Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (review)

Drawing on a wide-ranging interdisciplinary literature, this rich collection of essays examines the Russian past through the lens of geographical space. Its contributors emphasize how the transformation and imagination of space have shaped fundamental processes of Russian and Soviet history. Their essays integrate studies of Russia into a burgeoning literature on space and place, while also emphasizing the special analytical promise that these concepts hold for studies of Russia, where the Soviet collapse has left in its wake a “veritable laboratory for the study of geo-social and geopolitical reorganization and the changing patterns of spatial interaction and revalorization that go along with it” (4).

Space has, of course, long been crucial to interpretations of Russian history. Russia’s dizzying size, low population density, severe climate, continentality, poor soil, and pivotal transcontinental location are very familiar foci of Russian historiography. But whereas interpretations have typically focused on Russian geography as a real, material reality—a “backdrop or a container, against or within which the Russian historical chronicle was played out in all its drama and fatefulness”—this volume emphasizes space’s subjective dimension (6). In doing so it provides a reminder that nations are imagined communities not only of people, but of places as well (24).

The book’s ten essays are divided into three parts. The first, “Geopolitical Constructions of Space,” looks at conceptions of space on national and continental scales. Melissa Stockdale’s essay explores the shifting usage of the terms “fatherland” (otechestvo) and “motherland” (rodina), showing how, while these terms did come to be used interchangeably during the nineteenth century, “fatherland” acquired more narrowly political connotations. If love for the “motherland” was unconditional, Stockdale explains, love for the “fatherland” was a civic, conditional love that the state’s rulers had to earn. Or as anti-Bolshevik émigré Fedor A. Stepun quipped, “Betrayal of one’s fatherland for the sake of one’s motherland is not only permissible but perhaps even obligatory” (23). Mark Bassin’s essay offers a useful overview of the ideology of the Eurasianist movement, whose core claim was “an argument for the cohesive totality of what is called Eurasian civilization” (51). Emphasizing the centrality of Mongol khans rather than Kievan princes in the story of Russia, Eurasianists conceived of the Russian state as an heir of the Mongol empire. According to this logic, the basic “task” of Russia was the political unification of the “geographic individual” that was Eurasia. Russian expansion, it followed, was not aggressive imperialism, but a basic feature of the “natural geographic order of things” (57–60).

Part two, “Place, Space, and Power,” shifts the focus from broad conceptualizations of space to the operation of power in specific places. John Randolph explores the eighteenth-century history of the Moscow-St. Petersburg road, lifeline to Peter I’s isolated Baltic capital. The road and its society—in particular, the coachmen who were bound by their obligations to serve the state, yet enjoyed a “particular” sphere of autonomy—were extraordinary. But, as Randolph points out, the road’s crucial importance as the empire’s most traveled artery prompted its many travelers to see its inhabitants as a “normative yardstick for taking the measure of Russian life” (89). Richard Stites reminds us in his essay that the eighteenth century was the time when much of the Russian nobility became a “dancing nation.” The ballroom was both an “indoor drill field” on which Russia’s ruling elite schooled its nobles in European social customs and a vehicle of cultural diffusion (101). Ballrooms, in Stites words, “served as connecting dots, social microspaces, in the larger network of the vast provincial expanse” (109). Robert Argenbright’s “Soviet Agitational Vehicles: Bolsheviks in Strange Places” is a fascinating case study in how the young Soviet regime attempted to penetrate that provincial expanse during the Civil War. Special trains and steamboats propagandized, agitated, surveilled...