Richard Bessel (University of York) 1917-2017: THE REVOLUTIONARY WAVE AND EUROPE’S CENTURY OF VIOLENCE
The Russian Revolution of 1917 may have been relatively bloodless, but it occurred in the context of the bloodshed of the First World War and precipitated an era of violence the like of which Europe had not seen for more than a century. This talk aims to examine the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, and the explosion of ethnic violence, during the years from 1917 roughly to 1923, and to explore its longer-term consequences. It explores the relationship between the extraordinarily violent period roughly between the outbreak of the First World War and the immediate aftermath of the Second, on the one hand, and the remarkably peaceful second half of Europe’s twentieth century, on the other. This contrast, it will be argued, has helped to shape attitudes in contemporary Europe and our understandings of the revolutionary wave from 1917 to 1923.
Oleg Kharkhordin (EUSP) COULD THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION BE A RE-FORMATION OF THE PRACTICES OF BELIEF?
Revolution is not only a change in the political and/or social order, it is also a change in heart. I mean here that the Russian revolution of 1917 ushered in a new mass way in which people started to analyse their feelings, desires, wants and inner selves. Some scholars suggested that in a sense Russian revolution was akin to a Protestant reformation in that in reformed the practices of self-cognition and self-fashioning. My contention is that the Russian revolution produced a specific individual because it relied on the practices of self-cognition and self-fashioning different from Western Christianity: instead of (auricular) confessional practices that in the West were re-formed and radicalised by Luther and Calvin, in Eastern Christianity these were the (largely silent) penitential practices, radicalised and reformed by the Bolsheviks. The end result was an individual, but different from the Western one. It relied on the analysis of visible deeds, as performed by a relevant community, with this model being firmly rooted in the early Christianity of such figures as St. Jerome and Tertullian. Thus Communist revolution in its everyday practice was not about the cult of personality but rather about cultivating each separate personality, with this process leading to the rampant individualism of the post-1991 days.
Лекции состоялись 25 октября 2017 года в рамках конференции "1917/2017. REVOLUTIONS, COMMUNIST LEGACIES AND SPECTRES OF THE FUTURE".
