Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 1, 2013
The 87th NZ issue is somewhat unusual. Its contents, for the most part, consist of reflections on some of the most hotly discussed processes of the year just gone, the main topics of the day, so to speak. When appearing under the same cover as “topical” articles, even those of its pieces that are related to more remote social, political and cultural events, acquire a slightly different context, thus making different parts of the issue echo one another, often quite unpredictably. With this in mind, to call this NZ issue “thematic” would be a fair (if somewhat exaggerated) statement. The theme in question (to use a rather tentative definition) is democracy in the present-day world: what is it? What does this notion really mean today? How does it work in different national and historical contexts?
The first section (“There Is Such a Party…”) focuses on “party building” in contemporary
While the pieces of the first section are linked to particular political events in Russia, Alexander Kustarev in his regular column, Political Imaginary, considers a comparison – fairly widespread these days – between “democracy” and “meritocracy” (the latter seemingly “more just” and more appropriate in the present-day sociopolitical climate).
As far as the
phenomenon itself is concerned, a fascinating reflection on democracy’s future prospects can
be found in Pierre Rosanvallon’s “Democracy
of Appropriation” (this is a translation of the final chapter of his 2008
book “Democratic Legitimacy: Impartiality, Reflexivity, Proximity”).
Going back to the classical definition of a democratic state based on
the principle of the division of powers and, at the same time, restricting
ourselves to the state of affairs in
Traumatic experience, the ways of working through it characteristic for the Soviet
past, and the way they work now constitute the subject of a number of other
sections of this NZ issue. One of them, titled “Traumatic Experiences and Ways
of Working with the Past”,
has several articles on the perception and the representation of tragic events
in the history of the
The way vital
sociocultural problems are perceived and interpreted by public conscience, the
media and political rhetoric is the subject of two of this issue’s articles.
The Chinese TV journalist Huey Su Phan provides an overview of the Hong Kong
press after the reunification of the former British colony with China. Leonid
Storch, a culture expert working in
Our Case Study section presents two historical essays. Sergey Panarin tracks down the fate of Garibaldi’s persona in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet public conscience. Olga Demidova reconstructs the reaction of the Russian émigré press to the “Savinkov trial”.
This issue’s regular columnists are Ilya Kalinin (Daily Political Economy) and Alexey Levinson (Sociological Lyrics); other regular features include the Russian Intellectual Journals’ Review (Vyacheslav Morozov) and the New Books section with reviews of new books on history, sociology and political science.