Authors

Vera Kaplan¹;  ¹ Tel Aviv University, Israel

Discussion

Taking a Break from Revolution: Historians at the Village Haymaking in 1917-1918.

The intensity and drama of the revolutionary events of 1917 changed people’s lives and required them to make special efforts in order to survive the political turmoil. One strategy of survival was to distance themselves from the centers of the revolution and seek a safe haven in the countryside.  Many representatives of the urban educated class, historians included, adopted this strategy in the summer of 1917 when, disappointed by the course of the revolution, they decided to withdraw to their village estates. What did they find in the villages? What cultural and social mechanisms enabled or jeopardized their survival in a period when the institutions of the “old regime” were being destroyed and those of the new one had yet to be built? In this paper I seek answers to these questions in the diaries, letters and memoirs of the historians Iurii Got’e, Nikolai Chechulin, Georgii Vernadskii and Sergei Pushkarev. For each of them the attempt to find refuge in the village was fairly successful, but their stay there also meant an encounter with the “people” (narod) that was profoundly different from the ideal model of the relationship between an intelligentsia striving to educate the people and the grateful peasants. The radicalization of the peasantry, the growing violence that became