Contenu du sommaire

John P. Le Donne, The guberniia procuracy during the reign of Catherine II, 1764-1796. The purpose of this article is to discuss a little known subject. A first part draws a composite portrait of the guberniia procurator before and after the provincial reforms of the 1770s — his origin, his place in the apparatus, his appointment and length of service. A second part analyzes his responsibilities — legal adviser, defender of the law; his role in the initiation of future legislation; guardian of the state's fiscal interest; his crucial role in reconciling Russian and local laws in the borderlands, and the resulting political problems. A third part examines the relationships between the procurator and the governor or governor general after the reforms; this latter relationship provides valuable insights in the operation of Russian local government. The conflict between the governor general of Kursk and Orel and the Kursk procurator is given as an illustration.

Corinne Gaudin, The zemskie nachal'niki in the village: administrative customs and peasant culture in Russia, 1889-19I4. When the Russian government created the institution of land captain in 1889, it revived a paternalist and tutelary conception of government authority in the hope of solving the perennial problem of under-administration of the countryside. In practice, however, the broad discretionary powers attributed to the new official were applied with little coherence or consistency. Alternatively overworked, indifferent, or insufficiently knowledgeable about local conditions, few land captains supervised, regulated or molded rural society as effectively as the government had hoped. Access to the village remained in the hands of elected and hired peasant officials, whose mix of ignorance and classic passive resistance frustrated attempts to incorporate peasant institutions of self-government into a regular ladder of bureaucratic authority. The land captains, in their role as arbitrator did, however, accelerate the penetration into the village of outside authority and official concerns. The resultant superimposition of various administrative cultures, peasant, bureaucratic and paternalistic, posed particular problems for the coherent application of the Stolypin reforms.

Aleksandr Etkind, Adjustment in the context: five fragments of Lev Vygotskii's intellectual biography. The first period of Vygotskii's intellectual biography is the least studied one. His first works to be published have been his articles on the Jewish question in Russia. The ulterior evolution of these ideas can be observed in his theory on defect and over-compensation. The young Vygotskii should be studied in conjunction with philologists-post-Symbolists; his relations with Mandel 'shtam are particularly important. On basis of material found in the archives and of analogy with an episode of Jean Piaget's biography, it is endeavored to reconstruct Vygotskii's relations with Sabine Spielrein. In the early 1920's Vygotskii was intellectually and politically influenced by Trotskii which appears in his written works and in the orientation of the institutions with which he was linked. When Vygotskii is replaced in his historical and cultural context, the image of this Soviet period personality is greatly changed.

Benjamin Pinkus, The share of the extra-territorial national minorities in the political and public life of the Soviet Union, 1917-1939. In this article, based on a great amount of historical and statistical data, we analyze the share of the extra-territorial national minorities in the Russian revolutionary movement, the October Revolution and the political and public life of the Soviet Union in the years 1917- 1939. The process of sovietization of the national minorities was done in all three sections of the Soviet government: the Communist Party, the parliamentary representative institutions and the administration. Three main groups of extra-territorial national minorities were found in the Soviet Union as far as their share in the government is concerned: the over-represented minorities (Jews and Latvians), the proportionally represented ones (Poles and Koreans), and the under-represented ones (Germans, Bulgars and Greeks).

Marta Craveri, The crisis of Gulag: the revolt of Kengir of 1954 as per the documents of MVD. According to the documents of the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), preserved in the Central Archives of Moscow (GARF, GULag fund) and thanks to certain oral information, the author reconstructs the events that took place in 1954 at the occasion of the revolt of prisoners in the Kengir special camp, part of the Steplag of Kazakhstan. This study analyzes the main causes of the Gulag crisis after the Second World War and, on the other hand, the part played by various nationalities in triggering troubles and the impact of this revolt (and of the others that preceded it) on the Soviet concentration system.

Sergei N. Iskiul', An unpublished study by the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich: "The Empress Elisaveta Alekseevna ". One of the historical works of the Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich is an extensive biography of the Empress Elisaveta Alekseevna, wife of Alexander I, published in St. Petersburg in 1908-1909. A chapter entitled "The only romance of the Empress", pertaining to her private life, had remained unpublished till now. Its proofs have been found among the documents preserved by the State Historical Archive in St. Petersburg (RGIA), accompanied by a short biographic note handwritten by the Grand Duke. It is this document that we publish here.