Pavel Khazanov, "The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

episode

New Books in Intellectual History not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from New Books in Intellectual History

Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026) 54 min · 09 Sep 2026

Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French 48 min · 20 Dec 2025

All episodes from New Books in Intellectual History →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded06 Jan 2024

Publisherfeeds.megaphone.fm

Handlerec:5050497

Show notes

In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Pavel Khazanov shows in The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse (U Wisconsin Press, 2023), after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project. Khazanov’s careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class. Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a “lost Russia,” Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladamir Putin) successfully steered Russia into oligarchy and increasing autocracy. The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition. This book can be purchased a discounted rate for a limited time using the code ASEES23WISC here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.