Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 3, 2006
Debates on politics and culture
NZ No. 47(3) unlike the previous thematic issue Nature’s Politics: From the Environment of Survival to the Living Environment is dedicated to several topics. The main, cross-cutting subject is the matter of the intelligentsia, its self-definition and social responsibility.
The issue opens with an article by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas published several months ago. It was written in response to Habermas receiving the Bruno Kreisky Prize. In that article — To Be the First to Sense the Relevant: What Defines an Intellectual — Habermas discussed the beginnings of the idea of an Intellectual and its traditional social functions. The main question the German philosopher is interested in is: what prospects are brought to that idea by the challenge connected with the complete change of the whole public sphere caused by the rapid development of new information carriers and forms of communication.
In his Humane Economics Yevgeny Saburov also addresses that topic, albeit using Russian material. He discusses the correlation between the «so-called» as the author puts it, intelligentsia and the transforming middle class of Russian society – that exists as a specific social and economic phenomenon.
The problems connected with the self-identification of the Russian intelligentsia receive their most multifaceted treatment in the thematic section Nervous People. Intelligentsia – A New Round of Reflection. The immediate cause of that discussion was a newly published book by Aleksandr Kustarev, Nervous People. Sketches of the Intelligentsia dedicated to various self-descriptions and self-reflections characteristic of the late- and post- Soviet intelligentsia. As an invitation to a discussion in the pages of our journal, Aleksandr Kustarev prepared yet another essay, The Intelligentsia Conglomerate And Its Narrative, in which in a deliberately provocative form, he described the narrative and rhethorical devices that the intelligentsia used to construct its social and cultural identity paradoxically turning out to be both the subject of a reflection and its effect. The polemic answers are given by: a philosopher, orientalist and writer, Aleksandr Pyatigorsky, a philosopher, cultural scholar and political observer, Vitaly Kurennoi and by a sociologist, Aleksandr Bikbov. The section is concluded by Kustarev answering his critics.
The topic is picked up by the Politics of Culture section where politologist Sergei Turkin takes the readers back to the Perestoika era, examining the ways in which the reconstruction of Soviet history was conducted at the time, and which pressing social and political functions it carried out.
In his Sociological Lyrics Aleksei Levinson studies the dynamics and the structure of the replies to polls concerning Russian society’s attitude to the possible conflict with NATO and the USA. As a development of the issue’s cross-cutting problem Levinson, amongst other things, pays special attention to the correlation of the answers given by people who have tertiary education and those who have not.
The other topic of this issue is the specifics of the state experiment currently being conducted in Belorussia that attempts to combine old political and economic governing mechanisms with the new historical challenges. The block of materials Constructing the Future: the «Belorussia» Project presents three papers. An extended article by Yaroslav Shimov Belorussia: an East European Paradox explores the unique social and political case of Belorussia in a broad historical and cultural context that grounds that uniqueness in the border position traditionally taken by that country. The articles by Fedor Lukyanov and Yuri Drakokhrust are dedicated to the development and prospects of the Russian-Belorussian relationship as seen from the perspective of both neighbours — Russia and Belorussia.
The Culture of Politics section in turn elaborates on the topic of Belorussia, focusing on the means and mechanisms of the ideological construction taking place there. Thus, an article by a Belorussian philologist and politician currently in opposition to the Lukashenko regime is dedicated to the textbooks on State Ideology which has become almost the main subject taught in Belorussian educational institutions. An article by Anastasia Mitrofanova also makes an attempt to chart the contours of the Belorussian ideological project, albeit from somewhat different political positions.
In the Case Study of this issue we publish a huge work by Pavel Polan that rediscovers the prehistory of the Holocaust. That article, based on an enormous massif of archive materials, tells a tragic story of how Stalin and the Soviet government in 1940 refused a German offer to accept several millions of Jews.
The NZ Tribune this time is taken by the famous sociologist, political scholar and left-wing activist Aleksandr Tarasov. His text, built as a report on a 2006 Athens European Social Forum, is devoted to the crisis emerging within the antiglobalist movement and its perspectives of overcoming it.
A new section, Around NZ, invites our readers to be more active in discussing already published materials. An St. Petersburg historian Andrei Semenov shares with us his critical reaction to the NZ special issue «1905: 100 Years of Oblivion». He is answered by a Moscow historian Aleksandr Shubin who wrote one of the program articles of the discussed issue. An article by Denis Dragunsky The Great Human Rights Sophism (NZ. 2006. № 1) caused an exchange of opinions between its author and a journalist and human rights activist Aleksei Tokarev.
The issue is concluded with NZ standing sections: New Institutions (on the program and activities of the Institute of Eastern Europe), Journals Review and New Books. In the latter section we have to mark out Sergei Ushakin’s review dealing with the books on social and political identity of the youth.