Siberian Exile and the Invention of Revolutionary Russia, 1825–1917 by Ben Phillips

Author:Ben Phillips [Phillips, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429275098
Google: NBaazgEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-12-15T04:29:38+00:00

In practice the ASFRF did not live up to these lofty ambitions. Despite support from leading figures in progressive American society and the old abolitionist movement (including Mark Twain, William Lloyd Garrison Jr and Julia Ward Howe), it never had more than 200 members nationwide, while the American edition of Free Russia edited by Golʹdenberg never exceeded 900 subscribers and found itself in financial difficulties almost immediately.101 By 1894 the American Free Russia had ceased publication and the ASFRF itself was dormant. Many of its members nevertheless remained sympathetic to and (to varying degrees) involved with the Russian freedom movement, and the days of Russian émigré agitation in the United States were by no means over: as discussed in Chapter 4 (pp. 155-162), the ASFRF was revived in 1904–1905 to promote a lecture tour by the Socialist-Revolutionary Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, whose skill as an émigré spokesperson for the revolutionary movement, personal connections with Kennan and reputation for maternal virtue and stoical forbearance in Siberian exile enabled her to attain a degree of political celebrity in the United States far beyond that attained by Kravchinskii a decade earlier.

The failure of the agitation in America presaged that of the Russian freedom movement in Britain. The reasons for this failure were complex and to a great extent bound up with the wider political, social and cultural context of the time, and are therefore discussed separately at the end of the present chapter. Turning our attention to the cultural dynamics of the agitation, however, we will now focus on one significant factor strongly implied previously: the fact that expressions of outrage on behalf of Siberian exiles or nominal sympathy for a ‘free Russia’ by no means implied active support for émigré revolutionaries, and in many cases had little to do with Russia at all. For most British and American observers, as we will now see, the Siberian agitation was above all else a means of re-focusing attention on the image of the liberal and democratic West (as constituted by a backward, autocratic Russia) and, by extension, a cipher for the discussion of moral and political dilemmas much closer to home.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.