Dissidents, Émigrés and Revolutionaries in Russia: Anti-State Activism in International Perspective, 1848-2015

Charlotte Alston’s important new study explores the relationship between Russian anti-state activists and western publics, intellectuals and governments, from 1848 to the present.

Russian activists and writers were important agents in shaping western engagement with Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries and this book analyses and traces their involvement. From the 1890s Russian revolutionaries and western sympathisers and the 1920s opponents of the early Soviet regime, through to the 1960s and 1970s dissident literature, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published abroad to shape western understandings of the Soviet system, Alston investigates the ways in which anti-state polemics shaped and sometimes challenged western understandings of Russia. It also goes on to explore the opportunities and limitations afforded by the western space in which such activists operated.

Beginning in the tsarist era, and moving from the early revolutionary and Stalinist regimes through to the thaw, glasnost and the ’new Russia’, Dissidents, Émigrés and Revolutionaries in Russia deals with Russian dissenters and Russian authorities of many political stripes in what is a vital text for all students and scholars of modern Russian history.

Charlotte Alston is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolutions (2007), Piip, Meierovics, Voldermaras: The Baltic States Makers of the Modern World (2010) and Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (2013).