Category: Russia
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Face to Face Encounters: Letter-Writers and Portrait Photographs in the Russian State Archive
Hannah Parker On the final research trip for my PhD, I found some small portrait photographs of letter-writers in a file of between some hundred and a thousand 1925 letters to the editor of Krest’ianka – a series of biographies with enclosed photographs from their authors. Though, in my experience, group photographs were occasionally included…
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Reading Russian Sources
George Gilbert Reading Russian Sources: creating a new edited collection When I was tasked with editing the collection Reading Russian Sources for Routledge, one of the first questions that came to mind – and the spirit I will be approaching this blog post with – is, in our current research environment that privileges beefy articles and monographs,…
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The jokes always saved us: humour in the time of Stalin
Jonathan Waterlow This piece was originally published at Aeon under a creative commons licence, and has been reproduced here with the agreement and encouragement of the author. Stalinism. The word conjures dozens of associations, and ‘funny’ isn’t usually one of them. The ‘S-word’ is now synonymous with brutal and all-encompassing state control that left no…
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The British Army’s Chinese Auxiliaries in Arctic Russia
Yuexin Rachel Lin While conducting research in the Academia Sinica digital archives in 2017, I stumbled across a remarkable document: A list of Chinese workers, part of a labour company recruited by the Slavo-British Legion in the northern Russian cities of Murmansk and Archangel. The list includes every man’s name, age, hometown, and even the…
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