Publications

The article discusses the Soviet fate of Cubism after WWII. 

is chapter examines the diering opinions between industrial and scientic institutions over the use of the waters of Lake Baikal in the context of Soviet development policies in Siberia, beginning in the 1950s. It argues that institutions and people experienced Baikal as a place of contradiction, clearly illustrating that Soviet industry posed the risk of harm to the natural environment. In dierent professional layers of Soviet society, Baikal became an arena of conict over water (and nature more broadly) and the lake’s own, natural ability to purify chemical waste discharged into the waters. Employing new archival sources, such as institutional and individual correspondence and reports, this chapter discusses the role of Baikal in the interplay between industry and environment at the institutional level and contributes to the scholarship on Soviet postwar environmental history.

Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s Dar on dunyo (In the other world), first published in Tajik in 1965 and later translated to Russian, Uzbek, and many other languages, is the only known fictionalized account of the ḥajj produced in the Soviet Union. Based on a trip made by the author in 1963, the novel provided the Soviet reader a rare glimpse into this sacred rite. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary responses, and the text itself, this article traces the origins and publication history of the novel, situates it within Soviet domestic and foreign policy goals, and analyses the text to see how the author tries to reconcile competing ideological priorities.

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them

Among the inhabitants of the late medieval Venetian Tana one finds people from various countries from Central Asia to Spain. The place hosted the Venetian and Genoese trading posts, Greek, Slavic, Jewish settlements nearby, and anomadic city of Tatars. This study is devoted to the Greek Orthodox population of Tana (Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, part of the Zikhs and Tatars) in its dynamics throughout time.

The article is dedicated to the linguistic aspects of the conquest of Ireland during the age of Tudors and early Stuarts, which are examined from the perspective of establishment of power relations in British composite monarchy and through the prism of intellectual context. The author claims that the awareness of ethnocultural inequality was based on the complex attitude of medieval ethnographical knowledge to diversity, and emphasizes that distinctions were ideologized in the processes of establishing of power relations. The paper highlights two stages of state building in 16th — 17th centuries with distinct scenarios concerning the Irish language. Initially, the English crown demonstrated tolerance to the Irish language in exchange for loyalty to its policy, but later, mainly because of the opposition of the local elites to the processes of expansion of central authority, stricter strategies of disciplining and controlling diversity began to prevail. As a result, around 1640-s functional hierarchy was established, according to which English was the language of social domination, and Irish was used for everyday matters.

This article deals with the fates of the two notaries, Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto de Smeritis, who served in the 1430s in the Venetian colony in Tana (today Azov), placed in the mouth of the River Don where it flows into the Sea of Azov. In this article the author established based on the notarial documents the chronology of the arrival and departure of our two notaries together with the chronology of the arrival and departure of the respective consuls. Further, based on the self-identifications of the notaries the author inferred that that the self-description of the notary and, more broadly, of any person in notarial deeds varied considerably, and there is no reason to see any clear relationship between the formula and the legal status of the person. The imbreviaturae of the notarial documents drawn up by the notaries Niccolò de Varsis and Benedetto Smeritis mainly, although with a few exceptions, in Tana from 1430 to 1440 are stored in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, in the sections Notarili Testamenti and Cancelleria Inferior, Notai. After the death or the termination of the activities of public notaries, the Cancelleria Inferior received these imbreviaturae. The deeds of Varsis and Smeritis are the only notary documents of Venetian origin that came to us from Tana in the 1430s. Joining the notarial College, Venetian notaries were not always able to find a place in Venice and went to practice overseas, often combining their work with other positions, most often the clerical ranks, and then they returned home. In the overseas colonies the functions and responsibilities of a notary were much wider than in the metropolis – they included not only the drafting of the private notarial deeds, but also participation in the management of the colonial chancery and administration, the drafting of the official documents of the curial office of the consul, etc. The position of a notary could be combined with other administrative and ecclesiastic posts in the colonies. The notaries in the overseas Venetian trading stations were simultaneously priests, and this can be often seen in Tana, since they could combine in one person a number of essential functions (the chancellor of the consul’s curia, the chaplain, the notary). In Tana, the Venetians lived compactly within a community, which determined the special role of the notary, who performed in relation to them, in addition, the duties of the pastor. One of their tasks was to draw up private notarial deeds for the individuals, although their work as notaries was not limited to this, as it is discussed in this article.

There is a paradox in the aftermath of the global imperial crisis in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The Habsburg Empire which had been thought about as the katechon of future world of federalism broke into nation-states with regimes of accommodation and repression of national minorities. The Russian Empire which had been thought about as the future centralized nation-state transformed into a federation with layered forms of autonomy and decentralization. The exploration of this paradox begins with the critique of the image of the Russian Empire as a centralized and centralizing state and exploration of inclusive and differentiated governance and ways in which this political formation was reflected in political discourses of reformist and oppositional movements which in one way or another imagined the post-imperial order. The paper then traces the constitutional debates in the revolutionary contexts of 1905 and 1917 and assesses how these debates reflected local and global discourses of imagining the post-imperial order and how they were incorporated into the constitutions adopted on the territory of the former Russian Empire. The global imperial crisis which brought down the Qing, Russian, Ottoman, German and Habsburg empires stimulated imagination of post-imperial order not only in the named contexts, but also in the British, French and other cases. The circulation and synthesis of ideas fostered by the miscellany of the crumbling empires and the diversity within each of them produced a great variety of imaginations. The non-Soviet constitutional projects of 1917–1921 and the Soviet constitutions of 1918 and 1924 incorporated the experience of the Russian Empire and other imperial and post-imperial formations. The Constitution of the Far Eastern Republic, for instance, borrowed the concept of non-territorial autonomy from the Ukrainian Constitution of 1918, while the ineffectiveness of the formal right to territorial autonomy resembled that in the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920. The multilateral transfers and borrowings, both from the Russian imperial and other contexts, resulted in the departure of the 1924 Constitution of the Soviet Union from the initial Bolshevik plans. Instead of establishing a non-national class-centered formation, it became a mere preamble to a multinational confederation to be developed by its sovereign participants, which included two federations.

This paper outlines the complexity of interactions between Russian Orthodox monasteries and fish resources of the Russian North in the White and Barents Sea basins. The authors consider the complete cycle of monastic fishing activities as a complex of routine practices of an organizational, managerial, and commercial character. They demonstrate that the monks developed the organizational structure and management system that crucially contributed to the transformation of traditional fishing practices into the market-oriented exploitation of the natural resources of the White and Barents seas.

We now know that the Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable wall but, rather, a porous imaginary boundary through which people, ideas, and goods could travel. This volume is a fresh attempt to look across two blocs to examine variations, similarities, and connections between what we used to call East and West. As editors Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill explain in the introduction, the volume aims to challenge a traditional question about the East-West divide. It focuses on the environment and its connections to politics, culture, and society.

Since the nineteenth century, access to and the development of natural

resources became an important element of national and international politics. Resource

security emerged as an issue vital to national security; and resource competition and

crises gave rise to international tensions as well as to technological innovation and new

modes of transnational cooperation. This paper discusses ongoing collaborative research

activities in the Tensions of Europe network. Three broader themes are presented: (1)

perceptions and constructions of resources, resource crises, and resource futures; (2)

globalized resource chains and environmental transformation; and (3) managing crises:

technologies, expertise, and the politics of natural resources.

The Chapter reveals to the reader a look at the global process of climate change from the perspective of the local population of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous district and adjacent regions. Their destinies, way of life, professional plans and career trajectories unfold against the background of changing natural conditions, shifting seasons, unpredictable ice conditions, the collapsing Soviet and emerging post-Soviet infrastructure being built by new stakeholders. The first section explains the socio-economic, historical, infrastructural and natural linkages between the Arctic and subarctic zones, as well as the need to take into account the zonal changes throughout Western Siberia, as they form a transdisciplinary context of transformations in the Russian Arctic.

The second section shows the scenarios of overcoming the difficulties and adapting to the changing conditions caused by the new wave of development of the North, management decisions and natural disasters occurring during the life of the last two generations of the northerners. What is more important for survival in the Arctic: the ability to survive autonomously, using local knowledge and skills, community resources, or the bet made on the operational supply and close, intensive transport and informational links in the Arctic?

The third section raises the question of whether there are serious climate changes (that can be seen thanks to the research of landscapes, the state of permafrost, water resources, soils, ecosystems, ecology of regions), from the perspective of local residents, leading the economy and working in the far North? How do they feel them and what aspects of daily life are affected by climate change? The Chapter is based on empirical research on the territory of the Yamal and Khanty-Mansiysk district (Yugra) and northern part of Tomsk region, the corpus of interviews and observations.

Rhodiola rosea is a Siberian medicinal plant possessing qualities of a central nervous system stimulant that has been traditionally used in the folk medicine of the indigenous peoples in Siberia. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the plant had been intensively studied in the scientific laboratories of Tomsk. The study of physicochemical properties of the plant and its effects on humans was initially carried out in the Tomsk Medical Institute (TMI) by a large research group headed by A. S. Saratikov and E. A. Krasnov. Following a series of animal studies in the early 1960s, Saratikov started to enlist human volunteers from TMI students and staff and examine the effects of the plant on concentration and auto-suggestion. These trials were later expanded, and a number of medical institutions in Tomsk incorporated them into their research programs, seemingly hailing Rhodiola rosea as a potential all-curing miracle drug for the overworked and stressed modern self. (Interestingly enough, there has recently been a renewed interest in the plant in the West that has corroborated a number of Soviet findings). At the same time, research into the history of Rhodiola rosea trials also highlights both numerous ethically problematic issues in the treatment of research participants as well as unexpected divergences from the officially prescribed Soviet clinical trials practices. Using examples from a large number of published scientific studies and corroborating them with materials from oral history interviews with researchers and study participants, this paper explores the local idiosyncrasies that shaped Soviet clinical trials on the ground.

Daily legal practice in local centers of Muscovite Rus’ before the publication of the Law Code of 1649 (Sobornoe Ulozhenie) has been poorly studied. This article uses comparative analysis to study two groups of sources about the legal process and law enforcement in Novgorod the Great in the late 16th–early 17th centuries. The analysis illuminates a complicated hierarchy of legal levels. At the same time, the competences of the courts at each level were not always clearly defined, which corresponds to the ideas formulated by N.S. Kollmann in her study on crime and punishment in Muscovy. In the late 16th–early 17th centuries, the Novgorod Court Chancellery was a middle level of the judicial system. The highest instance was the court in Moscow, which passed judgment on behalf of the tsar and was provided by central chancelleries in the Kremlin. During the Time of Troubles, the hierarchy became simpler: the communication with Moscow disappeared and only two levels prevailed in Novgorod. The city administrator’s court (voevoda) dealt with political crimes and landowners’ disputes, while the City Court and other lower level courts dealt with civil and petty criminal cases. The courts were ruled by both codes and customary law: the existing law codes (Sudebniki) did not cover all the diversity of legal cases.

The article explores Vladimir Arsen’ev’s rationalization of the economic activities that he observed during expeditions in the Russian Far East, predominantly in the Ussuri region. It analyzes his categorization of the local population, which was derived from nonmatching taxonomies and included concepts such as nationality, religion, race, and subjecthood. Disentangling this categorization helps to outline the main contexts that influenced Arsen’ev, such as postwar political and military concerns, challenges of settler colonialism, and nationalizing empire. The article shows how Arsen’ev’s intertwined life experiences as a military officer and geographer, colonization official, ethnographer, and resource-conscious naturalist outlined the limits of his imagination and provided the ground for his intellectual innovations.

The article looks at a very under-researched legal case: the murder of Soviet diplomat V. V. Vorovski in Lausanne on 10 May 1923 by Russian émigré Moritz Conradi, and the trial of the latter six months later in which he was absolved as his defense turned the accusation against communism as the 'real' evil. The central argument is that Conradi's process was the last 'White victory", as his defense was aided by a myriad of émigré figures with documents, material, recollections and testimonies that turned the murder of one my by another into the clash of two conflicting worldviews. It was an arrival point of different communist and anticommunist tendencies already present in Europe since 1917, but also a departure point whose clearest consequence was the creation by Théodore Aubert (the defense's main advocate) of the "Entente Internationale Anticommuniste" in June 1924, also an under-researched yet prominent institution in transnational anticommunism.

How can we walk the talk of sustainability on a daily basis in our working environments? How can we interpret the concept of sustainability within the academic sphere and widen its scope? How can we build more sustainable careers? This notepad reflects on the condition of early-career environmental historians in Europe and beyond, introduces visions for the field, and suggests concrete action in order to build a more inclusive academic environment.

Having started the previous issue from an urgent and ongoing matter of the Covid-19, we would like to open this one with a forum on something that happened two years ago but what in many ways remains topical in a broader political and cultural climate of todays’s world. This is the 2018 repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution that in 1983 banned abortion in Ireland. The repeal effectively revered that decision, and is important not just for Ireland where abortion rights were at the centre of the relationship between the Catholic Church, the state and society but also in a global context where what one might call a ‘conservative turn’ of the era of Brexit, Trump and Bolsanaro often includes the explicitly anti-feminist and pro-natalist politics. Ela Drążkiewicz and Thomas Strong, who introduce this forum, ask what might be both national, and European, and indeed global significance of the Irish repeal, and how we might come to grips with anthropological understanding of its implications. The forum contributors detail how the referendum happened in the context of women’s movement (Fiona Murphy and Louise Maguire) and the voters’ emotional labour (Máire Ní Mhórdha). They discuss the repeal in the context of extremely complex Catholic legacies, and, in particular, that of the 2018 Irish visit of the Pope Francis, who remained conspicuously silent on this issue, and the views from elsewhere, from places such as Brazil where Catholic midwives see embryos and fetuses differently than Catholic clerics (Nancy Scheper-Hughes). Other contributors focus on Irish Catholicism and society, including womanhood and ageing, Church-State relations and media (Hugh Turpin, Brigittine French, Daniel Miller and Joanna Mishtal, Pauline Garvey); other Irish legislation, including the approval of Same Sex Marriage in 2015 (A Jamie Saris); and comparison with other European countries (Helena Wulff).

‘And then, there was something else, a feeling of having broken with the past, of pursuing an ideal by taking part in a really new enterprise whose truly formidable goal was to ensure the peace’, cites Jane Cowan a 1966 interview with Pablo de Azcárate y Flórez, Director of the Administrative Commissions and Minorities Questions Section of the League of Nations. Cowan quotes this civil servant in an article that is part of this issue’s special section on the bureaucratisation of utopia. ‘Pursuing an ideal’ here refers to League of Nations’ peace aspirations that  are of course famous for not being fulfilled — while also going to the heart of this special section’s argument. This thematic cluster asks what is the place of utopian aspirations in social organisation of bureaucracy and its subject formations. As Julie Billaud and Jane Cowan put this in its introduction, we are so used to Max Weber’s view of the bureaucrat as a ‘rationality machine’, working ‘without hatred or passion’ (Weber 1978: 225), that we overlook conceptually both the actual hatreds, passions and aspirations that we encounter in our ethnographies of bureaucracy, and a fundamentally utopian character of bureaucracy’s very ‘rationality machine’. One thing is to note, as James Scott famously does in his Seeing Like the State, that high state officials’ utopian aspirations ultimately always fail (Scott 1998); quite another is to pay close attention to what these utopian aspirations do in bureaucracy’s everyday workings even if they eventually fail. This special section thus formulates a new agenda for the ethnography of bureaucracy. It is not to explore how utopia is alienated in the ‘rational’ mechanics of the bureaucratisation but to chart how bureaucracies are continuously imbedded in utopian imaginaries and rationalities. 

This issue opens with a paper by Desirée Kumpf, winner of the 2019 EASA Award for a Postgraduate Student Paper in the Anthropology of Food. Kumpf explores how organic agriculture shapes both human labour and non-human relations on Indian tea plantations. She shows how tea growers facilitate certain kinds of collaboration across plant species and soil microorganisms to enhance the taste of tea that are believed to create a more positive connection between humans and nonhumans. The dark side of this process, however, is that these organic practices rely on monoculture mass production, which reproduces the exploitative conditions of plantation work for the tea workers and their supervisors.