Contenu du sommaire

Ioannis Sinanoglou, The Eugène Petit mission, the French socialist party and the February Revolution. Eugène Petit was an acute observer of the Russian crisis during 1916-1918 and, in the crucial summer of 1917, one of the most influential. Despite an obscure post in the French Munitions Mission in Petrograd, Petit's intimate knowledge of Russian liberal and socialist circles as well as his close ties with socialist minister Albert Thomas assured him ready access both to the Comité de Guerre and to the parliamentary leadership of the French socialist party. In June 1917, at the end of Thomas' second Russian mission, Petit became the liaison officer between the socialist minister of Armaments and the leaders of the Russian Provisional Government. Against the background of Petit's reports, the article explores official French assumptions about the evolution of Russia's wartime crisis before the Bolshevik uprising and the political repercussions in France of the issue raised by the February Revolution. An already divided SFIO attempted to mediate between republican France and revolutionary Russia, focusing its efforts on two questions brought to the fore by Russian socialists: the revision of wartime treaties among the Allies and the convening of an international socialist conference in Stockholm to formulate a socialist peace programme. Albert Thomas and Eugène Petit occupied pivotal positions in the socialist party's misguided effort to attenuate Russia's social and economic crises through political means. The immediate results in France were a deeper schism within the socialist party and the erosion of the party's political standing that accompanied the spectacular failure of its Russian policy. For the party had staked much of its political credit on the prospect of Russia's military revival under moderate socialist leadership.

Hans Rogger, Government, Jews, peasants, and land in post-emancipation Russia. In the vast body of legislation that governed Imperial Russia's treatment of its Jewish population, nothing was adhered to with more persistence or stringency than the laws, rules and regulations restricting the rights of Jews to live, as well as to own or lease land, in the rural districts of the country. Even when the upheaval of war made necessary the abandonment of the Pale of Settlement — that prime source and symbol of the inferior status of the Jews — the countryside remained closed to them. A discriminatory policy which was so sharply focused and so long maintained had to be rooted in more than traditional prejudices, the more so since it conflicted on occasion with the fiscal interests of the State and more often with those of the landed gentry. Our investigation concludes that it is in the nexus between the Jewish and the agrarian problems — that is, in the way in which these problems were perceived (and related) by Russian officials — that the explanation for their tenacious resistance to expanding Jewish rights in the countryside must be sought. Anti-Jewish bias joined with a paternalistic and fearful attitude toward the peasantry to place severe limits on Jewish emancipation and to rationalize the maintenance of legal discrimination.

Gérard Abensour, Art and politics. Tour of the Meyerhold Theatre in Paris in 1930. On basis of articles and critical reviews published at the time in French, German and Russian newspapers, the author endeavours to revive the atmosphere of the Meyerhold Theatre in Paris in 1930. After a stormy tour in Germany foreshadowed by its established reputation as iconoclast and revolutionary, this Theatre presents disconcerting versions of two classical works of the Russian repertory: The Revizor of Gogol's and The Forest of Ostrovskij 's. Whilst in Moscow starts for Meyerhold an era of friction with a bureaucracy that does not acknowledge him as corresponding to its image, he hopes to achieve a brilliant success in Paris with the vanguard public. Unfortunately and in spite of the interest of Gaston Baty, Louis Jouvet and Charles Dullin, his much too personal conception of a "popular" theatre will not arouse immediate response. It is only in the post-war period that the ideas of Meyerhold will penetrate in the theory and practice of the French theatre.

Florence Barale, Social groups and classes in Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1925 through contemporary films. The object of this short study is to present the record of Russian cinema of the years 1917-1925 on the society of the time. During the civil war, it is the figure of the soldier of the Red Army, in its double part of public and hero of propaganda and news films that dominates the motion pictures production. The peasant is a man that has to be attached at all price to the regime. The success of the Bolsheviks depends upon his adhesion as well as provisioning of towns devastated by famine where the working class is numerically weakened. With the NEP appear new social types; the kulak who endeavours to oppose progress of the countryside and encounters the resistance of poor peasants; the nepman whose bourgeois mentality has to be tolerated by the State, since it needs private commerce; youth educated in communist organizations of pioneers and of the Komsomol, the directing part played by the Party united around its chief, Lenin, guaranteeing the preservation of revolutionary ideals. The text is supplemented by figures on the cinematographic production and a filmography for the years 1917 to 1921.

Gabriel Gorodetsky, The Soviet Union and Britain's general strike of May 1926. The article examines the intensive diplomatic activities of the Soviet trade unions, which built on the theoretical foundations laid by Comintern by approaching British non-communist workers in an attempt to channel their solidarity into pressure on the British Government of the day. The alliance culminating in the formation of a joint committee, assumed a prominent position in Soviet diplomatic calculations. The general strike of 1926 put to an acid test the concepts underlying Soviet policy-making; it remained to be seen to what degree were the Russians prepared to pursue the diplomatic advantages embodied in the united front with the Trades Union Congress; whom they blamed for betraying class interests. The need to preserve the Soviet leadership's status as the avant-garde of world revolution without sacrificing national interests resulted in drastic revision of the relations between Comintern and Narkomindel.

Andreas Kappeler, The ethnogenesis of the Tatar, Chuvash, Mordv, Mari, and Udmurt peoples of the Middle-Volga in the Soviet research. The ethnogenetic research in USSR passed through several phases. Marked in the years 20 by nationalistic tendencies, it was replaced in the years 40 by a more systematic research in which participated archeologists, ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists. This research was first dominated by the theories of Marr until 1950, then an intense ethnogenetic discussion took place. The origin of peoples of the USSR continued to give rise to great debates until this day. The present study is devoted to problems pertaining to the origin of five ethnic groups of the Middle- Volga, in particular to the great dispute between Tatar and Chuvash research workers pertaining to the "inheritance" of the Bulgarians of the Volga.