Contenu du sommaire : Russie, Empire russe, URSS, États indépendants

Regionalism and constitutional reform, 1819-1826.
The topic of this article is four projects of a territorial restructuring of the Russian empire along regional lines : those of Novosiltsev, Speranskii, and two Decembrists : Muravev and Pestel. These projects are used to demonstrate that political regionalism went much further than the 1816 project discussed in a previous article and the timid attempt made in the 1820s to create a regional administration in the whole empire. It also shows how unrealistic they were, except for one, that of Speranskii, which took effect in Siberia. This third article 1 ends with an analysis of the difficulties encountered by imperial administrators in their effort to reconcile concentrated with deconcentrated administration, and hints at the problem which Vladimir Putin will face in his attempts to create a new regional administration in the Russian Federation.

A representation of Moscow halfway between the standardized description typical of the Enlightenment and the search for Russian singularity : Engelbrecht Wichelhausen's medical topography (1803).This article analyzes the content and organization of a medical text written about Moscow during the Enlightenment. One should expect from such a text that it fit into the classifications of the Enlightenment and that it meet its readers' need to understand the Russian difference. We successively study the author's -- the German doctor Wichelhausen's -- legitimation strategies, his different readings of the object “city” and his arguments. The result is paradoxical : Wichelhausen sees Moscow as a city of the Enlightenment just like any other, which can bear comparison with other European and Russian cities, but which can also be fundamentally different and point to potential changes in Russia.

Between town and country. Peasant households and their occupations in Russian economic statistics, 1861-1926.How is one to evaluate the Russian peasant's different occupations (agricultural and non-agricultural, occasional or for extra income) and distinguish him from a rural craftsman ? This question is crucial for the evaluation of economic dynamics and the way they fit in institutional classifications of social classes (“estates” -- sosloviia in tsarist times, “classes” under the Soviets). In this respect, the problem does not concern Russia alone but any country in the midst of industrialization and deruralization. Thus, after a preliminary survey of the main terms of the debate on proto-industrialization, the present article starts with an account of the difficulties one encounters in defining the categories mentioned in the major Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias from the late eighteenth century to the present. The author then studies the debates over these very same definitions that occurred in zemstva, societies and major institutions (ministries, commissariats) dealing with economics and statistics between 1861 and 1926. The author presents the origins of this predicament and its consequences on adopted policies.

A science without subject ? Soviet ethnography in the 1920s and 1930s and the stakes of ethnic classification. This article explores the means used by Soviet ethnography as it strove for legitimacy in the 1920s and 1930s. The determination of most Soviet ethnographers in perpetuating their discipline through the study of ethnicity turned out to be more problematic than expected. For they had to take into account the ever-increasing so-called Marxist categories and see to the accreditation of the great variety of categories and of the modes of representation and promotion specific to the discipline. They were thus led into a conflict centered on the definition of ethnicity. Paradoxically, after having been first rejected -- undoubtedly as part of the public repudiation inflicted to non-Marxist ethnology --, the study of ethnicity and the presentation of its identifying “markers” eventually coalesced with the Marrist scientific project that progressively absorbed Soviet ethnography in the 1930s.

Did members of the former bourgeoisie find “great opportunities” or new problems in the NEP?
This article deals with one of the least studied aspects of Soviet social history. The author uses a large body of sources, some of which appear in scientific research for the first time. She addresses the question of the NEP's contribution to members of the former bourgeoisie : were the “great economic opportunities” promised by the authorities real or fictitious ? To what extent did the economic concessions made to private capital go along with political concessions ? The author convincingly demonstrates that the NEP period was characterized by a constant opposition of two tendencies, economic and political liberalization on the one hand, and the maintenance (and in some cases the harshening) of ideological dictatorship on the other. Ignoring or underestimating any of these two tendencies would be an inadmissible simplification of historical reality.

Karl Radek and the Bureau of International Information of the CPSU's Central Committee, 1932-1934.
This article studies the short-lived history of the Bureau of International Information (BMI) of the CPSU's Central Committee. The creation of this bureau can be explained by a crisis in the activities of regular foreign policy institutions in the early 1930s as well as by a growing tendency towards authoritarianism, the tightening of Stalin's control over the activities of party and state organs. According to the author, the BMI was rather the informal institution of Stalin's personal plenipotentiary than a regular administration. Therefore, the analysis deals mainly with the activities of the BMI's director Karl Radek. From 1932 to 1934, these activities were primarily focused on political relations between the USSR, Poland and Germany. Radek developed a concept of Soviet foreign policy that he placed at the core of his negotiations with Pi¬sudski's representatives. This concept aimed at establishing a sound collaboration between the USSR and Poland based on their anti-German sentiment, and at turning Poland from a major potential enemy of the Soviet Union into a strategic partner. The defeat of Radek's ideas and the crisis that took place in the Soviet-Polish rapprochement in late 1933 and early 1934 brought about the decline of his influence and of that of the BMI. The bureau definitely closed in 1936. The analysis is based on Soviet and Polish archival documents and printed diplomatic documents and memoirs.

The alteration of place names and the construction of national identity in Soviet Armenia.
The Soviet practice of altering place names to serve political ends is well known. The Armenian SSR presents an interesting example of this practice, as it was systematically applied there, and at the same time served the nationalist agenda. Due to mass deportations of the Armenian population by Shah Abbas in the seventeenth century, most Armenian place names had already been replaced by Turkic toponyms when Armenia became a part of the USSR in 1921. The most prominent feature in the successive toponymic change is a practically complete reversal to the Armenian toponymic landscape in the Armenian SSR. The motivation for such a practice was nurtured by the anti-Turkish sentiments harbored by the Armenian society following the genocide of Armenians in 1915. Soviet authorities found these sentiments preferable to potential separatist and anti-Soviet tendencies. Nonetheless, at the same time the policy of place-naming remained closely controlled by Moscow bureaucrats and conditioned by the general ideological and political climate, under which the restoration of the original Armenian place-names became impossible due to their commonly religious character. As a result, the new place-names were frequently Armenian in form but Soviet in meaning. The article thus reveals a system of latent nationalist policies aimed at constructing a national identity acceptable within the Soviet ideological framework.