1917 Centenary – Studying the Russian Revolution

Keynote Roundtable

Friday, 31 March, Auditorium 12:30-13:30

Chair: Judith Pallot (BASEES President, University of Oxford)
Speakers: Sarah Badcock (University of Nottingham)
Steve Smith (University of Oxford)
Boris Kolonitskii (European University as St Petersburg)

Sarah Badcock

Sarah Badcock is Associate Professor in history at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on Russia in the late Imperial and revolutionary periods. She is interested in comparative perspectives on questions of punishment, free and unfree labour, and penal cultures. Her most recent book, A prison without walls? Eastern Siberian exile in the last years of Tsarism will be published by Oxford University Press in November 2016. She spent several years researching ordinary people’s experiences of the Russian revolution. This research culminated in a book published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia; A provincial history. Badcock’s interest in regional perspectives on the Russian revolutions continued with a collaborative project, and she recently published an edited collection of essays exploring Russia’s revolutions from regional perspective, along with her friends and colleagues Liudmila Novikova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) and Aaron Retish (Wayne State University), entitled Russian Home Front In War And Revolution, 1914-22: Book 1. Russia’s Revolution In Regional Perspective. (Slavica, 2015). 

Daniel Orlovsky

Professor Daniel Orlovsky is a specialist in the history of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution of 1917 and he continues to study the history of a much understudied hidden class of Soviet citizens, people who were neither workers nor peasants—the white collar “employees” of the Soviet
Union between 1918 and 1956.

He has held numerous grants for research in the former U.S.S.R. and Russia and has published on the social and cultural history of the Russian Revolution and early Soviet state building. 

Orlovsky’s major contributions have been the notion of a revolution of the lower middle strata in the society and politics of the Russian Empire and its successor regimes and the application of theories of corporatism to the institutional, social and political history of the turbulent years, 1914-1921.

He coordinated a project on the future of Soviet studies at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington D.C. The results were published as Beyond Soviet Studies. His latest work, a history of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917, entitled Russia’s Democratic Revolution, is forthcoming.

Boris Kolonitskii

Boris Kolonitskii is Professor of the Study of the Russian Revolution at the European University at St. Petersburg and a Head Research Fellow at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Boris Kolonitskii is a leading expert on the cultural and political history of late imperial and revolutionary Russia, in which he has developed new approaches to tracing the shifts in popular and elite responses topolitical crisis, particularly as reflected in the media of popular and street culture—cartoons, magazines, posters, and rumors. His works on 1917 include many articles and books, including Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (Yale University Press, 1999) and Tragicheskaya erotika: Obrazy imperatoskoi sem’i v gody Pervyi mirovoi voiny [Tragic Erotica: Images of the Royal Family During WWI] (Moscow, 2010).