Dear colleagues,

(Apologies for cross-posting!)

NZ No. 38, published in mid-January, is now available 
online at www.nz-online.ru (in Russian only). It focuses 
on Putin’s recent political reforms and the Ukrainian 
revolution and includes a detailed review of recent books 
on Chechnya, including a number of English titles.
I am appending a summary in English. New features on our 
web site include a Polish page, a thematic guide to NZ’s 
archives, and presentations of new books from the NZ 
Library series (e.g. on the Russian Internet).
For international subscriptions, please refer to 
http://www.nz-online.ru/index.phtml?cid=5010268

Mischa Gabowitsch
Editor-in-chief


As our contribution to a debate about social liberalism in 
Russia that is currently gathering momentum, this issue’s 
helping of the Liberal Heritage presents an article by 
philosopher Monique Canto-Sperber on The Philosophy of 
Liberal Socialism, translated from a recent anthology on 
that subject which she published in Paris.
Most of this issue, however, is devoted to the recent 
political reforms in Russia. Yevgeny Saburov links this 
topic with the issue of liberalism in his Humane Economics 
column by pointing out how the current political 
centralisation as well as the government’s budgetary 
policies run counter to liberal economists’ eagerness to 
downsize the state. Topic 1, entitled The Cogs, the Wheel, 
and the Drivers, features answers by analysts specialising 
in different aspects of Russian politics and society to 
four questions about the state of the Russian political 
system after the Duma and presidential elections as well 
as Putin’s recent reforms of electoral and party 
legislation and Russia’s federal system. Dmitry Furman, 
Alexander Morozov, Vladimir Pribylovsky, Nikolai Petrov, 
Yury Korgunyuk, and Alain Blum discuss whether the recent 
changes are evolutionary, revolutionary or reactionary, 
and whether the future is likely to bring a return to 
Soviet conditions, nationalist authoritarianism, or 
democratisation.
Moving on more specifically to the federal reform, whereby 
regional governors will now be appointed rather than 
elected, Alexei Levinson presents data from recent opinion 
polls on Russians’ trust in the governors in his 
Sociological Notes. In Topic 2 (The End of the 
Federation?), Leonid Smirnyagin, the geographer and former 
expert on regional politics in Boris Yeltsin’s 
presidential administration, reflects on The Fortunes of 
Federalism in Russia; Alexander Deryugin discusses The 
Features of Russian Federalism from the point of view of 
budgetary relations between the centre and the regions; 
Elena Belokurova and Natalia Yargomskaya provide empirical 
findings refuting Putin’s claim that the reform will 
strengthen civil society; and historian Tatyana Volkova 
compares municipal self-government in the Russian Empire 
after the 1861 reform with current practice.
The two following sections deal with events in Ukraine. In 
Re: birth of Ukraine, published under the Culture of 
Politics heading, Lviv-based historian Yaroslav Hrytsak 
expresses an optimistic view of the Ukrainian elections 
and the constitutional reform in that country, arguing 
that regional disparities need not become an obstacle to 
democratisation. Morals and Mores features travel notes by 
Nikolai Mitrokhin, who visited the Ukrainian capital at 
the end of November to get a first-hand view of the 
motives driving the main actors in the Ukrainian 
revolution (Kyiv: Two Days amid the Orange Revolution). 
Hrytsak’s and Mitrokhin’s texts are illustrated with 
photographs taken during the mass demonstrations in Kyiv.
Turning to a more historical subject, in Topic 3 (Maps, 
Images, and Pictures of the World) we look at the way in 
which, in different times and places, visual tools have 
modified people’s relation to the world, and themselves 
changed in the process. Historian of science Konstantin 
Ivanov writes about The First Telescopes: From Curiosity 
to Philosophical Instrument. His colleague Andrei Kuzmin 
charts Images of the Starry Sky in the History of European 
Civilisation. In ‘That’s why Urania is Older than Sister 
Clio’: ‘Attributes of Learning’ in Russian Portrait 
Painting in the Enlightenment Age, art historian Vadim 
Gavrin shows how Russian portraitsts in the late 18th and 
early 19th century depicted their models’ scholarly 
background.
In the Politics of Culture section, sociologist Vadim 
Volkov, an expert on the Russian mafia and its business 
connections, discusses two Russian blockbusters of recent 
years, Brat-2 and Boomer, contrasting the former’s 
idealisation of bandits’ way of life with the latter’s 
more realistic depiction of their language and code of 
conduct.
This issue’s New Institutions are the Coalition for a 
Right to Choose and The Russian Civic Congress that took 
place on the 12th of December.
Our regular review of Russian intellectual journals 
(focusing on philosophical and inter-disciplinary ones in 
this issue) is followed by a Translators’ Quarrel where 
one of Dutch philosopher Frank Ankersmit’s Russian 
translators responds to another’s critical review of her 
edition by discussing different stances towards 
translating philosophical texts into Russian, while her 
opponent retorts by pointing out more inaccuracies in her 
translation.
Finally, the New Books section features a detailed review 
of Russian and international books on Chechnya published 
since mid-2002, as well as individual reviews of recent 
Russian, English, French, German and Ukrainian books on 
history and the social sciences.