{"id":449,"date":"2016-10-17T11:23:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T15:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/?p=449"},"modified":"2016-10-17T11:23:23","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T15:23:23","slug":"seizing-stuff-in-revolutionary-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/2016\/10\/17\/seizing-stuff-in-revolutionary-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Seizing Stuff in Revolutionary Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Requisitions and Dispossession in Cheliabinsk, 1919.<\/p>\n

From\u00a0https:\/\/russiainphoto.ru\/<\/p>\n

By Drake Long<\/p>\n

OXFORD \u2013 Students were pressed Monday, October 10, \u00a0to think about the idea of experiencing a revolution. Miami University\u2019s Havighurst Colloquium speaker series continued this week with a lecture by Dr. Anne O\u2019 Donnell, an Assistant Professor of History from New York University. Her topic, titled \u2018Seizing Power: Possession and Property in the Revolutionary Republic, 1917-1922,\u2019 encouraged students and attendees to think about the phenomenon of dispossession, looting, and property theft during the formative years of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

O\u2019 Donnell told the story of a woman named Tikhobrazova, a citizen who fled Petrograd prior to the Russian Civil War only to return after and find her property gone. The process of getting it back was what captured O\u2019 Donnell\u2019s attention. The new state seizing property was a fairly common occurrance, but O\u2019 Donnell challenged calling this case one of pure nationalization. \u201cLocal governments followed the national government\u2019s lead, calling it \u2018municipalization,\u201d she said in reference to the lesser-known bureaucracies that emerged all over Russia after October 1917, especially in the biggest cities, that pursued social welfare mandates without ever being registered or acknowledged by the Bolsheviks themselves. In Tikhobrazova\u2019s case, she had to appeal first to a \u201cTroika on Requisition and Confiscation,\u201d and when her request for her property was denied, she appealed to the \u201cPresidium of the Petrosoviet.\u201d Despite the Presidium\u2019s intervention, she was denied once more, and had to appeal to both a \u201cPeople\u2019s Court\u201d and the \u201cPeople\u2019s Court of the First City Neighborhood, 4th<\/sup> Department.\u201d The multitude of names represents part of the institutional confusion, described by O\u2019Donnell, that Soviet citizens felt. These names and the new bureaucratic language of the Soviet state were in Russian, yet completely alien to most citizens. The impenetrable sphere of bureaucratization can also be detected when Tikhobrazova is allowed to see the warehouse where her things are kept, only to be denied at the door by the manager. Distraught, Tikhobrazova cried until a worker, in an act of kindness, retrieves her scrapbook for her.<\/p>\n

What happened to Tikhobrazova\u2019s property, in the end? O\u2019Donnell stated how it was scattered amongst so many departments and people that simply finding it was impossible for the smaller bureaucracies whose job it supposedly was, and the image of warehouses rotting full of other peoples\u2019 property underscores how bad the inefficiencies in the new institutions were. But pointing out the ineptitude of the municipalization is short of O\u2019Donnell\u2019s main point.<\/p>\n

In her lecture, she stated, \u201cDispossession is common to virtually all revolutions, but not all revolutions are founded on dispossession.\u201d According to O\u2019Donnell, the looting, seizure of property, and \u2018Red banditry\u2019 so endemic during the Civil War were a cause of the Bolshevik\u2019s very ideology: the revolution was borne out of a hatred for private property, and in such circumstances looting became the primary means for people outside the Bolshevik sphere to express their revolutionary spirit.<\/p>\n

In the destruction of private property, the Soviet state established \u2018new norms\u2019 of possession that would be determined by the bureaucracy, and doled out by resources owned by the bureaucracy. According to O\u2019Donnell, this had yet another concurrent effect. Tikhobrazova, offered the new norm in place of her old property, was no longer entitled to \u2018her\u2019 possessions. She was simply entitled to whatever the state could give her. The relationship between people and their things was utterly torn down, replaced by the mindset that all property was temporary, and insecure. \u201cNo form of possession was stable,\u201d O\u2019 Donnell stressed, mentioning how even high-ranking Soviet members would find their possessions stolen. Ironically, O\u2019Donnell mentioned, this was the very attitude that led to Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, being \u201cdispossessed\u201d (O\u2019Donnell called it a \u201ccarjacking\u201d) of his car at one point.<\/p>\n

In the atmosphere of \u00a0\u201cinstitutional cacophony,\u201d as O\u2019Donnell named it, and with the phenomenon of dispossession sweeping all over revolutionary Russia, O\u2019Donnell stressed that the events of people such as Tikhobrazova weren\u2019t aberrations, but rather normal experiences in the Soviet state. The experiences of the revolution and the Civil War were legitimated only by having been dispossessed of something. Tellingly, O\u2019Donnell noted at the end of her lecture, as Bolshevik power reached the borderlands of the new Russia, especially in Central Asia and Ukraine, the looting phenomena began again, as if it was a necessary step on the transition to membership in the coming Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Drake Long is a senior majoring in diplomacy and global politics at Miami.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Requisitions and Dispossession in Cheliabinsk, 1919. From\u00a0https:\/\/russiainphoto.ru\/ By Drake Long OXFORD \u2013 Students were pressed Monday, October 10, \u00a0to think about the idea of experiencing a revolution. Miami University\u2019s Havighurst Colloquium speaker series continued this week with a lecture by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-lecture_reviews","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":451,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions\/451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.miamioh.edu\/havighurst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}