In October 2020 the CamCREES/Slavonic Studies community at Cambridge hosted an exciting webinar on Anarchism in Russia, with presentations by Ania Aizman (University of Michigan) and Maria Rakhmaninova (St. Petersburg University of the Humanities and Social Sciences).

The event was free and open to the public.

Followers of Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, anarchists have fought against every kind of regime since the movement’s inception—tsarist, monarchist, state socialist, and liberal-democratic. It achieved brief political victories in their quest for a stateless society. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire itself saw the emergence of a diverse anarchist movement, with participants numbering in the tens of thousands and an anarchist network that spanned the breadth of the empire. The Bolshevik Party swiftly crushed this movement when it seized power, and anarchism never became a mass phenomenon in Russia again. In this webinar, we consider: Does anarchism matter? Does a “Russian” anarchism exist? What can the past, present, and future prospects of this radical movement tell us about Russian culture?

Watch the session below: