Die neueste Ausgabe von NZ ist ein Themenheft zum rußländischen Staat, in historischer und vergleichender Perspektive. Mit Beiträgen aus Rußland, Frankreich und Deutschland. Anbei eine Zusammenfassung auf Englisch.

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 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.