Christine Ruane, The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700–1917The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700–1917 byChristine RuaneReview by: Hugh D.   Hudson   Jr.The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 83, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 230-232Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/658045 .

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alist and racialist attitudes and policies of the Nazis, has thankfully seemingly failed inAustria and one imagines in Germany and the rest of Central Europe as well.

Stourzh, Binder, and Bruckmuller agree that Austrian identity and self-awarenessare relatively secure at this point in time. They also agree that the historical processwhereby Austrians became self-confident about their independent identity in Europewas mostly complete by the 1950s or 1960s, which must be considered late by mostWestern European standards. Further, they suggest but do not develop the idea thatAustrian identity, like any other historical construct, can be strengthened, undermined,or even transformed over time. With the addition of a single question mark to his text(110), Bruckmuller wonders whether military neutrality, a part of the Austrian politicallandscape since 1955 and for him a substantial part of Austrian identity, will survivein the world of the European Union with its international commitments and entangle-ments, for example. Finally, Austrian identity, distinct and separate from that of itsneighbors and especially from that of its neighbor to the north, Germany, can be takenas a sign of the political health of Central Europe. Nationalism and even ultranation-alism are still present in the region, of course, but, following Binder, Bruckmuller, andStourzh, one can hopefully assume that an independent state and mentality willcontinue to exist in Austria and that it will contribute to the balance of political,economic, cultural, and social forces in Europe, especially if it does its part inpromoting civic responsibility and defending equal rights in the modern era.

WILLIAM BOWMAN

Gettysburg College

The Empire’s New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry,1700–1917. By Christine Ruane.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xii�276. $65.00.

Kapitalizm—the great demiurge of the modern world—was brought forth in thehearths of the fire-breathing and soul-crushing iron industry, with its new proletarianclass and its Wilkersons, Rothschilds, and Rockefellers, and, Christine Ruane argues,also in the artisan- and sweatshops of tailors, with their skilled masters and “de-skilled”female seamstresses, toiling away with their needles or on their “Zinger” sewingmachines. The Empire’s New Clothes challenges the reader to broaden his or herconceptualization of the development of capitalism and modernization in Russia byexpanding his or her view beyond the gates of the factory and looking inside thewindow of the fashion industry. For as Ruane argues,

A history of the Russian fashion industry provides a much-need corrective to this interpre-tation [of Russian economic history in which the Russian bourgeoisie is portrayed as either“missing” or underdeveloped in contrast to its counterparts in western Europe] by bringinga neglected consumer industry into the discussion of economic developments. . . . Theseproduction and business practices became central not only to the creation of a fashionindustry but also to the development of capitalism in Russia. This book seeks to broaden ourunderstanding of capitalism by showing how one industry that remained wedded to artisanalforms of production helped to introduce changes in retailing and publicity, thereby trans-forming Russian economic life. (15–16)

This is a surprising book. Because of its title and the choice of cover artwork, oneopens the first page expecting a guidebook through the world of high fashion in Russia,

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one more glossy-paged paean to the lost world of the Russian aristocracy and hautebourgeoisie, or at least their clothes. Instead, one finds a fascinating social history ofRussia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, using the lens of fashion to investigateissues of national and especially gender identity; the relationship among government,business, and consumer interests; and the social relations of production, as Russians ofall social classes struggled with the necessity to find a place for their country andthemselves in the universe of expansionistic European capitalism. Europe takes noprisoners—one either becomes a part of Europe or one is devoured by it. And thechallenge of Europe, as Peter noted first, does not neglect the necessity of clothing.

Ruane is particularly concerned with the gendering of the fashion industry. Onecannot understand how the emergence of capitalism in Russia transformed thecountry without appreciating how gender structured post-Muscovite Russia. And itis her analysis of how the new capitalist order, as reflected through the fashionindustry, reconfigured gender that constitutes one of the more interesting aspects ofthe work. The author examines efforts to convince first elite and then youngworking women to “end their status as men’s slaves” (57) through participation inthe needle trades. Sewing and the sewing machine served in the minds of thosewrestling with the “woman question” as “a symbol of the redemptive powers ofmodern, domestic work for women” (61). At the same time, government officialsand social reformers wanted to keep women in the home to “protect” them from thesocial consequences of industrialization. But the use of women seamstressesworking from home as subcontractors in the emerging ready-to-wear industrymerely served to de-skill sewing and to undermine the old artisan system, as thedistinction between “unskilled” needleworkers and skilled tailors and dressmakersbegan to blur and as male workers, “having seen their work devalued as unskilledand labeled as women’s work, . . . felt their craft and their livelihood threatened”(85). Ruane traces the emergence of a garment workers’ labor movement and itsprotests, as “with their backs against the wall, garment workers looked to socialismto provide them with alternative strategies for improving their lives” (184).

As lower-class women found themselves slaving away in the ready-to-wear indus-try, the fashion magazine emerged not only to import from western Europe news ofclothing styles but also to transmit the ideals of domesticity: “Articles about clothes,cooking, and child-rearing became blueprints for how modern [elite] women shouldconduct themselves in society” (102). Shopping was one such conduct, a conduct thatalso served as a vehicle for the elites to fret over the changes occurring in society andthe economy. Russian conservatives and right-wing politicians, especially, respondedto dress reform and the feminist call for women’s self-realization by using dress, andan appeal for a return to “Russian” dress, as a weapon against the forces of modern-ization and Europeanization. But it was not Nicholas II’s efforts to bring back theclothing of the seventeenth century that struck the death blow to the beskope tailoringindustry. Rather, World War I saw more and more women hired to work in sweatshopsand as home workers, further lowering women’s wages and destroying what was leftof the old artisanal world that “gave way to the sewing machine, the sweatshops, anda ‘semi-skilled’ female workforce” (223).

Ruane has demonstrated that by World War I, Russian national identity, as reflectedin so existential a matter as clothing, was no longer a struggle between Westerners andSlavophiles or between Russia and Europe. Even peasants, under the influence of thecity and of wage labor, had come to adopt a variation of Western dress. Western ideasand behaviors of consumption had come to dominate the lives of most all Russians.And just as in the metal industry, issues of management and labor now consumed the

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fashion industry. The fashion industry does indeed, in Ruane’s account, provideanother means to understand the origins and development of capitalism in Russia.

HUGH D. HUDSON JR.Georgia State University

Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution. By Kenneth B. Moss.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. x�384. $39.95.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant, among other things, that historiansstarted to look at 1917 differently: 1917 is no longer only the year of the Bolshevikrevolution and the beginning of the establishment of Soviet power; 1917 is now viewedas part of longer and more global trajectories. One of the many significant accom-plishments of Kenneth Moss’s extraordinarily impressive book is to contribute to thisshift in meaning of what used to be an absolute chronology. The Jewish culturalmovement that is the subject of this study began before the revolution and flourishedduring 1917–19 but not as a consequence of the revolution. Its leading activists werecommitted to secular high art in Hebrew and Yiddish, at a remove from older, moreparochial concerns; furthermore, they worked to provide individuals with expressivefreedom, participation in cosmopolitan culture, and at the same time, a sense ofnational cultural continuity. What these cultural activists were interested in was notculture for the sake of politics or nation building but for the sake of the “unfetteringof the individual.” For the historical actors studied in this work, and for its author,culture is not the after-effect or distillation of economic, political, global, historical, ordemographic tensions and shifts but a distinct arena of human endeavor, valid and ofvalue in its own right. As Moss brilliantly and startlingly shows, for the Jewish culturalactivists who promulgated this view, the Russian revolution was not the fulfillment oftheir dream of emancipation but more of a welcome coincidence, consonant with atleast some aspects of the agenda they had already developed.

There has been some scholarly attention devoted to the Kiev Kultur-Lige, dedicatedto Yiddish visual art, education, literature, and theater, but most scholars will not knowthat Moscow in 1917 was the center of a vital Hebraist movement that sought thereform and expansion of Hebrew-language education and publication. Moss is the firstscholar to look at these parallel developments as a unified phenomenon. He sees broadsimilarities between the perspectives of the Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson and theHebrew national poet Haim Nahman Bialik, who in different ways made similar pointsabout the necessary separation of art from politics. Their common perspective issurprising given their ideological commitments, but Moss shows the importance of thetension between aesthetics and politics in the Jewish cultural movement of this period.The comparison between Bergelson and Bialik, it should be pointed out, is significantin and of itself since Moss is one of the very few scholars to analyze a pro-MoscowYiddishist together with the Zionist Hebrew poet. Walls have indeed come down.

Moss skillfully unites the study of these more widely known Hebrew and Yiddishcultural activists with less well-known figures, such as Kalman Zingman, whoseutopian vision of a separate, full-fledged Jewish high culture exemplifies the movementas a whole. Among the distinctive features of this movement were its refusal to limitJewish culture to folklore, insistence on its separateness from Russian culture, itsavoidance of the ideology of rupture characteristic of other movements of the time, aswell as its disinclination to redefine Jewish identity. The theoreticians of this vision,including Moshe Litvakov, for example, did not define national culture as the embodi-

232 Book Reviews

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