Mark Moll, a Central Eurasian Studies Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, received a 2015 AABS Dissertation Grant to investigate the spread of socialist ideas among the Estonian intelligentsia in the late 19th century. Centered in the university town of Tartu, several members of the radical underground, like Jüri Jaakson, Mihkel Martna and August Rei, went on to achieve prominent positions within the interwar Estonian Republic. The grant will finance a research trip to the Estonian Historical Archives and the manuscript collection of the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu.
My research focuses on the men and women in turn-of-the-century Estonia whose radical experiences as first as students, then as journalists, led to the push for Estonian political autonomy via a syncretic fusion of nationalism and socialism in 1905 during the first Russian Revolution. An analysis of the network of these activists reveals the importance that developments abroad played in shaping the discourse at home and helps contextualize the role of Estonians within the larger Russian revolutionary movement.