In the days before the centenary of the October Revolution, this lecture revisits the question of “utopianism” in the Russian revolution - conventionally a negative charge of fanciful desire, wishful illusion, or worse - from the perspective of the streets and diverse lives.
Mark Steinberg specializes on the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His recent and current research focuses on urban history, revolutions, emotions, religion, violence, and utopias. From 2006 to 2013, he was editor of the interdisciplinary journal Slavic Review. He is currently completing the 9th edition of A History of Russia and beginning a new project on “the straight and the crooked” in urban spaces in Leningrad, Odessa, and Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s. At the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he recently concluded his term as coordinator of the Department of History’s Center for Historical Interpretation, which focused for three years on the them of on Global Utopias (http://globalutopias.weebly.com).
Mark Steinberg's newest book, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017), will be available for purchase and signing after the event.