Studenchestvo Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka: Sotsialno-istoricheskaia sudba, and: Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (review)

Ever since perestroika, "civil society" has become a buzzword among historians of Eurasia, not to mention those involved in "transition studies." Breezily, commentators have equated "civil society" with a "middle class" &#8212 whether emerging or missing &#8212 with voluntary societies and the self-actualization of independent groups, with the appearance of elective bodies such as the zemstvo and the Duma, or with the emergence of capitalist forms of business and the spread of private property. Left out of most discussions of civil society is an attempt to define the term clearly, to ground it concretely in specific historical embodiments, or to demonstrate its analytical utility.

The evil twin of the discussion about civil society in Russia is that about social identity. Although some useful insights have made their appearance in recent scholarship (Alfred Rieber's concepts of sedimented identities, Vladimir Emmanuilovich Shlapentokh's ideas about "privatized" selfhood, and Sheila Fitzpatrick's look at ascribed identities and their complications), the analysis of social identities in Russia awaits more powerful analytical tools. ¹

What has all of this to do with the Russian studenchestvo? Quite a bit, it turns out. An exploration of the social history of Russia's university students, both before and after the 1917 divide, provides a highly useful prism through which to assess these questions, questions that continue to haunt Russia's troubled encounter with modernity.

Following his earlier authoritative studies of Russian higher education in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the evolution of academic degrees, ² Anatolii Evgen´evich Ivanov now offers an impressive, highly detailed analysis of the "studenchestvo." Defined as "students of higher educational institutions of all juridical types" except those who attended higher military academies and exclusive schools (uchilishcha pravovedeniia, the Aleksandrovskii and Katkov Lycées), the studenchestvo in Ivanov's conception was first of all a function of students' social locus: the 124 higher educational institutions of the empire as of February 1917 (Ivanov, 5). ³ What proclivities these 31,000 (in 1897) or 135,000 (in 1917) students had in common &#8212 a posited peculiar social psychology, a subculture, and a tendency to engage in mass, collective actions &#8212 Ivanov explains as a consequence of their common legal status, living conditions, and academic routine (Ivanov, 6-7). From the perspective of social origins and schooling, which were linked in complex ways, students were a disparate mass: realisty, or graduates of real´nye uchilishcha (or Realschulen), and those who had attended classical gymnasia, kommercheskie uchilishcha, corps of Cadets, and middle technical schools. They came from all sosloviia and confessional communities. Nevertheless, their common objective circumstances &#8212 social marginality and a condition of transience in all facets of their lives &#8212 was the thread that knitted this potpourri together. In a word, for Ivanov students were a "pre-intelligentsia," sharing the same "social-genetic code" as the tsenzovaia intelligentsiia (understood here as the social stratum of educated professionals and white-collar workers) but requiring a period of maturation (Ivanov, 5).

Offered as the first work to treat the students as a separate social group and to trace the dynamics of that group over time (Ivanov, 9), ⁴ Studenchestvo attempts to create a portrait of a composite, "typical" student for each of the various species of higher educational institutions of late tsarist Russia. Although this typological focus pervades this study, the 19 tables, the cornucopia of statistics, and the rich, detailed analyses of student housing situations, diet, legal status, and budgets, are all included in the service of a larger point: to demonstrate how...