Anastasiia Yu. Sizova

PhD in History, Associate Professor, Chair of Contemporary History of Russia

Russian State University for the Humanities

(Moscow, Russia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2022-1-39-54

Abstract. The article sheds light on the social revolutionary processes of February–October 1917 through the lens of anthropological research and the theory of psychoanalysis, identifying and analyzing the irrational patterns of mass behavior. Fundamentally irrational, the crowd became the main political actor in 1917, being the conductor of unconscious archetypal patterns of behavior. Understanding the mechanisms of these models opens up a new look at many socio-political processes of the revolutionary year. One of the important goals of the report is to take a step towards the integration of specific historical research and research in the field of anthropology and psychology, which will significantly expand the methodological base and open up opportunities for the researcher that are not achievable within the narrow framework of specific historical science. The article examines the socio-political events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 through the prism of anthropological studies of the human festive culture. The paper reveals the main features of a feast in revolutionary events, such as: carnival entourage, wastefulness, the use of intoxicating substances, sexual liberation, breaking the norms of social behavior, violation of prohibitions, changing social roles, escalation of violence. Being encrypted in the unconscious human cultural code, these "feast" patterns of behavior come to the surface as emotional, unconscious reactions to the revolutionary demolition of the rationalistic pillars of society and, according to the author, become determining of the development of the socio-political process in Russia during the revolutionary period. However, unlike a real feast, the chronological framework of which is always known in advance, revolution does not have predictable time frames, which makes it unforeseeable and dangerous, because a society that once went beyond the social norms of behavior experiences great difficulties in returning to its daily life without a coer-cive external factor.
Keywords: Russia, revolution, 1917, masses, crowd psychology, feast, archetypal behavior.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Sizova, AYu 2022, ‘The archetype of the "feast" in the 1917 Revo-lution’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 1 (9), pp. 39–54, http://doi.org/10.22405/2712-8407-2022-1-39-54 (in Russ.)

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