Power And The Sacred In Revolutionary Russia

Download Power And The Sacred In Revolutionary Russia full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Power And The Sacred In Revolutionary Russia ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia

Author : Glennys Young
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271042389
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia by : Glennys Young

Download or read book Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia written by Glennys Young and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the Bosheviks launched a massive assault on religion. Although we know a great deal about how the Bolsheviks went about doing this&—propaganda, persecution of clergy and laity, seizing church property&—scholars have not devoted much attention to the other side of the story: the people who were being persecuted and how they responded to their persecutors. Glennys Young shows how ordinary Russian peasants devised ways of asserting their religious faith during the difficult period of New Economic Policy, 1921&–28, when the Party-state was ideologically obsessed with eradicating religion. Faced with persecution, torture, and the creation of antireligious organizations such as the League of the Godless, Orthodox clergy and laity organized themselves against the Bolsheviks. They revived factional politics, even using the village soviets, the intended cornerstone of Soviet power in the countryside, to defend their religious interests. When they achieved some degree of success in their resistance, the Bosheviks were forced to respond and adapt their strategies&—a conclusion that scholars have not put forward previously. Based on extensive research in archives and published sources, Young's book will force historians of Soviet Russia to confront religious issues as central to rural politics. Her work also draws upon cultural anthropology and theories of peasant politics, making it of great interest to any scholars studying the processes of secularization and desacralization in other cultures.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

Author : Victoria Smolkin
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691197237
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Sacred Space Is Never Empty by : Victoria Smolkin

Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921

Author : Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher : Oxford Histories
ISBN 13 : 9780199227631
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (276 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 by : Mark D. Steinberg

Download or read book The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 written by Mark D. Steinberg and published by Oxford Histories. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a new history of Russia's revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire (Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered, ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice and freedom. Written especially for students and general readers, this history relies extensively on contemporary texts and voices in order to bring the past and its meanings to life. This is a history about dramatic and uncertain times and especially about the interpretations, values, emotions, desires, and disappointments that made history matter to those who lived it.

The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century

Author : Glennys Young
Publisher : OUP USA
ISBN 13 : 9780195366907
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (669 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century by : Glennys Young

Download or read book The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century written by Glennys Young and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a source-based approach, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century is the first text designed to help students, general readers, and scholars understand how people constructed Communist ways of life around the world. Taking a global approach, it extends beyond Russia and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba, and elsewhere. The book provides an inside look at the Communist experience, where people were--sometimes simultaneously so--enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters, and victims of an ideological project that was (and, for some, still is) both humanity's darkest nightmare and brightest hope.

A Companion to the Russian Revolution

Author : Daniel Orlovsky
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1118620895
Total Pages : 498 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (186 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Companion to the Russian Revolution by : Daniel Orlovsky

Download or read book A Companion to the Russian Revolution written by Daniel Orlovsky and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject. A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s. Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.

Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991

Author : Orlando Figes
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 0805095985
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 by : Orlando Figes

Download or read book Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991 written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of A People's Tragedy, an original reading of the Russian Revolution, examining it not as a single event but as a hundred-year cycle of violence in pursuit of utopian dreams In this elegant and incisive account, Orlando Figes offers an illuminating new perspective on the Russian Revolution. While other historians have focused their examinations on the cataclysmic years immediately before and after 1917, Figes shows how the revolution, while it changed in form and character, nevertheless retained the same idealistic goals throughout, from its origins in the famine crisis of 1891 until its end with the collapse of the communist Soviet regime in 1991. Figes traces three generational phases: Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who set the pattern of destruction and renewal until their demise in the terror of the 1930s; the Stalinist generation, promoted from the lower classes, who created the lasting structures of the Soviet regime and consolidated its legitimacy through victory in war; and the generation of 1956, shaped by the revelations of Stalin's crimes and committed to "making the Revolution work" to remedy economic decline and mass disaffection. Until the very end of the Soviet system, its leaders believed they were carrying out the revolution Lenin had begun. With the authority and distinctive style that have marked his magisterial histories, Figes delivers an accessible and paradigm-shifting reconsideration of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.

The House of Government

Author : Yuri Slezkine
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400888174
Total Pages : 1128 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (8 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The House of Government by : Yuri Slezkine

Download or read book The House of Government written by Yuri Slezkine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-07 with total page 1128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Youth in Revolutionary Russia

Author : Anne E. Gorsuch
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253337665
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (376 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Youth in Revolutionary Russia by : Anne E. Gorsuch

Download or read book Youth in Revolutionary Russia written by Anne E. Gorsuch and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-22 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the consequences if prerevolutionary and "bourgeois" culture and social relations could not be transformed into new socialist forms of behavior and belief?".

Readings on the Russian Revolution

Author : Melissa K. Stockdale
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350037435
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Readings on the Russian Revolution by : Melissa K. Stockdale

Download or read book Readings on the Russian Revolution written by Melissa K. Stockdale and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readings on the Russian Revolution brings together 15 important post-Cold War writings on the history of the Russian Revolution. It is structured in such a way as to highlight key debates in the field and contrasting methodological approaches to the Revolution in order to help readers better understand the issues and interpretative fault lines that exist in this contested area of history. The book opens with an original introduction which provides essential background and vital context for the pieces that follow. The volume is then structured around four parts – 'Actors, Language, Symbols', 'War, Revolution, and the State', 'Revolutionary Dreams and Identities' and 'Outcomes and Impacts' – that explore the beginnings, events and outcomes of the Russian Revolution, as well as examinations of central figures, critical topics and major historiographical battlegrounds. Melissa Stockdale also provides translations of two crucial Russian-language works, published here in English for the first time, and includes useful pedagogical features such as a glossary, chronology, and thematic bibliography to further aid study. Readings on the Russian Revolution is an essential collection for anyone studying the Russian Revolution.

Power to the People!

Author : Pavel Tsatsouline
Publisher : Dragon Door Publications, Inc
ISBN 13 : 9780938045199
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (451 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Power to the People! by : Pavel Tsatsouline

Download or read book Power to the People! written by Pavel Tsatsouline and published by Dragon Door Publications, Inc. This book was released on 2000 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How would you like to own a world class body-whatever your present condition- by doing only two exercises, for twenty minutes a day? A body so lean, ripped and powerful looking, you won't believe your own reflection when you catch yourself in the mirror. And what if you could do it without a single supplement, without having to waste your time at a gym and with only a 150 bucks of simple equipment? And how about not only being stronger than you've ever been in your life, but having higher energy and better performance in whatever you do? How would you like to have an instant download of the world's absolutely most effective strength secrets? To possess exactly the same knowledge that created world-champion athletes-and the strongest bodies of their generation? Pavel Tsatsouline's Power to the People!-Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American delivers all of this and more.

Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929

Author : Heather J. Coleman
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780253111371
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (113 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 by : Heather J. Coleman

Download or read book Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 written by Heather J. Coleman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-20 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... a fascinating read for everyone interested in Russia, religion, and modernity." -- Nadieszda Kizenko In the early 20th century, Baptists were the fastest-growing non-Orthodox religious group among Russians and Ukrainians. Heather J. Coleman traces the development of Baptist evangelical communities through a period of rapid industrialization, war, and revolution, when Russians found themselves asking new questions about religion and its place in modern life. Baptists' faith helped them navigate the problems of dissent, of order and disorder, of modernization and westernization, and of national and social identity in their changing society. Making use of newly available archival material, this important book reveals the ways in which the Baptists' own experiences, and the widespread discussions that they generated, illuminate the emergence of new social and personal identities in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia, the creation of a public sphere and a civic culture, and the role of religious ideas in the modernization process.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921

Author : Jonathan Smele
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1441119922
Total Pages : 656 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (411 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 by : Jonathan Smele

Download or read book The Russian Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 written by Jonathan Smele and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-04-15 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution and Civil War in the years 1917 to 1921 is one of the most widely studied periods in history. It is also somewhat inevitably one that has generated a huge flow of literature in the decades that have passed since the events themselves. However, until now, historians of the revolution have had no dedicated bibliography of the period and little claim to bibliographical control over the literature. The Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921offers for the first time a comprehensive bibliographical guide to this crucial and fascinating period of history. The Bibliography focuses on the key years of 1917 to 1921, starting with the February Revolution of 1917 and concluding with the 10th Party Congress of March 1921, and covers all the key events of the intervening years. As such it identifies these crucial years as something more than simply the creation of a communist state.

The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921

Author : Mark D. Steinberg
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191017779
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 by : Mark D. Steinberg

Download or read book The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 written by Mark D. Steinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 is a new history of Russia's revolutionary era as a story of experience-of people making sense of history as it unfolded in their own lives and as they took part in making history themselves. The major events, trends, and explanations, reaching from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to the final shots of the civil war in 1921, are viewed through the doubled perspective of the professional historian looking backward and the contemporary journalist reporting and interpreting history as it happened. The volume then turns toward particular places and people: city streets, peasant villages, the margins of empire (Central Asia, Ukraine, the Jewish Pale), women and men, workers and intellectuals, artists and activists, utopian visionaries, and discontents of all kinds. We spend time with the famous (Vladimir Lenin, Lev Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel) and with those whose names we don't even know. Key themes include difference and inequality (social, economic, gendered, ethnic), power and resistance, violence, and ideas about justice and freedom. Written especially for students and general readers, this history relies extensively on contemporary texts and voices in order to bring the past and its meanings to life. This is a history about dramatic and uncertain times and especially about the interpretations, values, emotions, desires, and disappointments that made history matter to those who lived it.

The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought

Author : George Pattison
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198796447
Total Pages : 753 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought by : George Pattison

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought written by George Pattison and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-13 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought is an authoritative new reference and interpretive volume detailing the origins, development, and influence of one of the richest aspects of Russian cultural and intellectual life - its religious ideas. After setting the historical background and context, the Handbook follows the leading figures and movements in modern Russian religious thought through a period of immense historical upheavals, including seventy years of officially atheist communist rule and the growth of an exiled diaspora with, e.g., its journal The Way. Therefore the shape of Russian religious thought cannot be separated from long-running debates with nihilism and atheism. Important thinkers such as Losev and Bakhtin had to guard their words in an environment of religious persecution, whilst some views were shaped by prison experiences. Before the Soviet period, Russian national identity was closely linked with religion - linkages which again are being forged in the new Russia. Relevant in this connection are complex relationships with Judaism. In addition to religious thinkers such as Philaret, Chaadaev, Khomiakov, Kireevsky, Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Shestov, Frank, Karsavin, and Alexander Men, the Handbook also looks at the role of religion in aesthetics, music, poetry, art, film, and the novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Ideas, institutions, and movements discussed include the Church academies, Slavophilism and Westernism, theosis, the name-glorifying (imiaslavie) controversy, the God-seekers and God-builders, Russian religious idealism and liberalism, and the Neopatristic school. Occultism is considered, as is the role of tradition and the influence of Russian religious thought in the West.

Culture and Legacy of the Russian Revolution

Author : Christopher Balme
Publisher : Frank & Timme GmbH
ISBN 13 : 3732906620
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (329 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Culture and Legacy of the Russian Revolution by : Christopher Balme

Download or read book Culture and Legacy of the Russian Revolution written by Christopher Balme and published by Frank & Timme GmbH. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was an event of global significance. Despite this fact, public attention and even research mostly focused on Russia and the other states that became part of USSR for many decades. The impact of these dramatic events on other parts of the world was neglected or not systematically explored until recently. And in analyzing the events, political history still dominates the field. This volume, which is largely based on papers presented at the third annual conference of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, adds to this image some valuable perspectives by exploring the culture as well as the political and cultural legacy of the Russian Revolution. Three focal points are taken here: the revolution’s rhetoric and performance, its religious semantics, and its impact on Asia.

The Story of Russia

Author : Orlando Figes
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1250796903
Total Pages : 267 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (57 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Story of Russia by : Orlando Figes

Download or read book The Story of Russia written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is the essential backstory, the history book that you need if you want to understand modern Russia and its wars with Ukraine, with its neighbors, with America, and with the West.” —Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy and Red Famine Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews From “the great storyteller of Russian history” (Financial Times), a brilliant account of the national mythologies and imperial ideologies that have shaped Russia’s past and politics—essential reading for understanding the country today The Story of Russia is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia’s history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it. No other country has reimagined its own story so often, in a perpetual effort to stay in step with the shifts of ruling ideologies. From the founding of Kievan Rus in the first millennium to Putin’s war against Ukraine, Orlando Figes explores the ideas that have guided Russia’s actions throughout its long and troubled existence. Whether he's describing the crowning of Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral or the dramatic upheaval of the peasant revolution, he reveals the impulses, often unappreciated or misunderstood by foreigners, that have driven Russian history: the medieval myth of Mother Russia’s holy mission to the world; the imperial tendency toward autocratic rule; the popular belief in a paternal tsar dispensing truth and justice; the cult of sacrifice rooted in the idea of the “Russian soul”; and always, the nationalist myth of Russia’s unjust treatment by the West. How the Russians came to tell their story and to revise it so often as they went along is not only a vital aspect of their history; it is also our best means of understanding how the country thinks and acts today. Based on a lifetime of scholarship and enthrallingly written, The Story of Russia is quintessential Figes: sweeping, revelatory, and masterful.

The Heart of Russia

Author : Scott Mark Kenworthy
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199379416
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Heart of Russia by : Scott Mark Kenworthy

Download or read book The Heart of Russia written by Scott Mark Kenworthy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1830s and 1840s, increasing numbers of Russians renounced the modernized, secularized, Westernized Russia created by Peter the Great in an effort to revive alternative lifestyles based on Orthodox spirituality and values. This effort found expression in a revival of monasticism that began in the era of Nicholas I and would last for the duration of the imperial period, brought to an end only by the cataclysm of revolution and repression of the new Bolshevik regime. Suppressed by the communists, Russian monasticism experienced another revival in the post-World War II era and again in the post-Soviet period, demonstrating that the impulse to renounce the contemporary world for the cloister is a central pattern of Russian religiosity. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of these monastic revivals, presenting a fundamentally new picture of religion in modern Russia. Scott Kenworthy's approach is that of a contextualized microhistory: an in-depth study of one monastic complex, framed within research on monasticism more broadly. The case study here is Russia's largest and most famous monastery, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in Sergiev Posad, near Moscow. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church is again experiencing a revival, and monasticism is playing a central role in this resurgence. In the search to recover the past, Russian Orthodox are turning to the nineteenth century revival as a normative model. Numerous Russians are once again renouncing the contemporary world--in this case, both the socialist past and the post-socialist capitalist present--and opting for a mode of life that represents a return to past values. Monasteries are again foci of popular piety as well as of important publishing activities, and their spirituality is regarded as the purest expression of Orthodox ideals. This book provides an essential basis for understanding Orthodoxy in its historical context and its contemporary manifestations.