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WORK TITLE: International communism and the Spanish Civil War
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Philadelphia
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/history/LKirschenbaum.aspx * https://www.wcupa.edu/arts-humanities/history/documents/Kirschenbaum_CV.pdf * https://www.amazon.com/Lisa-A.-Kirschenbaum/e/B001H9PZD0
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 00097970
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n00097970
HEADING: Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Brown University, A.B., 1986; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1987, Ph.D., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
West Chester University, West Chester, PA, professor, 1996–. Formerly taught middle and high school students at Oakwood School, an independent school in southern California.
MEMBER:American Historical Association, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Northeast Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, Association for Women in Slavic Studies, and Delaware Valley Seminar of Russian Historians.
AWARDS:West Chester University Trustees’ Achievement Award, 2009; grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Penn Humanities Forum.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including The Russian Experience: Americans Encountering the Enigma, 1917 to the Present, edited by Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren, Routledge, 2012, and others.
Contributor to journals, including Slavic Review, Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Nationalities Papers, and East/West Education.
SIDELIGHTS
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor of Soviet and Russian history at West Chester University, in Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. She is the author of three books: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932, in 2000; The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, in 2006; and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion, in 2015.
In an interview on the AHA Today Web site, Kirschenbaum explained how her interest in history developed: “I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in history. The Cold War no doubt played a part in channeling that interest into Russian history. I started college in the early 1980s—the era of the “evil empire” and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was clearly important. But it was Russian literature, which I had discovered in high school, devouring Crime and Punishment over winter break my senior year, that made me want to understand Russia’s past.” She added: “I love that both research and teaching are vital to history as a profession. I value the powerful interchange between teachers and students asking big questions and surprising one another.”
In International Communism and the Spanish Civil War, Kirschenbaum looks at communism in the Stalin era from an international perspective. According to Kirschenbaum, communist strongholds throughout the world all had connections to the Soviet Union, whether they were schools to train revolutionaries in Moscow or international Spanish Brigades. The Spanish civil war, according to Kirschenbaum, was at the center of this history and brought together the political commitments and life stories of the international communists. The author goes into individual stories and makes it clear that even though the communists practiced terror, these linked individuals also formed a strong solidarity.
N. Greene, writing in Choice, “recommended” International Communism and the Spanish Civil War and commented: “Extensive research in diaries, letters, and available materials provided Kirschenbaum … with a wealth of information.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, April, 2016, N. Greene, review of International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion, p. 1229.
ONLINE
AHA Today, http://blog.historians.org/ (March 17, 2016), interview with Kirschenbaum.
West Chester University Web site, https://www.wcupa.edu/ (April 30, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Professor Kirschenbaum has long combined a serious commitment to research with enthusiasm for teaching. While completing her PhD at University of California, Berkeley (1993), she taught middle and high school students at Oakwood School, an independent school in southern California. Since coming to West Chester in 1996, she has developed classes in Soviet and Russian history as well as thematic courses that transcend national boundaries.
Professor Kirschenbaum's research explores how people come to represent and understand their life stories as part of history, focusing on the linkages between individual, private lives and the momentous, often traumatic events of Russia's twentieth century. She has published three books: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (RoutledgeFalmer, 2000); The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press, 2006); and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge University Press 2015).
Professor Kirschenbaum's research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, and the Penn Humanities Forum. In 2009, Professor Kirschenbaum was awarded the West Chester University Trustees' Achievement Award.
QUOTED: I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in history. The Cold War no doubt played a part in channeling that interest into Russian history. I started college in the early 1980s—the era of the “evil empire” and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was clearly important. But it was Russian literature, which I had discovered in high school, devouring Crime and Punishment over winter break my senior year, that made me want to understand Russia’s past.
I love that both research and teaching are vital to history as a profession. I value the powerful interchange between teachers and students asking big questions and surprising one another.
AHA Member Spotlight: Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
March 17, 2016 Permalink Short URL
AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our talented and eclectic membership, AHA Today features a regular AHA Member Spotlight series.
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor at West Chester University. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has been a member since 1993.
Kirshenbaum_picAlma maters: AB, Brown University, 1986; MA, University of California, Berkeley, 1987; PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1993
Fields of interest: Russia and the Soviet Union, gender, childhood, memory studies, transnational
When did you first develop an interest in history?
I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in history. The Cold War no doubt played a part in channeling that interest into Russian history. I started college in the early 1980s—the era of the “evil empire” and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Union was clearly important. But it was Russian literature, which I had discovered in high school, devouring Crime and Punishment over winter break my senior year, that made me want to understand Russia’s past.
What projects are you currently working on?
My book International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion was published in July 2015. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces—from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain—the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union.
As is often the case, I find myself wanting to tell some of the stories that did not make it into the book. First up is an article on how Michael Gruzenberg, a Russian Jew who fled Russia after the Revolution of 1905 and spent a decade in Chicago running a school to teach immigrants English, transformed himself into Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern advisor to the Chinese Nationalists.
I am also working on a couple of projects related to teaching. With co-authors Choi Chatterjee and Deborah A. Field I am completing a textbook, Russia’s Long Twentieth Century. I am also working with Barbara Walker to translate Olga Berggolts’s memoir Daytime Stars. The project came out of our desire to bring Berggolts’s unique perspective—she was a child in 1917 and the voice of Radio Leningrad during the World War II blockade—to our students.
Have your interests evolved since graduation? If so, how?
I have worked on a wide range of topics—children and childhood in the early Soviet period, 50 years of memory and mythmaking around the blockade of Leningrad, and most recently international engagement with the Soviet project. So, yes, in some ways I have evolved quite a bit. I have always been interested in the global resonances of the revolution, but with my work on international communism that interest became more self-consciously transnational.
But in some ways I have not evolved all that much. I am still fascinated by the fundamental question of how individuals come to understand their lives as part of history. My first book asked not only how the revolution remade children’s lives, but what children made of the revolution. More recently, I have been asking how communist commitments shaped personal lives and how personal relationships influenced political understandings.
Is there an article, book, movie, blog etc. that you could recommend to fellow AHA members?
I would recommend Lydia Ginzburg’s unsparing account of the blockade of Leningrad, Leningrad Diary, to anyone interested in the experiences of civilians in wartime. It’s not a diary, but a fictionalized memoir of the siege told by an intelligentsia everyman who is resilient and anguished, ashamed and astounded by his survival.
What do you value most about the history profession?
I love that both research and teaching are vital to history as a profession. I value the powerful interchange between teachers and students asking big questions and surprising one another.
Why have you continued to be a member of the AHA?
There are so many reasons! I value the professional resources I find in Perspectives. I love dipping into far off fields via the book reviews in the American Historical Review. Perhaps most importantly, the AHA provides a crucial voice for the profession at a time when the value of the liberal arts has come under attack from so many quarters.
Other than history, what are you passionate about?
I try to never pass up unusual travel opportunities.
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.: International communism and the
Spanish Civil War: solidarity and suspicion
N. Greene
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1229.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. International communism and the Spanish Civil War: solidarity and suspicion. Cambridge, 2015. 278p bibl index ISBN
9781107106277 cloth, $99.99; ISBN 9781316371923 ebook, $80.00
53-3684
HX40
2015-10668 CIP
Determination and interpretation of Soviet aims and motives in apparent support of the Spanish Republic during the civil war of 1936-1939
remains contested, despite many studies. However this is understood, the activities everywhere of the Communist International are thought to be
utterly responsive to Moscow's instruction, including the mobilization of the International Brigades that fought in Spain. Although this study
scrupulously reports differing addresses to these matters, its focus is on the brigades and the experiences of their members, whose commitment to
communism went deep--many had been instructed on how to be Bolsheviks in the USSR. Extensive research in diaries, letters, and available
materials provided Kirschenbaum (West Chester Univ.) with a wealth of information about how participation in the brigades was directed,
organized, and portrayed. Critically she points to the prevalence of multiple suspicions, rivalries, harsh dislikes (including anti-Semitism), and
well-known brutalities committed by the brigades' leadership. The national characteristics of the brigades, e.g., German communists and the
American Abraham Lincoln Brigade, are observed, but primary evidence is drawn very largely from sources in English. The role of French
communists, specifically the activities of Andre Marty, requires more attention. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates
and above.--N. Greene, Wesleyan University
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Greene, N. "Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.: International communism and the Spanish Civil War: solidarity and suspicion." CHOICE: Current Reviews
for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1229. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661815&it=r&asid=0ec75af6a9471bf4bcc92a0a9173a9d5. Accessed 12 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661815
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Unruly women
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
The Women's Review of Books.
28.2 (March-April 2011): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2011 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Equality and Revolution: Women's Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917
By Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010, 356 pp., $27.95, paperback
The February Revolution of 1917, which ended more than three hundred years of Romanov rule in Russia and opened the way to the Bolshevik
seizure of power in October, began on International Women's Day, March 8 (February on the Julian calendar in use in Russia). This basic fact is
noted in most histories of 1917. But women's intervention in the revolution is usually narrated in a way that minimizes female agency,
emphasizes women's narrow, appropriately female demands, such as bread for their families, and shoos them from the scene as quickly as
possible. Standard narratives of the February Revolution begin with Women's Day, when thousands of "angry" housewives and factory women
poured into central Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) to protest food shortages.
But rather than pausing to ask why women ignored the advice of the male labor leaders who had urged them not to organize demonstrations, or
how women coordinated gatherings that brought together radical students and workers, the narrative generally jumps to the following day, when
some 200,000 Petrograd workers-presumably male--followed the Women's Day demonstrators into the streets. Troops sent to put down the
demonstrations refused to fire and instead began to join the protesters. Seeing no other way to restore order, the tsar's generals and the leaders of
the parliament, who had organized a Provisional Government, persuaded Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. By March 3, the autocracy was gone.
While the role of women in the February Revolution has been minimized, the demonstration that extracted a promise of support for women's
suffrage from the Provisional Government has been almost entirely ignored, both by historians of the Russian Revolution and historians of global
feminism. On March 19, about 40,000 people--in the words of journalist Liubov Gurevich, "factory workers and women doctors, medics and
writers, maids and students, telegraph operators and nurses"--descended on the Tauride Palace, where both the Provisional Government and the
Petrograd Soviet, the competing centers of power in revolutionary Russia, were meeting.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The leaders of both bodies tried to brush off the marchers, but the crowd refused to disperse. Finally the chair of the Soviet promised to support
women's rights. After much additional delay, two leaders of the demonstration, Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein, the first woman gynecologist in
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Russia and a longtime feminist activist, and Vera Figner, who had spent twenty years in solitary confinement for her part in the assassination of
Alexander II in 1881, went into the palace to meet with Prince Georgii L'vov, the head of the Provisional Government. Initially pleading that the
rules for elections had already been announced and therefore could not be changed, L'vov ultimately agreed that "universal suffrage" included
women. In July, the Provisional Government approved the electoral law establishing women's suffrage, and in November, after the Bolsheviks
took power, women participated in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.
Thus Russian women won the vote one year before women in Britain and Germany, three years before women in the United States, and 27 years
before women in France (and 54 years before women in Switzerland). Yet their achievement has had little impact on interpretations of the
Russian Revolution or feminism. In Russian and Soviet history, the Bolsheviks' and especially Aleksandra Kollontai's dismissal of feminism as a
"bourgeois" cause irrelevant to women workers and peasants has been remarkably effective in pushing the struggle for women's political equality
out of the story of the revolution. Outside Russia, histories of feminism have neglected the suffrage victories in revolutionary Russia, which
appear irrelevant to the narrative of feminists' efforts to win the vote in the democratic West.
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild's vigorously argued book works as a strong corrective, contending that feminism, and the struggle for women's
suffrage in particular, was central to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Linking equality to revolution and emphasizing the personal and
organizational connections among feminism, radicalism, and socialism, she also complicates understandings of the history of women's rights. The
Russian case allows us to view suffrage as not always or simply the result of a gradual, more or less militant struggle to extend the promises of
democracy to women. In Russia, the suffrage struggle was instead, Ruthchild emphasizes, "part of the overall movement for a democratic
transformation of the state."
While Ruthchild aims to fundamentally revise overarching political narratives, her method is firmly grounded in the details of women's lives.
Arguing that feminists should not be understood in "impersonal" terms or as a "monolithic bloc," she takes a biographical approach to
reconstructing women's varied "routes to gender consciousness."
At the core of Ruthchild's recovery project stands the remarkable group of women who developed Russian feminism. They benefitted from the
efforts of the first generation of Russian feminists to open higher education to women, but nonetheless had to struggle to take advantage of the
new opportunities. An unusually large number were doctors. Anna Shabanova, a cofounder in 1895 of the Russian Women's Mutual Philanthropic
Society, overcame numerous obstacles to become a pediatrician. Maria Pokrovskaia also faced opposition to her decision to break with traditional
expectations and study medicine. Her journal Women's Herald, established in 1904, often addressed issues of health and sex, and she became a
prominent advocate for the abolition of legalized prostitution. The young Poliksena Nesterovna Shishkina-Iavein, who in 1906 cofounded the
League for Women's Equal Rights, faced sexism in her efforts to become a doctor.
Women's higher education courses in Petersburg and Moscow often attracted unruly women and nurtured a "feminist subculture," says Ruthchild.
Praskovia Arian rebelled against the constraints of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing to graduate from the Bestuzhev Courses; from 1899 until at
least 1913, she published the First Women's Calendar, a compendium that brought together everything from nutritional advice to lists of
businesses hiring women. Anna Miliukova, from a family of Orthodox priests, similarly rebelled against the expectation that she marry a priest;
she supported herself while attending courses in Moscow. In 1905, she emerged as an important feminist voice within the liberal ConstitutionalDemocratic
(Kadet) party; indeed she was the primary voice contesting (her husband) Paul Miliukov's opposition to including a women's suffrage
plank in the party platform.
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Ruthchild is keen to demonstrate that these women were not "bourgeois" as their socialist opponents so often charged. She notes that most of the
feminists--like Kollontai, their most vocal critic--are best understood as representatives of the intelligentsia, a socially heterogeneous group of
educated Russians defined by their alienation from the state and dedication to serving "the people." Politically, Russian feminists, like Russian
liberals generally, tended to be more supportive of socialist concerns such as paid maternity leave than their supposed opposite numbers in the
West. They revered, even if they had no desire to emulate, the earlier generation of populist revolutionaries personified by Figner.
Moreover, socialists and feminists often had personal as well as institutional ties, and a single biography could include commitments to both
feminism and radicalism. Shabanova, who led the staid Mutual Philanthropic Society for 22 years, had as a teenager been jailed for her
involvement in radial circles. Ariadna Tyrkova, who was, from 1906 to 1917, the only woman on the Kadet Party Central Committee, led a life in
many ways more radical than that of her school friend Nadezhda Krupskaia, Vladimir Lenin's wife. It was Tyrkova who was expelled from
gymnasium for being a "troublemaker" and who took the bold and difficult step of leaving her husband and raising her children alone. Little in
these intelligentsia women's lives easily fits the mold of "bourgeois housewife."
Few historians would disagree with Ruthchild's characterization of feminists as representatives of the intelligentsia rather than the bourgeoisie.
However, unlike other historians of Russian feminism, Ruthchild understands the socialists' charge as evidence that feminism appealed to
working-class women. When Kollontai derided "bourgeois feminists" or mocked their "ladies congress," she aimed to delegitimize feminist
activism. Such efforts to brand feminism as perpetuating class privilege, Ruthchild argues, stemmed from feminists' successes in organizing
working women and socialists' fears that feminism posed a potential threat to working-class solidarity.
Despite Ruthchild's emphasis on the appeal of feminism for working women, the central actors in her story remain the intelligentsia women who
provided leadership for the feminist movement. She draws extensively on their published journals, correspondence, and memoirs. The clearest
evidence of workers' involvement in feminism comes in her discussion of the Revolution of 1905.
During the revolution, the Women's Equal Rights Union, founded in Moscow in early 1905, moved furthest in the direction of linking women's
rights to broader social change. Bringing together women from across the political spectrum, its local chapters organized well-received, if shortlived,
women's groups in the factories. In 1905 when the union instructed members to join only parties that supported suffrage, it effectively
asked feminists to align themselves with the socialists. However, the enthusiasm for working-class causes should not be overstated. Many
feminists responded with relief when in January 1906 the Kadets finally approved a suffrage plank.
By then the tsar had issued the October Manifesto, granting a legislature (Duma) and universal male suffrage. The possibility of revising the
election law quickly faded. The tsar prorogued the first Duma in July 1906 and the second in June 1907 before either considered women's rights
legislation. The third Duma was elected on a substantially narrowed franchise. In these circumstances, the feminist rank and file withered away,
although one of the union's founders, Maria Chekhova, managed to publish its journal virtually singlehandedly from 1907 to 1909. Leaders
remained in close touch and continued to lobby for legislation that, like a proposal concerning women's access to universities, rarely touched
working women's lives. Still, even in this period Ruthchild finds evidence, notably at the First All-Russian Women's Congress held in 1908, of
working-class women's support for women's suffrage.
Ruthchild also emphasizes that the socialists conceived of International Women's Day as a means of countering the "success of the feminist
message among women workers." The first Russian Women's Day celebrations in 1913 brought together feminist and socialist activists with a
wide range of political affiliations. By 1914, socialist organizers were downplaying the holiday's connection to suffrage. Nonetheless, feminists
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and socialists continued to cooperate. Such cooperation helps to explain women's desire and ability to organize their own demonstrations on the
most famous of Women's Days, in 1917.
As Ruthchild recognizes, some feminist concerns held little meaning for working women. But such cases, and the interest of feminists' political
opponents in highlighting them, should not, she argues, be allowed to obscure working women's support for women's rights. The women who
took to the streets of Petrograd in March 1917 to demand the vote serve as a powerful reminder that even when the demands--the right to vote or
more recently the right to marry--seem tame or "bourgeois," feminism can be revolutionary.
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is professor of history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in modern Russian/Soviet
history as well as women's studies. She is the author of two books: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932
(2001) and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (2006).
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. "Unruly women." The Women's Review of Books, Mar.-Apr. 2011, p. 10+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA255968655&it=r&asid=74b43bfa4287fe1adfa4fd7aefbe8261. Accessed 12 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A255968655
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The noble terrorist
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
The Women's Review of Books.
31.5 (September-October 2014): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
The Defiant Life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution
By Lynne Ann Hartnett
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, 320 pp., $35.00, hardcover
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
When the tsarist police apprehended Vera Figner in February 1883, she was the Russian state's Enemy Number One. In 1879, the noblewoman
turned revolutionary became one of seven women on the 22-member executive committee of the People's Will, an organization devoted to
assassinating Tsar Alexander II. She participated in numerous attempts on the tsar's life, finally helping to assemble the bombs that killed him on
March 1,1881. In the wake of the assassination, Figner, whom the police deemed "one of the most dangerous" members of the group still at large,
worked tirelessly, even recklessly, to confirm their worst fears. Despite the revolutionaries' depleted ranks, she managed, a year after the tsar's
death, to orchestrate the assassination of a military prosecutor in Odessa. The new tsar, Alexander III, took the precaution of postponing his
coronation and leaving the capital for Gatchina, a fortress-like palace thirty miles from St. Petersburg.
Tried in 1884, Figner was sentenced to die by hanging, a sentence quickly commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor, because the state
hesitated to execute a woman, even one as notorious as Figner. Instead, she and another woman, Liudmila Volkenstein, were sent to the most
repressive of tsarist prisons, the forbidding Shlisselburg Fortress. There she remained for twenty years, until a plea from her dying mother
persuaded the last tsar, Nicholas II, to release her. Eventually publishing seven volumes of memoirs before her death in 1942 at age 89, Figner
became an icon of revolution; although not a communist, her revolutionary commitment, and especially her long years as a political prisoner, won
her acclaim in the Soviet Union.
Lynne Ann Hartnett's new book is, somewhat surprisingly, the first biography of Figner in English. The timing of this biography, as Hartnett notes
at the outset, is linked to the "significant parallels between these nineteenth-century terrorists and their twenty-first century counterparts."
However, the book rarely analyzes those parallels beyond the general observation that the members of the People's Will "were radical zealots"
who regarded "bloodshed and death [as] immaterial." Indeed, the People's Will terrorists had a unique understanding of political violence as a
means of exacting "political concessions," including freedom of speech and assembly, which would then allow them to "return to peaceful
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activity among the people." The book's central concern is to reconstruct Figner's life as a means of debunking, or at minimum complicating, the
powerful legend of "revolutionary heroism and martyrdom" that she constructed in her autobiographical writing.
Hartnett finds in Figner's "typical and unexceptional" provincial noble childhood little indication of the terrorist she would become. In contrast to
Figner herself, who according to Hartnett, represented "every step she took along the way toward the unforgiving prison cell ... as a conscious
one," the biographer emphasizes that "timing"--the fact that Figner reached "the age of consciousness in a period filled with political and social
reform"--"impelled Vera Figner into the revolutionary underground." Hartnett understands Figner's radicalism as rooted in both the socially
engaged literature of the 1860s and the Gospels, which "aroused in Vera a commitment to devote herself toward a higher social goal." Hartnett
also emphasizes that from an early age the "beguiling" Figner was "cognizant of the power of her appearance," and unlike other female radicals
"never tried to downplay her looks." If her circumstances inculcated a desire for equality and meaningful work, they also taught her the
advantages of looking and acting like a beautiful, noble doll.
Figner's first effort to undertake socially useful work was radical but legal. Graduated from the Rodionovskii Institute for Noble Girls in 1869, she
was inspired to become a doctor by the example of Nadezhda Suslova, the first woman to receive a medical degree from the University of Zurich.
However, Figner's father refused to grant her permission to travel abroad to pursue this unconventional dream, and instead launched her on the
social circuit in Kazan. There the seventeen-year-old, "dark-haired, olive-skinned beauty" quickly bewitched the wealthy Alexei Filippov. Their
marriage less than ten months later emancipated Figner from the authority of her father, who died shortly thereafter. In 1872, she set out for
Zurich together with her husband, who agreed to abandon law for medicine, and her younger sister Lidia. Figner, whose autobiographical writings
never "mention love, passion, or even companionship with respect to her husband" described enrolling in medical school as embarking, writes
Hartnett, on a "holy mission."
While Lidia Figner quickly gravitated toward Zurich's radical emigre circles, Vera Filippov devoted herself to the difficult task of studying
medicine in a language she had not yet mastered. Yet even as she concentrated on her studies, the elder Figner sister struggled to balance her
desire for individual emancipation with her commitment to social justice. She ultimately joined her sister in the "quasi-socialist sorority known as
the Fritschi circle," writes Hartnett. However, the tension she continued to feel between her education and her radicalism became acute in May
1873, when the tsarist state ordered Russian women students to leave Zurich, where, according to the ukaz, or tsarist proclamation, they had been
"deluded by the communistic theories of free love." At least partly in response to this challenge to their independence, the members of the Fritschi
circle pledged to devote themselves to the cause of revolution. In 1874, Lidia returned to Russia to join the revolutionary underground and was
soon arrested. Vera, however, chose to continue her medical studies in Bern, which was not covered by the tsar's order, while her husband
returned to Kazan.
The crucial turning point for Figner came in late 1875, when a visitor from Russia arrived on her doorstep to urge her to join the revolutionary
underground and "replace ... imprisoned friends on the front line of the struggle." Relying on Figner's own account, Hartnett explains Figner's
decision to give up medicine as the result of her realization that to study while others sacrificed was selfish and shameful.
With the decision to return to Russia and participate in peaceful revolutionary propaganda and, in response to tsarist repression of such activity,
eventually terror, Figner began the process of constructing herself as a self-sacrificing woman revolutionary. Hartnett takes a rather dim view of
this self-mythologizing, carefully charting the gaps and distortions in Figner's self-representation as a "brave, virtuous martyr for the cause of
freedom." She discounts Figner's claim that she demanded an active role in terrorist actions because "it was intolerable to me that I should bear
only a moral responsibility" for an act of terrorism, while her comrades risked "the gravest penalties." Instead, Hartnett argues that "Vera's
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insistence was predicated in her own egotism rather than an inclination to self-abnegation." Figner, according to Hartnett, "craved" the
"spotlight," "radical glory," and martyrdom.
Yet even as Hartnett seems to disapprove of Figner's "selfish independence," she appreciates her desire for personal emancipation. The "radical
community" with its "collective fund-raising" and "communal living arrangements," she writes, offered women like Figner, whose first step on
the road to becoming a revolutionary was divorcing her husband, an alternative to marriage. However, despite the fact that radicals defined
themselves as "liberated individuals," they "still harbored some traditional ideas about gender norms." Even though women constituted one-third
of the People's Will membership, they operated mainly in support roles. Men developed the group's theories of terrorism and threw the bombs.
Unwilling to accept these limits and to write propaganda while others worked to mine the rails over which the group hoped the tsar's train would
pass, Figner had no compunctions about using her feminine charms to get assigned to the explosives detail.
Hartnett also recognizes that women, held to a higher standard of virtue and self-sacrifice than their male comrades, often paid a greater personal
price for their radical transgressions. Male revolutionaries, she notes, "seemed to have no trouble combining their personal lives and
revolutionary commitments," but they--and indeed the public more generally--reserved their greatest respect for "ascetic, virginal, yet beautiful"
women whom they could venerate as radical saints. However liberated Figner may have been in her private life--Hartnett speculates about several
affairs--the idealized woman revolutionary had to renounce intimate relationships. Thus Figner won the esteem of an ardent suitor, a fellow
revolutionary, whom she rebuffed with the claim (which he accepted as true) that "her radical priorities left no room in her life for love." In
prison, the men incarcerated with Figner and Volkenstein viewed them as "unattainable revolutionary goddesses," and "expected comfort to be
rendered by their female comrades." Upon leaving prison, the men often married and established families; by contrast, Hartnett pictures Figner as
lonely and emotionally stunted.
In the years after her release from Shlisselburg, Figner won increasing public attention as a "high priestess at the altar of sacrifice and
revolutionary martyrdom." She may, as Hartnett asserts, have "enjoyed the adulation"--but one wonders if Figner also found the role of sexless
revolutionary icon oppressive. In any case, she worked to build her own myth, writing and sharing her memoir-in-progress. The revolutions of
1917 established her as a member of what Hartnett calls the "revolutionary nobility." After the February Revolution that toppled the tsar, Figner
participated in more than sixty public events, including a major demonstration in favor of women's suffrage, a cause that she had earlier rejected
as "pointless." By her seventieth birthday, in 1922, she had become "a truly romantic figure for many Soviet citizens," who knew nothing of her
"intolerance, haughtiness or self-righteousness," writes Hartnett. The state promoted her as a model of Soviet womanhood and, Hartnett suggests,
bought her silence and tacit endorsement with honors and material privileges. By the late 1930s, Figner was too sick to play a public role--a
circumstance which may have saved her from the Stalinist purges that took the lives of so many old revolutionaries.
Despite the biography's often critical tone, Hartnett does not judge Figner too harshly. Like Figner's comrades and her Soviet readers, she admires
her "noble and revolutionary spirit." She has rather less sympathy for Figner when Figner displays an unwillingness to "put personal motives
aside," as when she hesitated to abandon her medical studies or charmed her male comrades into allowing her to build bombs rather than write
pamphlets. A more generous or forgiving (or feminist) analysis might understand Figner as struggling to emancipate herself from gender norms,
as powerful in radical as in mainstream society, which demanded beautiful revolutionary saints. In prison and in her autobiographical writing,
Figner ultimately embraced this image of herself, perhaps at great personal cost. The terrorist who had been radicalized by dreams of
emancipation and economic independence ended up teaching Soviet women that self-sacrifice, chastity, and suffering constituted the most
"revolutionary" of feminine virtues.
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Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is professor of history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of two books, Small Comrades:
Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (2001) and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and
Monuments (2006). Her current research explores the personal and political lives of international communists.
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. "The noble terrorist." The Women's Review of Books, Sept.-Oct. 2014, p. 12+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA384099938&it=r&asid=ded4ac2c989a62a46c0cbd9a3510d7c0. Accessed 12 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A384099938
---
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The war at home
Lisa Kirschenbaum
The Women's Review of Books.
20.3 (Dec. 2002): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose edited by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina. Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002, 242 pp., $29.00 hardcover.
The Siege: A Novel by Helen Dunmore. New York: Grove Press, 2002, 304 pp., $24.00 hardcover.
Blockaded for almost three years during World War Two, the city of Leningrad was a place where war invaded domestic spaces and blurred the
boundary between the largely male war front and the predominantly female home front. During the winter of 1941-1942, approximately one
million Leningraders died, most of them - of starvation. Those who survived were subjected to continual air raids and artillery attacks until the
siege was finally broken in early 1944. For Ol'ga Grechina, a survivor whose memoir is excerpted in Writing the Siege of Leningrad, the first
winter of the war left a painful memory "of stale odors of vacant frozen apartments, the taste of hot water with dried bread and boiled grass." If
her experiences lacked the drama of the battlefield, her memories are nonetheless "like a mine field--you just have to step on them, and you
explode, and everything flies to hell--quiet, comfort, and your present happiness."
The feminization and domestication of war in Leningrad occurred on several interrelated levels. By the time the blockade was in place in
September 1941, Leningrad had become a city of women, children and old people. Able-bodied men were drafted into the army, evacuated with
the war industry or volunteered to serve in civilian militias. For the perhaps two million civilians they left behind; the war happened at home.
Under starvation conditions the housewife's daily tasks became more difficult-- not only negotiating shortages but turning glue and leather
briefcases into food--and dangerous in a city where bread queues could become artillery targets. At the same time, women undertook what the
Soviet press called "unwomanly" work: digging anti-tank trenches, working in heavy industry, standing watch on rooftops to put out incendiary
bombs.
The siege of Leningrad cannot be understood apart from women's experiences. Yet as historian Richard Bidlack notes in his excellent
introduction to Writing the Siege of Leningrad, historical literature on the blockade has rarely attempted "to define female perspectives on the
siege and to trace those perspectives though a number of first-hand accounts." Cynthia Simmons' and Nina Perlina's collection of diaries,
memoirs, oral histories and fiction, which focuses on the "small stories" of individual Leningrad women, seeks to fill this void.
Simmons and Perlina identify three components of "the feminine perspective" on the siege: emphasis on the details of everyday life, on
"preserving private and familial values" and on "lost beauty and youth." They also explore women's public roles during the blockade with
contributions from female doctors, writers, scientists, artists and scholars.
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The documents collected in Writing the Siege of Leningrad include sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory accounts of the blockade.
What they share, Simmons and Perlina note, are the silences that mark survivors' "excruciatingly personal sacrifice of love, marriage, and
childbirth" during and after the war. The only substantial exception to the general silence on matters of love and sex is the 1996 oral testimony of
musician Kseniia Matus, who tells the story of how her lover's willingness to allow her to fill his plate before her own with the special ration
provided to performers at the front revealed to her his "shameless selfishness.... So this was a real turning point for me. Afterward, there was no
feeling left. For a while he kept coming, got down on his knees, kissed my feet," but "that was the end of our relationship."
Other writers document how hard it was to record the most deadly period of the siege, when bread lines were targeted by German artillery located
a few kilometers from the city. Evgeniia Shavrova noted in the preface to her "schoolgirl's diary," begun in the summer of 1942, that "[a]bout the
difficult winter past, I am not going to write. First of all, those memories are painful and gloomy. Second, I didn't write anything down then--other
things were more important." For more than thirty years after the war, Grechina did not speak or write about the memories that "lived within me,
physically torturing me."
The strain of maintaining family life, of caring for others when one's own survival was at stake, emerges as a particularly painful theme. Natal'ia
Stroganova, who was seven in 1941, recalled in an oral history recorded in 1994 that in her family, "No one took food away from anyone else.
Only once, Volodia Bystrov ate something that wasn't his. Mother yelled at him. She says she still feels ashamed about it." The conditions in
blockaded Leningrad made it impossible for Sofia Buriakova to bury her father in an individual grave. "All my life," she wrote fifty years after
the war, "I have suffered pangs of remorse that I was unable to fulfill this single request that my father made of me." Avgusta Saraeva-Bondar',
who was sixteen in 1941, suggested in her 1993 memoir that survival required selfishness. In a detached tone that obscured her own status as
survivor, she observed that the worst survived: those "[u]nable to be unethical, dishonest, insolent, and cruel... were the first to take leave of life."
Women also emphasized their selfless commitment to the cause. Buriakova maintained that "[w]hat played the decisive role" in her survival "was
the feeling of civic patriotism, the realization of a patriotic duty--at the cost of lives and deprivations to defend the freedom and independence of
our fatherland." Military surgeon Valentina Gorokhova recalled that among doctors and nurses who worked under conditions of "cold, hunger,
and darkness... there was such an effort, such a recognition of duty, of the necessity of superhuman labor, that no one complained. Everyone knew
that our work would return the wounded to action, would help us achieve victory over the enemy."
Simmons and Perlina argue that women's "narratives differ dramatically from valorous accounts of the Siege in their narrator's stance as an arbiter
of morality." Under this rubric they include self-criticism as well as condemnation of the Soviet regime and Stalin himself. Classicist Ol'ga
Freidenberg, the most unabashed critic in the collection, characterized Stalin as "[t]his Asian, unable to speak Russian," and blamed the siege on
"the vanity and ambition of the tyrants." Still, as the contributions of other survivors make clear, the most characteristic feature of women's
narratives may have been their willingness simultaneously to challenge, incorporate and rework the Soviet myth of "heroic Leningrad."
In "valorous" accounts of the siege, gender hardly matters--men and women alike were "heroic defenders." In some women's accounts, the
obverse of this gender equality included the disruption and erasure of clear, "civilized" lines between men and women. Lidiia Ginzburg, the
literary, scholar whose remarkable siege memoir is cited but not excerpted by Simmons and Perlina (it has been published in English as Blockade
Diary), tells the story of an intentionally genderless "siege person." Chronicling the sensations of starvation with an attention to detail that
survivors in Writing the Siege of Leningrad largely avoid, Ginzburg describes a sexless body, "unfamiliar, with new hollows and angles... bruised
and rough. The skin was a blotchy sack, too big for its contents." In Freidenberg's "retrospective diary," the siege became an attack on human,
rather than specifically female, identity. Describing her interaction with a musician visiting the besieged city, she noted that "Yudina was pre-war;
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I was our-and-out a person of the siege.... I felt the desecrated soul within me, dying desires, my appreciation of life humiliated and destroyed
forever."
The genderless despair of the out-and-out siege person can be understood as a denial of specifically female perspectives, attitudes and
experiences. It can also be understood as a consequence of the attempt to communicate the unimaginable in the readily understood language of
gender. Unable or unwilling to describe the effect of prolonged malnutrition on their bodies, many of the survivors whose accounts are included
in Writing the Siege of Leningrad represented starvation as the obliteration of conventional markers of gender identity. Kseniia Matus, who
participated in the historic 1942 performance of Dmitrii Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, remembered that "if you looked at the crowd, you
couldn't tell who was a man, and who a woman. The women were all wrapped up, and the men were also covered in scarves and shawls. Some
were wearing women's fur coats." Gorokhova, like many women in the military, "was issued an ill-fitting man's uniform." Her memoir
characterizes the blockade as a moment when "All instin cts died." She remembers that "Men and women washed together in the bath. Here too,
in two adjacent and open shower stalls, a wounded soldier showered with two nurses." While outsiders could not he expected to imagine the
experience of starvation, perhaps they could visualize the distance between the prewar world and the world of the siege, where men wore
women's furs and women wore men's uniforms, where men and women bathed together without desire or shame.
Helen Dunmore's novel The Siege draws on survivors' accounts. Dunmore demonstrates a talent for telling details--in a discussion, for example,
of how best to prepare guinea pig. She lyrically evokes the besieged city, where "Frost and snow gather, thickening centimeter by centimeter on
windows, roofs, parks, railways, and the bodies of the dead. Slowly the city sinks down, like a great ship sinking in an ice-field." Against this
portrait of the dying city, Dunmore constructs a relatively uncomplicated tale of female love and strength.
Placing the love story of Anna, the 23-year-old daughter of a politically suspect writer, and Andrei, a medical student, at the center of the novel
allows Dunmore to explore the impact of epic circumstances on intimate, everyday life. Her narrative strategy implicitly denies what, in
Freidenberg's words, happened to the siege person's "appreciation of life"--that it might be "humiliated and destroyed forever." While she
movingly describes how the cold and starvation of the blockade numbed desire--by December, the two lovers "don't ache for each other anymore.
They rest, wadded in their winter coats, like climbers bivouacked on an icy mountain"--she pictures self--sacrificing "maternal" love as
immutable.
Both Anna and Marina, her father's aging former lover, heroically deprive themselves of food in order to provide extra rations for five-year-old
Kolya, Anna's brother, whom she has raised since her mother died in childbirth. Andrei characterizes the household as a place "of meticulous
sharing-out of soup and cereal into equal portions which are then sabotaged by both women's determination to give Kolya that featherweight on
the scales which may add up to his life." The powerful female impulse to care for loved ones regardless of personal cost takes its most extreme
form in Dunmore's least convincing female character, Eugenia, a lesbian prostitute with a heart of gold, who on more than one occasion becomes
Anna's guardian angel.
Unlike the survivors whose memoirs and fiction are included in Writing the Siege, Dunmore writes in the present tense, sparing her characters the
painful work of remembering. The Siege ends with the return of spring and the revival of "normal" human relationships: children play and fight,
couples support each other as they stroll on the main streets.
The novel's final image is of the reestablished family. While it is not exactly what it appears to be, it nonetheless embodies the triumph of love
and hope. Anna worries that the previous winter "isn't the past. It isn't history and it never will be." Despite this reservation, Dunmore leaves her
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characters walking along the Neva River in the sunlight, Anna's vague sense that the siege will always be a dangerous memory muted by the
warm glow of an almost happy ending.
LISA A. KIRSCHENBAUM is associate professor of history at West Chester University. Her publications include Small Comrades:
Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 (RoutledgeFalmer). She is working on a book on the memory of the siege of Leningrad.
Kirschenbaum, Lisa
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kirschenbaum, Lisa. "The war at home." The Women's Review of Books, Dec. 2002, p. 12+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA95320119&it=r&asid=52a143dda02d0a291ccc74c3cd5b960f. Accessed 12 Apr.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A95320119