Publications

This article examines the history of socialist collaboration in Comecon through the lens of a large industrial project in Soviet Siberia. It examines the construction of the Ust`-Ilimsk forest industrial complex which was conceived as a collective effort of six socialist European countries. On the one hand, the project formed part of the Soviet Union’s strategy of technological colonization of Soviet Eastern lands, and on the other, it aimed to enhance socialist collaboration and integration efforts through the exchange of material goods and expertise, as prescribed by the project agreements. The paper focuses on the interplay between ideological implications, national interests and material shortages when completing the project, showing the contradictory nature of socialist collaborative construction. It argues that the Soviet central government sought material resources for the construction from ‘brother’ socialist countries with an ideological emphasis on how important it was for further cooperation in the Eastern bloc. In fact, the project exposed difficulties, ranging from material shortages typical of state socialism and the predominance of national economic interests, with the result that this socialist project was compelled to also make use of Western equipment and expertise, transforming Ust`-Ilimsk from a socialist to a far more international construction site.

Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov and religious philosopher Sergius Bulgakov in 1905–1918 were connected by formal relations and friendship. In 1914 Ivanov published the poem “Mother” (“Te glyby chto nezhno zasypali grob ...”), with a dedication to Bulgakov. The article discusses this poem and its draft version, which allows to trace the movement of the poet's creative thought. The biographical context is the death of Bulgakov's mother – he described his intimate experience in the “Unfading Light” (“Svet Nevecherniy”). Special attention is paid to the symbols and motives typical to Ivanov's poetics: the firmament, the sun-heart and the motive of transparency. An idea, common both for Ivanov and Bulgakov, is that of some pre-world feminine principle that appears in their texts under different names: as Sophia, the Soul of the World, Great Mother, Mother Earth. They are also united by the special attitude towards death which is understood in a Christian way – as a birth into a new life and just a step on the path of resurrection. The intertextual connections of the poem with the philosophical and theological works by Bulgakov may be considered as a result of mutual influence and their reliance on common sources.

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.

The article offers a new perspective on Belinsky’s literary and social impact, by retracing his intellectual evolution.  In the aftermath of his crucial formative immersion in Hegel’s philosophy as a member of the Stankevich circle, the predominant trajectory of Belinsky’s personal and conceptual development essentially corresponds to the discovery and affirmation of one of Hegel’s most important principles: the sociality of reason.

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.

Over the 20th century, there were significant changes in children's health and enormous gains in pediatric healthcare because of systematic healthcare development including public health interventions. This study reviews children’s morbidity and mortality at the end of the 19th century by examining historical medical records of the Children’s Clinic of Tomsk Imperial University (Western Siberia, Russian Empire). We reviewed the official books of the inpatient department`s records between 1893 and 1899 as well as outpatient department’s records for the one-year period of 1899. The study confirms that mortality due to infectious diseases remained in first place among all other causes.

The paper deals with communication failures in everyday spoken discourse. The spontaneous character of oral speech is its basic property and becomes a prerequisite for the appearance of such a phenomenon as communicative failures. By communicative failures, we mean speech situations when the recipient of a speech message does not understand it correctly, i.e., in the way the speaker intended. The purpose of this pilot study is 1) to assess the total number of communication failures that occur with a person during a single day and 2) to determine the dependence of communication failure frequency on the communication settings and conditions. The main result of the study is a qualitative and quantitative assessment of communication failures during a subjects’s d ay.The research is based on a special experiment based on 24-hour monitoring of the subject’s speech and his subsequent retrospective commentary on all recorded data. Such an approach allows one to reduce the subjectivity inherent in much linguistic work. The research continues a series of studies devoted to the effectiveness of spoken communication and is important not only for understanding the fundamental processes of speech perception but is also crucial for the development of artificial intelligence systems involving human-computer speech dialogue systems and for speech technologies of the next generation.

This chapter focuses on textual data that is collected for a specific purpose, which are usually referred to as corpora. Scholars use corpora when they examine existing instances of a certain phenomenon or to conduct systematic quantitative analyses of occurrences, which in turn re#ect habits, attitudes, opinions, or trends. For these contexts, it is extremely useful to combine different approaches. For example, a linguist might analyze the frequency of a certain buzzword, whereas a scholar in the political, cultural, or sociological sciences might attempt to explain the change in language usage from the data in question.

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).

The “digital” is profoundly changing Russia today. While in the mid-1990s less than 1 percent of the Russian population had Internet access, today Russia ranks sixth globally with approximately 110 million Internet users, or three-quarters of the population (The World Factbook 2019). The proliferation of affordable smartphones in the 2010s has made Internet access a commonplace by 2020, with over 60 percent of users connecting through mobile devices, and Russia’s Internet market is the largest in Europe (GfK 2019). According to the Russian Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, the Russian Internet industry amounted to an estimated value of "ve trillion rubles in 2019, or 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) (TASS 2019). Taking into account the additional 25 million Russians who live outside of Russia, it is no surprise that Russian is the second most popular language on the Net after English (Historical trends 2019). These figures alone make Russia an attractive object for researchers interested in the development of today’s digital society. The Russian information technologies (IT) industry, moreover, is an ample provider of highly sophisticated digital tools and well-organized software solutions

The aim of this article is to develop an against-the-grain reading of Dostoevskii's relationship to the rise of revolutionary terrorism in nineteenth-century Russia. I start by interpreting the Underground Man's forlorn state of ‘inertia’ and inwardly directed violence in terms of the Hegelian problematic of conscience (Gewissen) and the ‘beautiful soul’, as elaborated in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I then argue that, as Dostoevskii struggled to affirm a moral ideal that could overcome his protagonist's underground condition (which resembles a warped version of Hegel's beautiful soul), he gave lucid articulation to the moral-aesthetic values that would later become a staple for Russian revolutionaries, particularly the ‘conscientious’ terrorist. Within this context, I examine the case of Vera Zasulich as an unanticipated realization of Dostoevskii's moral ideal.

A growing strand of work in ERPP (English for research publication purposes) explores how English is nested within research evaluation regimes in non-Anglophone contexts across the world. This paper focuses on the under-researched context of Russia, where language of research publication is at the heart of tensions in institutional, national and international research evaluation regimes: between Russian, which until the 1970s was the second-most used language in the world’s total scientific output, and English, the dominant language of global evaluation indexes.

The paper uses documentary sources to outline recent structural transformations in Russian academia, including the relatively recent insertion of English into evaluation systems. It draws on an interview-based study to explore how 16 scholars in one research-intensive university are navigating such changes in their publication practices, in three disciplines: economics, sociology and philosophy. Key findings highlight: 1) scholars’ languages of publication; 2) the challenging material conditions shaping scholars’ opportunities for research writing; 3) the pressures to publish in English alongside Russian; 4) the ways in which language choice is refracted through geohistorical ‘disciplinary conversations’ traditions; 5) the challenges of navigating different discourse communities. The value of such studies for ERPP within EAP as a field is underlined.

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 article focuses on the rave subculture of St. Petersburg in the 1990s and demonstrates how new forms of psychoactive control and resistance emerged in the wake of the Soviet collapse. By staying sensitive to the material and corporeal aspects of these phenomena, it contributes to the socio-material studies of drug control and emphasizes that the physical body itself should be an important venue for drug research. In doing so, we build on existing literature that discusses bodies as information resources to detect drug use and identifies resistance strategies to increasingly technological drug control measures. We advance this discussion by suggesting that the psychoactive setting of rave in post-Soviet St. Petersburg gave rise to a highly particular yet notably elusive and difficult-to-define type of corporeality. On the one hand, this corporeality could be positively interpreted as a marker of resistance and belonging on the “inside.” At the same time, it could also be employed strategically by law enforcement officers to detect and prosecute drug-consuming individuals. Moreover, we propose to view this psychoactive “rave body” as deeply embedded in its spatio-temporal context—thus accounting for the influence of time and space on the materiality of drug control and resistance. In examining these dynamics, we draw on a wide range of sources, including memoirs, press materials, early Internet archives, publicly printed interviews, photographs, and video materials.

The article focuses on two notions which are present in Boris Poplavsky’s latest oeuvre, namely the “Paradise and Kingdom of friends” and the “Republic of the Sun”. These are linked to Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetic philosophy which solicited vivid interest among German and French poets of 910-1930. It is assumed that the semantic aura of the image of the flag, one of the most frequent in Poplavsky, might have been formed in “dialogue” with Hölderlin’s key poem «Hälfte des Lebens». Besides, the poem «Quietly the city rustles», which holds a special position in his posthumous collection «Snowy Hour» (1936), seems to be an imitation of the first stanza of Hölderlin’s famous elegy «Brot und Wein».

The introduction to the archival documents published in this issue of Ab Imperio frames the broad context of the political reform of 1905–1906 in the Russian Empire and highlights the imperial dimension in the elabora- tion of the first electoral law (the Bulygin Duma law). The authors explore the multisided and layered nature of political conflicts as well as divergent political imaginaries with regard to the institution of political representation in the ranks of the imperial bureaucracy. In particular, the text explicates the nationalizing and colonializing imaginary of social engineering that guided the work of Sergey Kryzhanovskii on electoral principles and mecha- nisms. That imaginary stood in contradiction to the vision and practice of imperial citizenship that was shared by more senior officials in the central government of the empire such as Count Dmitry Sol’skii and Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov. The concept of imperial citizenship can be traced to the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which created the universalizing framework of norms and institutions for diverse space and groups of population in the empire. At the same time, the political logic of the Great Reforms allowed the incorporation of imperial particularisms into universalizing norms and institutions. Analyzing responses to ministerial proposals of the electoral law by high-ranking officials of various imperial peripheries, the authors demonstrate how the institutions of imperial citizenship framed the campaign of information-gathering marshaled by the imperial center and how the language of imperial citizenship conditioned the approach of local officials to the phenomenon of political representation.

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.’

The article presents Leningrad’s Khelenukty group, a literary association from the second half of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, in the context of the late Soviet underground. Khelenuktism is described in a framework of traditions from avantgarde and absurdist literature. The article brings to light both futurist and OBERIU sources of Khelenukt aesthetics, as well as connections to works created in the circle of A. K. Tolstoy and the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers under the name of Kozma Prutkov and influences from older neo-avantgarde contemporaries (the Verpa group and writers in their orbit). Khelenuktism’s aesthetic foundations are reconstructed to correlate with the group’s active practice of the art of living. Artists’ behavior, which had evolved in post-Romantic tradition, Symbolism, and the avantgarde into a full-fledged artistic experiment, was implemented in “dramagedies,” an experimental genre invented by the Khelenukty. Members of the group followed in the footsteps of futurism to create an absurdist theater of everyday life at the same time as artists elsewhere were elaborating the aesthetics of the “happening” (without, by the way, any direct links) and managed to free themselves and other participants from the regulatory framework circumscribing Soviet life.

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’.