Опубликовано в журнале НЛО, номер 2, 2007
1990: AN ATTEMPT AT STUDYING THE RECENT PAST
SUMMARY
STUDYING THE RECENT PAST
The articles in this section describe the changes in the conceptual structure, methods and aims of historical understanding when analysing the recent past. The key notion for the authors of this section was an idea of modern history as a challenge to familiar totalising schemes and conceptualisations that, by definition, alienate the singular and unique nature of the experience gained by “us” at the turn of the 1980s—1990s. In this connection it’s recent history theories that become objects of critical historisation: the concepts of “end of history”, “civilisational clash”, historical hermeneutics and “realms of memory”.
Martin Jay’s (University of California, Berkeley) paper “1990: Straddling a Watershed?” demonstrates how immediately after the end of the Cold War a divergence was discovered between recorded elements of experience and the means of its interpretation that proved to be imprecise and superficial. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) in his article ““Contemporary history” in the present of a changing hronotope” states there is a need for a way to record in the present the traces of past experiences, a way that could not be reduced to the blueprints of traditional historicism or to a postmodernist cancellation of the significance of the past. Francois Hartog (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris) in his article “Times of the world, history and historical writing” problematises modern concepts of global history, comparing them with the doctrines prevalent in Europe after the First World War. Finally, Mikhail Yampolsky (New York University) in his article “The present as a rupture: notes on history and memory” insists on the need to understand the year 1990 as a unique historical constellation — in opposition to any programming strategies (locking it in a particular “naming”, transformation of that year into a “realm of memory”, etc.).
Boris Stepanov’s (Institute of European Cultures, Russian State University for the Humanities [RSUH]) article “A thin red line: debates on personality and individuality as a beginning of historiography of the 1990s” studies the polemics on the concept of individuality in the Odyssey almanac (1990) and the debate between two outstanding medievists Aaron Gurevich and Leonid Batkin as landmarks in the formation of the new concept of the past as well as in the hermeneutics of the subjective.
NATIONAL ELITES
Aleksandr Feduta (Minsk) in his work “Power divided by three” analyses the formation of nation-building projects in Belorussia in 1990 as well as the process of the Communist Party of Belorussia splitting into different political movements. Georgy Kasyanov (Institute of History, National Academy of Science and “Rebirth” Foundation, Kiev) in his article “Ukraine-1990: “battles for history”” demonstrates how previously taboo episodes of Ukrainian history (e.g. the famine of 1932—1933) started to serve as a basis for the ideological myths of the new nationalist democratic movements. Sergei Romanenko’s (Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow) article “1990 — the Yugoslavian Rubicon” provides a detailed study of the preconditions of ethnic and political crisis that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1990—1991. According to the author, that crisis could be considered the conclusion of the process begun with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Zaal Andronikashvili (Ilya Chavchavadze University, Tbilisi/Berlin) and Georgy Maisuradze’s (Zentrum fur Literaturforschung Research Fellow, Tbilisi/Berlin) article “Georgia-1990: a Philologema of independence, or Unextracted experience” discusses the question: why did Georgian intellectuals fail to provide their society with a project of future development that would oppose the project of the extreme nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who came to power as a result of the 1990 elections (and was toppled by an armed coup in 1992). As an alternative to Gamsakhurdia the authors portray the prominent Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1928—1990).
TRANSFORMATIONS OF MASS CONCSIOUSNESS
Ekaterina Mikhailovskaia (Moscow) in her article “Political words as things, or a Reflection on reading a certain shorthand record” analyses changes in the semantics of political language that happened in the USSR in 1990 on the basis of speeches made at the First Congress of Peoples’ Deputies of the Russian Federation (Boris Yeltsin was elected the leader of Russia and a parallel centre of power started to form within the USSR). The author demonstrates that in 1990 modern Russian political language was formed. Aleksei Yurchak (The University of California, Berkeley) in his article ““If Lenin were alive he would know what to do”: the bare life of a leader” traces the lightning transformation of Lenin’s image in the Soviet mass media of the 1990—1991s: at the start of 1990 Lenin was still perceived as an infallible leader, but a revision of the texts written by the creator of the Russian Revolution along with the change of the political situation led to a complete decanonisation of his image. That process, for example, manifested itself through a TV practical joke presented in the spring of 1991 by avant-garde composer Sergei Kuryokhin: he tried to prove with pseudo-scientific arguments that the Bolsheviks brought about the Communist revolution under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Elena Yarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov (both — Center for cultural sociology, Saratov State University) in their article “The Social as Irrational” study the torrential spread of the craze for irrational knowledge (UFOs, alternative medicine, parapsychology, the occult (poltergeists), etc.) that hit the Soviet mass media in the end of the 1980s. That interest previously existed in the USSR as a surrogate of religious beliefs but was never allowed to be legitimised in the public sphere. Anna Ulura (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, Ukrainian National Academy of Science, Kiev) in her article “Mitki are not sexual: erotisation of the border territory, 1990 specimen” shows that after the taboo had been lifted from erotic matters in the Soviet public sphere at the end of the 1980s the majority of jokes and statements of an erotic nature expressed a male, patriarchal viewpoint; female sexuality remained repressed and unrecognised by public consciousness under new conditions; however, literature had already started looking for adequate means of its expression. The version of this section on the attached CD contains an article by Maksim Krongaus (RSUH) on the intense transformations of everyday language and that of the media that happened in 1990. This paper studies the process of “freeing the language” that manifested itself by the rapid infiltration of public discourse by jargon and borrowed words from foreign languages. The article also describes modern legislative acts, adopted or discussed in the Russian parliament (Gosudarstvennaja Duma) that addressed the matter of codifying public language.
INSTITUTIONS
This section analyses the transformations undergone by the social institutions already existing within the Soviet system by 1990 and the emergence of new public organisations and groups. Vitali Yelizarov (St. Petersburg University of Economics and Finance) analyses political institution-building in the Soviet Union in 1990. He demonstrates that a fully-fledged party system failed to form in the USSR because the place of parties in the public consciousness was taken by the new alternative centres of power (the Russian Federation leadership that opposed the leadership of the Soviet Union; and regional elites). That collective perception of administrative elites as competing quasi-party formations hindered the emergence of civic society in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. Vadim Goncharov’s (M.A. Bonch-Bruevich State Telecommunications University, St. Petersburg) article demonstrates that the formation of new non-Communist parties in Russia in 1990 paradoxically occurred separately from the development of new ideological trends which in the end did not produce any organisational structures. In the future that separation prevented the formation of a fully fledged multi-party system in Russia in the 1990s. Vladimir Pribylovsky’s (Panorama Research Center, Moscow) article “At the dawn of party building (chronicler’s notes)” give a detailed account of a new political system being established in Russia from the political clubs of the mid-1980s through CPSU-opposing “National fronts” towards normal mass parties (within the Democratic Russia movement).
Sergei Turkin (Analytical centre CJSC “LUKOIL-Inform”, Centre of Economic and Political Research and Development, Moscow) in his work “Miners in 1989— 1990: a foray into big politics” explores the importance of the miners’ strike movement in the coal regions of Kuzbass, Donbass and Northern Kazakhstan. During those strikes miners advanced the slogans calling for the democratisation of the regime. The leader of the first independent professional union in the USSR, SOTSPROF, Sergei Khramov (Moscow) who took part in organising the strikes in 1990, in his answer to Turkin’s article “The notes of a non-casual observer” states that that development in the formation of the workers’ movement had not only its positive sides but also its drawbacks since the involvement of the miners’ leaders in political issues allowed them to gain positions in the governing institutions but hindered them in solving trade-union problems — e.g. fighting for favourable tariffs and defending the rights of wage workers, etc.
Nikolai Mitrokhin (Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Bremen/Moscow) in his article “The Russian Orthodox Church in 1990” discusses various aspects of changes in Orthodox religious life: elections of the new Patriarch, relationship between the church and the state, return of churches and cathedrals, the interrelation between the national, traditionalist and liberal currents within the church, its conflict with the Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine, etc. Tamara Eidelman (Upper secondary school № 1567, Moscow) in her article “The Year of Fulfilled Utopias” uses numerous interviews with school teachers from Moscow and various regions of Russia to describe the process of deideologisation in the schools and the weakening of state censorship in the field of education that took place in 1990. New types of schools were created and new (“personal”) methods of education were adopted.
ECONOMICS
This section is devoted to the most important sphere in the life of Soviet society where the contradictions of the previous social model and its crisis manifested themselves in 1990 with particular clarity. To provide an answer to the matter of alternatives to Soviet economic policy, the authors of this section strive to reconstruct the complete spectrum of intellectual and organisational capacities available at the time. Those capacities were set by several factors: the real state of the economy (combined with a totally distorted picture presented by Soviet statistics), the memory of Soviet reforms — from the NEP to the aborted reforms of 1965 — and, finally, by the characteristics of economic science. It was in 1990 that economists started playing the part of experts, public figures, politicians and top state officials in the USSR.
Evgeny Saburov (State University “Higher School of Economics”, Moscow; Deputy Minister of Education in 1990) in his article “A drawn-out prelude” analyses the main problems facing the Soviet economy in 1990 (the systemic crisis of state capitalism) and underlines their non-classical nature. He also describes the most important discussions of the year 1990 between the partisans of a more dirigist and more liberal approaches to the strategies of Soviet changeover to market economy. Konstantin Sonin (Russian School of Economics, Moscow) in his article “Reforms and institutions: an economist’s view” demonstrates the limited nature of academic discussions of the year 1990 from the viewpoint of modern economic science. Olesia Kirchik (Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science / E ? cole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, France) in her article “History as Economics, or a journey from 1921 to 1906 via 1990” reviews the transition from idealising the new economic policy to an assertion of a simplified liberal mode of thinking in the articles about economics from the end of the 1980s.
The attached CD contains a paper by Natalia Shmatko (Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow). Using Pierre Bourdieu’s social analysis as a basis, the author traces the transformation of economic science in 1990 as “heretical revolutions” against the predominant Marxist orthodoxy.
NEW CLASS
Andrei Kabatskov and Anna Kimmerling (both — Perm State University) on the basis of multiple interviews analyse the self-perception of those entrepreneurs who became public figures in 1990 in the USSR, discussing both their image of themselves and their social role (characteristic of 1990) and the peculiarities of their recollections of the beginnings of their business careers, “strategies of recollection and amnesia”. The authors describe the political and social views of the first legal Soviet businessmen. Irina Olimpieva (Center for Independent Sociological Studies, St. Petersburg) studies connections between business and academic science in the USSR in 1990 — both the social (many scientists decided to become businessmen that year or signed contracts on exploratory development with the first Soviet businessmen) and the institutional ones (heads of state research institutions deprived of state financing as a result of the financial crisis started creating business structures inbuilt into their institutes). Marina Zagidullina (Chelyabinsk State University) in her article “Life as Fate: touches to a biography of a businessman” analyses a biography of entrepreneur Pavel Rabin that is quite characteristic of Post-Soviet Russia: Rabin, a research fellow at a state institution, in 1990 with great doubts started his own business and learned how to survive in the new social environment; at the moment Rabin is one of the best-known businessmen in Chelyabinsk (a big industrial city in the Urals).
The version of this section on the attached CD contains an article by Natalia Osminskaya (Moscow) “From the stories about “new people”” which analyses strategies for describing entrepreneurs and business ethics in the Soviet press in 1990. She pays special attention to the means by which journalists managed to overcome the idea prevalent in the Soviet society of private business being a criminal and dangerous occupation (that concept had been planted by state propaganda for decades).
MASS MEDIA
Former Minister of Press of the Russian Federation Mikhail Fedotov (INDEM Foundation, Moscow) in his article “Law on the Press as a legal miracle” offers an in-depth analysis of the process of preparation and passing by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the Law on the Press and other Mass Information Media. That law abolished censorship and allowed the registration of the independent mass media. Mikhail Fedotov was one of the authors of that law passed on 12 June 1990. Marina Zagidullina (Chelyabinsk State University) and Irina Kaspe (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) write about the print media in 1990: Marina Zagidullina describes metropolitan and regional newspapers while Irina Kaspe deals with publicistic articles in literary journals.
While preparing papers on electronic media of 1990 our authors had to face an unexpected difficulty: television archives from 1990 were not well preserved or were not easily accessible. Therefore articles by Vera Zvereva (The Institute of European Cultures, RSUH, Moscow) and Pavel Pavlov (The South Urals TV Company, Chelyabinsk) offer a careful analysis of the few surviving programs with Vera Zvereva dealing with the Moscow and Pavel Pavlov with the Chelyabinsk side.
Maria Maiofis’ and Ilya Kukulin’s (The New Literary Observer magazine, Moscow) paper “Freedom as an unconscious precedent” presents a review of institutional transformations of the Russian media in 1990. On the basis of interviews with leading journalists and media-managers they describe the work of new information agencies (“Interfax”), TV companies (ATV) and radio stations (“Echo of Moscow”), discuss the public influence and the political weight of the most influential TV programs (“View”, “Fifth wheel”) and analyse the political activities of opposition magazines.
The electronic issue also contains 10 exclusive interviews given to our magazine by the most prominent electronic media innovators of the year 1990: TV presenters Vladimir Pozner, Aleksandr Politkovsky, Dmitri Zakharov, managers of the “ATV” TV production company Kira Proshutinskaia and Anatoli Malkin, founder of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Anatoli Lysenko, creators of the “Echo of Moscow” Radio station Vice-President of the “Radio” Association Grigori Kliger and journalists Sergei Korzun and Sergei Buntman, one of the Interfax Agency founding members Renat Abdullin.
ART
Oksana Sarkisyan’s (Moscow) work “Euphoria” describes the transformational processes occurring within Moscow and Leningrad’s artistic community in 1990. The author shows that during this year no new aesthetic ideas were produced, yet some new social structures and institutions were created: the first private galleries, the first art fairs, artistic associations and so forth. Those institutions had not only practical but even to a greater extent symbolic meaning. Viktor Tupitsyn (Pace University, New York) in his article “Seventeen years later” analyses the problems of “translatability” or re-contextualisation of official and unofficial Soviet art — both of these trends were present in abundance on international markets after the enormous success of the Moscow 1988 Sotheby’s auction, at which some masterpieces of non-conformist art were sold. Grigory Durnovo (Moscow) in his work “Orientation in a plasticine universe” studies changes in the main trends within Soviet rock music in the year 1990, the transformations undergone by the audience and the changes within self-awareness of its most radical counterculture section (the so-called Siberian punk). Yan Levchenko (“Alternative Cinema” film company, Moscow) in his essay “Year of a closed fracture” presents an analysis of the most important films made in 1990. Marco Sabbatini’s (Universita di Perugia) article offers a detailed analysis of a poem by unofficial Russian poet Viktor Krivulin (1944—2001) “What was rhymed” (1990); the author demonstrates that the work contains an analysis of the way in wich religious and philosophical ideas that earlier were the patrimony of unofficial culture underwent radical simplification and were turned into newspaper cliches.
CHRONICLE
The issue contains a detailed chronicle of the year 1990 compiled using the materials of both the official and unofficial press. This chronicle describes political, cultural and social events in the USSR as well as the most important events that happened in other countries at the end of 1989 and in 1990 (the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-Communist revolutions in the Eastern European countries, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, reforms in South Africa, etc.). The complete version of the chronicle, more than three times the size of the printed version and containing detailed biographical notes and quotations from memoirs can be found on the attached CD. Every month of the chronicle is commented on by the witnesses and participants of the events and by the experts. Among the commentators are a former Soviet Foreign Minister, a Croatian politician, a leader of an independent trade union, activists of newly formed political parties, eyewitnesses of armed conflict in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Albania, historians from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Kirghizia, Germany and Bulgaria.
MEMORY
The articles by Aleksei Levinson (Levada Center, Moscow) «The nineteen nineties and the year nineteen ninety: sociological materials» and Boris Dubin (Levada Center, Moscow) «Dot, Line and Date, or the Year that Disappeared» use data from sociological polls to analyse how the images of the year 1990 have been changing in the collective memory of Russian society during the last 17 years (1990 to 2007). To a great extent that year was displaced from the social memory, its hopes and fears also forgotten.
MY 1990
Gasan Guseinov (Dusseldorf, Heirich-Heine-Universitat) recalls the public discussions of the year 1990 in which he took part as a political scholar. The most important ones were the discussions on the ways to create a civic nation and on the part of national self-determination within that process. Guseinov thinks that some of the questions discussed at the time have not been answered explicitly in Post-Soviet Russia. Vyacheslav Glazychev (Moscow Institute of Architecture and Europa Publishing House, Moscow) describes the emergence of new institutions in the USSR: the “Cultural initiative” foundation supported by George Soros and a political and educational “Memorial” society. He also speaks about transformations undergone by the professional creative associations using the Soviet Architects’ Union as an example (in 1990 Glazychev was part of the association’s governing body). Marietta Chudakova (Literary Institute, Moscow) analyses her perception of political and social events of the year 1990 by studying and commenting on her diary and that of her husband, philologist and writer Aleksandr Chudakov as well as on her op-ed pieces written right after the events. Well-known artist and writer Grisha Bruskin (New York) publishes annotated fragments of his 1990 diary (the first year of his life after immigrating to the USA). His witty notes describe how Russian non-conformist artists perceived the rage for the new Russian art that was quite widespread in the West at the end of the 1980s — the beginning of the 1990.
“NLO” also presents a Russian translation of an excerpt from a book by Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell University) “Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West” (The MIT Press, 2000), that describes a conference that happened in 1990 in Dubrovnik (former Yugoslavia, now Croatia), where the left-wing Western intellectuals and philosophers from Russia and Eastern Europe held a debate under the conditions of freedom.
EVERYDAY PRACTICES
The majority of research projects in this section was conducted using the methods of “oral history”, i.e. on the basis of various specialised interviews. Linor Goralik
(The Eshkol Project, Moscow) in her work “Entresols of memory: recollections of the clothing of the year 1990” analyses the transformation of semiotic codes of dressing in the Soviet society in 1990. That period, characterised by a desperate lack of clothing and foodstuffs, was when new practices of perceiving and wearing clothes were formed or existing ones radically transformed. Sergei Karnaukhov (European University, St. Petersburg) in his article describes the characteristic sources of procurement and the variety of foodstuffs available to middle-class families in four Russian cities: Leningrad, Irkutsk, Angarsk (Siberia) and the port of Tiksi (Yakutia). Goralik and Karnaukhov’s articles show that the state system of distribution of goods in 1990 was in a state of catastrophic crisis. Linguist Revekka Frumkina (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow) analyses her first experiences of lengthy trips abroad (in 1990 she gained permission to visit Sweden and Australia, prior to that the authorities had not allowed her to travel to “capitalist states”). Svetlana Koroleva’s (Levada Center, Moscow) article studies the intense development of hot air ballooning in 1989—1990; prior to that independent construction of balloons that could be used by aeronauts had been impossible in the USSR. In 1990 the first Soviet ballooning festival was conducted and a famous British aeronaut Don Cameron was given permission by the KGB to fly from Britain to the USSR (he flew with a Soviet pilot Pavel Gromov and landed in a village near Riga).
DIARIES
In this issue we publish fragments of five 1990 diaries whose authors represent various colours of the political spectrum of the time: Mikhail Gorbachev’s aide Anatoli Cherniaev; a liberal and anti-Communist prose-writer and translator Mark Kharitonov; a “patriotic” writer Sergei Semanov; avant-garde artist and poet Mikhail Grobman who in 1990 returned to the USSR for the first time since his immigration to Israel in 1971; and finally two American Slavic scholars Eric Naiman and Ann Nesbet (University of California, Berkeley), who in their diaries describe both East and West Berlin of 1990. The printed version contains an abridged variant of the abovementioned diaries. Their complete versions can be found on the CD.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In his review Boris Wittenberg (St. Petersburg) analyses the recently published books on perestroika and the year 1990 while Valery Shubinsky (St. Petersburg) discusses the actual scientific and cultural book output of the year 1990.
The issue has an extensive index of names and notes on the authors.
1990: AN ATTEMPT AT STUDYING THE RECENT PAST
SUMMARY
STUDYING THE RECENT PAST
The articles in this section describe the changes in the conceptual structure, methods and aims of historical understanding when analysing the recent past. The key notion for the authors of this section was an idea of modern history as a challenge to familiar totalising schemes and conceptualisations that, by definition, alienate the singular and unique nature of the experience gained by “us” at the turn of the 1980s—1990s. In this connection it’s recent history theories that become objects of critical historisation: the concepts of “end of history”, “civilisational clash”, historical hermeneutics and “realms of memory”.
Martin Jay’s (University of California, Berkeley) paper “1990: Straddling a Watershed?” demonstrates how immediately after the end of the Cold War a divergence was discovered between recorded elements of experience and the means of its interpretation that proved to be imprecise and superficial. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) in his article ““Contemporary history” in the present of a changing hronotope” states there is a need for a way to record in the present the traces of past experiences, a way that could not be reduced to the blueprints of traditional historicism or to a postmodernist cancellation of the significance of the past. Francois Hartog (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris) in his article “Times of the world, history and historical writing” problematises modern concepts of global history, comparing them with the doctrines prevalent in Europe after the First World War. Finally, Mikhail Yampolsky (New York University) in his article “The present as a rupture: notes on history and memory” insists on the need to understand the year 1990 as a unique historical constellation — in opposition to any programming strategies (locking it in a particular “naming”, transformation of that year into a “realm of memory”, etc.).
Boris Stepanov’s (Institute of European Cultures, Russian State University for the Humanities [RSUH]) article “A thin red line: debates on personality and individuality as a beginning of historiography of the 1990s” studies the polemics on the concept of individuality in the Odyssey almanac (1990) and the debate between two outstanding medievists Aaron Gurevich and Leonid Batkin as landmarks in the formation of the new concept of the past as well as in the hermeneutics of the subjective.
NATIONAL ELITES
Aleksandr Feduta (Minsk) in his work “Power divided by three” analyses the formation of nation-building projects in Belorussia in 1990 as well as the process of the Communist Party of Belorussia splitting into different political movements. Georgy Kasyanov (Institute of History, National Academy of Science and “Rebirth” Foundation, Kiev) in his article “Ukraine-1990: “battles for history”” demonstrates how previously taboo episodes of Ukrainian history (e.g. the famine of 1932—1933) started to serve as a basis for the ideological myths of the new nationalist democratic movements. Sergei Romanenko’s (Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow) article “1990 — the Yugoslavian Rubicon” provides a detailed study of the preconditions of ethnic and political crisis that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1990—1991. According to the author, that crisis could be considered the conclusion of the process begun with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. Zaal Andronikashvili (Ilya Chavchavadze University, Tbilisi/Berlin) and Georgy Maisuradze’s (Zentrum fur Literaturforschung Research Fellow, Tbilisi/Berlin) article “Georgia-1990: a Philologema of independence, or Unextracted experience” discusses the question: why did Georgian intellectuals fail to provide their society with a project of future development that would oppose the project of the extreme nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who came to power as a result of the 1990 elections (and was toppled by an armed coup in 1992). As an alternative to Gamsakhurdia the authors portray the prominent Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili (1928—1990).
TRANSFORMATIONS OF MASS CONCSIOUSNESS
Ekaterina Mikhailovskaia (Moscow) in her article “Political words as things, or a Reflection on reading a certain shorthand record” analyses changes in the semantics of political language that happened in the USSR in 1990 on the basis of speeches made at the First Congress of Peoples’ Deputies of the Russian Federation (Boris Yeltsin was elected the leader of Russia and a parallel centre of power started to form within the USSR). The author demonstrates that in 1990 modern Russian political language was formed. Aleksei Yurchak (The University of California, Berkeley) in his article ““If Lenin were alive he would know what to do”: the bare life of a leader” traces the lightning transformation of Lenin’s image in the Soviet mass media of the 1990—1991s: at the start of 1990 Lenin was still perceived as an infallible leader, but a revision of the texts written by the creator of the Russian Revolution along with the change of the political situation led to a complete decanonisation of his image. That process, for example, manifested itself through a TV practical joke presented in the spring of 1991 by avant-garde composer Sergei Kuryokhin: he tried to prove with pseudo-scientific arguments that the Bolsheviks brought about the Communist revolution under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Elena Yarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov (both — Center for cultural sociology, Saratov State University) in their article “The Social as Irrational” study the torrential spread of the craze for irrational knowledge (UFOs, alternative medicine, parapsychology, the occult (poltergeists), etc.) that hit the Soviet mass media in the end of the 1980s. That interest previously existed in the USSR as a surrogate of religious beliefs but was never allowed to be legitimised in the public sphere. Anna Ulura (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, Ukrainian National Academy of Science, Kiev) in her article “Mitki are not sexual: erotisation of the border territory, 1990 specimen” shows that after the taboo had been lifted from erotic matters in the Soviet public sphere at the end of the 1980s the majority of jokes and statements of an erotic nature expressed a male, patriarchal viewpoint; female sexuality remained repressed and unrecognised by public consciousness under new conditions; however, literature had already started looking for adequate means of its expression. The version of this section on the attached CD contains an article by Maksim Krongaus (RSUH) on the intense transformations of everyday language and that of the media that happened in 1990. This paper studies the process of “freeing the language” that manifested itself by the rapid infiltration of public discourse by jargon and borrowed words from foreign languages. The article also describes modern legislative acts, adopted or discussed in the Russian parliament (Gosudarstvennaja Duma) that addressed the matter of codifying public language.
INSTITUTIONS
This section analyses the transformations undergone by the social institutions already existing within the Soviet system by 1990 and the emergence of new public organisations and groups. Vitali Yelizarov (St. Petersburg University of Economics and Finance) analyses political institution-building in the Soviet Union in 1990. He demonstrates that a fully-fledged party system failed to form in the USSR because the place of parties in the public consciousness was taken by the new alternative centres of power (the Russian Federation leadership that opposed the leadership of the Soviet Union; and regional elites). That collective perception of administrative elites as competing quasi-party formations hindered the emergence of civic society in Russia in the 1990s and 2000s. Vadim Goncharov’s (M.A. Bonch-Bruevich State Telecommunications University, St. Petersburg) article demonstrates that the formation of new non-Communist parties in Russia in 1990 paradoxically occurred separately from the development of new ideological trends which in the end did not produce any organisational structures. In the future that separation prevented the formation of a fully fledged multi-party system in Russia in the 1990s. Vladimir Pribylovsky’s (Panorama Research Center, Moscow) article “At the dawn of party building (chronicler’s notes)” give a detailed account of a new political system being established in Russia from the political clubs of the mid-1980s through CPSU-opposing “National fronts” towards normal mass parties (within the Democratic Russia movement).
Sergei Turkin (Analytical centre CJSC “LUKOIL-Inform”, Centre of Economic and Political Research and Development, Moscow) in his work “Miners in 1989— 1990: a foray into big politics” explores the importance of the miners’ strike movement in the coal regions of Kuzbass, Donbass and Northern Kazakhstan. During those strikes miners advanced the slogans calling for the democratisation of the regime. The leader of the first independent professional union in the USSR, SOTSPROF, Sergei Khramov (Moscow) who took part in organising the strikes in 1990, in his answer to Turkin’s article “The notes of a non-casual observer” states that that development in the formation of the workers’ movement had not only its positive sides but also its drawbacks since the involvement of the miners’ leaders in political issues allowed them to gain positions in the governing institutions but hindered them in solving trade-union problems — e.g. fighting for favourable tariffs and defending the rights of wage workers, etc.
Nikolai Mitrokhin (Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, Bremen/Moscow) in his article “The Russian Orthodox Church in 1990” discusses various aspects of changes in Orthodox religious life: elections of the new Patriarch, relationship between the church and the state, return of churches and cathedrals, the interrelation between the national, traditionalist and liberal currents within the church, its conflict with the Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine, etc. Tamara Eidelman (Upper secondary school № 1567, Moscow) in her article “The Year of Fulfilled Utopias” uses numerous interviews with school teachers from Moscow and various regions of Russia to describe the process of deideologisation in the schools and the weakening of state censorship in the field of education that took place in 1990. New types of schools were created and new (“personal”) methods of education were adopted.
ECONOMICS
This section is devoted to the most important sphere in the life of Soviet society where the contradictions of the previous social model and its crisis manifested themselves in 1990 with particular clarity. To provide an answer to the matter of alternatives to Soviet economic policy, the authors of this section strive to reconstruct the complete spectrum of intellectual and organisational capacities available at the time. Those capacities were set by several factors: the real state of the economy (combined with a totally distorted picture presented by Soviet statistics), the memory of Soviet reforms — from the NEP to the aborted reforms of 1965 — and, finally, by the characteristics of economic science. It was in 1990 that economists started playing the part of experts, public figures, politicians and top state officials in the USSR.
Evgeny Saburov (State University “Higher School of Economics”, Moscow; Deputy Minister of Education in 1990) in his article “A drawn-out prelude” analyses the main problems facing the Soviet economy in 1990 (the systemic crisis of state capitalism) and underlines their non-classical nature. He also describes the most important discussions of the year 1990 between the partisans of a more dirigist and more liberal approaches to the strategies of Soviet changeover to market economy. Konstantin Sonin (Russian School of Economics, Moscow) in his article “Reforms and institutions: an economist’s view” demonstrates the limited nature of academic discussions of the year 1990 from the viewpoint of modern economic science. Olesia Kirchik (Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science / E ? cole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, France) in her article “History as Economics, or a journey from 1921 to 1906 via 1990” reviews the transition from idealising the new economic policy to an assertion of a simplified liberal mode of thinking in the articles about economics from the end of the 1980s.
The attached CD contains a paper by Natalia Shmatko (Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow). Using Pierre Bourdieu’s social analysis as a basis, the author traces the transformation of economic science in 1990 as “heretical revolutions” against the predominant Marxist orthodoxy.
NEW CLASS
Andrei Kabatskov and Anna Kimmerling (both — Perm State University) on the basis of multiple interviews analyse the self-perception of those entrepreneurs who became public figures in 1990 in the USSR, discussing both their image of themselves and their social role (characteristic of 1990) and the peculiarities of their recollections of the beginnings of their business careers, “strategies of recollection and amnesia”. The authors describe the political and social views of the first legal Soviet businessmen. Irina Olimpieva (Center for Independent Sociological Studies, St. Petersburg) studies connections between business and academic science in the USSR in 1990 — both the social (many scientists decided to become businessmen that year or signed contracts on exploratory development with the first Soviet businessmen) and the institutional ones (heads of state research institutions deprived of state financing as a result of the financial crisis started creating business structures inbuilt into their institutes). Marina Zagidullina (Chelyabinsk State University) in her article “Life as Fate: touches to a biography of a businessman” analyses a biography of entrepreneur Pavel Rabin that is quite characteristic of Post-Soviet Russia: Rabin, a research fellow at a state institution, in 1990 with great doubts started his own business and learned how to survive in the new social environment; at the moment Rabin is one of the best-known businessmen in Chelyabinsk (a big industrial city in the Urals).
The version of this section on the attached CD contains an article by Natalia Osminskaya (Moscow) “From the stories about “new people”” which analyses strategies for describing entrepreneurs and business ethics in the Soviet press in 1990. She pays special attention to the means by which journalists managed to overcome the idea prevalent in the Soviet society of private business being a criminal and dangerous occupation (that concept had been planted by state propaganda for decades).
MASS MEDIA
Former Minister of Press of the Russian Federation Mikhail Fedotov (INDEM Foundation, Moscow) in his article “Law on the Press as a legal miracle” offers an in-depth analysis of the process of preparation and passing by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of the Law on the Press and other Mass Information Media. That law abolished censorship and allowed the registration of the independent mass media. Mikhail Fedotov was one of the authors of that law passed on 12 June 1990. Marina Zagidullina (Chelyabinsk State University) and Irina Kaspe (Higher School of Economics, Moscow) write about the print media in 1990: Marina Zagidullina describes metropolitan and regional newspapers while Irina Kaspe deals with publicistic articles in literary journals.
While preparing papers on electronic media of 1990 our authors had to face an unexpected difficulty: television archives from 1990 were not well preserved or were not easily accessible. Therefore articles by Vera Zvereva (The Institute of European Cultures, RSUH, Moscow) and Pavel Pavlov (The South Urals TV Company, Chelyabinsk) offer a careful analysis of the few surviving programs with Vera Zvereva dealing with the Moscow and Pavel Pavlov with the Chelyabinsk side.
Maria Maiofis’ and Ilya Kukulin’s (The New Literary Observer magazine, Moscow) paper “Freedom as an unconscious precedent” presents a review of institutional transformations of the Russian media in 1990. On the basis of interviews with leading journalists and media-managers they describe the work of new information agencies (“Interfax”), TV companies (ATV) and radio stations (“Echo of Moscow”), discuss the public influence and the political weight of the most influential TV programs (“View”, “Fifth wheel”) and analyse the political activities of opposition magazines.
The electronic issue also contains 10 exclusive interviews given to our magazine by the most prominent electronic media innovators of the year 1990: TV presenters Vladimir Pozner, Aleksandr Politkovsky, Dmitri Zakharov, managers of the “ATV” TV production company Kira Proshutinskaia and Anatoli Malkin, founder of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Anatoli Lysenko, creators of the “Echo of Moscow” Radio station Vice-President of the “Radio” Association Grigori Kliger and journalists Sergei Korzun and Sergei Buntman, one of the Interfax Agency founding members Renat Abdullin.
ART
Oksana Sarkisyan’s (Moscow) work “Euphoria” describes the transformational processes occurring within Moscow and Leningrad’s artistic community in 1990. The author shows that during this year no new aesthetic ideas were produced, yet some new social structures and institutions were created: the first private galleries, the first art fairs, artistic associations and so forth. Those institutions had not only practical but even to a greater extent symbolic meaning. Viktor Tupitsyn (Pace University, New York) in his article “Seventeen years later” analyses the problems of “translatability” or re-contextualisation of official and unofficial Soviet art — both of these trends were present in abundance on international markets after the enormous success of the Moscow 1988 Sotheby’s auction, at which some masterpieces of non-conformist art were sold. Grigory Durnovo (Moscow) in his work “Orientation in a plasticine universe” studies changes in the main trends within Soviet rock music in the year 1990, the transformations undergone by the audience and the changes within self-awareness of its most radical counterculture section (the so-called Siberian punk). Yan Levchenko (“Alternative Cinema” film company, Moscow) in his essay “Year of a closed fracture” presents an analysis of the most important films made in 1990. Marco Sabbatini’s (Universita di Perugia) article offers a detailed analysis of a poem by unofficial Russian poet Viktor Krivulin (1944—2001) “What was rhymed” (1990); the author demonstrates that the work contains an analysis of the way in wich religious and philosophical ideas that earlier were the patrimony of unofficial culture underwent radical simplification and were turned into newspaper cliches.
CHRONICLE
The issue contains a detailed chronicle of the year 1990 compiled using the materials of both the official and unofficial press. This chronicle describes political, cultural and social events in the USSR as well as the most important events that happened in other countries at the end of 1989 and in 1990 (the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-Communist revolutions in the Eastern European countries, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, reforms in South Africa, etc.). The complete version of the chronicle, more than three times the size of the printed version and containing detailed biographical notes and quotations from memoirs can be found on the attached CD. Every month of the chronicle is commented on by the witnesses and participants of the events and by the experts. Among the commentators are a former Soviet Foreign Minister, a Croatian politician, a leader of an independent trade union, activists of newly formed political parties, eyewitnesses of armed conflict in Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Albania, historians from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Kirghizia, Germany and Bulgaria.
MEMORY
The articles by Aleksei Levinson (Levada Center, Moscow) «The nineteen nineties and the year nineteen ninety: sociological materials» and Boris Dubin (Levada Center, Moscow) «Dot, Line and Date, or the Year that Disappeared» use data from sociological polls to analyse how the images of the year 1990 have been changing in the collective memory of Russian society during the last 17 years (1990 to 2007). To a great extent that year was displaced from the social memory, its hopes and fears also forgotten.
MY 1990
Gasan Guseinov (Dusseldorf, Heirich-Heine-Universitat) recalls the public discussions of the year 1990 in which he took part as a political scholar. The most important ones were the discussions on the ways to create a civic nation and on the part of national self-determination within that process. Guseinov thinks that some of the questions discussed at the time have not been answered explicitly in Post-Soviet Russia. Vyacheslav Glazychev (Moscow Institute of Architecture and Europa Publishing House, Moscow) describes the emergence of new institutions in the USSR: the “Cultural initiative” foundation supported by George Soros and a political and educational “Memorial” society. He also speaks about transformations undergone by the professional creative associations using the Soviet Architects’ Union as an example (in 1990 Glazychev was part of the association’s governing body). Marietta Chudakova (Literary Institute, Moscow) analyses her perception of political and social events of the year 1990 by studying and commenting on her diary and that of her husband, philologist and writer Aleksandr Chudakov as well as on her op-ed pieces written right after the events. Well-known artist and writer Grisha Bruskin (New York) publishes annotated fragments of his 1990 diary (the first year of his life after immigrating to the USA). His witty notes describe how Russian non-conformist artists perceived the rage for the new Russian art that was quite widespread in the West at the end of the 1980s — the beginning of the 1990.
“NLO” also presents a Russian translation of an excerpt from a book by Susan Buck-Morss (Cornell University) “Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West” (The MIT Press, 2000), that describes a conference that happened in 1990 in Dubrovnik (former Yugoslavia, now Croatia), where the left-wing Western intellectuals and philosophers from Russia and Eastern Europe held a debate under the conditions of freedom.
EVERYDAY PRACTICES
The majority of research projects in this section was conducted using the methods of “oral history”, i.e. on the basis of various specialised interviews. Linor Goralik
(The Eshkol Project, Moscow) in her work “Entresols of memory: recollections of the clothing of the year 1990” analyses the transformation of semiotic codes of dressing in the Soviet society in 1990. That period, characterised by a desperate lack of clothing and foodstuffs, was when new practices of perceiving and wearing clothes were formed or existing ones radically transformed. Sergei Karnaukhov (European University, St. Petersburg) in his article describes the characteristic sources of procurement and the variety of foodstuffs available to middle-class families in four Russian cities: Leningrad, Irkutsk, Angarsk (Siberia) and the port of Tiksi (Yakutia). Goralik and Karnaukhov’s articles show that the state system of distribution of goods in 1990 was in a state of catastrophic crisis. Linguist Revekka Frumkina (Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Science, Moscow) analyses her first experiences of lengthy trips abroad (in 1990 she gained permission to visit Sweden and Australia, prior to that the authorities had not allowed her to travel to “capitalist states”). Svetlana Koroleva’s (Levada Center, Moscow) article studies the intense development of hot air ballooning in 1989—1990; prior to that independent construction of balloons that could be used by aeronauts had been impossible in the USSR. In 1990 the first Soviet ballooning festival was conducted and a famous British aeronaut Don Cameron was given permission by the KGB to fly from Britain to the USSR (he flew with a Soviet pilot Pavel Gromov and landed in a village near Riga).
DIARIES
In this issue we publish fragments of five 1990 diaries whose authors represent various colours of the political spectrum of the time: Mikhail Gorbachev’s aide Anatoli Cherniaev; a liberal and anti-Communist prose-writer and translator Mark Kharitonov; a “patriotic” writer Sergei Semanov; avant-garde artist and poet Mikhail Grobman who in 1990 returned to the USSR for the first time since his immigration to Israel in 1971; and finally two American Slavic scholars Eric Naiman and Ann Nesbet (University of California, Berkeley), who in their diaries describe both East and West Berlin of 1990. The printed version contains an abridged variant of the abovementioned diaries. Their complete versions can be found on the CD.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In his review Boris Wittenberg (St. Petersburg) analyses the recently published books on perestroika and the year 1990 while Valery Shubinsky (St. Petersburg) discusses the actual scientific and cultural book output of the year 1990.
The issue has an extensive index of names and notes on the authors.