Laura Engelstein has spent her academic career exploring the world from which her grandparents and parents emigrated – the last decades of imperial Russia and the years of revolution and civil war. History kept impinging. In the late 1960s, amid political protests close at home, she began her dissertation on the 1905 Revolution.

The emergence in the mid-1970s of gender and sexuality as objects of social mobilization led her to wonder whether concepts introduced by Michel Foucault might not be applied to Russia. The “sexual question” turned out to concern the fate of Russian liberalism, a subject that once seemed as dull as dishwater but now appeared fascinating and important.

Post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s was also in search of sexuality and civil society. It was in search of religion, as well. Engelstein addressed the issue in a back-handed way, by investigating a folk community of radical deviance from the Orthodox Christian norm – the self-castrating Skoptsy. Secular liberals, religious conservatives, fanatical sectarians. Liberalism, individualism, nonconformity, political moderation – these became her central topics.

Anticipating the centennial of 1917, she returned to old themes: socialist ideology, social movements, anti-Semitism. New perspectives opened as well: a post-ideological take on political passions, an expanded documentary base drawn from liberated archives by colleagues in Russia. At a moment when democratic institutions in the West are under unprecedented strain, the cause of democracy in revolutionary Russia speaks to our own concerns.

Representative Publications: 

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press)

Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Cornell University Press, 2009)

Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Cornell University Press, 1999)

The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Cornell University Press, 1992)

Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford University Press, 1982)