Contenu du sommaire

Wladimir Berelowitch, The ancient and the new: the life of the Russian village under the NEP as per Soviet monographs of the time. At the time of the NEP, Soviet villages had been the subject of different monographs bearing on all aspects of rural life, in most cases on the scale of the volost'. These monographs, which combine precise information with personal impressions and comments of peasants, constitute irreplaceable evidence bearing on changes that occurred in the Russian countryside. Utilizing this little-explored source, the author endeavors to establish the constants. The analysis attempts to show that the "ancient" is still very much alive and that the "new" that the research workers endeavor to define is mostly mythical: the differentiation of peasants is very slight, the Soviet institutions are but barely implanted, the political influences practically non-existent, and the Church still present. But against the background of deep social changes (propulsion towards instruction, unsettling of the family...), new elements tend to appear (school of atheism, anti-adult Komsomols...) announcing the revolution of 1929.

John P. Le Donne, The territorial reform of the Russian Empire. 1775-1796. II: The borderlands, 1777-1796. This article traces the extension of the territorial reform to the lands annexed from the Polish Commonwealth, Little Russia, New Russia, the Orenburg Territory and Siberia. Its thesis is that the reform very substantially increased the number of administrative-territorial units and their staffs, thus facilitating the process of governing and opening a large number of positions to be filled by landowners and demobilized officers. The new gubernii were created around the Polish voevodstva and the Little Russian territorial regiments. The criteria for drawing the boundaries of the new gubernii and uezdy continued to be geographical and economic, as in Great Russia, and the resulting shapes, often so different from those of the territories before their incorporation into the empire, reflected a concern for the creation of stable boundaries. The reform virtually abolished political and administrative regions, a policy reflecting the convergence of interests between the Great Russian nobility, the polonized shliakhta and the Cossack starshina.

Janet Martin, Muscovy's northeastern expansion: the context and a cause. Muscovite expansion to the northeast occurred in two stages. The first, which resulted in the annexation of the Vychegda-Vym' region in the fourteenth century, was an outgrowth of Muscovy's relations with Novgorod. The second, which took place in the latter half of the fifteenth century, led to the subordination of Viatka, Perm' Velikaia, and some of the Voguly and Iugra tribes as far away as the Ob' river. The second stage was closely connected with two competing influences, Muscovy's relations with the Khanate of Kazan' and its internal relations with Ustiug. An examination of the chronicle accounts of the measures taken to subordinate the peoples on the Viatka, upper Kama, and Ob' rivers suggests that these episodes were initiated by Ustiug. That northern trade center was evidently trying to secure a trade route that would link it via Cherdyn' to the fur-supplying northeastern tribes; that route would bypass Ustiug's rival, Kazan'. Moscow, which benefited from the ventures through the receipt of tribute payments in sable from the subordinated tribes, supported Ustiug's drive to the northeast despite the fact that it provoked hostile responses from Kazan'. But Moscow withdrew its support after 1487, when the assumption of the Kazan' throne by a pro-Muscovite khan altered the nature of Muscovy's relations with its Tatar neighbors. Those relations then took precedence over Ustiug's pressures as a determinant of Muscovy's northeastern policies. Moscow, with the exception of a few incidents that occurred when its relations with Kazan' were strained, refrained from pursuing its aggressive policies in the northeast well into the sixteenth century.

IL'ia Serman, Lomonosov and Boileau (a matter of literary orientation). The outset of modern Russian literature (from the end of the 1720's to the 1730's) and the part played by its founders - Kante- mir, Trediakovskii, Lomonosov - cannot be understood without taking into consideration the European and more particularly the French literary context. The polemics caused by the theoretical writings of Boileau and his translation of Longin led Lomonosov to a solution to the problem arising from the elaboration of the poetical language, which was tested by him in 1742-1743. Lomonosov, a disciple of the Slav-Greek-Latin Academy of Moscow, was well aware of the difference between the secular literary language, the Church Slavonic and the "seething" (according to the term used by Pushkin) spoken Russian language. He combined the sublime language of the Bible with the noble thematic of the ode and created a new language apportioning scientifically the Slavonic and the spoken Russian. The part played by Boileau's heirloom and the discussion around his writings explain also the literary itinerary of Lomonosov.

Maksudov, The national composition of the Red Army according to the 1920 census. The 1920 census, as it bears on the composition of the Red Army, contributes an answer to the following question: to whom are the Bolsheviks indebted for their victory in the Civil War? It seems that it is the peasants and the workers of the Central districts of Russia who constituted the bulk of the Red Army. On the other hand, the peoples of the borderlands of the Empire (Ukraine, Bielorussia, Poland, Baltic countries, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia), who constituted practically one half of the Russian population, represented only one tenth of the Red Army troops. Foreign war prisoners (Hungarians, Czechoslovakians, Serbs, Chinese, etc.), who amounted to about 3 million in Russia, in 1917, counted only a few thousand within the Red Army in 1920 and played an even smaller part in the operations. Such a distribution of the forces of the Russian Empire during the years of the Civil War can be explained by the national interests of the peoples of the borderlands, by the help they received from Western countries, and by a greater receptivity of the Russian population with regard to the main Bolshevik slogans: peace and land.

Gerhard Podskalsky, Contribution of Kiev's metropolitans, of bishops and monks of Greek origin to the original old Russian literature (theology), 988-1281. Contrary to the growingly nationalist - and therefore anti- Greek - attitude characterizing the Russian state at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times, the Kievan culture (988-1237, or even 1281) is unimaginable without the literary contribution of Byzantine hierarchs, even when reduced to theological polemics — of which they have the monopoly - and to canon law. Works that deserve special mention because of their extensive scope of views are those of Metropolitans of Kiev, John II (Ioann, 1076/77-1089), Nicephorus I (Nikifor, 1104-1121), and also of Theodosius the Greek (Feodosii, 12th century), abbot of the Kievan Monastery of the Caves. This group of authors, which had never been studied until now and whose importance had never been stressed or was under-estimated by the Soviet research, constitutes nevertheless one fifth of the known authors of that period; it is principally they who are responsible for the spiritual break between Russia and the West before the Mongol invasion.