Stuart D. Finkel

|Associate Professor

Academic Appointments

Associate Professor of Russian Studies
Affiliated Associate Professor of History

Stuart Finkel joined the Department of East European, Eurasian, & Russian Studies in 2018, after having taught for a number of years in the History Department at the University of Florida; he was not entirely new to Dartmouth, having previously taught as a visitor including courses on the Russian Revolution, Soviet history and culture, and the history of human rights. He is currently working on a multi-volume project surveying the long, complex history of aid to political prisoners & exiles in Russia and the Soviet Union, critically engaging with the burgeoning scholarship on the origins and genesis of international humanitarianism & human rights. The first book, Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2024), which details the origins of "political philanthropy" in the late nineteenth century, will be available in spring/summer 2024 (e-book available in May, print edition in July). The second volume in the larger project, tentatitively entitled Defending the Enemy: The Political Red Cross and Aid to Soviet Political Prisoners, will provide a detailed examination of the so-called "Political Red Cross," led by Ekaterina Peshkova, which lobbied on behalf of political prisoners and exiles from 1918 to 1937.

He also continues more broadly to investigate the contentious but persistent notion of Russian intellectuals as "public actors," expanding on his previous scholarship on their sharply contested role following the Revolutions of 1917. His first book, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (Yale University Press, 2007) examined the series of disputes culminating in the expulsion of scores of prominent intellectuals from early Soviet Russia and the initial severe restrictions on autonomous civil society under the Bolsheviks.

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Contact

Stuart.D.Finkel@dartmouth.edu

Reed, Room 206

HB 6085

Department(s)

Russian

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University
M.A. Stanford University
B.A. Harvard College

Selected Publications

"'I Reserve the Right to Criticize My Friends': The International Committee for Political Prisoners and its Letters from Russian Prisons," International Review of Social History 68, no. 3 (December 2023): 453-81
"Philanthropy, Politics, and Public Action: Ekaterina Peshkova in Wartime and Revolution," in Women and Gender in Russia's Great War and Revolution, ed. Adele Lindenmeyr and Melissa K. Stockdale (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2022), p.269-89.
"The 'Political Red Cross' and the Genealogy of Rights Discourse in Revolutionary Russia," The Journal of Modern History 89, no. 1 (March 2017): 79-118.
"Intelligentsia Conceptions: Duty and Obshchestvennost' in War and Revolution," in Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22, Book 3: National Disintegration and Reintegration, ed. Christopher Read, Peter Waldron, and Adele Lindenmeyr (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2018), p.267-95.

"Perversions and Transformations: A. S. Izgoev and the Intelligentsia Debates, 1904-22," in Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Debates 100 Years On, ed. Robin Aizlewood & Ruth Coates (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), p.69-85.
"Nikolai Berdiaev and the Philosophical Tasks of the Emigration," in Gary M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, eds., A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 346-62.
On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
"Sociology and Revolution: Pitirim Sorokin and Russia's National Degeneration," Russian History/Histoire Russe 32, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 155-69.
"An Intensification of Vigilance: Recent Perspectives on the Institutional History of the Soviet Security Apparatus in the 1920s," Kritika 5, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 299-320.
"Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia," Russian Review 62, no. 4 (October 2003): 589-613.
"Organizovannaia professura i universitetskaia reforma v Sovetskoi Rossii (1918-1922)" [The Organized Professoriate and University Reform in Soviet Russia, 1918-22]. In Vlast' i nauka, uchenye i vlast': 1880-e – nachalo 1920-kh godov. St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2003.

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Works In Progress

Defending the Enemy: The Political Red Cross and Aid to Soviet Political Prisoners
(Scholarly monograph, estimated date of completion 2026.)
The Many Lives of Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova: Towards a Biography of a Humanitarian and Activist.
(Planned scholarly monograph, estimated date of completion 2027.)

Revolutionary Philanthropy: Aid to Political Prisoners and Exiles in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2024)

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