Oleg Budnitskii details the historical background relevant to the personal stories of the three Holocaust survivors from Poland, whose interviews are published in the "Archive" section of this issue of Ab Imperio . He provides quantitative estimates of the dynamics of the Jews who found themselves in the USSR following the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, from 1939 to their return to Poland after the war. Budnitskii outlines the chronology and composition of four waves of Soviet deportation from Polish territories, discusses the problem of official Soviet antisemitism and the antisemitism of Polish patriots during and after the war. He also contextualizes the interviews within the broader field of published firsthand testimonies of other Polish Jews who had similar experiences.
Ekaterina Sakharova (1886−1963) is primarily remembered as the first wife of the famous Russian biologist, Nikolai Vavilov (1887−1943), one of the founding fathers of genetics in Russia. Yet, Sakharova was a remarkable person herself, as can be seen in the diary that she kept, with interruptions (not making entries for some periods or destroying them), from 1905 to 1963. Fragments of this diary published in this issue of Ab Imperio present the fascinating personal evolution of Sakharova, which, as if in a mirror, reflected the main stages of the evolution of the dominant intelligentsia worldview: from revolutionarism, through a rediscovery of individualism and psychology, to progressivist reformism, the upsurge of nationalism during World War I, to frustration over the Bolshevik takeover and the outbreak of civil war. Sakharova's diary explicates the logic behind the formation of the "statist" complex of the intelligentsia that still persists in Russia. Traditionally suspicious of the state and its institutes, sometime around 1920, the Russian intelligentsia produced a very influential discourse about the state (regardless of the political regime) as the sole guardian of Russia's integrity and viability. This departure from almost a century-long essentially anarchist tradition of the Russian intelligentsia made the survival of the Bolshevik regime possible. In the last entry made several weeks before her death, Sakharova summarized her experience of the twentieth century – as an individual and as an exemplary intelligent, a role she consciously accepted as the author of the diary. At the end of the day, after the Soviet regime deprived the intelligentsia of its primary role – producing and debating hegemonic public discourses – the main mission of this exemplary intelligent was to be a custodian of European culture. At least, this is how Ekaterina Sakharova summarized her own experience of the twentieth century.
The article tells the story of a series of attempts by Russian imperial authorities to codify the customary law of the Kazakh nomads, from the 1780s to the 1850s. Similar projects were undertaken by other colonial powers of the time seeking to integrate local legal regimes into the imperial legal system, thus strengthening control over the colonies. Unlike more successful Russian experiments with standardizing and codifying customary law ( adat ) in the Caucasus, in the Kazakh steppe no officially recognized collection of adats was produced. The main reason for this failure should be sought in the very success of the fieldwork produced by Russian Orientalists, assigned the task of studying Kazakh customary law, and the progress of Russian legal expertise. After the 1830s, Russian jurists began differentiating between tribal customs ( adat s) and Muslim Sharia law as two main sources of local customary law in Asian regions of the empire. The increasingly nationalizing worldview of the regime and the educated society advanced the political agenda of codifying the "national" customs of the Kazakhs while muting the influence of the Sharia as a universalizing ideology – the chief rival to the empire's own universalizing and assimilating policy. At the same time, scholars working on codification projects had realized that in practice Sharia was inseparable from adats and the entire system of traditional administration of justice in the steppe. This brought them repeatedly into conflict with the authorities. The most spectacular instance of such a conflict discussed in the article in details was one between the author of the most comprehensive collection of the Kazakh customary law, Efim (Iosif) Osmolovskii and his supervisor, a renowned Orientalist himself, Vasilii Grigoriev. Aware not only of the intrinsic interconnectedness of adat and Sharia but also of the futility of attempts to distill some universal single "common law" shared by all the tribal and regional groups of Kazakhs, Osmolovskii produced a complex and nuanced compendium of Kazakh legal norms, sensitive to local variations. Grigoriev had his own highly ideological vision of the prospects of eventual Kazakh Russification, and therefore deemed the work of Osmolovskii extremely subversive for the plans of Kazakh assimilation and de-Islamization. When transferred to St. Petersburg, he purloined the collection – the official document commissioned by the government – and all the preparatory materials, making sure that they would never become available to administrators or scholars. The purely theoretical distinction between the Sharia and adat, and the nationalizing and anti-Islamic drive of the Russian authorities resulted in a peculiar politics of reconstructing the pure legal traditions of the Kazakh people as the foundation of their Russified future.
The article studies the contested process of construing a new geographic image of Lithuania as a national territory (rather than a historical land) at the turn of the twentieth century. Different approaches to defining Lithuanians as a nation begot alternative visions of the boundaries of their national territory. The author distinguishes two principal aspects of this process. First, by manipulating the boundaries of historical lands, modern-day administrative units, and linguistic groups, Lithuanian national activists carved the future national territory in such a way as to secure the dominant position for ethnically defined Lithuanians. Second, they were determined to include Vilnius (which at the time has only a tiny minority of Lithuanians among its population) in the future national territory. The historical capital of the medieval and Early Modern Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilnius was seen as a symbolic link to the glorious past and vivid proof of the "historical" nature of the emerging new Lithuanian nation. There was also a political significance for claiming Vilnius as Lithuanian: the much more powerful Polish nationalism claimed the entire territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania as part of the Polish national territory, so the Lithuanianization of Vilnius was seen as a way to undermine these historical claims with very practical implications.
SUMMARY: What ideas and practices do ordinary Russians draw upon to mobilize public opinion in the struggle against the corrupt "system" (sistema) of police officials? In this article, I consider a case of social contention in Novosibirsk in 2013–14, which followed the death of a young woman in an accident involving a traffic police officer. The dynamics of contention I attend to suggest that Russia today has the social conditions for politically efficacious publics. In my analysis, I identify several strategies of "public-making" that take these conditions into account, to conjure a collective subject and "call out" to the constituencies that could give this subject legitimacy. The communicative styles I attend to are embedded in local histories of activism, and resonate with what we know about protest dynamics in Russia today. Drawing on literature that has urged thinking outside normative paradigms of the public sphere, I consider these "technologies of persuasion" as indicative of neither "liberal" nor "illiberal" regimes of textual circulation. Instead, I suggest, that as in the liberal models of stranger sociability, public-making in Novosibirsk presupposed a moral common sense, joint attention to a space of common discourse, and openness to potential strangers. However, it also required a different kind of political work. In addition to addressing potential strangers, activists had to persuade the potentially immoral "them" to set aside particular social interests, and recognize their shared footing with "us" with respect to self-evident actualities. На какие идеи и практики полагаются обычные россияне для моби-лизации общественного мнения на борьбу с коррумпированной поли-цейской системой? В настоящей статье разбирается случай социального противостояния, имевший место в Новосибирске в 2013−14 гг., после гибели молодой женщины в ДТП с участием офицера полиции. Про-слеженная автором динамика противостояния позволяет предположить, что в сегодняшней России есть социальные условия для появления политически эффективной общественности. Автор идентифицирует несколько стратегий "конструирования общественности" с использова-нием этих условий, фокусируясь на создании коллективного субъекта, выступающего от имени групп, наделяющих его легитимностью. Стиль коммуникации, анализируемый в статье, связан с местной историей активизма и соответствует тому, что мы знаем о протестной динамике в сегодняшней России. Развивая подходы, стимулирующие выход за пределы нормативных парадигм публичной сферы, автор отказывается классифицировать эти "технологии убеждения" как индикаторы "либерального" или "нелиберального" режима текстуальной циркуляции. С одной стороны, в соответствии с либеральными моделями социабиль-ности чужаков, конструирование общественности в Новосибирске основывается на предполагаемом разделяемом всеми моральном здравом смысле, совместном внимании к пространству общего дискурса и открытости потенциальным чужакам. В то же время, оно требует иного типа политической работы. Помимо обращения к потенциальным чужакам, активисты должны убедить потенциально имморальных "их" отказаться от определенных социальных интересов и признать, на основании очевидных фактов, общую базу с "нами".
