Personal Statement
My lifelong fascination with Russian
history and culture originated in an almost casual decision to
take Russian language in high school in Connecticut back in the
1960s. Majoring in Russian language and literature at the
University of Pennsylvania, I then entered graduate school in
history at Princeton University, where I received my Ph.D. in
1980. In graduate school I became intrigued by the history of
charity and the question of whether a civil society, as
represented by privately funded, organized relief for the poor,
could develop in an autocratic state like imperial Russia. When I
began my research on the history of Russian charity and social
welfare in the Brezhnev era, such a topic seemed to have only
historical, academic interest; under Soviet socialism, there was
little apparent trace of pre-revolutionary Russia's long, rich
history of voluntarism and philanthropy. But by the time my book,
Poverty Is Not A Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial
Russia, was published in 1996, Soviet socialism had been replaced
by a new Russia characterized by an explosion of private charities
and other voluntary organizations, all searching for an
alternative, usable past; and thus the book has attracted interest
from people involved in reconstructing Russian civil society today
as well as historians. The book explores the culture of giving, as
shaped by Russian Orthodox belief and popular practice, and the
emergence of more organized private charity in the form of
voluntary philanthropic associations in the nineteenth century.
The book is also the first history in any language of public
welfare in Russia, which is contrasted in its goals and
effectiveness with the much more vital sector of private organized
relief.
After
finishing this book, I turned my attention to a new research
project in Russian women's history -- the biography of one of the
most prominent women of late Imperial Russia, Countess Sophia V.
Panina (1871-1956): an heiress, philanthropist, and the only
female member of the Provisional Government in 1917, who became
the first "enemy of the people" to be put on trial by the
Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. The work of reconstructing
Panina's long life, interrupted as it was by war, revolution,
civil war, and emigration, has taken me far afield in search of
sources, from Columbia University's Rare Book Library and Archive
to the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, and
various archives and libraries in St. Petersburg and Prague. A
combination of luck and diligence also led me to discover two
living descendants of Panina, who shared their reminiscences,
knowledge of family history, and, in one case, the contents of a
water-stained valise filled with letters and handwritten memoirs.
The project combines biography with the history of gender, and
examines the impact of revolution and emigration on the generation
to which Panina belonged.
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