44 Lenin Avenue

A researcher's journey to Siberia

Month: November 2017

On collaborative projects

14 November 2017 / / 0 Comments

While not directly related to the “44 Lenin Avenue Project,” I thought I’d highlight a recent collaborative publication in which I participated with Alan Barenberg, Sean Kinnear, Steve Maddox, and Lynne Viola. At the May 2017 meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists (Ryerson University, Toronto), we participated in a roundtable discussion on new directions in Gulag studies. Heather Coleman, editor of Canadian Slavonic Papers, attended the discussion, and encouraged us to re-create the discussion in written form. We did so in early September 2017 on a Google Doc, with Alan Barenberg facilitating the discussion. Thank you to everyone involved!

I found the group-writing process quite rewarding. We responded individually to the questions, but directly on to the same document,  making the final result a truly collaborative effort. It has a lot of rich discussion of the current state of Gulag historiography and suggestions for classroom use of certain publications. These types of academic discussions often only appear at conferences if at all, and it is great to see it in print (soon), and available on-line, now. “New Directions in Gulag Studies: A Roundtable Discussion” is available on-line, here: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00085006.2017.1384665

I even manage to mention the “44 Lenin Avenue” project a couple of times, briefly, in the discussion. If you have any interest in the Gulag, it’s worth the read!

Tomsk as Imperial Project

3 November 2017 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking a bit about Tomsk as a project of empire. These thoughts arose partly out of my early modern European survey course at TRU, during which I recently lectured about Russia’s eastward expansion. Tomsk was founded in 1604 as one of a series of fur-trading outposts along Siberia’s vast river routes, and thus in timing and motivation wasn’t that different from much of the European expansion into North America (my hometown of Annapolis Royal, NS, for example, was founded in 1605 as Port Royal, a French fur-trading outpost).

Outpost of Tiumen. Wikimedia commons. Public domain.

My thoughts about Tomsk and empire also relate to my upcoming presentation at the 2017 ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies) Annual Convention in Chicago, Nov. 9-12, 2017. The title of my presentation, “A Murder Most Siberian: ‘Crime and Punishment’ in 1909 Tomsk,” is a nod to Louise McReynolds’ excellent book, Murder Most Russian: True Crime and Punishment in Late Imperial Russia (Cornell U.P., 2012), which notes, among other arguments and information, that Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, influenced the criminal justice system in numerous ways. The 1909 murder of Ignatii Dvernitskii, supposedly motivated in part by Dostoevsky’s writings, seemed to fit into McReynolds’ framework (“a desire to put Dostoevsky to the test,” one of the perpetrators allegedly said. See: unknown author, “Ieromonakh’’ Ignatii i ego sistema,” Sibirskie voprosy vol. 5, no. 20 (30 May 1909): 24-37, quotation 36-37).

Still, as I was writing the paper and thinking about the title, I thought, “What is specifically Siberian, as opposed to Russian, about this murder?”; “Does it tell a story that is unique to, or reflective of, specific issues that Siberia and/or Tomsk faced?”; “Is this murder, in other words, most Siberian?”

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