Contenu du sommaire

Martine Mespoulet. Zemstvo statisticians: The making of a new intellectual profession in Russia in the prerevolutionary era (1880-1917). The case of Saratov. Zemstvo professionals were one of the different groups of intellectual professions that appeared in Russia in the prerevolutionary period. Their situation raises specific questions as to how they integrated the local life of their region and what kind of professional, social and political representations they had. These questions are all the more justified in the case of former students from Moscow or Saint exiles. This essay tries to give a partial answer to these questions on the basis of the study of one group, that of statisticians, a great number of which came precisely from these two cities. The study of one local example, Saratov zemstvo statisticians, gives one the opportunity to analyze how these men concretely integrated local public life. This integration process gives the reader specific insights on how they viewed themselves as actors in local life: it reveals a double identity, made of a real local professional and public integration and of an allegiance to a national professional and scientific community. Furthermore, this essay illuminates the making of statistical knowledge in Russia in the prerevolutionary era. It shows in particular that survey subjects and the methodology applied in zemstvo statistical offices were elaborated in a to-and-from movement between theoretical thinking developed in national professional and scientific meetings and field experiments in the regions. From this point of view, zemstvo statistics were much more than regional statistics focusing only on local topics and surveys.

Donald J. Raleigh. Co-optation amid repression: The Revolutionary Communists in Saratov province, 1918-1920. This essay seeks to restore to the historical record the Revolutionary Communist Party, formed in September 1918 by a group of former Left SRs. From late 1918 until late 1920 the Revolutionary Communists participated in the ruling coalition in Saratov province, attracting a considerable following in several key districts and uezd towns, as well as elsewhere in the Urals and Volga regions. I argue that the party's sustained commitment to Soviet power proved a decisive factor in keeping the province — perhaps the most important supplier of grain to the urban centers of the Communist-controlled heartland — from falling to the Whites as a result of a rejection of Soviet power from within. The opening of Russian archives makes it possible to illuminate its relationship with the Bolshevik Party, and to study the reasons for the party's ultimate decline in 1920. In comparing the narratives of revolution constructed by both parties, the essay examines Bolshevik policies of co-optation of their populist rivals' strategies of dissent amid repression, a dynamic that became a characteristic Bolshevik practice during the period and a key element of the formative experience of Civil War for all involved. Thus, this case study of the party's relationship toward its populist ally offers valuable insights into how the Bolsheviks exercised state power in general.

Anna Joukovskaia. The birth of normative epistolography in Russia: A history of the first Russian letter-writing guides. Letter-writing guides appeared in Russia in the seventeenth century and flourished until the 1917 revolution. No research has been done on them as yet. In this article, we first analyze the cultural and ideological climate which impeded the expansion of normative epistolography before the eighteenth century together with the changes which allowed for its development. Then we examine the first stage in the development of Russian letter-writing guides (1708- 1830) which was marked by a strong western influence and finally we analyze the structural evolution of this transplanted genre in its adoptive milieu.

Stephen Blank. After Primakov. The evolving context of Russian national security policy. This essay addresses the security threats to Russia as of mid-1999. Russia at that time underwent severe internal crises linked to the firing of Evgenii Primakov as prime minister and the Duma's attempts to impeach President Boris Yeltsin. The essay argues that the main threats to Russia's security, contrary to the angry reactions to Kosovo, are internal in nature stemming from the failure to build an effective state, control the armed force, resolve the federal bargain in adequate fashion, or revive the economy. All these factors encourage the privatization of the state where individual actors regard the state as a vehicle for the aggrandizement of their personal interests at the expense of any national interest. Indeed, Russia finds it difficult to define any sort of coherent national interest and cannot address classical security threats or new transnational ones. While Russia feels itself threatened or rather the armed forces and political elite feel threatened by NATO's Kosovo campaign, the real threats are at home and the fixation with derzhavnosť and Russia's inherent great power status will only inhibit efforts to deal with real threats and further aggravate its protracted crises.

Alexandre V. Tchoudinov. Gilbert Romme's account oť the eighteenth-century Russian army. Gilbert Romme's biographers have often studied the time spent in Russia (1779-1786) by this notorious figure of the French Revolution. What they examined was the work of a naturalist who collaborated with practically every outstanding natural science specialist in Russia at the time; they also looked at Romme's experiments in teaching practices as tutor to the young Count Paul Stroganov whom he educated according to Rousseau's theories. However, was spreading the fruits of the Enlightenment the sole purpose of Romme's stay in Russia ? It was recently discovered that he also operated as a secret agent for the French government and gathered intelligence on the Russian military. In this article, we are publishing his memoirs on the state of the Russian army in 1780. These documents are held in the archives of the Saint Petersburg section of the Russian History Institute and in those of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They contain valuable information on every aspect of the Russian military at the time of Catherine II.

George F. Jewsbury. The Greek question : The view from Odessa 1815-1822. Coming as they did in 1821, when Tsar Alexander I simultaneously led the European Congress system against liberal and national uprisings and maintained the traditional pressure on the Ottoman Empire, the Northern and Southern Greek revolutions presented a grave challenge to Russia. In the first three months of that year, the focal point of that challenge was in Odessa, led by its Governor-General, the French émigré L. A. Langeron. Because of St. Petersburg's slowness in communicating the explicit changes in its foreign policy down the chain of command, Langeron pursued the traditional practice of supporting the Greeks in Odessa and their activities in the Black Sea region until the end of March. Prince Alexander Ypsilanti took advantage of this to use Russia as a staging ground for the Greek rising in the Danubian Principalities. After being roundly criticized by the Tsar and his Foreign Minister, Nesselrode, Langeron stopped support for the Greeks and began to follow closely the actions of the British in the region, which he considered hostile to Russia. He kept an especially wary eye on the British consul in Odessa and the ambassador in Constantinople.

S. Maksudov. Internal migrations in the USSR between 1926 and 1939. This article deals with the population migrations that took place between the Soviet European and Asian republics during the years 1926-1939. Our computations were based on materials from the 1926, 1937 and 1939 censuses of the ethnic composition of the population region by region. According to these estimations the migratory balance between Russia and Kazakhstan and Central Asia was negative: -1,490,000; the same is true concerning migrations between Russia and Transcaucasia: -531,000; the balance reached -217,000 for the Ukraine and -57,000 for Bielorussia. Kazakhstan took in 550,000 people, Central Asia, 1,155,000 and Transcaucasia, 590,000. These results seem to be somewhat underestimated because they do not take into account gaps in the 1937 census' population breakdown by nationality and the human losses which occurred after migration. During that time, 590,000 people moved to Russia from the Ukraine and 273,000 from Bielorussia.