Faith C. Hillis

This project examines the rise of mass politics in a diverse and highly contested locale. Following Kiev's Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish inhabitants from 1863 to 1914, it asks how city dwellers’ encounters with both formal political institutions and cultural politics transformed the terms in which they viewed themselves and their neighbors. Drawing on sources never before consulted by western historians, this work demonstrates how ideologies shaped and responded to the political cultures developing among the urban masses. Along the way, it contributes to historians’ understanding of urban life in multi-cultural cities, political violence, and the connections between local and imperial/national politics.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of tsarist subjects left the Russian empire and resettled in the major urban centers and university towns of western and central Europe, forming internally diverse yet close-knit communities that they called “Russian colonies.” The first synthetic treatment of westward traffic from the Russian empire before 1917, this project explores the internal dynamics of Europe’s Russian colonies as well as their interactions with the outside world. Contending that these unique communities served as incubators for new political ideas, cultural practices, and subjectivities that eventually made their way back to Russia proper, this project also argues that the colonies shaped in consequential ways the host societies in which they were located.