Popular Contention and Political Activism in the Tsarist Borderlands: Mapping Political Mobilization of the Inter-Revolutionary Decade: 1907-1917

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

While the customary name of the 1904-1907 events is the Russian Revolution of 1905, actually a large part of militancy, strikes, street fights and other social unrest happened in the borderland regions where social strives were entangled with national ones. A decade later, most of these regions were haunted by warfare and intense class conflict, albeit of much diversified types. What processes were responsible for these divergent outcomes? The proposed panel seeks to address one of the possible dimensions of this conundrum – patterns of popular mobilization on the ground. We want to know more about regional activists or shop-floor-workers between the 1905 Revolution and the consequential conjuncture of 1917-1921. This panel aims at tackling a stealth but far reaching transformation of popular resonance to political ideas in the inter-revolutionary decade. This, in turn, may shed light on the divergent pathways of the borderland regions of the Russian empire in disarray, helping to explain future trajectories of the Eurasian states.

Sub Unit

• History: Russian and Eurasian, 1800-1924

Chair

• Roman Horbyk, Umeå U (Sweden)

Papers

• From Revolution to Nation: Popular Unrest in Russian Poland (1907-1918) - Wiktor Marzec, U of Warsaw (Poland)

• Why did the Social Democracy of Menshevik Type Prevail in Georgia? - Beka Kobakhidze, Ilia State U (Georgia)

• Nationalism from Below: Prosopography of Ukrainian National Movement, 1906–1914 - Anton Kotenko, NRU Higher School of Economics (Russia)

• Õigus, Uus Ilm, and the Estonian Press in Exile as Bellwethers of Independence, 1906-1917 - Mark Moll, Indiana U Bloomington

Discussants

• Keely Stauter-Halsted, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Robert Edward Blobaum, West Virginia U