Articles and Book Chapters
"Government, Press, and Subversion in Russia, 1906-1917," The Journal of the Historical Society (forthcoming)
"Machine guns, Hysteria, and the February Revolution in Russia, Russian History (forthcoming)
"Police and Revolutionaries," in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2 (1689-1917), ed. Dominic Lieven (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 637-54.
"Russian Punishments in the European Mirror,” in Russia in the European Context, 1789-1914: A Member of the Family,
ed. Susan McCaffray and Michael Melancon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
“Krasnyi terror v Sovetskom gosudarstve (v otsenkakh rossiiskih i zarubezhnykh issledovatelei)” [“Red Terror in the Soviet
State: Assessments by Russian and Foreign Scholars”], in Rossiia v XX v.: Istoriia i istoriografiia, vol. 2, ed. V. D.
Kamynin and Vladimir N. Brovkin et al. (Ekaterinburg: Ural’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2005).
“Security Services in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” Kritika (Fall 2003): 955-73.
“Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia,” Journal of Modern History 74 (March 2002): 62-100.
This article analyzes the nature of political crime in late Imperial Russia. Drawing upon my knowledge of the security police and their struggle against Russian opposition movements, as well as upon significant further research, I attempt to answer several questions. How did the regime conceive political crime, both legally and in terms of what actions were actually punished? Did the existence of draconian laws against political crime deter dissidents from political activity? How did the regime, from this point of view, differ from the major western European regimes? To cite one example, English jurors in the 1890s thought nothing of condemning people to a year or more of hard labor people for mere verbal or written incitement to violence. This was not the case in Russia, where officials had to resort to less harsh administrative law. The main theme of my project is whether the late Imperial regime was truly as repressive as has been assumed and claimed, or whether its inefficiency drove it to importune people in visible ways while leaving whole realms of illicit activity uncontrolled.
“Pravitel’stvo, pressa i antigosudarstvennaia deiatel’nost’ v Rossii, 1906-1917 gg.” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (2001): 25-45.
Here I argue that the element of the burgeoning civil society most threatening to the absolutist propensities of Russia’s rulers-and the hardest for them to control-was the press. Despite the power and influence of the trade-union movement, the increasing number of voluntary associations, and even the State Duma (parliament), whose deputies could speak with almost complete impunity, only the press could broadcast to a larger readership the views and arguments uttered in the Duma. Indeed, Miliukov admitted Rech’ “did more for the popularization of our ideas than all the other public activities of the Kadets.” And Lenin said that “without Pravda the Bolshevik duma fraction will lose 99/100 of its significance.” Just as threatening to the government was the mass press. It reached millions of readers on a daily basis, touched on issues of mass appeal, and disposed of huge financial resources. Editors and publishers could shape public opinion, but they also had to please and follow it, often with sensationalism. When linked to politics and social problems, however, journalistic sensationalism could be just as subversive as the radical press. In fact, it could pose a greater danger, since the government could more easily repress the radical press.
The courts restricted press freedom in the constitutional period, but not very much more than in most western European countries. Unable to stifle the press by judicial means, administrative officials resorted to extrajudicial restrictions on the press, especially in the period 1907-1908. During the following two years, the revolutionary and even much of the liberal periodical press disappeared from the scene, apparently as much from lack of public interest (no periodical of opinion could have survived without subsidies) as from government repression. An upswing in popular discontent in 1910-1914 buoyed the radical press, demonstrating a high level of freedom of the written word in Russia. The radical press retreated after the outbreak of war in 1914, owing to both repression and, one suspects, feelings of patriotism, at least in the first months of war. Yet the major story of these years was the popular press, which had continued to expand enormously. It was precisely the popular mass press that, seeking to thrill its readers, proffered sensational representations of the “enemy within,” of crises looming on the horizon, of corruption and incompetence in high places. This sensationalist reporting, blended together with even more subversive hearsay and rumors, helped to undermine the legitimacy of the government and the ruling dynasty.
“Criminal Punishments and Europeanization in Late Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47 (2000): 341-62.
This article compares the incidence of harsh criminal punishments (penal exile, hard labor, capital punishment, and imprisonment) in Imperial Russian, France, Prussia, England and Wales, and United States during the sixty years before World War I. The article begins with extensive research in official statistical compilations of the various countries. Its theoretical framework derives from the abundant recent historical studies of penal reform in the early nineteenth century in Europe and America. My purpose is to seek to understand whether and to what extent the late Imperial Russian government’s penal policies mirrored policies implemented by contemporaneous governments in western Europe and the United States. The guiding question is, Did Russia’s rulers of the nineteenth century try to carry forward, in the realm of crime and punishment, Peter the Great’s ambitious project of Europeanizing Russia?
“The Security Police in Late Imperial Russia,” in Anna Geifman, ed., Russia Under theLast Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894-1917 (London: Blackwell, 1999), 217-40.
This essay tells the story of how the Imperial Russian security police developed in response to revolutionary conspiracies and mass opposition movements during the last four decades of the Russian Empire. It is argued that the Imperial security police grew more sophisticated and professional, especially from the mid-1890s to the end of the monarchy in 1917. There were two watersheds in this process. The first was the terrorist campaign of 1878-1881, in response to which the security police developed modern methods of covert operation. The second was the mass popular agitation of 1905, which nearly put an end to the Imperial order. Major improvements in security police technique and organization introduced during the inter-revolutionary years permitted the security police both to respect legal procedure and to neutralize the “professional revolutionaries.” Popular discontent deepened again beginning in 1916 amidst the rigors of World War I. Opposition to the regime gradually overwhelmed the security police, whose main activities were the surgical removal of revolutionary leaders and the provision of sophisticated domestic intelligence on the “popular mood.” By late February 1917, only the army could have saved the monarchy.
“Storming the Last Citadel: The Bolshevik Assault on the Church, 1922,” in Vladimir N. Brovkin, ed., The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: Revolution and Civil Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 235-268.
This study, which draws in part on recently declassified archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, argues that in 1922 the Bolshevik leadership consciously exploited the horrors of a famine plaguing the country since summer 1921 as a screen behind which to despoil Russia’s religious communities of consecrated vessels and other valuable objects (all immovable property had been nationalized in 1918). Alleged expressions of popular support for the confiscation of church valuables are further shown to have been the result of a propaganda campaign orchestrated in the Politburo.
“On the Significance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 54 (Fall 1995): 602-629.
This article analyzes the development of emergency legislation in Imperial Russia beginning in the 1870s and culminating with the security law of 14 August 1881. While many earlier historians viewed this law as a turning point on the path toward a modern “police state,” my article suggests that it was in fact a by-product of the country’s uneasy transition from an absolutist to a constitutional order. This argument is corroborated by the fact that the law substantially limited the powers conferred on administrative officials by previous emergency legislation and established precise rules whereby such powers were to be wielded.
“Beletskii, Stepan Petrovich”; “Benckendorff, Aleksandr Khistoforovich, Count”; “Burtsev, Vladimir L’vovich”; “Capital punishment in Russia and the Soviet Union,” “Department of Police of the Russian Empire”; “Drentel’n, Aleksandr Romanovich”; in Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History, ed. Bruce Adams (Gulf Breeze, Fla.: Academic International Press, 2003-2004), vols. 3-4.
“Zubatov, Sergei,” in Encyclopedia of Russian History, ed. James R. Millar (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004).