pre-Petrine Russia Research Articles

Празднование Нового года в Византии

Introduction. Many cultures consider the first day of the new year a holiday which supposes the performance of specific rituals and rites. The traditions of New Year celebrations reflect the nature of this or that civilization, its historical experience, and religious and world-viewing constants. The said is to the full extent actual for the Byzantine civilization. The purpose of the work is to reconstruct the general scenario of official celebrations, to trace its evolution, and to analyse the folk tradition related to it. Methods and materials. The main sources of the given research are liturgical books, treatises on ceremonies, and epistolography. Analysis. In Byzantium, the New Year was celebrated on September 1 at different levels: church, state, and public. Despite its origin from the laity, the Byzantines viewed this holiday primarily as religious as it opened both the new year cycle and the church calendar. By the tenth century, there developed the order of service (akolouthia) for the first day of the new year. The patriarch served special liturgies in St Sophia’s Church and performed a crucession. The emperor was not allowed to participate in the church rituals. In Late Byzantium, the climax of the New Year ritual was the public prayer made in the imperial capital, in the Forum of Constantine, in the presence of the emperor. The ceremonial protocol documented that the ruler must participate in the New Year service. The ordinary people of Byzantium widely celebrated this holiday, spending this day in going to church, paying visits, and exchanging greetings. Conclusions. The enlarging of the programme of palatial ceremonies with the emperor’s appearance in the New Year celebration shows, from the one hand, the strengthening of the secular component of the holiday and, on the other hand, the trend to sacralization of the palatial life. The comparison of the scenario of the New Year celebration that existed in the Age of the Palaiologoi with the official holiday on such a case in the pre-Petrine Russia shows an important Byzantine influence on Russian culture of celebration and church policy.

Criminal liability for suicide in the law of pre-Petrine Russia

This study is devoted to the criminal law regulation of issues related to suicide in pre-Petrine Russia. This period of development of domestic law is characterized by a rather weak, compared with the later stages of the history of criminal legal counteraction to suicide, study. The work presents the testimonies of contemporaries, as well as the monuments of law that were not previously considered in publications devoted to a similar topic. The prescriptions of the norms of positive law affecting suicidal behavior, as well as the sanctions that threatened suicides under the church and customary law of the period under review, are described. Special attention is paid to the popular opinion about the identity of murder and suicide in ancient Russian criminal law. Based on the analysis of normative legal acts of the era in question, it is concluded that although there was no legal responsibility directly for committing suicide in pre-Petrine Russia, the condemnation of suicide by the state authorities still found expression in other forms, in particular, by mentioning this phenomenon in a negative context. At the same time, on the example of a number of normative legal acts of the period under review, the inconsistency of the statement common in Russian science that the term "murder" included not only murder, but also suicide is shown.

Rukoprikladstvo (‘Manhandling’): from ‘Handwritten Signature’ to ‘Beating’

The article discusses the history of the semantic transformation of the compound word rukoprikladstvo (‘manhandling’) – from the meaning ‘handwritten signature’ in the business language of Medieval Russia to the meaning ‘beating’ in the modern common Russian language. The word rukoprikladstvo, derived from the stable combination ruku prilozhit (‘set one's hand to’), denoted the symbolic confirmation of an official text by placing a palm, previously smeared with ink, on a blank sheet, the reverse side of the document. The article stresses that the medieval idea of a Russian person about the state as a ‘house’ headed by a ‘father-sovereign’ left a peculiar imprint on the office work of pre-Petrine Russia. Thus, the reliability of the content of a business text was ensured, on the one hand, by the testimony of the closest relatives or respected people of the clan (‘poslukhi’) and on the other hand by the unwritten laws of Christian morality. Since the time of Peter the Great, who was oriented towards Western models of the ‘state machine’, many official formulas have forever moved into the national language, acquiring new meanings motivated by the original semantics of their lexical components. Without a historical digression into the ‘ritual’ features of this obligatory action when sealing a business transaction and, as a result, without considering the functioning of the combination ruku prilozhit' (’put a hand’) in the official writing of pre-Petrine and post-Petrine Russia, it is impossible to trace the meaningful evolution of the word ‘rukoprikladstvo’ to its modern meaning ‘inflict hand beatings’. The history of the expression ruku prilozhit' (‘set one's hand to’) and the word rukoprikladstvo – both in the command language and in common Russian life – testifies to the history of the Russian official language as a separate cultural phenomenon with its own unique destiny.

ОБРАЗЫ ШУТОВ И ЮРОДИВЫХ В ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОМ КИНЕМАТОГРАФЕ

Directors of Russian cinema of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods portray jesters and fools in the development of the theme of historical formation of pre-Petrine Russia. As participants of social communication with an atypical code of visual and verbal expression, jesters, skomorokhs and fools encrypt socio-cultural codes of historical memory, which can acquire additional productivity due to the nature of the screen medium. The fools in the films of S. Eisenstein, A. Tarkovsky, and P. Lungin are depicted as denouncers of vices through direct (pleas, monologues, prayers) and indirect (public gestures) appeals to people: parodies, provocative skits, spontaneous performances and quotations. The visual techniques of screen arts are coupled with all those forms of denunciation. The unity of the line of depicting jesters and fools by Russian directors becomes evident in the technique of “theater in the theater”, “mask of masks”, when social masks put on masks in order to expose a significant character. The article shows the performative nature of screen arts and the ways for enhancing the performativity by the portrayal of social outsiders.

Features of Solving Plots in Temple Painting by the Founders of the Religious-national Trend and Artists of the Circle of M. M. Vasiliev

The subject of the study is to identify the peculiarities in solving the plots of church painting of individual representatives of the religious-national trend of the turn of the XIX - XX centuries. The purpose is to show the development of national trends of Russian monumental church art by the founders of the religious-national trend on the examples of the work of V. M.Vasnetsov, M. V. Nesterov, M.A. Vrubel and artists M. M. Vasiliev, A. P. Blaznov, L. A. Pyanovsky, K. S. Petrov-Vodkin, F. R. Raylian, to identify similarities and differences in the manner and in the transmission of images and compositions, as well as to substantiate the significance of these differences for art history. The basis of art criticism research is the formal stylistic method of G. Velflin, the iconographic method of N. P. Kondakov, the iconological method of E. Panofsky; the method of phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic perception of the artistic work of V. V. Bychkov and G. K. Wagner. Comparative analysis of murals by artists M. M. Vasiliev, A. P. Blaznov, L. A. Pyanovsky, F. R. Raylian, K. S. Petrov-Vodkin in comparison with the work of representatives of the "Vasnetsov school" allowed us to see the development of the national style in art, from an abstract-figurative understanding to a conscious spiritual-symbolic interpretation of church painting of the Middle Ages and pre-Petrine Russia as an integral artistic phenomenon of the religious-national trend. The practical significance of the study lies in the fact that the example of the artists of the "Vasiliev circle" revealed a kind of overcoming of one of the main problems of the iconographic image, which consists in maintaining a delicate balance of life-likeness and ideality. In their works, in the context of interpretation, the measure of realism of the image is traced, in which the spiritual content can be embodied in a material form without losing its sacred content, which is a valuable example for modern artists who set themselves the task of creating images without copying, but remaining in the canon.

The Image of Peter I in the Publicistic Works of A.S. Suvorin and V.P. Meshchersky

In this article the author examines the concept of the image of Peter the Great expressed in the publicistic works of the publisher of “Novoje Vremya” (“New Time”) journal A.S. Suvorin and the publisher of the Grazhdanin” (Citizen”) magazine Prince V.P. Meshchersky. Examining the personality of the emperor and his role in the history of Russia, Suvorin and Meshchersky turned to the issues of the relations of society and power, reforms and education, society development and attitude towards the “eastern” and “western” way. The image of Peter the Great appeared ambiguous in the publications of those editions, but all of them disapproved of the rough way Russian traditional society destruction performed by the Emperor. At the same time, Suvorin saw in the pre-Petrine Russia the development of elements of freedom and public initiative, while Meshchersky relied more on the ideal of autocracy based on mutual affection of people and the tsar.

N.M. Karamzin’s “Herald of Europe” and S.N. Glinka’s “Russian Herald” about Peter the Great – Consonance and Dissonance

The article provides a comparative analysis of the views on the reforms and historical role of Peter the Great, expressed in N.M. Karamzin’s “Herald of Europe” (1802–1803) and S.N. Glinka’s “Russian Herald” ­(1808–1824). Since the foreign policy context of the era of Napoleonic Wars had fundamental impact on Russian journalism of that period, historical publications should be considered in their correlation with current processes in the information space of the early 19th century. In the article the author shows that given the ideological continuity, the world outlook and historical views of the journals of Karamzin and Glinka were characterized by fundamental differences. The primary task for Karamzin was to substantiate the equal status of Russia in the cultural space of Europe, and his apologetic attitude towards Peter I during that period was determined by the role of the first emperor in the Europeanization of Russia. Glinka, in the conditions of information confrontation on the eve of the war of 1812, needed to emphasize the moral and cultural superiority of Russians over Europeans, so he made an attempt to create a reconciling historical narrative, paradoxically combining both the praise of pre-Petrine Russia and the praise of the reforms of Peter the Great.

Tavern revenues and alcohol consumption in the Muscovite state, 1620s-1640s

The level of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol taxes as a source of state revenue in pre-Petrine Russia have been the subject of much scholarly interest and political speculation, yet reliable data on the magnitude of trade in “grain wine” is still lacking. This article draws on the records of central government agencies from the 1620s to the early 1650s to partially fill this gap. In the decades immediately following the Times of Trouble, tavern revenues nearly doubled in absolute numbers and accounted for about a quarter of the total state revenue of Muscovy. The growth rate of tavern revenues was on par with the rate of population growth (the urban population increased by 60 percent between the 1620s and 1640s). The article discusses different methods of running the state alcohol monopoly and estimates the profitability of alcohol trade and the overall levels of alcohol consumption during the period under study.

The Origins of Classicalization Publication and Perception of Academic Heritage of S.B. Veselovskiy

The research of how scientific works acquire the status of “classics” is an essential aspect of studying the actualization of ideas and approaches, their circulation in the academic field, as well as the current state of a scientific direction or discipline. Based on historiographical sources and documentation, this article analyzes the role of publication and perception of academic heritage of the famous historian, academician Stepan Borisovich Veselovskiy (1876–1952) in classification. In this research, the creation and activity of the Commission for the publication of Veselovskiy's papers are considered one of the key stages in the process of classicalization. The reasons for creating the Commission and its history, personal membership, and publishing plans based on documentation materials from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) are studied. Also, the influence of Veselovskiy's literary heritage on the historiography of the late Soviet era is analyzed. The author considers the continuity of Veselovskiy's scientific views and research approaches on pre-Petrine Russia's history, the criticism of papers published both during his lifetime and posthumously. Special attention is paid to the influence of reviews on the classification of literary heritage. Further research prospects are highlighted, and it is assumed that the posthumous publication of Veselovskiy's academic works and their involvement in historiography created the basis for the classification of Veselovskiy's literary heritage in the late Soviet period.

Slavophiles on the European Enlightenment and the Reforms of Peter the Great as Causes of the Transformation of Russian Cultural Identity and Historical Memory

The author addresses the problems of the correlation between the national and the global (universal) in the cultural identity of Russia, as well as the interaction of tradition and modernization in the development of all spheres of Russian society. The article presents the position of the founders of the ideology of Slavophilism — A.S. Khomyakov, I.V. Kireevsky and J. F. Samarin. In the conditions of Russian autocracy in the middle of the 19th century Slavophiles demonstrated double civil courage, opposing their point of view to the state conservatism and state modernization. The attitude of Slavophile thinkers to the reforms of Peter the Great as a turning point in the history of Russian society and state, as well as in the formation of national selfconsciousness is shown. There were disagreements between Slavophiles in assessing the state of pre-Petrine Russia. However, the most important negative consequence of Peter's reforms and uncritical borrowing of the Western enlightenment was seen by all Slavophile authors as a split in Russia's cultural identity: the separation of educated society from the people and separation of the state from society. The Slavophiles associated the bridging of this gap with two factors. Firstly, with a revival of the Russian Enlightenment based on a synthesis of the national spiritual tradition and the universal achievements of Western civilization. Secondly, with the implementation of social and political reforms “from above”, first of all — with the abolition of serfdom.

Патронат и клиентела в Московском государстве XVI–XVII вв.: историография и проблематика

Introduction. The paper deals with the phenomenon of patron-client relations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia, which until recently has been almost completely neglected by the scholars. Relying on recent publications and his own findings, the author addresses the key issues of the topic including the origins of this phenomenon in Russia, the typology of patron-client relations and their specifics in Muscovy. Methods and materials. The paper combines a survey of the current historiography with examination of selected primary sources (mainly private letters from archival collections) and forays into the theory of patron-client relations elaborated by social scientists. Comparing the Muscovite patronage system to its counterparts in other European countries enables some hypotheses about the peculiarities of patron-client relations in pre-Petrine Russia. Analysis. Addressing the problem of the origins of the Russian patronage the author traces the evolution of social relations and the appearance of the specific language of patronage which leads him to a conclusion that the phenomenon in question might have emerged by the end of the 16th century. Proceeding then to the typology of patron-client relations, the author assumes that, although only aristocratic patronage has been thoroughly studied so far, similar phenomena can be detected in other milieus as well, including the Church, where nepotism and corporate clientelism flourished. Finally, the author isolates some specific features of the Muscovite patronage, especially its depoliticized and decentralized character, as contrasted to the analogous phenomena in Poland-Lithuania, England, and France. Results. Summing up the present-day knowledge of the Muscovite patronage, the author highlights it as a typically early modern phenomenon that evolved within the official state institutions and functioned as an addendum to them.

Arms manufacture in Pre-Petrine Russia within the Russian historiography

The subject of this article is the assessment of the history of establishment and development of arms manufacture in Russia in the period up to the end of the XVII century given by the Russian researchers. The purpose goal consists in conducting a historiographical analysis of the works of domestic researchers of pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet periods on the problem, and in formation of the general idea on the emergence of one of the critical branches of military industry in pre-revolutionary Russia. The author explores the initial period of firearms manufacturing in Russia and its geography; emergence and functioning of the Tula and Moscow arms factories in the XVI – XVII centuries; impact of the emerged in the XVII century blast-furnace hydraulic metallurgical plants and specialized arms manufacturing enterprises upon the development of the industry. The novelty consists in giving a new perspective within the domestic historiography on the problem of the initial stage of the history of arms manufacture in Russia. The article follows the evolution of arms industry at its initial stage, the regularities of existence of various forms of production organization and formation of centers of firearms manufacture. It is concluded that by the end of the period under review, the arms production capacities did not meet the actual needs of the Russian armed forces for firearms. The author makes recommendation on filling the gaps that exist in the history of arms manufacture in Pre-Petrine Russia.

The History of Pre-Petrine Russia as Recounted by Voltaire: The View of an Enlightened European

This article analyses Voltaire’s evaluation of pre-Petrine Russia, its evolution, the sources of Voltaire’s data on medieval Muscovy, and his Russian contemporaries’ attitude to the historical work of the enlightener. The topic of Russia is touched upon in a number of Voltaire’s works: The History of Charles XII, Anecdotes of Peter the Great, Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations, and History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great. Peter I is always characterised as the “creator” of a new Russia. This idea, as well as European stereotypes of Muscovy, determined the author’s attitude to pre-Petrine Rus’. Voltaire created a picture of a barbaric society characterised by superstitions, ignorance, despotism, the enslavement of its subjects, the dominance of Asian customs, and isolation. In History of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great, Voltaire softens his characterisation of pre-Petrine Rus’. It no longer looks to him like a country stuck in its barbarism. Voltaire emphasises the desire of Peter’s predecessors for transformation, as a result of which the picture of medieval Russia acquires a more realistic form. On becoming acquainted with the sources, the enlightener’s observations indicate the formation of a new look at the process of civilization. The article’s author singles out issues of medieval history of Russia considered by Voltaire in his works and the sources that formed the basis of the “Russian” works of the famous French writer, paying attention to the conclusions that ultimately not only confirmed Voltaire’s new history of Russia, but also outlined novel ways to study world history.

Making Sense of Central Asia in Pre-Petrine Russia

Abstract The existing historiography on liaisons between Russia and Central Asia in early modern period often tends to portray the cross-cultural diplomacy between the settings as an assemblage of sporadic, inefficient, clumsy encounters, full of diplomatic failures. Further to it, the dominant paradigm emphasizes cultural differences in the region, whereby any form of cross-cultural encounters was inevitably hampered by various confessional, religious and social borders. As a result, we tend to read every case of cross-cultural encounter between early modern Central Asia and Russia as a metaphor of cultural incommensurability. In the essay, I shall offer a close reading of two 17th-century Muscovite diplomatic missions to Central Asia as test cases with which to make sense of cultural encounters through the lens of individual actors. In doing so, I shall highlight the specific practices and strategies that allowed the diplomatic actors to play key roles as cultural mediators using their language skills, local knowledge and contact networks. In the broader sense, the essay set out to examine how can we problematize cross-cultural encounters between Central Asian principalities such as Khiva and Bukhara on the one hand, and Pre-Petrine Russia on the other: and to consider what we actually mean when we speak of early modern diplomacy in Central Eurasia.

Отец Иоанн Кронштадтский о монархии в России

The article deals with the views of Father John of Kronstadt on the monarchy in Russia through the prism of the conception of an ideal Orthodox sovereign formed in pre-Petrine Russia. The author of the article compares the opinions of a cleric who was also an outstanding representative of the conservative thought, with the ideas reflected in the documents of the 17th century. Special attention is paid to certain characteristics of Russian reforms in the second half of the 19th century given by Father John. The author also analyzes the influence of the social and state transformations in Russia in the period of the first Russian revolution on Father John’s attitude to the government, incipient parties and changes in public morals.

Tavern Revenues And Alcohol Consumption In The Muscovite State In Mid-Seventeenth Century

The level of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol taxes as a source of state revenue in pre-Petrine Russia have been the subject of much scholarly interest and political speculation, yet reliable data on the magnitude of trade in “grain wine” is still lacking. This article draws on the records of central government agencies from the 1620s - early 1650s to partially fill this gap. In the decades immediately following the Times of Trouble tavern revenues nearly doubled in absolute numbers and accounted for about a quarter of the total state revenues of Muscovy. The growth rate of tavern revenues was on par with the rate of population growth (between the 1620s and 1640s, urban population increased by 60 percent). The article discusses different methods of running the state alcohol monopoly and estimates the profitability of alcohol trade and the overall levels of alcohol consumption during the period under study.

Сибирь в поэтическом воображении русского модернизма: живые и ожившие картины Марины Цветаевой

The article is devoted to the experience of poetic visionarism and ekphrastic description in the narrative poem “Siberia” by Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva’s poem is a text with a double status. On the one hand, this is a completed historical poem dedicated to the early history of Siberia and the Russian Empire (16 th – 17 th centuries). On the other hand, the poem is part of a large historical epic (“Poem of the Tsar’s Family”) dedicated to the collapse of the empire and the tragic fate of its rulers. The primary sources for Tsvetaeva’s poetic visionary work are the works of Siberian historians (K. Golodnikov, P. Slovtsov, I. Fisher and others), as well as the literary texts of her contemporaries (M. Voloshin). Marina Tsvetaeva has never been to Siberia, there were no meaningful encounters with Siberians in her personal biography, however her contribution to the Siberian text of Russian modernism can be considered as significant. The article explores the sources of several “living pictures” (poetic historical sketches of the morals of pre-Petrine Russia). In particular, the paper deals with the history of the Pokrovsko-Turin Monastery in Tsvetaeva’s poetic reflection. The historical sketch is significantly deepened by the appearance of the “Siberian elder” Grigory Rasputin within the 17 th century history. This figure, while still alive, was mythologized simultaneously on an hagiographic and a demonological basis. Tsvetaeva presents this exotic figure as a cultural revenge of pre-Petrine Rus. In such a historiosophical construction, an important role is played by the Siberian origins of Rasputin. Against the background of various “living pictures” of Tsvetaeva’s poem, one “revived” picture stands out. This is an ekphrastic image of “Menshikov in Berezovo”, referring both to V. Surikov’s painting and to M. Kuzmin’s famous poem “December freezes in a pink sky...”. Tsvetaeva’s image of Menshikov clearly takes on palimpsest features. A similar phenomenon (a multilayered work as a factor in the liberation of author’s consciousness from empirical reality) was examined by Yu. V. Shatin.

Bashkirs in Imperial Discourse of Peter The First

The purpose of this article is to consider the extent to which the policies of the government of Peter I in the Ufa province correspond to the modern ideas of imperial government. According to the concept of C. Tilly, the desire to unify legal statuses and eliminate the methods of indirect governance inevitably leads to the destruction of imperial structures. On the contrary, J. Burbank and F. Cooper note that such a policy corresponds to the Roman type of empires. In fact, the Russian authorities are switching to the Roman type of imperial government at the beginning of the 18th century. On the contrary, the pre-Petrine Russia was peculiar to the Eurasian imperial type, involving the differentiated control of different peoples. Bashkirs, who considered their citizenship to be contractual, i.e. privileged, had armed resistance to the egalitarian transformations of the beginning of the 18th century, which by 1711 led to the breakdown of subservient relations. The failure of the reforms in the Ufa province was due to the fact that they violated the principle of "protection-obedience", according to which the degree of loyalty of a given people is due to the level of its state protection. From the middle of the 16th century. up to the 40s 18th century. Bashkirs possessed a military organization of tribal militia, independent of the Russian authorities. The southeastern border was not part of the All-Russian border guard system, and the Russian authorities were forced to allow a relatively high level of autonomy for the Bashkir communities.

Shevelenko, Irina Modernizm kak arkhaizm. Natsionalizm i poiski modernistskoi estetiki v Rossii (review)

REVIEWS 549 Shevelenko,Irina.Modernizmkakarkhaizm.Natsionalizmipoiskimodernistskoi estetiki v Rossii. Nauchnaia biblioteka, 163. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Moscow, 2017. 334 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. R450.00. ‘ModernismasArchaism:NationalismandtheQuestforaModernistAesthetic in Russia’ is the product of more than ten years’ concentrated study and takes into account not only Russian primary sources but also much American and some English, German, French and Scandinavian scholarly considerations of various aspects of the subject; or, perhaps, as the title and subtitle suggest, the subjects, for it is ‘nationalism’, as it was variously understood in the early twentieth century, which dominates much of this book. Irina Shevelenko sets the scene with a detailed picture of the increasing importance of the concept of the nation state and, later, of the imperial ethos, throughout Europe during the period preceding the turn of the century and the run-up to the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 which is the main focus of her study. From this, she proceeds to a meticulous overview of modernist debate from the rejection of governmentsponsored populist nationalism (narodnost´) which, in the World of Art group, for instance, coexisted and sometimes overlapped with interest in the largely merchant-class and Old Believer sponsored patronage of folk art and crafts and nostalgia for the splendour of the ‘Westernized’ culture of the St Petersburg eighteenth century. Inevitably, the aesthetic and political debate touches on the religious (Orthodox) roots of pre-Petrine culture, although the element of Russian Nietzscheanism, the cult of the Superman and ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, so important for later interest in the archaic, is not taken into consideration. This omission somewhat undermines the introduction of Viacheslav Ivanov’s Solov´evian synthesis of the two cultures and ideal of the artist as healer of the social divide, a creator of myth who returns to ancient roots. It was, after all, Ivanov who introduced, albeit theoretically, the idea of a choral, cathartic art which would viscerally involve the reader or audience. Shevelenko, however, chooses to trace his direct influence on the poet Gorodetskii and Aleksei Remizov, writer of unique and learnedly archaic fairy tales, and to demonstrate, most interestingly, a direct link between these less well-known figures and, on the one hand, the futurists (notably Khlebnikov) with their strange combination of ethnography and neologism and, on the other, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Stravinskii and Prokof´ev, Larionov and Goncharova. Here, we see also the explosion of the pan-Slavic and Scythian ideas which provided an alternative, more exotic and gloriously barbaric past to the folklore and artefacts of Kievan and Muscovite Rus´. In the last chapter, Shevelenko returns to the visual arts, the consideration of which began with the art and craft revival and the heavy ‘old Russia’ stylizations of Vasnetsov, and gives an interesting account of the rediscovery of the medieval Russian icon as high art, culminating in the Moscow Exhibition of 1913, welcomed at SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 550 the time as pre-Petrine Russia’s entrance ticket to the club of civilized medieval and pre-Renaissance Europe. These rich and complex developments are mapped out with admirable clarity through literary polemics, manifestoes, critical articles and surveys. For once the summary in English at the end of the book (pp. 328–33), usually an embellishment any academic Russian publication could well do without, is admirably cogent and faultlessly expressed. Indeed, one of the few reservations I have about this book is the number of transliterated Anglo-American words which make it heavy reading in the Russian. Exchange and loanwords are, of course, endemic to the growth and flexibility of language, but I would have preferred fewer of these: ‘instiutsional´no’. ‘idiosinkraticheskii’, ‘subordinirovannaia pozitsia’, ‘intentsia’, ‘reinkarnatsia’, ‘transformatsiia’ — to cite but a few — which all sit uneasily in the Slavonic context. This contributes to a sense of disappointment more difficult to formulate: the research is impeccable but the excitement and beauty of the rediscovery of an archaic modernist aesthetic is not conveyed. The profoundly poetic and universal idea that the many may speak for the one, that the individual can embody the people, so essential to ‘choir’ and ‘myth’, does not mix happily with the kind of discourse appropriate to the discussion...

The Many Faces of the Collective: Poruka, Responsibility, and Requirement in the Soviet Society

From 1970 to 1984 Ann Kleimola and Horace William Dewey wrote a series of articles exploring the concept of poruka (suretyship) in pre-Petrine Russia. Kleimola and Dewey called the variety of communities where poruka applied the collectives. The present article argues that the Soviet state used the collectives, borrowed as a concept from French utopian socialists, as vehicles for bonding its subjects with poruka and thus extending state control down to the smallest social groups and organizations. The article examines in detail the original Soviet theory and practice of using poruka bonds in the educational collectives of Anton Makarenko’s youth delinquent colonies. Makarenko’s experience, proliferated in fictionalized accounts, articles and lectures, became the foundation of the Soviet suretyship-based collectives.