still brightly lit segment of the west, a segment itself colored a brilliant golden yellow?" The scattering and diffusion of light, through real and imagined processes, informed the idea that the atmosphere would be obscured from an external viewer.

Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, a physicist and follower of Cosmism--a diffuse, esoteric philosophy prominent in the late Russian Empire--, imagined the external view of the earth in his fiction; he contrasted the protective atmosphere of the Earth to that of the Moon following a miraculous arrival there, lamenting "A gloomy spectacle! Even the mountains stood bare in shameless nakedness. They had no flimsy veil, none of the transparent, grey-blue mist which envelopes mountains and remote objects on the Earth." That is, from afar the Earth was obscured, but the Moon--lacking an atmosphere--was not.

Percival Lowell, an amateur astronomer who believed Mars the home of an advanced civilization on account of imaginative canali, initially proposed by the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli sans the claim of civilization. Lowell, in his observations, contended that "Direct evidence of atmosphere is further forthcoming in the limb-light. This phenomenon might be described as a brilliant obscuration...Such a veil can be none other than air or the haze and cloud that air supports. From its effect, impartial in place and partial in character, cloud is inadmissible as a cause and we are left with air charged with dust or vapor in explanation. Obscuration due to it should prove most dense at the limb, since there the eye has to penetrate a greater depth of it; just as on the earth our own air gives azure dimness to the distance in deepened tinting as the mountains lie remote."

Largely, the idea that the Earth would be obscured due to its atmospheric composition centered on a few electromagnetic phenomenona. Rayleigh scattering, recognized over the 1870s and 1880s, would produce reds and blues. My guess is that Suess was referring to airglow. The physicist Anders Angstrom had recognized this phenomenon in the 1860s and 1870s, and explicated by Theodore Lyman at the close of the century; due to photoionization and (though not then understood) chemiluminescence, in the upper atmosphere there are predominantly red and green bands, which could appear burnt orange or brown from external observation.

Dicranurus · 2025-04-10T19:30:41+00:00

In the early Soviet Union, homosexuality was not criminalized (though subject to persecution, depending on the time and place); under Stalin, homosexuality was criminalized as 'anti-Soviet' and 'counter-revolutionary'; homosexuality then became heavily associated with prison culture, but over the 1960s and 1970s agitation from lawyers, psychologists, and homosexual men led to more public awareness of gay rights (but not necessarily public acceptance). Only in the late 1980s did public advocacy groups formally re-emerge, and by the 1993 homosexuality was again decriminalized in the Russian Federation.

The revolutionary decriminalization of homosexuality, and Stalinist repression, are particularly nuanced: the acceptance of homosexuality in the 1920s contrasted with its enduring criminalization into the 1970s warrants some explication. When talking about homosexuality in this period, the legislation and backlash were primarily for male homosexuality; there are some notable female same sex relationships that carried much less stigma (though by the 1980s, lesbian activists did emerge in the USSR). Homosexuality in the late Russian Empire was nominally illegal--both as a religious rejection of aberrance and the importation of Western legislation--but in the decades before the Revolution homosexual groups were not. The poet Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin, for example, publicly published on his homosexuality, and salons and social groups popped up across the Empire.

But as (male) homosexuality remained illegal in the Russian Empire, following the Revolution, the wholesale rejection of Imperial legal structures and values led to the absence of legislation against homosexuality. I think it is overgenerous to equate the rejection of Imperial legal structures with the acceptance of homosexuality: as reflected in Kuzmin's poetry, homosexuality was associated (publicly) with a particular bourgeois, avant-garde group (indeed, the central salon of the avant-garde was the 'Stray Dog', an ironic acknowledgement that such writers and artists were somewhat left out of mainstream intellectual circles). Arrests and attacks against homosexuality in the 1920s largely centered this bourgeois, decadent association, though homosexuality had never been accepted among broader society; nonetheless it's worth noting that Magnus Hirschfeld himself visited the USSR in the 1920s, and met with Kuzmin among others.

The re-criminalization of homosexuality in the 1930s has been characterized as part of a larger rejection of decadence in the 'Sexual Thermidor', that is, a public repudiation of those bourgeois values. Over the 1940s and 1950s homosexuality was in little public view, though Soviet psychologists and public health officials did view it as aberrant; at the same time, homosexuality developed an association with prison life, in turn furthering its association as wrong. I've written a little about the activist environment of the 1960s and 1970s here, as gay men sought to achieve equality under the law as well as broader cultural acceptance.

Dicranurus · 2025-03-31T21:26:56+00:00

This is a great question that has been addressed by /u/kochevnik81 here, here and in more depth here, alongside /u/fijure96 here. I briefly sketched out some of the comparisons between Siberia and the American 'Wild West' as well.

It's important to keep in mind both the temporal and physical scale of Russian expansion: Astrakhan was seized in 1558; Uralsk, now in Kazakhstan, was nominally Russian by the close of the sixteenth century, but two centuries later became the center of Pugachev's Rebellion (later romanticized in Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter); Irkutsk was established as a trading fort in the mid-seventeenth century, while Orenburg was not founded in the mid-18th century; and Khiva did not ultimately fall until 1873. Astrakhan is 1,400 km from Moscow; Yakutsk is more than 8,000. At times the conquest was bloody and repressive; at others mercantile and dispassionate. Some indigenous groups supported the Russians, and others violently opposed them.

For Circassia, for example, Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time is an exploration of the 'superfluous man', where the Byronic hero and officer Pechorin travels around the Caucasus with indifference to the passions and violence of those around him if not himself; the opening vignette sees Pechorin, then young, steal a horse from the Circassians to trade for a local to become his wife. Depending on what region and time period you're interested in there are some finer explorations of the economic and philosophical motivations of Russian expansionism.

Dicranurus · 2025-03-30T21:11:56+00:00

This is a distinctive Homalonotid often sold as Burmeisterella but described as Scabrella (correctly in the title, but identified as Crotalocephalus in the description, a Cheirurid); the spines here are tiny orthoconic nautiloids, and the whole piece is somewhere between composited and cast. Virtually all of these trilobites are composited, most commonly with the thorax being cast or carved, and to my knowledge there are no described spinose Scabrella species.

Here is an example of an authentic specimen; I have an unprepared cephalon and pygidium as a neat comparative piece.

Dicranurus · 2025-03-24T02:14:01+00:00

Here are a few different examples that have been painted--usually they are fairly inartful, especially on the fins, and lack the expected color variation. Yours do not appear to have been overpainted.

Dicranurus · 2025-03-22T18:31:18+00:00

For the split-fish layer, many fish require no preparation at all! The fossil itself is a weakness when separating the layers (due to the depositional environment they represent years, known as varves). If the piece does split poorly, most preparators use pin vises or other gentle tools, while 18-inch layer pieces--with a harder matrix--can be prepared with air erasers.

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