Dr Ben Phillips (Exeter), "The Sozonov Case, 1910: The Making of a Revolutionary Martyrology" (10:15-10:55 + Q&A)
and
Dr Anna Safronova, "Unfreeze Fortune: a Case Study of Dairy Cooperatives of Western Siberia, 1890-1930" (ca 11:10-11:50 + Q&A)
Dr Phillips's abstract:
"On the night of 27 November (10 December) 1910, the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist Egor Sozonov, renowned as the assassin of Interior Minister V. K. Pleve in July 1904, committed suicide in his Siberian prison cell in protest at the use of corporal punishment against his fellow political prisoners. News of Sozonov’s death provoked an outcry across Russia: it was accompanied by questions in the Duma, widespread and hagiographical coverage in the liberal and revolutionary press, and student protests in the major university towns (and, conversely, by barely concealed joy from the Black-Hundredist right).
This talk reconstructs, in as much detail as the available evidence allows, the events surrounding Sozonov’s death, which (despite their infamy at the time) have up to now received very little scholarly attention and remain, to a certain extent, shrouded in mystery. It then proceeds to explore how these events came to serve as the basis of a martyr-myth – originally promoted by the SRs, but maintained in the Soviet period – that glorified Sozonov as a ‘just assassin’, persecuted by a despotic government, who had ultimately sacrificed his own life in order that others might live.
Building on work by scholars such as Susan Morrissey and Abby Schrader, the paper situates Sozonov’s death in the wider political, social and cultural context of the time, considering it in relation to contemporary discourses on suicide (as a transcendentalist political act), corporal punishment (long regarded as the gravest imaginable insult to the dignity of educated Russians), the ‘moral economy’ of revolutionary terrorism, and the quasi-religious mythologies of the revolutionary underground".
Dr Safronova's abstract:
"When one thinks of Siberia, successful dairy production is not the first thing that comes to mind. Nevertheless, at the turn of the twentieth century, Siberia - or rather its western part near the cities of Tomsk and Tobolsk - becomes a location for the successful development of dairy cooperatives. Thanks to the profits from butter exports, in 1913, some Siberian villages had electric lighting - long before the Illich bulb. To what can this success be attributed? Was it due to the peculiarity of the region - land of exile?
This talk will discuss the socio-political and economic conditions that made possible the success of dairy cooperatives in Siberia, while in no other region of tsarist Russia cooperatives enjoyed the same performance. The integration of this region into the national market launched a dynamic of illiberal modernization, since the concentration of capital prioritized not the maximization of profits but rather the distribution of benefits among the multiple local producers. Another highlight will be the transformation that these cooperatives underwent under the so-called "socialist" regime, during the NEP, when cooperatives saw themselves in competition not only with private enterprises but also with the state-owned company."
Zoom link:
https://uit.zoom.us/j/63726242584?pwd=a3hCWVhpSjFFbFJpNXJmMllLM1V6dz09