Keywords: A. I. Nepenin; A. V. Kolchak; 1917; the Civil war
Review of the book
More...
Keywords: 1940s; grain savings; Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History; archival data
Publication of the unique sources from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History.
More...
Keywords: factory community; power; conflicts
On the basis of minutes of Petrograd trade unions communist groups the present article studies the process of the forming of the informal power hierarchy at Soviet industrial works known as “treugolnik” (triangle), of the settlement of conflicts among managers, Party and trade unions leaders on the factory floor.
More...
Keywords: Leningrad city court; Leningrad military tribunal; criminality; crisis legislation; criminal proceedings; civil justice; history
Characteristics and specificity of the Leningrad city court operation for the crisis legislation duration and in conditions of a blocked city are analyzed in the article.
More...
Keywords: scientific and technical knowledge; natural-science knowledge; lecture work; propagation
The article analyzes lecture propagation that is form of natural-science and natural knowledge propagation. A number of organizations that take part in lecture work are explored; their work methods are shown. The difficulties of natural-science and natural knowledge propagation among population are analyzed.
More...
Keywords: Oleg. N. Znamenskiy; study of Russian Revolutions
The article is devoted to Oleg N. Znamenskiy — scientist, historian, one of the best specialists in the History of Russian Revolutions. The author affords us the first comprehensive view of Znamenskiy’s scientific heritage, including an article in his personal memories of the life, research and many-sided personality of O. N. Znamenskiy.
More...
Keywords: Collection; Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History; archival data; correspondence
Publication of the unique sources from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History.
More...
Keywords: defense industry; German secret-service intelligence; naval counterintelligence; naval general staff
In the article for the first time an attempt is made to reconstruct the main stages of the creation of agencies of naval counterintelligence on one of the most crucial sectors of the country’s naval defense — the Baltic sea. The article considers not only the organizational and staff structure of these agencies, development of the legal basis of their activities and the formation of the first counterintelligence courses, but also the tragic end of the short history of the naval counterintelligence of the autocratic regime.
More...
Keywords: Civil War; 1917-1922; conference
Review of the sixth scientific conference provided by the project "1917–1922: The Fates of Russia and the World".
More...
Keywords: Alexander Petrovich Alexandrov; the Navy; the theory of “Possession of the sea”; a theory of the “Small war at sea”; naval Academy; the repression of the red banner Baltic fleet; the Great Patriotic war
The article is devoted to rear-Admiral Alexander Petrovich Alexandrov, who stood at the origins of the Soviet naval science. On the basis of rare archival materials and memories colleagues recreated difficult way of life of the naval commander.
More...
Keywords: Social history; inebriety; Russian peasantry; Russia in late XIX – early XX century
The author analyzes the phenomenon of drinking in prerevolutionary Russia in late XIX – early XX century. Using a large of landscape of sources and literature, adducing a numerous statistics, he reconstructs a detail picture of the life of the Russian Peasantry turn of the century. Disagreeing with other researches, the author judges to the independent conclusions, anew discovered the problem of “drunken country”.
More...
Keywords: civil society; urban policy; urban confl ict; discourse theory; hegemonic discourse
Here I present a successful example of citizen action, mobilised by a local urban social confl ict. I analyse how the action group constitutes itself, organises and achieves success in infl uencing municipal policy. This study lends concreteness to the notion of „civil society“ that in Bulgaria is still seen largely as an abstract ideal. It counters the widely-held idea that here policy-making is beyond the reach of the common citizen and that Bulgarian society is not yet able to mobilise for defending its rights and interests. My argument here is that the most powerful weapon that civil society can use is its mastery on shaping public discourse.
More...
Keywords: capital city; Sofi a; national discourse; mayoral candidate.
The paper presents the results of a study focusing on the interviews with the main contenders for mayor of Sofi a published in national dailies during the election campaigns in 2007 and 2011. The analysis is trying to verify the hypothesis that in Sofi a mayoral election campaigns, the contenders exploit the national discourse, focusing on ‘Sofi a, the capital of the nation-state’, and promote themselves as defenders of the national interest which is claimed to be defended ‘solely’ by the political force to which they belong. The presumptions are that they easily resort to this fi gure, avoiding the signifi cantly more complicated position on Sofi a as a big city, a position that presupposes greater expert/governmental knowledge; and that the national is assumed to be a more reliable and easy resource for mobilizing voters who, in addition to everything else, tend to identify themselves more as residents of the capital city (stolichani) than as Sofi anites (sofi yantsi).
More...
Keywords: civic education; school; teacher-student relations; power; uncertainty, tactics; polemics; intellectual bricolage
Modern school education is often regarded as a mere (ideological) function of the general state strategies aiming at producing and reproducing a certain socio-political order. Civic education is thus analyzed as an almost mechanical translation of state policy towards production of civic consciousness through educational programs. The present article offers a different way of analyzing this process by focusing on education as a tactical interaction in the particular situation of the contemporary Bulgarian school. It stresses the inherent uncertainty of power relations between teacher and students by privileging the teachers’ point of view. The school is therefore described as a fi eld of polemical interactions in which the usual power positions are constantly contested and redistributed by reason of a multiplicity of internal and external factors evoked by the teachers themselves. As a consequence the latter are transforming their ‘pedagogical’ practice in tactics of intellectual bricolage in order to ‘capture’ the students’ ‘interest’ and by this to maintain the ‘discipline’ in the classroom – an indispensable but somehow unachievable basis for the education process. A point is made that it is on these polemical bases that nowadays civic education programs and practices struggle to embed. However they are by necessity traversed by the same tensions that constitute the form of educational interaction.
More...
Keywords: Thracian studies; Thracians; heritage; construction; commercialization, commodifi cation; tourism; archaeology; nationalism; Orphism.
The article deals with the ideological construction and the popular and commercial usages of the “Thracian heritage” in Bulgaria. The promotion of the ancient Thracian spirituality as an archetype of the Bulgarian culture was made possible by the national
More...
Keywords: political correctness; Roma; Gypsy; normative vocabularies; social justice
The more public a word is, the less questionable its usages are: this is what those who believe in public sphere as consensus hope. But it seems rather the other way round: the more public a word is, the more and more various social actors have access to it and hence the more heterogeneous its usages are. The paper views this as the main reason why the vocabularies of political correctness inevitably and necessarily fail. This is demonstrated through an interpretation of a locally specifi c attempt introducing a politically correct vocabulary trying to replace the word ‘Gypsy’ and its derivatives with the word ‘Roma” and its respective derivatives. The demonstration rests on an analysis of internet media forums and media publications from 2008-2009 and shows how the newly introduced words turn into a tool of shaping a new segment of reality and how with the transition of the vocabulary from expert through media to everyday discourse it interweaves with a normative resignifi cation of some key notions in the normative vocabulary of democracy – ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘power’, to mention a few. The argument of the turn to politically correct ethnonims ran that ‘Gypsy’ is used as offence, while ‘Roma” was not pejorative because had no usages. But since a word can only have a meaning in its interactive usages, the social-rhetorical effect was to resignify ‘Roma’ as a ‘Gypsy’ but one with rights; and since rights were thus interweaved with culture understood as ethnicity, these very rights were reinterpreted in media forums to be privileges, which in turn was taken to be unjust inequality on the part of non-‘Roma’. Thus in the long run (which actually happened to be rather short) the turn toward a vocabulary of political correctness resulted in the discursive reconstructing of a part of the Bulgarian citizens as second hand citizens.
More...
Keywords: identity politics; Language politics; national narrative; nationalism; politics of history; symbolic space; victimization; Ukraine; Yushchenko; Yanukovych
This paper problematizes the contradictory discourse of national identity in post- Soviet Ukraine which is framed by two essential factors: on the one hand institutional isomorphism of Soviet structures, on the other hand heterogeneity of the symbolic space, plurality of memories and narratives. We analyse the model of “strategic relativism” as an informal government strategy and demonstrate its structural weaknesses, which contributed to full-scale identity politicization in the “Orange Revolution” and the subsequent attempts to intensify identity politics. The consequences of these successions of events are interpreted as decisive for future attempts to instrumentalising identity categories in view of the high political costs of “constructing” identity politics and effi ciency of “electoral” identity politics
More...
Keywords: canon formation; literary anthologies; cultural politics; institutional power
The paper explores the processes of intensive canon formation in the Bulgarian literature after World War I through the perspective of the literary anthologies. Being an individual artistic gesture in the prewar period, later, in the postwar situation, anthology becomes an instrument of state cultural politics and institutional power. In 1922, the Ministry of Education commissions and sponsors a national poetry anthology which is examined in detail in the text. On the background of the various literary fractions competing for the symbolic capital of the youth in the literary fi eld of the early 1920s, the State turns out to be a mediocre anthologist undermining its own strategies for canon formation.
More...
Keywords: popular culture; repertoires; online communities; media discourses, collective identities.
The article attempts to analyze how the national identity is contested and re-interpreted by the “ordinary people” in Certeau’s terms. It starts from a paradox, identifi ed by the social sciences – the trend of diminishing identifi cation with the political community and the state on one hand and the growing popularity of the nationalistic discourses, on the other. The text uses as a case study the public debates on the Turkish soap operas. Interpreting how different actors use popular repertoires, the article argues that “the national” functions as a discourse at hand to conceal the fragmentation of the political community and to block the construction of new narratives of a collective future.
More...
Keywords: citizen action; volunteer; nature; social order; habit; subjectifi cation, social self; collective
The paper is focused on media campaign initiated by bTV “Let’s clean up Bulgaria for one day!” which is a part of the global initiative “Let’s Do it World”. It examines discursive fi gures which constitute citizen action and through which a certain social and political order is described. What kind of agency is produced within ecological discourse and how these forms of subjectifi cation reassemble a collective? What does the campaign tell us about the political state of Bulgarian society?
More...
