От Редакции: Безевременье Как "Момент Истины"
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2014, Heft 3, S. 11-16
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2014, Heft 3, S. 11-16
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2014, Heft 3, S. 49-62
ISSN: 2164-9731
Andriy Portnov interviews Nataliya Gumenyuk – a Ukrainian journalist and cofounder of Public TV (Hromadske.tv), which played a prominent role in covering the Euromaidan. Her views are informed by her double position as a participant in the events and a journalist in describing and analyzing them. Gumenyuk strongly opposes the politics of essentializing groupness and ascribing a single political motivation (and hence, common responsibility) to any part of the population – including the inhabitants of the troubled Donbass region. She questions seemingly self-evident explanations of conflict through references to the influence of historical legacies or ethnic solidarity. Nataliya Gumenyuk insists on the priority of individual civil rights and multiculturalism as foundations of the new Ukrainian nation.
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2014, Heft 1, S. 391-397
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2014, Heft 1, S. 398-406
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 1, S. 383-388
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 2, S. 360-363
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 3, S. 429-434
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 1, S. 141-158
ISSN: 2164-9731
In his reflection on the issues raised in Mark Lipovetsky's essay, Maxim Waldstein expresses his overall solidarity with Lipovetsky's genealogy of the current discourse of the Russian intellectual establishment and proposes a sketch of his own contribution to this project: the study of the antinomies of intellectual nonconformism and cultural conservatism in the works of the Tartu semioticians and Sergei Averintsev. Furthermore, based on his critical assessment of Lipovetsky's methodology, Waldstein proposes a strategy for how the dialogic interrogation of the key assumptions of contemporary Russian (liberal) mainstream may proceed. Waldstein agrees with Lipovetsky that the currently dominant intellectual discourse in Russia, even as represented by politically liberal intellectuals, is often plagued by ingrained elitism, xenophobia, and cultural conservatism. In part, this observation accounts for widespread suspiciousness toward Western trends such as feminism and for the inability of the Russian "liberal mainstream" to resist currently rising official neotraditionalism. Historically, this discourse goes back not only to the scientific modernism of the 1960s ITR intellectuals, which is Lipovetsky's prime focus, but also to the cult of (high) culture, professed by iconic late Soviet humanists such as Yuri Lotman and Sergei Averintsev. Originally (and tacitly) aimed at protecting cultural and intellectual creativity from the Soviet state's encroachments on its autonomy, Lotman's and Averintsev's cultural studies grew increasingly antagonistic toward the analogous intellectual trends in the West because of their alleged implications of cultural amnesia and permissiveness. As Waldstein shows by analyzing Lotman's and Averintsev's reflections on the nature of (artistic) play and humor, these authors combined the conservative rejection of any transgression with respect to the culturally normative and the cult of transgression in "high art," classical literature, the artist's personal self-fashioning or antitotalitarian humor. Originally embedded in the social strategies of intellectual and personal self-fashioning under the totalitarian regime, this intellectual position has outlived the Soviet regime and continues to serve as a paradigm for the contemporary liberal mainstream, but has lost much of its nonconformist and antiauthoritarian potential. In the context of today's Russia, this perspective implies limiting playful and humoristic creativity to the enclosed social enclaves of the intellectuals' inner circle while leaving the public sphere to official neotraditionalism. In his critical assessment of Lipovetsky's project, Waldstein points to its residual essentialism and teleology. In addition to traditional genealogy, or the search for roots and origins, he advocates more consistently embracing the Foucauldian project of "genealogy," aimed at fragmenting the unified and discovering heterogeneity in what seems to be consistent with itself. In practice, this means not only engaging seriously with the late twentieth-century Western reflexivity toward the project of the Enlightenment but also recovering and bringing into the conversations the "native" critical resources. As examples of such resources, Waldstein cites the less understood and valued ideas of Yuri Lotman. The expected outcome of such engagements is the renegotiation of the key assumptions of Russia's current academic and intellectual discourse and reinvigoration of the public dialogue.
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 4, S. 187-216
ISSN: 2164-9731
Статья Александра Пономарева посвящена проблеме взаимодействия канонического права православной церкви и светского законодательства в современной России. Эта проблема анализируется на примере судебного процесса по делу феминистской панк-группы Pussy Riot, участницы которой были приговорены в 2012 г. к тюремному заключению по обвинению в хулиганстве в главном православном соборе Москвы. Их уголовное дело впервые в современной российской истории апеллировало к канонам христианской церкви 1-го тысячелетия н.э. Разбирая положения канонов, на которые ссылалась сторона обвинения, автор вскрывает логику взаимодействия древних церковных правил и светского правосудия в современной России.
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 4, S. 321-323
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 3, S. 435-440
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 4, S. 219-230
ISSN: 2164-9731
The former literary scholar Grigory Chkhartishvili, now better known as the popular Russian detective writer under the pen name Boris Akunin, who is also a visible figure in the ranks of the Russian liberal opposition, in 2013 started the ambitious project of writing a multivolume history of Russia. Akunin announces his History of the Russian State as an alternative to the new mandatory history textbook currently under preparation by a group of professional historians on the request of President Vladimir Putin. According to Akunin, what sets his history of Russia apart from histories done by competitors is its objectivity: as he explains, he just wants to describe the past "as it actually happened." Turning to the first volume of Akunin's History of the Russian State published in the fall of 2013, Ilya Gerasimov does not discuss its merits as a history study, for it is beyond any professional criticism: Akunin is a pulp fiction writer, whose idea of historical craft corresponds to the standards of the 1820s or 1830s. Rather, Gerasimov uses this opportunity to discuss the influential "canon of Russian history" shared by both "conservative" and "liberal" historians. This canon was formed by the first Russian professional historian, Nikolai Karamzin in the 1820s, and then perfected by great historians of the late imperial period, the classic Stalinist historical text History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course , and the academic historiography of the 1970s. Despite conflicting interpretations of individual historical events and figures, all of these historians shared the fundamentally common view of Russian history as the history of "the Russian people" on Russian "historical territory". The history of the state became pivotal to this dominant view of Russian history, as only political institutions offered the necessary sense of continuity and consistency to the millennium-long process. Akunin's History of the Russian State provides Gerasimov with an ideal example of the archetypal version of the "canon of Russian history" as understood and thoroughly reproduced by a modern-day educated Russian. Akunin reveals the whole intellectual gestalt of social imagination of the Romantic historiography of the 1820s Restoration epoch that was preserved almost intact by the "scheme of Russian history": the organicist perception of nation, the "blood and soil" imagery of national territory, the idealization of the state as a mystic embodiment of the nation's "will," the racialized understanding of the "people." This type of thinking about society was instrumental in producing the ideal of nation-state in the late nineteenth century, and informed the politics of national purges in the 1930s (on political or ethnic grounds). Without dismantling this dominant scheme, Russian society is doomed to reproducing ideologies of variously framed nationalism, and even liberal historians will cultivate in their students the ideal of national purity and domination over "national" territory.
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 2, S. 409-411
ISSN: 2164-9731
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 2, S. 191-222
ISSN: 2164-9731
This article examines the way that de-Stalinization and Soviet engagement in the Third World provided Central Asian elites with an opportunity to redefine the terms of their republics' cultural and economic participation in the Soviet Union. Drawing on archival materials, memoirs, and interviews, the article traces the careers of a number of key figures and examines their efforts to negotiate cultural and economic modernization by positioning themselves as Khrushchev's allies in de-Stalinization and the struggle for the Third World. The wave of decolonization occurring beyond the USSR's borders provided the impetus to complete the "decolonization" of the Central Asian republics within a Soviet framework. В статье рассматривается, как десталинизация и активизация советской политики в Третьем мире предоставили среднеазиатским элитам возможности для переопределения культурной и экономической роли среднеазиатских республик в Советском Союзе. Основываясь на архивных материалах, мемуарах и интервью, автор прослеживает карьеры ключевых представителей республиканских элит и анализирует их усилия для культурной и экономической модернизации региона. Самопозиционирование как союзников Хрущева по десталинизации и борьбе за влияние в третьем мире способствовало успеху этой политики. Автор заключает, что волна деколонизации, поднявшаяся за пределами СССР, способствовала завершению "деколонизации" советских среднеазиатских республик.
In: Ab imperio: studies of new imperial history and nationalism in the Post-Soviet space, Band 2013, Heft 2, S. 373-380
ISSN: 2164-9731