Suchergebnisse

This is an obituary for Professor Ol'ga Ivanovna Zhigalina, the well-known Russian Kurdologist and Iranist and director of the Kurdish Cabinet at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Science (Institút vostokovédenija Rossíjskoj akadémii naúk) in Moscow, who sadly passed away at her place of work on 23rd October, 2013. Over four decades Professor Zhigalina made an immense contribution to the field of Kurdology and the modern history of the Kurds, and her work continues to resonate in this field.

Ol'ga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890-1955) has recently emerged from oblivion in the Soviet Union and in the west. In the Soviet Union, she has gained renown for the extraordinary diversity of her scholarly interests, from classical philology to a broad range of topics in theoretical poetics. In the west she is now known for her correspondence with her cousin, Boris Pasternak, and as the author of voluminous memoir notes, Probeg zhizni. The epistolary part of Freidenberg's archive was published in Russian and in English by Elliott Mossman in The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg: 1910-1954.

The pagan (and future saint) Ol'ga's revenge on the Derevlians as described in thePovest' vremennykh lethas intrigued generations of readers of early East Slavic literature. Using evidence from roughly contemporary Germanic sources, Francis Butler argues that Ol'ga uses intelligence and verbal dexterity to achieve good ends (the protection of her son and the defense of her people) without violating the strictures placed on women by her society. The early East Slavs seem to have disliked the idea of women as warriors but not to have seen women as intellectually inferior to men. Moreover, they regarded women's use of intelligence praiseworthy if it benefited their people, as Ol'ga's did. Ol'ga's gender prevented the chroniclers from portraying her as a warrior-ruler, thereby forcing them to create one of the most striking depictions in thePovest'.

In Russia, the memory of the Second World War has been at once deeply personal and profoundly political. Largely erased from official memory until Stalin's death, the story of the war became, in the 1960s, a key means of legitimizing the Soviet state. The mythic "20 million"—more recent estimates are closer to 30 million war dead—became the heart of a lasting and state-sanctioned collective memory of shared suffering, patriotism, and redemption. As historian Nina Tumarkin has argued, the official "cult" of the war began to crumble in the mid-1980s, and what she calls "raw human memory," personal stories untainted by the myth created from above, began to emerge. Tumarkin contends that the "winds of glasnost' and perestroika" effectively "ravaged" both the state-sanctioned "myth" and the "shared memory" of the Great Patriotic War. Personal tragedies began to replace the official tale of national triumph.

Wenngleich es den linksradikalen Strömungen bislang nicht gelungen ist, sich eine neue ideologische Grundlage und eine breitere gesellschaftliche Basis zu verschaffen, so existieren im gegenwärtigen Rußland doch zahlreiche anarchistische, terroristische und neobolschewistische Gruppen, deren Organisationsstrukturen und Aktivitäten in dem Beitrag näher dargestellt werrden. Trotz bislang fehlender klar umrissener programmatischer Grundlagen und starker Führerfiguren kann der Linksradikalismus in Rußland nach Meinung der Autorin angesichts der durch den Reformprozeß aufgeworfenen politischen, wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Probleme jederzeit gesellschaftlich virulent werden. In diesem Zusammenhang werden einige mögliche Varianten eines Erstarkens des Linksradikalismus in Rußland - traditioneller Linksradikalismus, linker Nationalismus, ökologischer Linksradikalismus, jugendlicher Linksradikalismus - diskutiert. (BIOst-Mrk)