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Notes
1 The Soviet Union stopped using the province (guberniia) as an official territorial delineation in 1929.
2 Johnson, "2023 President’s Address." Smith-Peter argues for recognizing that Russia acted as an imperial colonial power towards Ukraine and that US scholarship has privileged the Greater Russian historical narrative. “How the Field was Colonized." See also the special forum ‘Approaches to Decolonization,’ in Canadian Slavonic Papers 65, no. 2 (2022).
3 Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province, esp., 228–50. Evtuhov also notes that many leading intellectuals in the late tsarist period had provincial origins, a statement that applies equally to the revolutionary period.
4 Smith-Peter, "Bringing the Provinces into Focus," 836. Smith-Peter also references Bourdieu’s interpretation of the region as an alternative vision of the central state’s power that simultaneously legitimizes and subverts the state. "Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region."
5 To name just a few classic works: Worobec, Peasant Russia; Seregny, Russian Teachers and Peasant Revolution; Channon, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry’, which all relied on central archives or published sources. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War was the first to be based largely on sources from regional archives.
6 On the broad impact of the opening of the archives on Soviet history, see Fitzpatrick, ‘Impact of the Opening of Soviet Archives’. Hiroaki Kuromiya argues that this revolution yielded important findings but in the end was illusory because the Russian state limited access to many documents and tightly regulated access to visas. ‘Russia’s Undue Influence on Western scholars’.
7 This trend is captured in Badcock, Novikova, and Retish, eds., Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective, 1914-1921; and Raleigh, Provincial Landscapes. See the peripheral histories project (https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk) that demonstrates the wide range of current scholarship, mostly by a new generation of scholars.
8 Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 43-5. Raleigh quotes Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, xii. Raleigh’s book is a quintessential example of a project that could not be done without access to regional archives. Indeed, access to the archives prompted Raleigh to return to a topic that he had already studied. See his earlier work Revolution on the Volga.
9 See https://nlr.ru/eng/RA2403/digital-library; https://search.rsl.ru/en#s=fdatedesc; and https://unis.shpl.ru; https://www.prlib.ru.
10 See, for example, https://statearchive.ru/1315;
11 See https://gwar.mil.ru/documents/. This collection extends through 1917 and the Civil War and include documents that I had not seen before. Special thanks to Tony Heywood for bringing this site to my attention.
12 https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk. Some recently-published books by these scholars include Gibson, Geographies of Nationhood; Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin; and Hearne, Policing Prostitution. The biggest ‘gap’ in the narrative that I see is how ‘ordinary people’ outside the centres across Central Asia experienced this period and helped shape the world around them from the ‘bottom up’. Thomas as well as Adrienne Edgar, Jeff Sahadeo, and Adeeb Khalid have begun to address this issue. In 2014, I conducted research in the wonderful Almaty regional archive, located outside of the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan and only reachable through a long commute from the centre of the city, but wasn’t there long enough to gauge its full holdings.
13 Some institutions in the US at least are now lending out reels, so scholars do not need to travel.
14 Bonhomme, Forest, Peasants, and Revolutionaries. Is an example of a work that uses archives in Russia but also draws deeply from journals, congresses transcripts, and specialists’ reports that are mostly accessible outside of Russia.
15 These include Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand; Smele, Civil War in Siberia. Evtuhov’s innovative and award-winning book draws on regional and central archives, but its argument and what I found to be its richest details are based on published sources, some of which can be found outside of Russia.
17 http://basees.org/news-1/2022/3/10/joint-statement-of-opposition-to-banning-scholars-based-on-citizenship; https://www.aseees.org/advocacy/joint-statement-opposition-banning-scholars-based-citizenship; https://www.baseesconference.org.
18 Many people commented during the 2023 ASEEES conference that the unofficial theme should have been "Don’t talk about Russia.”
19 Like historians, journalists and social scientists who rely on data from human subjects are also struggling to study Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus’. See "Known Unknowns: Studying Russia after 2022." https://nemtsovfund.org/en/known-unknowns-studying-russia-after-2022/.
20 Lem, "Fewer Students Study Russian"; Petit, "Scholars See Dangerous Precedent in West Virginia U.’s Plan." West Virginia’s planned cuts include the elimination of Russian Studies.
21 Lem, 'Fewer Students"; Peppared, "Teaching Russian Studies in the Wake of the War," 221–2.
22 These courses are taught in the United States at universities who are part of the Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute (CESSI) and have funding supported by Title VIII and Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships.
23 See, for example, Hill, There is Nothing for You Here; Gessen, "The Quiet Americans."
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Aaron B. Retish
Aaron B. Retish is professor of Russian history at Wayne State University. He is the author of Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922 and co-editor of Russia's Home Front In War And Revolution, 1914-22: Book 1. Russia's Revolution In Regional Perspective, and Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well Ordered State.