Contenu du sommaire

Leonid Heller, Necro, retro or post ? modernisms, modernity and socialist realism. In this article, the author takes a stand in a discussion engaged over the last few years on the current situation of Western and Soviet art. First, it re-assesses several meanings of the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism", as well as the connections that various theoreticians (Lyotard, Habermas, Meschonnic, Compagnon) establish between modernist and vanguard aesthetics. Then, after a short analysis of S. Groys's stance - according to whom socialist realism achieves the fundamental postulates of Russian vanguard - two methodological propositions are stated. The first one concerns the extension of historical perspective beyond the mere confrontation between the vanguard and socialist realism: the examination must go back to the origins of "modernism" and demonstrate the eventual break or, on the contrary, the continuation of the latter. The second proposition advocates the shaping of an analytical approach along the lines determined by what could be termed a "cultural paradigm". Russian modernist paradigm is briefly described and an attempt is made to explain the changing relationship between turn-of-the-century modernism, socialist realism and the "post-totalitarian" art.

Michael Jabara Carley, Five kopecks for five kopecks: Franco-Soviet trade negotiations, 1928-1939. This article - which is based on French and British archives as well as the Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR - is an account of Franco-Soviet trade negotiations during the 1930's. The article focuses on the political context of the negotiations, the issue of the Tsarist debts, and the opposition of the Ministry of Finance and the Banque de France (i.e., the mur d'argent) to a Franco-Soviet trade agreement. Hatred of Communism motivated opposition from the Banque de France and Finance Ministry bureaucracies in spite of lobbying from French industrialists who favoured a trade agreement with the USSR. These negotiations are a little known episode in the lamentable history of appeasement during the 1930's.

Susan Gross Solomon, The demographic argument in Soviet debates over the legalization of abortion in the 1920s. The signing of the Soviet edict of November 1920 legalizing abortion on social as well as medical grounds provoked intense criticism from within the Russian medical community. Curiously, the demographic argument against abortion, so widespread in other countries of Europe at this time, played almost no role in the Soviet physicians' critique of legalization; until the early 1930's, the doctors attacked the new policy primarily on the grounds that abortion, legal or illegal, had harmful effects on the female organism. This paper argues that the focus of the Soviet physician's critique was shaped by the terms under which the state granted physicians authority over the performance of abortion in 1920. In support of this argument, the paper draws on three different bodies of writing about problems of fertility in Soviet Russia - debates by Soviet physicians over contraception, discussions by Soviet demographers of abortion, and evaluations by German demographers of the impact of legalizing abortion on the Soviet birth rate.

Götz Hillig, How A.S. Makarenko discovered the family. Regarding the history of genesis and impact of the Book for parents (1936-1939). This article will examine the questions, - which have received little attention from researchers -, of the way the Soviet educator and writer A.S. Makarenko has composed his Book for parents and the way it has been edited and later on received by the pedagogical and literary critique. In this context the question will also be discussed, why Makarenko who in the twenties had attached no value to the family as a pedagogical institution, decided in the middle of the thirties to write a manual for parents to help them educate their children. In addition to published sources, the author was able to draw on materials from archives, as well as statements from witnesses.

Annie Epelboin, Of hair and fur. On the figure of the bear in Platonov's Foundation pit. The enigma of the bear in The foundation pit lies in the ambivalence of his fur: does it signify a humanized animal, or a dehumanized man? This sign refers us to other abnormally hairy characters in works written between 1929 and 1934 (Elisei, Nastia's mother, and later Lichtenberg in Rubbish wind/Musornyi veter). In varying degrees, at that tragic turning point of Russian history, they represent the impossibility of surviving while keeping one's integrity and conscience intact. As virtual victor in the class struggle, sole survivor of this individual and mass destruction, he is the metaphorical hero of the Russian proletariat. And he presents us with a reverse image of the Siberian myth of the bear as founding father, heralding the age of the great regression.