Contenu du sommaire

Janet Martin, The Novgorod uškujniki : merchants or marauders? During the second half of the fourteenth century, while a struggle for control over the Middle Volga was being waged, Novgorodian uškujniki conducted a series of expeditions to that region. Previous interpreters have characterized these expeditions as plundering, piratical attacks. An analysis of the accounts of the uškujniki in the Russian Chronicles, however, indicates that there were two reasons for the expeditions. The violent raids on Kostroma, Žukotin, and Vjatka were intended to protect Novgorod's monopoly over its northern hinterland from northeastern Russian and Bulgar encroachment. Other raids were directed against Bulgar and Nižnij-Novgorod, the main commercial centers on the Middle Volga. When successful, those raids were followed by peaceful, commercial expeditions, and it was in response to those ventures precisely that the local Russian and Tatar authorities made their most determined efforts to subdue the uškujniki. This pattern suggests that the second reason for the uškujniki raids was to force the commercial centers of the Middle Volga to allow Novgorodians direct access to the Volga- Kama trading system.

Paul Bushkovitch, Urban ideology in medieval Novgorod: an iconographic approach. This article is an attempt to define the ideology of the merchant class of medieval Novgorod by using the evidence of a fourteenth-century icon. It concentrates on the cult of St. Paraskeva Piatnitsa and other saints depicted on the same icon. The vitae of these saints show that urban ideology developed in two stages. In the twelfth century the merchant class began to have its own peculiar cults and thus express its separateness, but at the same time it found its ideals in the rulers of Novgorod society — boyars and clerics. In the fourteenth century social unrest and the appearance of heresy provoked a response of conservatism.

John P. Le Donne, Appointments to the Russian Senate, 1762-1796. The Russian Senate remained until the end of the eighteenth century the major coordinating agency of domestic administration and the study of its membership helps to identify a substantial segment of the ruling group. It has been found that Catherine appointed one hundred and thirty-two senators during her reign and that most of these men can be classified into two family groups : the one related to the Panin family whose major figure in this period, Nikita, was the dominant influence on Russian foreign policy in the early years of the reign, and the other related to the Viazemskii and Trubetskoi families with which the post of Procurator-General was associated for more than half a century.

Mihnea Berindei and Gilles Veinstein, Regulations of Süleyman the First concerning the livâ' of Kefe. The present article deals with unpublished regulations contained in the Istanbul Archives pertaining to certain towns of the Ottoman province of Kefe: Kefe (Caffa), Kerš (Vosporo), Qopa (Сора), Taman (Matriga), Azaq (Tana). These documents given here in facsimile, with their French translation and accompanied by a glossary of technical terms and an index, serve to determine the Ottoman fiscal system in this region. They contain extensive information on taxes, their nature, their amounts, units of measure and means of transport on which such taxes are based as well as information on economic activities on which they bear. This information enabled us to draw up in the introduction a table of commercial currents and of production in this region. This table leads to the conclusion that though under Süleyman the First the Northern region of the Black Sea was no longer the turn-table of international trade as in the times of the Genovese colonies and of Pax Mongolica — a position it had moreover lost in the second half of the XIVth century — it still remained a scene of active trade, noted already at former periods, for numerous local products (cereals, slaves, hides and skins, salt, fish, caviar, etc.) plied between Istanbul, Anatolia, Tatar and Cherkess countries and the Abkhaz coast, in which merchants of Western Europe continued to play a certain part.

Michel Mervaud, Two unpublished letters from Turgenev to Natalie Herzen (Tata). The two short letters from Turgenev to Natalie Herzen that we present belong to the collection of Mr. Mario Rist. Dated respectively 26th September and 4th October 1875, they are to be added to the seven other notes, already known, that I. S. Turgenev wrote to "Tata" between 1870 and 1876. By this opportunity, we want to remember the little that is known about the relations between Turgenev and Natalie Herzen.

Francis Conte, Around the polemic Rakovskii-Stalin concerning the question of nationalities, 1921-1923. The article analyzes a significant episode which marked the transformation of the Soviet state into a Union of Socialist Soviet Republics between 1922 and 1923. It observes and examines a fundamental disagreement: the one that opposed Christian Rakovskii, president of the Council of the commissars of the people of the SSR of Ukraine, member of the Central Committee of the Russian communist party, to Stalin. Rakovskii advocated supple and representative institutions which, in his opinion, were to ensure a "democratic" centralism and accused Stalin of creating a system of "bureaucratic" centralism, the disastrous consequences of which he foresaw. The author endeavours to demonstrate that this opposition of principles can be understood only in connection with the evolution of the meaning that Bolsheviks attached to the concepts of internationalism, nationalism and bureaucracy in the light of the world revolution.