Russia's Long Twentieth Century

Voices, Memories, Contested Perspectives

Choi Chatterjee, Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Deborah A. Field

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317221227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

Covering the sweep of Russian history from empire to Soviet Union to post-Soviet state, Russia's Long Twentieth Century is a comprehensive yet accessible textbook that situates modern Russia in the context of world history and encourages students to analyse the ways in which citizens learnt to live within its system and create distinctly Soviet identities from its structures and ideologies.

Chronologically organised but moving beyond the traditional Cold War framework, this book covers topics such as the accelerating social, economic and political shifts in the Russian empire before the Revolution of 1905, the construction of the socialist order under Bolshevik government, and the development of a new state structure, political ideology and foreign policy in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The authors highlight the polemics and disagreements that energize the field, discussing interpretations from Russian, émigré, and Western historiographies and showing how scholars diverge sharply in their understanding of key events, historical processes, and personalities.

Each chapter contains a selection of primary sources and discussion questions, engaging with the voices and experiences of ordinary Soviet citizens and familiarizing students with the techniques of source criticism. Illustrated with images and maps throughout, this book is an essential introduction to twentieth-century Russian history.

12 Russia after 1991

Change and continuity

DOI: 10.4324/9781315621845-13

Introduction

The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, originally built in 1885 and then dismantled in 1931 (see chapter 5), was rebuilt and reconsecrated in the city of Moscow on 19 August 2000, the Day of Transfiguration.¹ With monies donated by the faithful, and supplemented by sizable contributions from the state and rich donors, the giant construction project was conceived by the Yeltsin administration and spearheaded by the energetic and ambitious mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. In the 1980s, groups of Soviet intellectuals and members of the Orthodox Church had conceived of rebuilding the church as they were concerned with preserving the architectural and religious legacy of the Russian past. But their ideas were quickly hijacked by the Yeltsin administration. Supported by Alexei II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, both Yeltsin and Luzhkov believed that the reconstruction of the cathedral was a way to restore the Russian national and cultural identity that had been disrupted by the Soviet experience and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The monumental cathedral, built at a cost of an estimated 400 to 500 million dollars, was to serve as a symbol of resurrection: of Moscow, the heart of the Russian nation, and its cultural essence, the Russian Orthodox Church.

On 21 February 2012, members of a feminist punk rock collective called Pussy Riot staged a brief rock performance at the altar of the cathedral to protest the authoritarianism of the Putin regime, only to be forcibly interrupted by irate church officials. With their faces covered with balaclavas and clad in loose dresses and neon tights, the members of the band danced and sang with electric guitars. But by the evening an enhanced video of their performance entitled “Punk Prayer—Mother of God, Chase Putin Away” had gone viral on the internet. The members of the group were soon arrested and two of them sentenced to a period of incarceration. If the Russian Orthodox Church had survived many years of antireligious propaganda under the Soviet regime and made a triumphal comeback after the collapse of the Soviet Union, then the Pussy Riot performance showed that reports of the death of the Russian ...