Plebeian Modernity: Social Practices, Illegality, and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1906-1916

289 Pages·2018·5.838 MB·English

by  Ilya Gerasimov

ILYA GERASIMOV
P L E B E I A N
M O D E R N I T Y
Social Practices, Illegality,
and the Urban Poor in Russia, 1905-1917
Plebeian Modernity
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Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe
Senior Editor: Timothy Snyder
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Plebeian Modernity
Social Practices, Illegality, and the
Urban Poor in Russia, 1906–1916
Ilya Gerasimov
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Copyright © 2018 by Ilya Gerasimov
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no
part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2018
University of Rochester Press
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.urpress.com
and Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-905-0
ISSN: 1528-4808
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gerasimov, Ily a, author.
Title: Plebeian modernity : social practices, illegality, and the urban poor in
Russia, 1906–1916 / Ilya Gerasimov.
Description: Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2018. | Series:
Rochester studies in East and Central Europe, ISSN 1528-4808 ; Vol. 19 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039508 | ISBN 9781580469050 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Social classes—Russia—History—20th century. | Social
conflict—Russia—History—20th century. | Sociology, Urban—Russia—
History—20th century. | Russia—Social conditions—1801–1917. | Russia—
History—1613–1917.
Classification: LCC HN530.Z9 S63365 2018 | DDC 305.5/120947—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039508
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Editorial Conventions xi
Introduction
The Subalterns Speak Out: Gerasim and the Infamous 1
1 Writing Degree Zero, and Beyond: Reading Social
Practices between the Lines 18
2 The Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground:
Urban Plebeian Society 55
3 The Patriarchal Metropolis: Trespassing Social Barriers in
Late Imperial Vilna 81
4 “We Only Kill Each Other”: The Anthropology of Deadly
Violence and Contested Intergroup Boundaries 108
5 The Transformative Social Experience of Illegality 133
Epilogue
Gerasim in Power: A Plebeian Modernity 171
Notes 193
Selected Bibliography 249
Index 269
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Acknowledgments
I have been writing this book for nearly twenty years, parallel to my other
research projects. Twenty years was the amount of time required to conduct
research in twenty archives and libraries in six countries in a quest for answers
to the most basic questions. Like many other scholars, the initial motiva-
tion for my interest in the multiethnic urban milieu in Late Imperial Russia
came from Isaac Babel’s powerful “Odessa myth.” Specifi cally, I asked myself
a simple question: Did the fi ctional “King of thieves” Benya Krik rule over the
entire city of Odessa or just its Jewish community? Babel’s texts allow both
interpretations, but the implications of choosing one version over another are
huge: How diff erently New York City and post-World War II American soci-
ety in general would have looked if the infl uence of the also fi ctional Don Vito
Corleone were restricted to Little Italy and portions of Brooklyn? Th is ques-
tion led to other equally simple questions: What did it mean and why did it
matter to be a Jew in a Russian imperial city at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury? What is a Russian imperial city and can we speak of the imperial city as
a distinctive social locus? Where do we look for the primary sources to study
city commoners and how do we explain the stark disconnection between the
actual behavior of these people and the way they are presented in our most
popular historical sources—newspaper reports and publications written by
various experts? Soon I had to broaden the scope of my study beyond Odessa,
and compare the case of Jews to Tatars, Poles, and Russians. Eventually,
I realized it was necessary to question the seemingly self-evident categories
that historians use to analyze societies, such as “ethnicity,” “criminality,” or
even “modernity.” Th ere is nothing more diffi cult or productive than answer-
ing simple questions—I only wish that these answers could be as laconic and
simple. Still, I worked hard to substantiate my explanations and make them
vivid—open to verifi cation not just on methodological grounds, but simply
based on the credibility of the life stories reconstructed in the book.
Th is complex and long-term research became possible only thanks to the
external support I received throughout all these years. By support I mean not
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viii Acknowledgments
only funding but, fi rst of all, the trust of reviewers and boards of grant-mak-
ing foundations that sustained my determination to carry out the study. Each
major grant helped me to clarify the scope and focus of my research, taking it
from one stage to another, until the pieces of the puzzle fi nally came together.
It all started with Grant no. 437/2000 from the Research Support Scheme
of the Open Society Support Foundation (Prague, Czech Republic) in
2000–2, for the project Russia’s Own “Central Europe”: Th ree Strategies of
Ethnic Minorities’ Integration in Odessa and Batum at the Beginning of the
Twentieth Century. In 2003–4, the American Council of Learned Societies
gave me a research grant for the project Jewish Ethnic Crime in Early
Twentieth Century Odessa as a Marker of Modernization. In 2009–10, my
research was supported by Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf, Germany),
on the topic Ethnic Crime, Imperial City: Practices of Self-Organization
and Paradoxes of Illegality in Late Imperial Russia. In 2011, a grant from
the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (New York) allowed me to con-
centrate on the theme of violence under the research project Ethnic Violence
vs. Imperial Segregations: Multinational Criminality in the Russian Imperial
City as a Space of Confl ict and Cooperation. Finally, thanks to the Aleksanteri
Institute Visiting Fellowship (Helsinki University, Finland) in 2011, I was able
to fi nish the fi rst draft of my book.
At diff erent stages, parts of this study were presented at countless confer-
ences and workshops in the United States, France, Germany, Poland, Russia,
and Ukraine. I am deeply indebted to everyone who commented on my pre-
sentations or just raised questions—this feedback directly enhanced the devel-
opment of the research. I also tested my ideas in various published texts, one
of which, published as “A Middle Volga City as the Middle Ground: Urban
Plebeian Society in Late Imperial Russia in Search of a Common Sense,”
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 62, no. 1 (2014): 1–29, became the foun-
dation of chapter 2 of this book. I wish to thank Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH,
Stuttgart, Germany, for their kind permission to use parts of this article here.
Of special and most decisive importance has been intellectual exchange
with my colleagues—coeditors of Ab Imperio quarterly. Together we are devel-
oping a new imperial history of Russia as a study of complex societies as open
systems. Th is study is the result of our collective quest for a modern postna-
tional history and my contribution to the new imperial social history. Marina
Mogilner, Sergei Glebov, and Alexander Semyonov are the most important
readers and critics of my work.
Th e latest impact on this study has been made by two reviewers for the
University of Rochester Press; Sonia Kane, the editorial director; and Timothy
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Acknowledgments ix
Snyder, the series editor of Rochester Studies in East and Central Europe. My
book has been written in dialogue with the most dynamic scholarship in sev-
eral fi elds, and it refl ects the multiple infl uences of attentive, critically think-
ing readers. I want to repay this intellectual debt and I hope that the book’s
future readers will fi nd it equally engaging and stimulating.
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