Russian Empire

"The paper examines the inconspicuous influence of the legacy of the classical natural law of the 18th century on Russian dogmatic jurisprudence of civil law, taking as an example the authoritative “Course on Civil Law” (1868-1880) by Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Despite the dogmatic purpose of the course and the hostility of its author towards European liberal doctrines of natural law, some striking similarities between them can be found, especially in the general provisions and principles of contract law, the method of its exposition and the recourse to justice and supra-positive ideal.
Key words: legal history; dogmatic jurisprudence; natural law; civil law; contract law; principles; justice; Russia."

Nein, nicht Foucault war die zentrale Quelle für Edward Said’s Kritik an der westlichen Wissensproduktion über den ‚Orient’, sondern der russische Orientalist Sergei F. Ol’denburg (1963-1934). Dies ist eine von Vera Tolz’ Thesen in ihrer Studie zur Orientalistik im späten Zarenreich und der frühen Sowjetunion. Mit ihr stellt sie nicht nur die Grundfrage nach der Genealogie post-kolonialer Orientalismus-Kritik neu. Sie unterstreicht zudem, dass das Verhältnis russischer bzw. sowjetischer Orientalisten zum ‚Orient’ mehr als ein weiterer beliebiger Vergleichsfall für die Imperienforschung oder lediglich ein Korrektiv für Saids Thesen darstellt. Denn ihre Identifizierung russischer Orientalisten als – wenn auch indirekte – Stichwortgeber Saids macht Fragen nach Wissen und Herrschaft in einem Vielvölkerreich mit imperialen Ambitionen über geographisch definierte Fachgrenzen hinaus relevant.....

The paper examines how geographic and political spaces of the Russo-Japanese rivalries in East Asia in the early twentieth century were represented by Japanese, Russian and other artists and cartographers. The main source material includes images related to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Japanese Intervention to Siberia シベリア出兵 (1918–1922) and contemporary maps.  The Russo-Japanese War, caused by the collision of interests between the expanding Russian and Japanese empires, was extensively visualized by both sides and outside observers of the conflict. Despite major differences in pictorial forms, the belligerents followed similar patterns on the content side, depicting the enemy in both serious and pejorative ways. On many Japanese and Russian pictures there are striking similarities in representations of the global political spaces: the enemy is always personified; in most cases the enemy attacks from the West, whereas own troops come from the East. The latter can be seen as a sign of both internal and external positioning of Russia and Japan in the “Orient”, with the “threat” coming from the “Occident”. Both Russian and Japanese images are highly transcultural in this sense. German and French artists at the same time tend to represent the belligerents in the global political space as animals, children and toys, employing nationalist and racial stereotypes. As recent works on political cartoons suggest, this was a general European trend at the period. On the cartographic sources racial connotations are also present in the coloring of the polygons. Besides, in their quest for an “objective representation” of the geographic space, the authors of the maps tended to hesitate on how to depict the spaces of Russian and Japanese political power in East Asia before, during and after the RussoJapanese War. Although the cartographic representations were standardized in form, they were very different in content. The Japanese Intervention to Siberia left far less graphical sources. Here the Japanese images of the Russian Far East are especially interesting. Unlike the European stereotypes of frontier and wilderness, Siberia is portrayed as an economically developed “European” region with corresponding infrastructure and architecture. In comparison with contemporary photographs the Japanese depictions of Siberian cities appear fictional representations of an abstract foreign and unequivocally “European” space. This impression is further supported by the “enemy” in German and AustroHungarian military uniforms and absence of the Bolsheviks which were the actual enemy in this campaign.  The graphic sources of the Russo-Japanese rivalries in East Asia make it possible to examine in detail the Europe–Asia and we–other juxtapositions in heterogeneous interpretations of geographical and political spaces and contribute to the ongoing debates on identity, space and culture from a multipolar transcultural perspective.

""Presenter: Stella Ghervas (MSHA, Bordeaux, France).
Paper: “Philhellenism and Russian Ambitions in the Context of the Eastern Question”.

Despite recent efforts to reinterpret a movement as complex as Philhellenism, its eastern branch still remains little known or understood. Based on multiple, unpublished documents
consulted in Russian and Ukrainian archives, this paper takes a new look at the political, diplomatic and religious components of Russian Philhellenism from 1815 to the Crimean War.
This eastern movement entertains a more intimate relationship with the Greeks than its western counterpart, since it brings together humanitarian concerns and a religious affinity that sometimes extends to their cultural language. It falls, however, squarely within the context of the Eastern Question, a Russian geopolitical issue to which the independence of Greece is tightly connected. So, to what degree was Russian Philhellenism a merely generous feeling for brothers in religion, rather than a tool in the hands of a state seeking to dominate the Straits and the eastern Mediterranean, to the detriment of the Ottoman Empire?""