Russian History

The occupation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014 has become the most mediatised armed conflict in history as both sides were extremely media conscious, to the point that almost no shots were fired partly due to the sides' reluctance to be seen as the initiator of bloodshed. Mediatised warfare based on spectacle quasi social movement techniques (blockings and takovers) prevented casualties, but it also gave much advantage to the attacking side who imposed its agenda and forced the defender to assume the role and responsibility of a military aggressor on its own ground

The article investigates changes of amount of arable land possessed by particular peasant’s household in Irbitskaya settlement (Western Siberia). It was found out that the households’ evolution is similar to one among peasants from Central Russia in 19th century. Most of households significantly changed the amount of arable land during 20-year period (1659 – 1680); no more than 35% were stable. The dynamics in both cases was probably caused by changes of adult men in families. In both cases households with small amount of arable land grew up or disappeared (that was more probable). It was however a peculiarity of Siberia in 17th century that most of average households became larger, though in Central Russia middle strata households didn’t change the amount of arable land significantly.

"Ovaj rad je uvodni deo obimnijeg rukopisa u kome se razmatraju mogućnosti upotrebe dela Edvarda Saida u tumačenju ruske imperijalne prošlosti i istražuje problem (ne)postojanja „ruskog orijentalizma“. Nakon kratkog osvrta na Orijentalizam, u radu su prikazani primeri stvaralačke primene „orijentalističke paradigme“ izvan okvira analize imperijalne vladavine Bliskim istokom kojom se prvenstveno bavio Said. Autor je pokazao kako je nizom tumačenja posebnog statusa evropskih regiona (poput „Istočne Evrope“ i „Balkana“), kao i interpretacijom  mehanizama nastanka evropskih nacija-država („orijentalizam u jednoj zemlji“), Saidov izvorni koncept „orijentalizma“ znatno izmenjen i uopšten. Akademske debate o mogućnostima i granicama primene tog koncepta u tumačenju odnosa Ruske imperije prema njenim „unutrašnjim Istokom“ nisu, prema autorovom mišljenju, samo posledica prikazanog redefinisanja „orijentalizma“, već i tekućeg „imperijalnog obrta“ u savremenoj istoriografiji. S obzirom da u svetlu tradicionalne „istočno-zapadne dihotomije“ Rusija zauzima ambivalentan položaj, pitanje o postojanju „ruskog orijentalizma“ čini se značajno kako za sud o Saidovom teorijskom stanovištu, tako i za razumevanje ruske imperijalne prošlosti.

Summary
This article is the introductory part of the author’s forthcoming book about the concept of “Russian orientalism”. In this section the author considers two main questions: How relevant is Said’s Orientalism for understanding of the Russian past, and if we could speak about “Russian orientalism” at all? The answer to these questions depends not only on the interpretation of Said’s work, but also on our understanding of the peculiarities of the Russian imperial history. According to the author’s opinion, the debates about the prospects and limits of the application of Said’s “orientalism” in the studies of Russian history are results of modern re-definitions of this concept, as well as recent “Imperial turn” in contemporary historiography. Since Russia occupies an ambivalent place in the traditional “East-West dichotomy”, the question of the existence of a “Russian orientalism” appears to be significant not only to the estimation of Said’s theoretical perspective, but also for comprehension of Russia’s imperial past.
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"The project entitled “How to steal a billion” referrs to the contemporary economic history of Russia. The project was the result of a cooperation between the internet portal ‘Economic crime today’ (Russia, http://econcrime.ru/) and the Chair for Macro-Sociology of the University of Konstanz (Germany, http://www.uni-konstanz.de/zakharine/). The primary subject of the investigation was the scandal involving the misappropriation of public funds from the budget of Moscow Region in the period from 2000 to 2008. The true reason for the economic downturn was the continuous misuse of state and public funds, whose resources had been embezzled by a mysterious group of crooks.
Over a long period of time, investors kept purchasing securities issued by a number of state companies hidden behind undecipherable abbreviations like MOITK, IKMO etc..
The author has been analyzing strategies on how companies can successfully participate in the promising market of international money laundering. It was to be demonstrated that the consequences of so-called globalization for national economies worldwide were extremely inconsistent. There is a discrepancy between a weak impact of national states on global markets on the one hand and the free circulation of financial resources, commodities and people on the other hand. The first conclusion that can be extracted from the analysis is that the risks associated with corruption are increasing against the backdrop of wide-spread electronic commerce. There appears to be a growing temptation for state officials to take advantage of their status. High posts in finance have a good chance of being sold at a “higher price” on the world market than offered in the local market. The second conclusion one has arrived at is that international monitoring policy has a week influence on combating corruption. It seems to be due to the wave-like character of media campaigns and a genuine lack of political commitment on the part of quarrelsome independent states
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Approaching language as communicative practice, the author investigates relationships between 1) techniques for storing knowledge, 2) practices of memorization, 3) ways of teaching, and 4) epistemic bases of linguistic classifications, such as grammatical systems of tense, mode, or gender in different historical periods. First, the study explores ways in which structures of grammatical paradigm could be made to intersect with methods of memorization. Secondly, it investigates how practices of memorization had been transmitted to Eastern Europe, where they served as models for early descriptions of Russian. Thirdly, the work examines the interrelation between different fields of knowledge, such as mathematics and linguistics. The research showed that, for instance, the privileged position of modus infinitivus in grammars and dictionaries of the seventeenth century was anticipated by Newton’s investigations on the infinite universe. The research has given rise to a mediological model of knowledge transfer in Early Modern Russia.   

"The author analyzes the relationship between verbal (speech rituals) and nonverbal practices (gestures, postures, proxemic behavior, greeting, dancing, fencing, boxing) within the contexts of intercultural communication between Eastern and West European travelers. The study starts out from the premise that the symbolic orders of any society include constant typological distinctions, such as 1) spatial order, 2) movement order, and 3) speech order. All these orders involve time-dependent configurations of visual and rhetoric images, which are represented in systems of 1) proxemic, 2) kinetic, and 3) verbal signs.
The study revealed that nonverbal practices, being presented to the eye of spectators, have always played a potent anchoring role in social communication, particularly in societies where literarization was delayed. Bodily practices (presented in Russian vs. Western visual sources, in memoirs and treatises on good comportment have been studied comparatively.  The author tries to pursue the transformation of culturally significant patterns of non-verbal communication (postures, gestures, dance figures, figures of fencing) from pre-filmic visual sources (engravings, oil painting) into such filmic images which were entitled to shape collective identity (e.g. ‘bowing’, ‘brotherly kiss’, ‘bell alarm’, ‘sauna friendship’, ‘boxing’, ‘clenching fist’ in Soviet fiction movies and in Soviet documentaries).
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"Voice – E-voice-design – E-voice community
Early public debates about the emotional quality of radio and TV announcers’ voices in Germany, the Soviet Union and the USA (1920-1940)

Dmitri Zakharine (Constance)

This article focuses on public debates about the emotional quality of electronically recorded voices of early radio and TV announcers. The following questions will be addressed in connection with this main research focus: Which technical problems did the sound designers of the early 1930s encounter in transforming a natural human voice into an electro-acoustic voice design? What psycho-acoustic and ethno-cultural aspects of voice performance have been rated most important in the context of such transformations? By which means were the boundaries of social communities and gender displayed in early e-voice-designs?

The analysis of discussions and surveys carried out by early radio magazines in Germany (Radio Amateur, Funk, Radio für alle), Russia (Radio front, Radio Vsem) and the United States (Radio broadcast; Radio service bulletin) with regard to the quality of female and male announcer voices should provide an answer to the posed questions. The first part of the study examines press materials, in which the problem of low vs. high voice pitch was discussed with regard to the semantic differentiation of hard vs. soft news in newsreels. Based on the analysis of early sound films, the second part of the study deals with the interrelationship between the voice stereotypes of radio and TV announcers on the one hand and the voice stereotypes of classical horror films (monster, scream queen) on the other hand. The purpose of this analysis is to determine the contribution of electronically reproduced voices to the emergence of mass media publicity."""

The question concerning the logical relationship between the structures and media of totalitarianism has been treated controversially in contemporary scholarship. A large part of the relevant publications (represented by Franz Borkenau, Walter Laqueur and Hannah Arendt) defines totalitarian power primarily as the power of the minority over the majority and, following Aristotle, sees the latter as rooted in structures of political order.  A second corpus of research increasingly interprets totalitarianism as technological power and associates it with scientific inventions in the field of telecommunications.  In this second corpus, the radio, the loudspeaker and sound film, i.e. media forms that realize the principle of optical sound recording, are assigned a structuralizing function with regard to the reproduction and continuity of totalitarian power.