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Marc Raeff, An empire like any other?
Neither the people nor the elites were conscious of the imperial character of old regime Russia. Two lines of explanation may be offered for this state of affairs: in the first place, Moscow's expansion to the East facilitated the integration of the native elites into the social and political leadership groups of the Russian empire; while the conquest of a "cultural parapet" in the West enabled the creation of modern. Westernized, Russian culture thanks to the contributions made by the europeanized elites of the conquered territories. In the second place, the "civil society of the educated" and the ideologized intelligentsia that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century in opposition to the State, totally rejected all aspects of the imperial regime without giving any thought to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the population. We may wonder whether history will repeat itself, for the bolshevik regime has neither eliminated Russia's imperial(ist) character nor paved the way to a better understanding of its political problems.

Marc Raeff, L'émigration et la Cité nouvelle.
A la lumière de la renaissance religieuse de l'Age d'Argent et des expériences vécues pendant la guerre, la révolution et la guerre civile, de nombreux émigrés trouvèrent le chemin du retour à l'Église russe et à l'orthodoxie. Parmi ceux-ci des intellectuels - en particulier I. Bunakov-Fondaminskij, F. Stepun, G. Fedotov et la Mère Mar'ja (Skobcova) - fondèrent un cercle d'inspiration chrétienne, déployant tous ses efforts pour remédier à la misère matérielle et spirituelle de leurs compagnons d'émigration. Leur revue, Novyj grad (1931-1939) était un forum pour l'élaboration et la dissémination de leurs idées sur les événements majeurs du moment : la Dépression, le Front populaire, la guerre civile d'Espagne, l'évolution de la situation en URSS. Leurs critiques aussi bien du système bourgeois capitaliste que du système totalitaire (bolchevik, nazi, fasciste) et leur plaidoyer en faveur de la « christianisation de la vie» et le sentiment de leur devoir envers la société en font les prédécesseurs des mouvements chrétiens socialistes postérieurs à la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

Marc Raeff, Georgii Florovskii historian of Russian religious culture.
Priest, philosopher and historian Father Georgii Florovskii completed his studies in emigration. The experiences of revolution and civil war, as well as the impact of Western thinkers and of a Christian, personalist philosophical anthropology, laid the foundation for his rejection of historical determinism and of all utopianism in social and philosophical speculation. His major historical work, Puti russkogo bogosloviia, rooted in this philosophy and using a contextualist approach, marks a watershed in Russian intellectual history and its historiography. The paper briefly points out the major concepts and contributions of the seminal book.