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.

Aleksandr Turbin looks at the ethnically diversified merchant communities of the far east of Russia, investigating the means with which Russian citizenship was acquired, and their evolution, within the dynamics of inclusion animating the Priamurye region during the thirty years preceding the war. He pays particular attention to the rhetoric of the discourse concerning the inclusion and exclusion of individuals on the grounds of local, national, racial and other forms of classification. To understand more fully the nature and role to be attributed to Russian citizenship, the author made a comparison not only of local or regional contexts, but also of global processes, by considering the relationship between elements present within the empire and by measuring them against those of other empires of the time. This approach reveals the constant search for alternative languages with which to discuss the relationship between sovereignty, political community and individuals, bringing into question a teleological narrative on the transformation of Russian citizenship.

Although nation and empire – as well as the organicist and universalist visions mirroring them – are usually put in opposition to each other, this article argues that the two can create synergistic alliances. The attempt of the Danish dynastic union proposal to Sweden in 1810 sheds light on the repertoire of rhetoric and arguments the state could harness to substantiate its potential to rule over diverse populations. First, the paper demonstrates how the trope of Scandinavian kinship was formulated in the Danish public debate during the transitional period, or what Koselleck calls Sattelzeit. Then, the article shows how this language was embedded into power relations and configured to reinforce the imperial aspirations of the Nordic amalgamation, meaning the fusion of the Scandinavian nations. The core sources I consult are the pamphlets published to advertise union-building and the documents stored in the folders of the Royal Archive in Copenhagen (Rigsarkivet).

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.

Several days after a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Russian tsar on April, 2 1879, a new regime of "permission to exercise the right to purchase and carry weapons" was introduced in St. Petersburg. Despite the fact that the first attempt on Alexander II's life occurred in 1866, also in St. Petersburg, it took thirteen years to make a radical departure from the previously unrestricted regime of access to arms in the capital of the Russian Empire.

In this article I analyze archival materials documenting how this new regime of weapons ownership was implemented. In particular, I am interested in the dimensions of locality and temporality in the practices by which imperial legislation introduced gun-control in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, the Russian Empire's most cosmopolitan cities. The archival documents that I rely on show that the gun control regulations that were intended as a repressive act of the authorities in reality unfolded as a process of negotiations and merciful exclusions. The imperial legal order's intermediaries reacted to the international challenges posed by emergent revolutionary movements, including the negotiation of the permissible restriction of subjects' rights. As a result, new practices of “public safety” were implemented as exceptional measures — both locally and temporally. This article sheds light on the imperial legal regime of gun control as a practice of ‘exception.’

This chapter serves a dual function, helping students of Tolstoy understand both the

legal contexts that influenced Tolstoy and contexts where his moral theory made an impact. In the first case, it will help students and scholars new to Tolstoy to make sense of his targets, that is, the references and allusions that appear in his works (for example, mentions of Russian law, of jury trials or of private property). In the second case, it will inform students about the enormous and charismatic influence that his writing had on practices and ideas of what we call today ‘popular sovereignty,’ ‘legal nihilism,’ and ‘nonviolent protest’.

Somewhat provocatively, I intend to reread this explicitly politicized autobiography through less political optics, in order to indicate which meanings, arguably, were important for the author. Approaching an analysis of My Life, one should emphasize its subtitle, Opyt avtobiografii, which was originally translated into English somewhat misleadingly as An Attempt at an Autobiography. This formulation is not coincidental; on the contrary, it is crucial for understanding the place of autobiographical writing in Trotskii’s way of thinking and writing. Moreover, My Life appears as one of the turning points and central nodes in Trotskii’s auto- and biographical narratives, which reveal continuity and comprehensiveness through their multiple evolutions. Although it was not revised in his later years, My Life should be read in this broad context of Trotskii’s writings. Thus, the first section outlines the variety of Trotskii’s attempts at an autobiography with a special focus on their background and preconditions. In the case of My Life, the aim of this chapter is, broadly speaking, to map out both its main controversies, but also to stress some marginal issues of rather individual nature.

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

This article examines Comecon’s scientific-technological cooperation via the lens of the so-called ‘direct contacts’ of Soviet industrial and research institutions and specialists. It emphasizes two particular questions: the place of institutional and technological inequality in the attempt to integrate socialist Europe; and the motivations of Soviet research and industrial institutions. The paper studies from a local perspective the way in which regional integration was to provide modern technologies to help both the bloc and the Soviet technological system beat the West. It demonstrates that technological integration of the bloc was complicated by institutional inequalities on the local level that contradicted the design and bureaucracy of cooperation that had initially been based on the principle of equality. As a result, in many cases, cooperation was not an opportunity for mutually beneficial technological development, but a formalized necessity and a source of individual benefits. It gave Soviet specialists motivation to see better techniques and higher working and living standards, which sometimes became an important incentive for cooperation.

Background/aims

Current research largely tends to ignore the drug-testing model that was developed in the “Second World” as an explicit alternative to the randomized controlled trial. This system can be described as “socialist pharmapolitics,” accounting for the specific features of state socialism that influenced the development and testing of experimental drugs. The clinical trials model employed in the “Second World” was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union, which was by far the most influential player in the socialist bloc during the Cold War. Based on extensive archival research, this article presents an empirical case of a late Soviet clinical trial as a pragmatic alternative to the randomized controlled trial model. It accounts for the divergences between the official model prescribed by the Soviet authorities and the messy realities of healthcare practice. It further outlines different factors that ultimately shaped how clinical trials were organized in Soviet institutions “on the ground.” Accordingly, this article presents a “real-life” history of “socialist pharmapolitics” and outlines the problems that this system faced in practice.

Methods

Archival research was conducted at the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation in Moscow. Archival files include scientific, technical, and registration documentation such as biochemical, pharmacological, and clinical descriptions of the experimental drug Meldonium, letters between various hospitals, research institutes and the Soviet regulatory body, as well as 26 reports of completed clinical trials. Manual content analysis was used for the interpretation of results.

Results

This article presents an empirical case of a late Soviet clinical trial as a pragmatic alternative to the randomized controlled trial model. It demonstrates some key differences from the randomized controlled trial model. This article also highlights some of the discrepancies between the model that was officially prescribed by the Soviet authorities and the realities of experimental drug testing in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, it notes some elements of randomization, double-blinding, and the use of placebo that were present in Meldonium trials despite being formally denounced by Soviet bioethics.

Conclusion

The Soviet model for testing experimental drugs differed from the Western one substantially in a number of respects. This difference was not only proclaimed officially by the Soviet authorities, but was for the most part enforced in clinical trials in practice. At the same time, our research demonstrates that there were important differences between the official model and the clinical realities on the ground.

In 1918, while Vera Zasulich was dying in hungry Petrograd in a small apartment crammed with baskets of rotting produce, Koni was giving lectures on ethics. Despite the abundance of publications on A. F. Koni’s distinguished service to jurisprudence during the era of the Great Reforms, the question of his motivation has still not been thoroughly researched. The existing historiography is devoted mainly to the professional accomplishments. His personal life has not been studied.  In this chapter, we analyze variety of published and unpublished sources from Koni’s personal archive in order to shed light on the moral component of Koni’s vocation and its religious underpinning.

The formation of the travel and tourism industry in the Russian Empire was a prolonged process. Along with the development of a vast transportation network, the spread of rail services and the introduction of new railway tariffs in 1894, the number of travellers in the Russian Empire increased by the beginning of the twentieth century. All those people required reliable information, instructions and advice on how to organise and complete their journeys, which they increasingly found in tourist guidebooks. Guidebook authors and publishers helped them master the fears arising from the uncertainties of travel.  Being a highly contested rhetorical resource, authors, compilers and publishers of guidebooks debated, negotiated and constantly changed the Trans-Siberian ‘landscapes of transportation’. By analysing travel guides on Siberia as complex artefacts and focusing on the transportation landscapes as a historical phenomenon, we hope to shed more light on the complex intersections of mobility, transport technologies and environment in the Russian Empire at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. We argue that in the process of (re)making railway landscapes—which we consider as a material stage on which actions took place—perception of these landscapes was shaped by the natural environment in the process of its transformation, by transportation technologies and infrastructure, by services and conveniences, comfort and safety.

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 examines the distribution of burdens from Russia’s participation in the First World War. During this period, dissatisfaction with the balance between those who went to the front and those who remained in the rear could be expressed openly. By 1917, the human reserves of the Russian empire were practically exhausted. At the same time, a large part of the population enjoyed deferrals from serving in the army. After the revolution, servicemen, many of whom had already been on the front line and were wounded, were very active. They demanded that soldiers who served in rear units should go first with new reinforcements. This category included new recruits, soldiers of auxiliary troops, military clerks, officers, and all ranks who were involved in training in reserve battalions. By the summer of 1917, soldiers demanded the mobilization of former policemen, deserters, and everyone who legally or illegally used deferrals from military service. In the end, the slogan “The bourgeoisie to trenches!” was born spontaneously. This meant sending to the front all who profited from the war by remaining in the rear. The spread of this slogan speaks of the assimilation of the language of class antagonism by soldiers. It also became important to the escalation of civil war. The demands were directed to the state authorities whose silence led to soldiers’ desires to implement “mobilization” on their own.

In this article I review the corpus of newspaper materials related to the purported involvement a group of Saratov Old Believers in a ritual murder, which allegedly took place in late 1911. Taking into account the context of other high-profile cases of ritual murder of that time—“Multan’s case” and “Baelis’ case”—the paper considers the specifics of the charges against the ethnic majority to which the suspected ethnic Russian wanderers belonged. The analysis focuses on the discursive transformation of the majority / minority boundaries under the conditions of the nationalizing Russian Empire at the turn of 19th–20th centuries, reflected in the press materials devoted to a specific episode. The religious factor in determining the boundary as “the Self / the Other” turned out to be non-essential— compared to the ethnic factor—when it comes to the Saratov wanderers. Thus, we find evidence for a certain normalization of the wanderers, who begin to be thought of as Russians first—and sectarians second. Their ethnicity, according to the logic of some of the publicists who describe them, endows them with a certain set of qualities—among them the impossibility of committing ritual murder. Without questioning the homogenizing logic of the modern discourse about defining the boundaries of “the Self / the Other” and “norm-deviation”, the article argues that these boundaries, even in the conditions of a nationalizing empire, appeared to be flexible enough to carry out the inclusion of subjects that were outside the conventional norm, thus making the normative area a plastic and constantly changing space. The ambivalent position of the Old Believers (representatives of a dominant ethnic group and, at the same time, a religious minority) was reflected in the press reports on the Saratov incident, forcing journalists and readers to take a fresh look at the limits of majority and minorities, and to redefine the place of religious outcasts in this system.

The Time of Troubles brought not only social and cultural changes to the Russian society at the beginning of the 17th century, but also political ones, including modifications in understanding the political “space”. The processes of increased migration flows, and cultural exchange were characteristic features of the Russian history in the first third of the 17th century. As a result of the Truce of Deulino (1618), Smolensk and Chernihiv lands became a part of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. Some representatives of the Russian nobility, who did not leave their land plots in these territories, became subjects of King Sigismund III. In Russia, such representatives of the nobility were considered as “traitors”. The article is devoted to the phenomenon of emigration of the Russian nobility to the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Smolensk Voevodship) in the first third of the 17th century. The study explores the reasons for changing the subjectness by representatives of the Russian nobility, the practice of their integration into the PolishLithuanian society, and their number. The purpose of the study is to find out the status of Russian defectors in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, as well as to compile a list of representatives of the Russian nobility who became subjects of the Commonwealth in 1600–1630.

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.