41st Annual Conference: “Journeys” nui galway, 4-6 May 2017 Conference Abstracts

Sandor Magyarosi (Maynooth University)

Military service had a big impact on veterans’ lives, even when the period of service was limited, since it gave him the opportunity to become familiar with the customs, the culture and the industries of countries well beyond the reach of ordinary people. This paper demonstrates this by means of the experience of the soldiers of the 27th Szekler Light Division, a Hungarian formation sent to the eastern front in April 1944. What makes their history exceptionally interesting, on the one hand, is that the division was raised in a mostly Hungarian-inhabited region of Transylvania, which had been ceded to Romania after the First World War, given back to Hungary in 1940, and lost to Romania yet again in 1944; on the other hand, the unit was deployed to Galicia, another former Austro-Hungarian province, which, in its turn, had been ceded to Poland in 1918, seized by the Soviet Union as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and it was finally occupied by German and Hungarian forces in 1941. This paper will focus on the unfamiliar lands and people the soldiers of the examined division encountered during their deployment to the eastern front, both at the front and in the areas behind the lines. To understand the quite ambiguous nature of this encounter, the following questions will be addressed: how did Hungarian propaganda depict the region in question, what was the army’s official attitude towards the civilian population, and what sort of informal relationship developed between the Hungarian rank-and-file and the members of the various local ethnic groups.

‘Martyrs of the Nation: The Role of Death and Martyrdom in the Formation of the Kosovo Liberation Army’

Samantha Simpson (Maynooth University)

The Albanian title dëshmorët e kombit (martyrs of the nation) refers to the deceased heroes who were killed while fighting for the creation of an independent Albanian nation. During their lifetime, many of these martyrs were active members of clandestine organisations and paramilitary groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In their death, they served as heroes and iconic figures whose stories essentially became part of the national mythology for their living counterparts. This paper will examine two symbolic events which occurred during the Kosovo War: the first public appearance of KLA members during the funeral of an Albanian teacher killed by Serb forces in 1997 and the massacre of the Jashari family at Prekaz in 1998. This paper explores the significance of these two events and argues that the creation and circulation of national myth centred around death and martyrdom provided legitimacy for the actions taken by the KLA against opposing forces and helped in the formation of an Albanian national identity. This paper will ultimately discuss how these martyrs of the nation played a key role in the formation and growth of the Kosovo Liberation Army not only through the actions they took in their lifetime but also through their act of dying and shows that death is not necessarily the final journey that we take.

Panel 16: Responses to the Russian Revolution (G011)

Chair: Balázs Apor (Trinity College Dublin)

‘Irish Responses to the Russian Revolution’

Manus Lenihan (Independent Scholar, Galway)

Like millions across Europe, Irish nationalists stood in the years from 1917 to 1923 between “between Wilson and Lenin” who “presented the world with two competing visions of a future peaceful utopia.” The Bolsheviks pinned all their hopes to the chance of spreading socialism to other countries and the Sovietu state that they founded impressed Irish observers as “the first foreign government to mention Ireland’s freedom among its peace terms.” Within the labour and trade union movement the idea that a Workers’ Republic had been established was electrifying. The members of James Connolly’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), which grew from 5,000 members in 1916 to over 100,000 in 1920, were enthusiastic and vocal supporters of the Russian Revolution. Thousands of trade unionists read or heard weekly updates on the Russian Civil War and on the mass movements spreading across Europe and beyond. In February 1918 Dublin saw a mass rally hailing the October Revolution. Thousands of town workers and rural labourers applied the ideas and vocabulary of the Russian Revolution directly to their own everyday struggles. Strikes and occupations described by their own participants as “Soviets” began on a small scale in Dublin and in Monaghan. The Limerick Soviet, a city-wide exercise in municipal working-class rule, lasted weeks and gained international media attention. “Soviet” strikes and occupations spread across the country, primarily in Munster. Irish labour leaders such as William O’Brien and Thomas Johnson praised the uncompromising character of the Bolsheviks, but their own “Bolshevism” was “à la carte.” They surrendered the electoral field to Sinn Féin in 1918 and de-escalated the Limerick Soviet in 1919.

‘Russian professors’ memoirs of their road into exile in the 1920s’

Sergei Mikhalchenko (Bryansk State I.G.Petrovsky University)

One of the consequences of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1918-1920 was two million Russian émigrés who disagree with the policies of the Bolsheviks. Although many believed that the Bolshevik regime would soon collapse and allow them to return, they were soon disappointed. The most important sources for the history of the movement in exile are the memories of émigrés, including Russian representatives of the university community - professors and students. This presentation is dedicated to the analysis of the memoirs of Russian emigrants from among the intellectuals as a source on the history of movement in exile. The memoirs of famous Russian scientists S.P.Tymoshenko, N.O.Lossky, E.V.Spektorsky, N.M.Bubnov, M.M.Novikov, P.A. Sorokin and many others are analyzed. The main way to escape from Russia for the authors of memoirs was a passage on the steamer from Odessa (Spektorsky, Bubnov) and Sevastopol (Tymoshenko). Another way abroad was for the famous philosophers Lossky, S. Frank, biologist M.Novikov and others (more than 150 persons). All of them were expelled from Russia on the orders of Vladimir Lenin in the so-called "Philosophers' ships" in the autumn of 1922 (sociologist Sorokin and some others – by train). On the one hand, it was a tragedy, on the other hand, the expulsion had saved their lives: if they remained, they would inevitably have died during great terror. External differences from the first group of refugees was that they were not going to leave, but the Bolshevik state has counted them as ideological enemies and expelled. Terms of the German steamers " the Oberbürgermeister Haken" and "the Preussen " on which they sailed from Petrograd to Stettin, were far better than those of the refugees from the southern provinces of Russia. But the result was one - and they both appeared in Europe in exile, hoping to return, never actually finished their journey.

‘Russian academics in exile in Prague in the 1920s’

Stephanie Solywoda (Stanford Research Centre, Oxford)

The story of the ‘philosophy steamer’ is the best known single example of intellectual exodus from revolutionary Russia, but it symbolizes a greater trend of philosophical academics relocating to Europe. Prior to leaving Russia, many of these academics had made prominent criticisms of both the Tsarist regime and the ideology of the Bolsheviks. These thinkers came together in emigration and helped to consolidate a particular interpretation of the meaning of Russian identity. Their conclusions about Russianness have become mainstays in Western assumptions about the Russian national character, and so it is very worthwhile to examine the origins of the national stereotype. This paper looks more closely at the academics who relocated to Prague in the 1920s, and specifically on those who composed the faculty of the Russian Institute and the Russian Law Faculty in Prague. The focal figures considered in this paper are Professors Bulgakov, Novgorodstev, and Lossky, whose pre-revolutionary attitudes were well published. Each of them came to Prague by different geographical routes and also ultimately continued on to different destinations from Prague. It is the contention of this paper that the experiences of travel and geographical relocation facilitated key changes in their thought, resulting in a newfound consensus appraisal of the revolution. By looking at one stop along these thinker’s journey into Western academia, the stay in Prague, it becomes possible to see how the physical experience of turbulence, dislocation and movement parallel similar intellectual paths of development that contended with the chaos and confrontation of revolutionary ideas.

Panel 17: Women Revolutionaries in Russian and Southeastern Europe (The Bridge)

Chair: Wendy Bracewell (University College London)

‘From Daughter of a “Fascist Writer” and “Bloody Foreigner” to “A Mother for Disabled People”: The Biographical Case of Dorina Ilieva-Simpson’

Snezhana Dimitrova (South-West University, Blagoevgrad)

In (post)colonial Mauritius, Dorina Ilieva-Simpson (1925–1991) struggled to lay the foundations of a charity aimed at the excluded others (people “superfluous and abject” in their disabled bodies). In a Bulgaria swiftly overtaken by the communist regime (1944-1947), when bourgeois Sofia was agonizing, Dorina was viewed as the daughter of the allegedly “fascist” writer Nencho Iliev ( and as Iliev’s “frivolous and indifferent” daughter ). Later, in the society of white British colonial wives (1950s and 60s), she was looked upon as a “bloody foreigner”. And yet, it was precisely she who fought to change the lives of those “doomed to a humiliating death” (in that unbearable iciness: a body-not-mine, a body physically scarred and socially stigmatized). Proceeding from the fact (“behind which thousands of motives might lie”) of an empowering utopian female ideal, this article attempts to outline the historicity of a kind of female subjectivation generated in the attempt to survive social suffering, that is the public and private disinheritance of a woman of bourgeois origin after the symbolic effect of “her father’s name” had lost its power, and her bourgeois origin had lost its value. Revealing these nodes of a woman’s painful life experience, in which the world became visible for Dorina in its negative present (“violence and fear”, “hypocrisy and non-compassion”, “jealousy and social hatred”), this text becomes an essay on another kind of female social loneliness (in, as it were, that body-not-mine, the hostage-of-the-other), in order to outline the social and cultural efficiency of another kind of female social economy (faith and compassion). Hence it aims at disclosing the other historical witnesses, truths, facts and archives – those of the excluded others – in whose optic the familiar historical past is “distorted” into its unknown other. So, this article, based on a quasi-archive, the archive of a life (comprising Dorina Ilieva- Simpson’s autobiographical writings and her deeds, including her exceptionally efficient charity for disable people), tells the story of her journey from social exclusion to high recognition, the journey to her uniqueness. It analyzes how, in crossing geographical, political and cultural spaces, one woman emancipated herself and built a different woman’s subjectivity (by which she challenged the social horizons and political discourses related to women).

‘Women revolutionaries as “absolute comrades” and their extreme transnational trajectories’

Renata Jambrešić Kirin (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb)

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), Anna Kuliscioff (1857-1925), Angelica Balabanoff (1869-1965), Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), Elena Stasova (1873-1966), Tina Modotti (1896-1942), Inessa Armand (1874-1920), and sisters Sedenfeld, were among distinguished socialists who, travelling across Europe and linking Western and Russian leftist intelligentsia, popularized Marxist ideas of socialist revolution. Yugoslav socialists and communists, for instance, Angela Vode (1892-1985), Milena Mohorič (1905-1972), Herta Haas (1914-2000), also travelled and enthusiastically campaigned in favour of the October revolution under the constant threat of prison, exile, and later Stalinist reprisals. They used all their competences, language skills, fearlessness, zeal and generosity to cross and transcend physical and mental, national and class borders and barriers of bourgeois society. In addition to their own intellectual, feminist and political empowerment, they gravitated to European "leftist centres" such as Paris, Vienna, Zurich, Milan etc., to cultivate their knowledge and political agency for the benefit of all human beings. It is hard to imagine manifold obstacles they encountered in their transnational conspiratorial journeys, the amount of prejudices, rules and norms they radically violated while travelling alone. Becoming a political activist with the right to agitate for socialist cause and to articulate her own demands for a better, just society was considered a criminal activity accompanied by the misogynist countercampaign ("red harpy", “red hyena” etc) that culminated with the fascist propaganda. Besides, female comrades who openly condemned the Red Terror and Stalinist purges risked to be expelled from the official national and the history of the labour movement. A few of them entered history because of their liaisons with leading revolutionaries, whereas the "absolute comrades" (E. Stasova’s nickname) – countless reliable Comintern’s couriers, secretaries and treasurers, those neglected "maids of revolution” – fall into oblivion although their dramatic trajectories have shown what it means to be the most devoted revolutionary in the most extreme century.

‘The Russian Amazons: Journeys and Revolution’

Anna Di Giusto (Italian Society of Women Historians)

‘The Russian avant-garde movement was the only one of its kind in which the achievements of women were unquestionably equal to their male colleagues,” wrote Hilton Kramer in 1981. In the nineteenth century, whereas in the West women could only assume a domestic role, in Russia women were allowed access to art education. Many of these were painters, writers and set designers. They travelled a lot in Europe, America and Africa and met the most celebrated artists of that period, experienced Futurism, Cubism, Suprematism and Constructivism. They were a bridge between Russian folk art, with the refined Byzantine influence, and Western art, influencing the artistic creations of Malevic, Larionov or Tatlin. Goncharova, Ekster, Udaltsova and Serebriakova sought to create a renovated art for a new humankind and world. They were communist revolutionaries, but they fought for the dignity of all empowered women. Travelling a lot and following the example of the truly free woman Goncharova, Russian artists found a free lifestyle they had created on their own. The disagreement between the modern movement OSt and the reactionary AchPR, supported by Lenin and Stalin, completely undermined the efforts to create a common artistic language for the Revolution. The development of Stalinism created a stifling climate in particular for these painters. Some survived as artists even in exile, but some had their lives ruined for years or were killed in Stalin’s purges. My research tries to reconstruct this period, focusing on the journeys of these Russian Amazons.

The conference organisers would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Discipline of History, the School of Humanities, the Office of the President, all at NUI Galway, the Embassy of the Russian Federation, Fáilte Ireland and Meet in Ireland.



The Embassy of the Russian Federation

Twitter Hashtag: #IARCEES2017

For queries please contact Dr. Róisín Healy, History, School of Humanities at [e-mail]