?????????Dear all,

(Apologies for cross-posting!)

Number 42 of NZ, or Neprikosnovenny Zapas, came out in July, and most of it 
is already accessible online at www.nz-online.ru. It's another thematic 
issue, focussing this time on the state in general and especially the 
Russian state, past and present, including topics such as the cult of the 
secret services in contemporary Russia, the administration of the Stalinist 
state, economic crime in the USSR, and the Soviet and Russian police. Copies 
of the paper edition can be ordered via [log in to unmask] (5 Euros 
plus postage). I am appending an English summary.

Mischa Gabowitsch
Editor-in-chief

www.nz-online.ru


NZ No. 42 is a thematic issue presenting New Perspectives on the Russian 
State. As we argue in our introduction, rather than viewing the state as 
either a monolith or an arena where rival groups vie for money and power, it 
would be useful to look at it as a set of social practices that may conflict 
or converge on different levels and often yield unexpected results.

The general perspective of this issue is historical, and so in the Liberal 
Heritage section we start with two texts on Western Europe under the Old 
Regime in order to provide a comparative angle and highlight recent 
conceptual innovations in research on the state that help illustrate the new 
perspective this issue proposes. The introductory chapter from historian 
Simona Cerutti’s book Summary Justice: Practices and Ideals of Justice in an 
Ancien Régime society (18th century Turin) outlines a new approach to the 
history of judicial institutions that pays particular attention to different 
conceptions of justice and their collision and interaction in different 
types of trials. Her colleague Claude Michaud provides historical background 
to another theme that runs through this issue -- the police as part of state 
and society -- in his article on The Police in Ancien Régime France, 
outlining the emergence and evolution of a ‘police’ in France in the 17th 
and 18th century and explaining how that police (which, in modern terms, was 
closer to something like a state administration) differed from what we now 
understand by that term.

The Culture of Politics section puts the spotlight on Russia and takes the 
topic closer to our own time. Susanne Schattenberg, in her article The 
Culture of Corruption, or On the History of Russian Functionaries, argues 
that traditional Russian bureaucrats simply followed a logic of behaviour 
that was originally based on distributing material or symbolic goods among 
their kin group or followers, and was only declared ‘corrupt’ by 19th and 
20th century critics after social change made the rulers’ ideas of efficient 
administration evolve towards a more rationalistic view. Christian Moutier 
provides A French Official’s View of the Russian Administration, expressing 
his bewilderment at the ‘confusion of genres’ that makes Russians mix up 
their country’s administration with the government or even the presidential 
administration, and providing recipes for turning the administration into an 
efficient instrument of state policy based on his West European experience.

In Morals and Mores, Vadim Volkov takes a look Beyond the Judicial System, 
or Why the Laws Don’t Work as they Should, showing how, in the 1990s, the 
Russian state was ‘privatized’ by groups linked to the Ministry of Internal 
Affairs and the secret services, who subordinated the courts to their own 
interests, making all talk about Russia’s ‘imperfect judiciary’ simply 
redundant.

Yevgeny Saburov’s devotes the latest instalment of his Humane Economics 
column to a reflection on social contract and the Russian state. He comes to 
the conclusion that rather than following any such contract, Russian 
bureaucrats have evolved from identifying themselves with the people 
(‘Whoever is against us is an enemy of the people’) to making the people 
identify themselves with them (‘I’ll vote for him because he’s like me, not 
because he’s good at his job’).

Topic 1 takes a look back at the genesis and metamorphoses of the 
contemporary Russian state in Stalinist times, presenting recent work by 
historians based at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian, and Central European 
Studies of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. 
Entitled Persuade, Classify, and Subject to Repression: Social Practices of 
the Stalinist State, this section is introduced by Catherine Gousseff, who 
gives an overview of The New History of the Soviet State. Nathalie Moine 
discusses Passports and Choice of Residence: The Russian and Soviet Past, 
showing how the restrictive ‘special regime zone’ system whose emergence was 
linked to the ‘passportization’ of ever more groups of Soviet citizens, far 
from fulfilling the authorities’ aim of ‘cleansing’ wide areas of the Soviet 
Union, made it even more difficult to administer the population and channel 
labour into different sectors of the economy. Alain Blum traces the social 
and intellectual evolution of two consecutive generations of early Soviet 
statisticians, showing how, in following universalistic ideas of 
science-based rule and knowledge-gathering, they unwittingly 
institutionalized a set of categories (such as ethnicity) that allowed the 
repressive apparatus of the Stalinist state to victimize individuals by 
virtue of their membership of an abstractly defined group (Statisticians and 
the NKVD: On Elite Participation in the Development of the Stalinist State). 
Finally, in his article In Search of Authority (The 1930s), Yves Cohen 
discusses different concepts of authority prevalent in 1930s Russia, showing 
how factory directors were striving for a traditional type of authority in 
order to make their plants work, while the Stalinist leadership gradually 
moved away from the Marxist theory of authority elaborated by Friedrich 
Engels, in order squarely to place all ‘authority’ (and thus responsibility 
in case of failure) on directors’ shoulders, ignoring the ‘authority’ of 
material things which, as Engels understood, limits the scope of human 
authority.

Topic 2 takes a look at The Knights of the Planned Economy. Historian Tamara 
Kondratieva reviews the predicament and behaviour of the so-called 
Materially Responsible Persons under the Regime of Socialist Property, 
analyzing the risks and opportunities that were inherent in this particular 
status, which gave access to many scarce goods but also led many of its 
bearers to prison. Political scientist Gilles Favarel-Garrigues shows the 
‘other side’ of the story: he writes about The Soviet Police and Its 
Struggle Against Economic Crime Before Perestroika. His article traces some 
of the structural problems that continue to mar the work of the post-Soviet 
police back to earlier times: corruption, lack of motivation, and pressure 
to fulfil quantitative requirements, making it difficult to concentrate on 
tricky cases.

Topic 3 is entitled The Post-Soviet Police, and presents results of recent 
qualitative sociological research on the police in Russia and Ukraine. Asmik 
Novikova paints Portraits of Ordinary Policemen in the Contemporary Law 
Enforcement System; her colleague Olga Shepeleva examines What Citizens 
Expect and Can’t Get From the Police. Kharkiv-based sociologist Igor 
Rushchenko analyzes police brutality in Ukraine in his article Without 
Status, or In the ‘Indeterminacy Pit’: On the Problem of Unlawful Police 
Violence, arguing that the main victims of these practices are those who 
have no special social ‘status’ to protect them.

Our columnist Alexei Levinson, in the latest instalment of his Sociological 
Lyrics, deals a blow to the stereotype that Russians overwhelmingly expect 
the state to behave in a paternalistic and even patronizing way. The survey 
data he quotes show that although paternalistic values are still widespread 
on a superficial level, Russians are less and less prepared to let the state 
encroach upon their property and constitutional rights.

In the Politics of Culture section, sociologist Mikhail Sokolov analyzes the 
Cult of the Special Services in Contemporary Russia. He reviews a number of 
explanations of the immense popularity of those services in Russian popular 
culture, and concludes that the ‘institutional charisma’ of this group is 
mainly due to a yearning for order instilled by the chaotic 1990s.

The New Institutions section presents the Public Verdict Foundation, a 
recently created NGO whose aim is to increase society’s control over the 
Russian law enforcement apparatus.

The issue concludes with a review of recent Russian journals focussing on 
politics and social sciences, a review essay by Nikolai Mitrokhin covering 
recent books on the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet times, and numerous 
shorter reviews of Russian, English, French, and German books on topics 
ranging from the history of the 20th century to contemporary Russian 
politics and society.