Suchergebnisse

SUMMARY:
This article examines the history of the Russian holiday calendar from the imperial post-reform era to the early Soviet period. Svetlana Malycheva argues that contrary to the western European practice of negotiations between employers and their employees and strong traditions of urban culture, in the Russian Empire the major impetus toward modernization and universalization of the holiday calendar came from the top. Many different groups of the urban population responded to state attempts to universalize the official holiday calendar by lobbying for their confessional and social interests and, at the same time, by reforming traditional confessional and local patterns of rest to make them fit into a common empire-wide system of holidays. The official imperial holiday calendar was based on the Orthodox calendar and dynastic universalism. At the same time, it never became mandatory for all subjects of the Empire and dynamics of universalizing versus particularistic tendencies remained central in the process of reforming imperial urban life. In the late nineteenth century, the city itself became an important locus of horizontal dialogue between different groups of urban dwellers about their calendars of holidays and rest. The first part of the article deals with government laws regulating holiday calendars of the imperial subjects. The second part is a case-study of a region in central Russia. The author investigates negotiations of different groups of the urban population with government officials about their rights to observe local and religious holidays and days of rest. In conclusion, the author shows that the imperial dynamics of universalism and particularism survived into the early Soviet period and were reconsidered only in the early 1930s in the course of the anti-religious campaign.

SUMMARY:
Drawing on methodological riches of the debates surrounding the French and the Russian revolution, the author analyzes the process through which the myth of the Russian revolution was constructed in the Soviet Union from 1920s on. Gradually excluding the democratic elements and their role in the Revolution, the myth underscored the supposed unity within two opposite camps, the camp of the Bolsheviks and the "White" camp. The author argues that the transformation of the myth was related to the change in the political goals of the regime as the construction of the state emerged as a major task as opposed to the propagation of the world revolution.

SUMMARY:
Introduction to the publication of archival documents on the history of Kazan University focuses on the attempt to commemorate the bicentennial of the University by writing a historical narrative of its development. According to the authors, the history of Kazan University underwent profound ruptures and the continuity of historical narrative is impossible to achieve. Collective essays on the university history produced to commemorate the institution's bicentennial became an object of heated debates among members of the University community, especially in the light of the struggles for the right to trace the origins of departments and chairs from the original 28 chairs founded in 1804. Especially, the text on the last decade of the University history proved to be highly controversial. There emerged a spontaneous movement to create different histories of various departments and schools within the University. The history of the University now proved that memory of the University's communities is highly divisive.

In an attempt to write a synthetic and all-inclusive history of the University, the authors attempt to see the main focus of their work in what they identify as "the University style" or a cultural code of the University. It is this cultural code that the authors believe can be imposed upon the variety of sources and materials in order to help create a narrative of the University history. The University is further treated as a place of memory, while different aspects of the self-representation of the University community are reconstructed on different levels of the cultural code. The authors explore instances of "forgetting", whereby particular events, perceived as shameful within the cultural code, have been obscured and removed from the University's past. Given the University location as the easternmost institution of higher learning, the authors discuss orientalist tropes in the cultural code of the school. They also explore memory of women in the University. Discussing the structure of memory, the authors note its asymmetric character: the pre-1917 period is characterized by the proliferation of memoirs, whereas the Soviet period is dominated by official documents. Nevertheless, during the Soviet period memoirs of the University graduates were collected through a librarian's initiative and the authors make use of these materials to discuss the role of the University in the progressive narrative of the making of Soviet personality. The authors further discuss different places of memory of the University, including the figure of the rector and various personalities associated with the school (including that of V. I. Lenin), and commemorating practices (monuments and museums) on the University campus.