Contenu du sommaire

Bernard Doumerc, Venetians in La Tana (Azov) in the fifteenth century. In the early fifteenth century, Italian merchants - especially the Genovese and the Venetians — frequently visit La Tana for trade purposes. The organization of the Venetian district willed by the state encountered some opposition from local authorities. During the first half of the fifteenth century, the everyday life of Venetians established in La Tana deteriorated because of the renewal of hostilities with the Genovese. Furthermore, the existence of Venetian establishments in the Black Sea was rendered precarious by the advance of Turks. Even before the fall of Constantinople, the Venetian trading post of La Tana lost its attractiveness because of the reorganization of commercial circuits in the East and patricians desired first and foremost to retrieve their goods while this was still possible.

Isabel de Madariaga, Who was Foy de la Neuville ? This article attempts to establish the identity of the author of the Relation curieuse de la Moscovie, which was published under the name of Foy de la Neuville. The identification with Adrien Baillet is rejected, and La Neuville is placed firmly in the Polish court. His presence as Polish envoy in England and France is substantiated, and it is suggested that he also acted as a Polish agent on his visit to Russia in 1689. His sources of information about events in Russia are briefly discussed and some doubts are raised about his description of the views of Prince V.V. Golitsyn, since the only language the two men could converse in was Latin.

John Keep, Justice for the troops: a comparative study of Nicholas I's Russia and France under Louis-Philippe. Military justice is an essential ingredient of any stale's repressive machinery. Under the absolutist rule of the militaristic tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) the Russian system lagged behind that of France under the "bourgeois king" Louis-Philippe. There was no control by any civilian law agency and. courts martial had jurisdiction over many categories of civilian offenders and offences. In France, by contrast, the principle of civilian supremacy was recognized and widely enforced. Russian preliminary investigations and courts martial were conducted largely by officers without legal training or specified functions, whereas their French counterparts possessed a ramified administrative structure designed to easure that justice was duly rendered; a defendant could call on an advocate, which in Russia was possible only in summary trials under accelerated procedure, and defendants were at the prosecution's mercy; trials were held in secret on the basis of written documents; verdicts were often arrived at arbitrarily, for reviewers might redefine the charge and raise penalties. These were barbarous and frequently involved severe corporal punishment. The lot of Siberian exiles is compared with that of French bagnards and detainees in penal units. Deserters were treated less severely in France, partly for political reasons, and acquittal was much more likely since Frenchmen had a developed legal consciousness which Russians were only beginning to acquire.

Guy Imart, Victoria Imart, The procurator, the native and the block: a "hatchet stew". The block: a new explosive novel by the Kirghiz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, author of Djamila. A "positive hero", believer and preacher, an ecological message, disclosure on drugs in USSR! A miracle of glasnost' ? What if the author under the cover of a perfectly orthodox veneer, gave voice - a few months before the Alma Ata troubles — to certain national concerns of members of the minority tired of the Slav and the Muslim integrisme that hem them in?

Wladimir Berelowitch, A voice from underground. Unpublished diary of Ivan Ivanovich Shitts. We are giving here a few passages from the unpublished diary of a Muscovite professor, written between March 1928 and August 1931. This liberal, then sixty-three or sixty-four years old, friend of Professor André Mazon, comments on the events that he sees around him and even on those about which he learnt from the press: stories connected with collectivization, Amanullakh-khan's visit to Moscow, and the Shakhty trial, destruction of churches, purges of schools, attacks against universities..., all these phenomena the general atmosphere of which is described by this diary. A unique document for this period, it revives for us this new Russian revolution seen by a man belonging to former Russia.