Contenu du sommaire

Charles J. Halperin. Novgorod and the "Novgorodian Land." Although scholars continue to study the medieval city-state of Novgorod, little attention has been devoted to Novgorod's ideology. Despite its appearance in book and article titles and scholarly prose, the phrase "the Novgorodian Land" (Novgorodskaia zemlia) has not been adequately studied. Historians assign it a geographic meaning ranging from Novgorod-city to the entire Novgorodian Empire; it can also refer to a group of people, usually military. The vagueness of the term masks the fact that it was not used ideologically: Novgorodians did not fight for, or make treaties in the name of the Novgorodian Land. Other terms, "the Novgorodian region" (oblasť) and "the Novgorod district/districts" ( volost'/volosti), also occur with the same range of usage as the "Novgorodian Land." Novgorodskaia zemlia only occurs rarely in Novgorodian chronicles, and erratically, in non-ideological contexts, in Novgorod's treaties. Therefore, the "Novgorodian Land" was a phrase, not a concept, parallel to the russkaia zemlia and other "land" terminology. Those concepts were always connected to dynastic lines; perhaps Novgorod did not develop an ideology of the "Novgorodian Land" because of the unique attribute of its political structure, the absence of a dynastic line.

Svetlana Goršenina. Russian and French archeologists' first steps in Russian Turkestan, 1870- 1890. This article presents the pioneers of archeological research in Russian Turkestan between the years 1870 and 1890 - among others, Borzenkov, Krestovskii, Veselovskii, Chaffanjon - before the more systematic era ushered in by the foundation in 1896 of the Turkestani Circle of Archeology Lovers and the appearance of Viatkin and Barthold. The key site was already Afrasiab, the site of pre-Mongolian Samarkand. Cursory digging went hand in hand with systematic collecting of antiquities picked up on the site and in local bazaars. The military encouraged the research out of interest for the region's past. The French archeologist Jean Chaffanjon's mission (1894-1895) must be reconsidered in this perspective. This archeologist was put at the center of a somber legend in Soviet historiography. He does not differ much from the other pioneers, whether by his lack of real digging methods or by his acquisition of a private collection (that of Barshchevskii - part of this collection constitutes the core of the Samarkand Museum). New research by the author of this article, conducted mainly in French archives, allows one to put the final touch on the rich portrait of this explorer with numerous interests, to understand his motivations and find out where his financial support came from, and finally, to assess his field work (which, in Central Asia, spread from Merv to Semirech'e).

Dorena Caroli. The social treatment of juvenile delinquency in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. This article studies the decriminalization of juvenile delinquency in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. Contrary to most European countries which treated juvenile delinquency within the framework of the judiciary, after the revolution, Soviet Russia initiated an administrative handling of child homelessness and juvenile delinquency carried out through social care services. The author was able to retrace the evolution of the commissions in charge of minors' affairs throughout the 1920s from legal sources, archive documents and the concrete cases appended to this article. These administrative commissions' role was to implement the Bolshevik state's medical and pedagogical measures, thereby depriving the judiciary of this function. One can make out three distinct stages in social policy regarding child homelessness and juvenile delinquency during the 1920s. The first, which corresponds to War Communism, was characterized by a centralized administrative modus operandi. After NEP, this changed into a joint administrative and judiciary operation. During the third and last stage, which corresponds to the collectivization and forced industrialization era, the commissions were bereft of real function, contenting themselves with divulging communist pedagogical information.

Maria Zalambani. Boris Arvatov, theoretician of productivism. Boris Arvatov is the most significant theorist of productivist art. The present article goes through the main stages of the evolution of his thought. Starting from his first theoretical formulations of a proletarian art (which resounds with echoes of Bogdanov's theory about Proletkurt), through his numerous contributions to the journals of the 1920s until the publication of his most significant works of 1926 and 1930, the author has taken into consideration the whole arvatovian corpus. She has studied its inner evolution in order to place it within the political and cultural debate of the period, concerning the genesis (and the necessity) of a productivist art. Arvatov's thought focuses on three main points: 1. work as a free and creative process; 2. identification of work, art and life; 3. the development of an art which is work and invades all human life, starting from time spent working, overflowing into free time and finally pervading private life. To carry out his plan, Arvatov puts his trusts in the rules of the scientific organization of work ( NOT) and creates the figure of the artist-engineer, supreme fusion of art and technique. Productivist art thus arises as an image and likeness of the working process in factories, perpetuates its norms and rules: vanguard art changes into a kind of perpetual working process.

Elisabeth Gessat-Anstett. The stakes involved in name attribution at the family and social levels. In Russia, a person's identity is indicated by several elements which vary both in nature and according to the rules governing their attribution and use. The present article, which is based on an ethnographic survey conducted in the region of Iaroslavl', focuses on the stakes involved in first-name (imia) and patronymic (otchestvo) attribution in the context of the family, and investigates the rales and strategies leading to onomastic recurrences. It seems indeed that in Central Russia, the name-giving process is part of a strategy which consists in providing a basis for the construction of a family's identity by giving prominence to a founding ancestor (rodonachal'nik). Once belonging to a filiation is marked by name attribution, it then guarantees an individual's integration in the larger social context.

Vladimir L. Genis. The Bolsheviks in Gilan: the overthrow of Kuchek Khan' s government. The Bolsheviks' arrival in northern Persia and the overthrow of Kuchek Khan's government in June and July 1920 are among the most dramatic episodes of the Gilan revolution of 1920-1921. First, the stationing of a red squadron in the Caspian sea port of Anzali together with the evacuation of the British garrison from Rasht, the capital of the Gilan province, had led to the proclamation on June 14, 1920 of the "Soviet Republic of Persia," whose head was Mirza Kuchek Khan, the leader of the Jangali nationalist partisans group. Moscow's intention was to set up a "Soviet-type" government without imposing a social revolution because it wanted to avoid the Jangalis' withdrawal from the struggle for national liberation. Thus, by supporting this revolution, the government of the RSFSR was seeking less a sovietization of the shah's empire than a way of pressuring the British government with the threat of a "red expansion" in Asia in order to bring Moscow and London to the negotiating table. At stake was the raising of the British embargo on the RSFSR in exchange for the cessation of the Russian offensive in the East. However, local communists opposed this "façade Sovietization" and fomented a plot against the "bourgeois democrat" Kuchek Khan. They successfully overthrew his government and replaced it with a puppet Re v kom which attempted to set up a land expropriation policy. This Revkom was able temporarily to remain in power thanks only to reinforcements in Russian and Azerbaijanian troops. The de facto occupation of Gilan, the population's hostility as well as a series of defeats on the front obliged Moscow to start negotiations with the shah's government. These negotiations led to the Soviet-Persian agreement of February 26, 1921, the evacuation of Russian troops, and the end of the Gilan Republic.

Cosroe Chaqueri. Did the Soviets play a role in founding the Tudeh party in Iran? The article deals with the establishment of the Tudeh in fall 1941 and the role the Soviets played. Based on documents from the Comintern archives, opened in 1992 and 1993, the article demonstrates that the theses sustained thus far by pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet writers are incorrect insofar as the creation of the Tudeh was neither initiated by a number of independent leftists nor by the NKVD. It was rather planned and brought into existence by the occupying Soviet army through secret contacts with the veteran Iranian (pro-Soviet) socialist and former Minister of Reza Shah. Solaiman Mirza Eskandari. The Soviet army officer in charge saw to it that the program and activities of the party were in conformity with Soviet interests in Iran. Essential in this strategy was not to create an openly communist party, but a front organization run by seasoned Communists - a strategy that was approved, through the Comintern, by Stalin and his associates. Additionally, what is made clear through these documents is that some old Iranian Communists, still in NKVD captivity, were, in spite of the demand made by some younger Communists in Iran and seconded by the Cadres Section of the Comintern, not allowed to return to Iran to help the newly founded party, but were eliminated posthaste, for their "sectarian" positions in the past and, no doubt, for fear of their anti-Soviet leanings during and after the war. They were liquidated shortly thereafter. Initially not very popular with the people of Iran, the Tudeh began to make inroads into Iran's political arena after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad; it gradually lost its appeal as it sided with Soviet interests in Iran and against those of Iran's, particularly on the issue of oil nationalization under Mosaddeq.

Jerzy Borejsza. Modern Russia and the Soviet Union in Polish historiography after 1989. Polish historical science developed under very different conditions from those existing in the Soviet Union or other communist countries, particularly after 1956. It has produced important works on the history of Poland, Russia, and Polish- Russian relations. Most American and German scholars are well aware of the importance of these publications for the study of Russian and Soviet history. However, it is not always the case with scholars in other Western countries such as France or Italy, for instance. The representation of Russia's foreign policy from the end of the eighteenh century up to 1870 remains incomplete if one does not take into account the contribution of Polish historiography. Similarly, knowledge of the history of the Polish 1830 and 1863 nationalist uprisings and their influence on Nicholas I's and Alexander II's internal policies is crucial to understanding the history of the Russian empire. The history of Poland and that of the Soviet Union became closely intertwined after the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, and remained so until 1939. Afterwards, Polish-Russian relations were marked by deportations of Poles to the Gulag Archipelago, and both histories remained interconnected until the crucial years 1989 and 1990. The present article points to the present tendencies in Polish historiography and cites the most important publications of the last years.