Picturing Russian Empire

Picturing Russian Empire offers an overview of the history of Russia from the tenth century to the present through the connections between empire and visuality. Using thought provoking images, Picturing Russian Empire presents readers with a visual tour of the lands and peoples that constituted the Russian Empire and those that confronted it, defied it, accommodated to it, and shaped it at various times in more than a millennium of history.

Bringing together scholars and experts from across the world and from various disciplines, Picturing Russian Empire consistently raises big historical questions to stimulate readers to think about images as embedded in the diverse, lived worlds of the Russian empire. The authors challenge the reader to not only to see images as the creations of individuals, but as objects circulating among viewers in a variety of contexts, creating new impressions, meanings, and experiences.

Valerie Kivelson is the Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Author of several books on medieval Russia, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Cornell University Press, 2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2006).

Sergei Kozlov is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Tyumen (Russia).

Joan Neuberger is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Author of several books on modern Russian history, including This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia (Cornell University Press, 2019).

List of Images
List of Maps
About the Contributors
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliterations

Valerie Kivelson, Sergei Kozlov, and Joan Neuberger, Introduction

I. Medieval Rus among the Empires
1. Monica White, Early Rus: The Nexus of Empires
2. Irina Konovalova, Placing Rus among World Empires in Tenth-Century Arab Geography
3. Sergei Kozlov, The "Imperial Mirage" of Sviatoslav (twelfth century)

II. Muscovy and the Expansion of Empire
4. Nancy S. Kollmann, Empire and Culture: The Sixteenth-Century English Encounter the Samoyedy
5. Valerie A. Kivelson, Racial Imaginary and Images of Mongols and Tatars in Early Modern Russia (1560s-1690s)
6. Ekaterina Boltunova, Visual Polemics: The Time of Troubles in Polish and Russian Historical Memory (1611-1949)
7. Maria Grazia Bartolini, The Image of the Good Orthodox Ruler between Kyiv and Moscow (1660s)
8. Erika Monahan, Tents or Towns: The Limits of Sovereignty in the Russian North in the Late Seventeenth Century
9. Evgeny Grishin, Divine Creation and Russian Exploitation of the Environment in Siberia (circa 1700)

III. Imperial Russia
10. Ernest A. Zitser, Re-visioning Empire under Peter the Great: How Muscovite Russia became Imperial
11. Gregory Afinogenov, Depictions of China from a Caravan Journal (1736)
12. Catherine Evtuhov, A "Complete" Atlas of the Russian Empire (1745)
13. Nathaniel Knight, What's in a Hat? Representations of Ethnicity and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Russia 14. Alison K. Smith, Annushka, the Kalmyk (circa 1767)
15. Erin McBurney, "If fate had not given her an Empire...": Catherine the Great and the Optics of Power (1783)
16. Anna Graber, Depicting Expertise and Managing Diversity in the Urals Mining Industry (1773-1818)
17. Willard Sunderland, Father Hyacinth's Chinese Portrait (Early Nineteenth Century)
18. Richard Wortman, Vignettes of Empire: "Asiatic Peoples" at Nineteenth-Century Imperial Russian Coronations
19. Nadja Berkovich, The Women of Empire Strike Back (1856)
20. Bart Pushaw, The Peasant and the Photograph: Gender, Race, and the Sunlight Picture in the Baltic Provinces (1866)
21. Olga Maiorova, Severed Heads on Display: Visualizing Central Asia (1868-1872)
22. Sarah Badcock, The Cautious One: Identity and Belonging in Late Imperial Russia (1877)
23. Fedor Korandei, Siberian Travelogues: Images of Asiatic Russia during the Transport Revolution (1860s-1890s)
24. Maria Taroutina, "To the Caucasus": Representations of Empire in the Visual Arts at Abramtsevo (1870s-1890s)
25. Louise McReynolds, Archeological Imagery Colonizes the Caucasus
26. Alison Rowley, Chained to a Wheelbarrow: Hard Labor on an 1890s Picture Postcard from Siberia
27. Rosalind P. Blakesley, Siberian Roots in an Imperial Space: Ermak's Conquest of Siberia by Vasily Surikov (1895)
28. Anna Kotomina, Alexander Borisov and Tyko Vilka: Two Artists Who Made Worlds of Their Own from the Arctic Wilderness
29. Galina V. Lyubimova, Yermak from Yenisei Province: A Peasant Painting from the Early Twentieth Century
30. Katherine M. H. Reischl, Imperial Color in the Present Tense: The Photography of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky

IV. The Revolutionary Era
31. Naomi Caffee and Robert Denis, "Go Be Russian:" Political Caricature and the Tbilisi Press After the 1905 Revolution
32. Ronald Grigor Suny, In the Claws of the Imperial Eagle: Finland, Georgia, and Joseph Stalin (1906)
33. Laura Engelstein, Agit-Empire: Bolshevik Civil War Art
34. Angelina Lucento, Breakfast in Suuk Su: The Rise of Visual "Tatarism" (1917-1923)

V. The Soviet Union
35. Mollie Arbuthnot, Propaganda in Translation: Imagined Muslim Viewers in Early Soviet Posters (circa 1926)
36. Craig Campbell, Two Laws: The Image of the Tungus in Soviet Dreamworlds (1920s)
37. Oksana Sarkisova, Views from the Roof of the World: 1920s Film Expeditions to the Pamir Mountains
38. Emma Widdis, A Shared Soviet Space: Filming the Caucasus in the 1920s-1930s
39. Helena Holzberger, Socialist Orientalism: Picturing Central Asia in the Early Soviet Union (1920s-1930s)
40. Nick Baron, "Fascist Colors": Stalinist Spatial Ideology, Cartographic Design, and Visual Learning
41. Robert Weinberg, Representing Jewishness in the Red Zion: The Jewish Autonomous Region in the 1930s
42. Charles Shaw, Love Letters to O'g'ulxon: Photography and Imperial Intimacy in the Second World War
43. Nikolai Vakhtin, From Ethnographic Reality to Socialist Realism: Illustrations in Soviet Primers for the Indigenous Minorities of the North
44. Erika Wolf, The Stalinist Imperial Body Politic: Photomontage in a Soviet Poster
45. Stephen M. Norris, Caricatured Empire: Cold War Political Cartoons
46. Yana Skorobogatov, "Where the Sun Begins its Path Over our Soil": El'dar Riazanov's Documentary Sakhalin Island (1954)
47. Olessia Vovina, Crafting the Art of Tradition: Chuvash Embroidery Reframed
48. Erik Scott, The Imperial Iconography of the Georgian Table (1900-1980s)
49. Jessica Werneke, Representations of Women in the Soviet Periphery: Tartu Photography Exhibitions in the 1980s

VI. The Post-Soviet Era
50. Yulia Mikhailova, Competing Nationalisms in Russia's Empire and Its Aftermath: Sviatoslav of Kiev and the Diorama of His Last Battle
51. Evgeny Manzhurin, Return of the Sables: Interpretations of the Symbol of Imperial Siberia (Seventeenth Century to Today)
52. Karen Petrone, Soviet War Memorials in Post-Soviet Spaces
53. Elizabeth A. Wood, Crimea in my Heart: Visualizing Putin's Resurgent Empire in 2014
54. Joshua First, The Maidan: Anti-Imperial Modes of Mythmaking in Documentary Film (2014-2015)
55. Olga Shevchenko, The Post-Soviet Body Politic: Media, Diaspora, and Photographs in the Immortal Regiment
56. Joan Neuberger, Photo Essay: Picturing Wartime 2022

Credits
Index