Aitamurto, Kaarina
Egalitarian Utopias and Conservative Politics: Rodnoverie Representations of Veche
Rodnoverie is a religion that seeks to revive pre-Christian Slavic spirituality. As majority of contemporary Pagan religions, Rodnoverie is characterized by anti-authoritarian spirit and avoidance of dogmatism. The egalitarian ethos of the religion also manifests in the organizational structure of the movement. Some Russian and international Rodnoverie organization are called veche, and numerous Rodnoverie communities claim to follow the order of medieval Slavic popular assembly.  Furthermore, veche is often presented as an ideal, and namely Slavic, model of governance. The aim of this paper is to examine Rodnoverie representations of veche in Russian societal and political context. On the one hand, the egalitarian utopianism attached to the idea of veche represents rejection of hierarchical authority, and consequently, may be employed to promote grass-root democracy. On the other hand, the ideal of veche has also been used by Ronovers who are reflecting democracy highly critically. This criticism may base on cynicism towards contemporary Russian political system, but it also reveals the conservative and nationalist posture of many Rodnoverie groups. Veche can be taken literally as an assembly of free, Slavic men, and thereby connected to patriarchal, nationalist and even elitist political ideology. As a case study, Rodnoverie discussions provide an interesting outlook on vernacular political visioning. Rodnoverie representations of veche also reflect both the recent resurrection of Slavophil political tradition in Russia, and attempts to establish native roots for democratic values. 

Ambrose, Kathryn
Turgenev’s Strong Women: Terrible Perfection?
This paper will seek to clarify Turgenev’s position in the debate on the ‘woman question’, by looking at the degree of his ‘feminism’ in his portrayal of the ‘Strong Woman’ (in a longer version of this paper, I also look at the ‘mysterious heroine’ and the ‘femme fatale’).  The ‘Strong Woman’ is perhaps the most prevalent type of female character in Turgenev, and several variations have also been identified (the ‘New Woman’, the ‘radical heroine’, the ‘emancipated woman’ and the ‘necessary woman’).  I will consider the position of ‘strong women’ such as Elena (On the Eve) within the narrative, examining the extent of their influence on the plot and the other characters, especially the male protagonists. I will explore the extent to which Turgenev gives his women a ‘voice’ (through both their use of dialogue, and other narrative devices such as diaries and biographical details), and the degree to which they are fully psychologically realised characters.  I intend to trace the development of the ‘strong woman’ in Turgenev by using Elena as a ‘model’ on which previous characters prefigure and subsequent characters are based. I will show the significance of Elena for the debate on the ‘woman question’ of the 1860s as a whole, by comparing her to Vera Pavlovna in What Is To Be Done? and Lelenka in Khvoshchinskaya’s The Boarding-School Girl.

Andrew, Joe
‘Silent Witness’: A Study of Male and Female Identity in “Krotkaia”
In nineteenth-century Russian literature there developed a tradition of stories which had women’s names in, or implied by the title.  Included in this list would be Lermontov’s Bela and Princess Mary and Turgenev’s Asia and First Love.  The reader enters the world of these works with the illusion that the narrative will concern the identity of the eponymous heroine.  The reader is, though, soon disillusioned as the central narrative thrust of these works is not really the fate of the heroine, but rather the hero’s, or narrator’s, (and the reader’s) erotic desire for these women.  At the same time, each of these stories concern’s issues of the male narrator’s identity as he is able to construct it though memory. The present paper will seek to locate Dostoevskii’s Krotkaia (1876) within this tradition.  The paper will examine the discourse of the story, the very act of trying to remember by telling the story, to establish to what extent the eponymous character’s identity emerges in clear perspective, or whether, in fact, it appears at all beneath the self-justifying reminiscences of the narrator. The implied audience and addressees are also a key to our reading of the work.  Issues of narrative structure will also be crucial, especially given that the story begins with its ending, the suicide of the eponymous heroine.  In this context the paper will explore whether the narrator’s purpose is to explain this act of self-murder - ‘why did she do it?’ - or does he rather seek to exculpate himself from having driven her to it.

Andy, Joshua
Personalities in Conflict and Cooperation: Civil-Military Relations in the Khrushchev Era
Civil-Military relations under Khrushchev were both cooperative and very tenuous.  Personalities dominated the relationship between the CPSU and the Armed Forces.  Khrushchev pushed through military reforms based on increasingly advanced technology, which would allow for a reduction in conventional military forces and in military expenditure.  However, Zhukov, and other military leaders after his ouster in 1957, struggled to maintain a balanced force structure and pushed for increased military expenditure based on the exigencies of the Cold War.  Civil–military relations were in conflict over these issues, but also important were issues at the core of that debate. Khrushchev’s reliance, almost dependence, on developing military technologies, namely nuclear weapons and their attendant delivery systems, opened a debate on the progression of strategic military thought and doctrine.  Khrushchev’s military commanders - those who supported Zhukov or those who were loyal and owed allegiance to Khrushchev - believed in a balanced force structure with nuclear and conventional weapons working in parallel.  This debate was played out in the public press, something not seen during Stalinist rule. The military developed rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s.  Changes were occurring exponentially.  The Khrushchev era differed from the Stalinist years, and itself can be broken down into two distinct periods.  The first ended with the removal of Zhukov from his posts in the Party and Ministry of Defense.  After his removal began the second phase of civil-military relations when the military command were more ‘Khrushchev men’ and more amenable to his thinking on military improvements.

Autio-Sarasmo, Sari
Khrushchev and Technology Transfer from the West
Khrushchev continued the policies of technology transfer adopted by earlier leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union. During Khrushchev’s leadership, technology transfer had a more definite and target oriented goal and it was clearly connected to the official politics of the Communist Party through the concept of ‘scientific-technical revolution’, and to the economic modernisation of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev promoted technology transfer and initiated most of the processes connected to it. The main aim of these processes was to catch up and surpass the West. Soviet delegates were sent to Western European countries from the late 1950s to contract commercial and technical agreements. Despite the embargo on the transfer of high technology, Western countries were interested in trade and other forms of cooperation with the Soviet Union. What kinds of connections were established during the Khrushchev leadership and what provided the focus of Western technology from the Soviet side? What were the patterns of change in policy under Khrushchev?

Balkelis, Tomas
Living in the Displaced Persons Camp: Lithuanian War Refugees in the West, 1944-1951
After WWII, about 60,000 Lithuanians found themselves among more than one million of so-called Displaced Persons (DP’s) in Western Germany. This paper explores how the experience of living in DP camps shaped their political, social and cultural lives. I proceed with the notion that the DP camp was a typical ‘total institution’ whose key features were its total character, hierarchical structure and disruption of social intercourse with the outside (Erwing Goffman, Asylums, 1962). The camp was a site of administrative, political and communal interventions which produced ‘camp mentality’ responsible for a specific group behaviour among the inmates. In the camp setting, one of the central challenges for the authorities was to uphold ‘a camp moral’ among the DP’s. Their political, social and cultural activities were examined in light of elite’s efforts to forge ‘a united national community’ from a mass of initially disorganized refugees. I highlight not only Lithuanian intelligentsia’s efforts to cast the DP’s in favourable light ‘for the Western world’, but also individual ‘counter-narratives’ that needed to be fought and discarded in order to present the DP community in politically acceptable ways. The Soviet efforts of camp indoctrination are also discussed as well as DP’s pains to resist them. One of the consequences of living in the camp was that the DP’s ethnic background has been re-emphasized and inscribed in their identity. This prompted a process of ‘nationalization’ of camps, which meant that those displaced who did not have a strong national identity now were assigned one by the virtue of living in a camp.

Bartlett, Djurdja
Folk Motif and Socialism
The paper covers the ideological uses of folk motif in dress in six countries – East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union – during 72 years of the communist rule. Introduced in the first half of the 1920s by the Russian fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova, folk motifs were gradually established as the approved type of embellishment in the new socialist dress. The local provenance and relative immutability of their folk decorations isolated the new dress from fashion changes. The 1930s uses of folk were informed by the all-encompassing Stalinist myth. Appropriated folk images blended the huge ethnic variations that existed throughout the Soviet Union, and domesticated the otherness that was still acknowledged in the 1920s. The East European countries officially recognized folk as a historical sartorial quotation in the immediate post-war period, following the Stalinist coups in 1948. Having started out as an attempt to construct utopia, but preventing designers from exploring its artistic possibilities, the regimes’ attempts to harness folk to the invention of socialist dress ended in acquiescence to the Stalinist myth. The folk aesthetics was perpetuated through the state-sponsored companies that coordinated the production of folk-inspired objects. Once folk motifs had been introduced in order to fight Western influences on socialist dress codes, they never disappeared from socialist official fashion. While contemporary Western fashion, in order to reinvent itself each season, is happy to permanently borrow cuts, patterns and colour schemes from its own past, and from epochs preceding it, the socialist folk motif was politically imposed and failed as a fashion reference.

Bekasova, Aleksandra & Lajus, Julia
Attitudes towards Russian natural and human resources in historical perspectives, C18 - early C20th
History of studies and exploitation of natural resources in the Russian Empire was tightly connected with the state building on the one hand and with the process of development and specialization of scientific knowledge, on the other hand. Previously historians, historians of science, geographers and economists paid attention to many aspects of this problem. However, theses different aspects have never were integrated, for instance, studies of history of resource use developed independently from the studies of their users. This paper propose new approaches which might facilitate the understanding of the general process of changing attitudes towards natural and human resources during rather long historical period, from the end of the 18^th to the beginning of the 20^th cc. It is based on analysis of narrative strategies about resources and their users of different interested groups: central and local state authorities, scientists, entrepreneurs, the public. To make this task feasible we will focus on the European Russia only. This focus is crucial for the understanding how the attitudes towards resources were connected to the process of formation of the national identity. Our analysis started from the state projects of inventory of resources in the last third of the 18^th c. when Academy of Sciences organized a number of complex expeditions to the different regions of the Empire. It ends with the state inventories of the period of the WWI which could be considered as the returning on a new stage to the understanding of resources as “state resources”. Narratives of the 19^th c. are much more diverse and include not only state-related and scientific texts but also popular descriptions of territories and peoples. We also will look on narrative strategies and visual representations of resources which were used in the programs of enlightenment and education of local users of resources.

Belina, Anastasia
An Unlikely Wagnerite
S. I. Taneyev (1856-1915) signed his own 'sentence' when he wrote to Tchaikovsky 'one can learn a lot from Wagner, including how not to write operas'. This comment was and still is often taken as his final judgment on Wagner and, as a consequence, no research has been done on Taneyev and Wagner. However, written in 1889, Taneyev's statement only signaled the start of his interest in the German composer. This paper will examine the beginning of Taneyev's interest in and study of Wagner's music dramas, making extensive use of archival materials, Taneyev's diaries and letters, reviews, and other relevant sources

Benacchio, Rosanna
Pragmatic implications of the use of verbal aspect in the Slavic imperative: a comparative analysis
The research focuses on the pragmatic implications of politeness, in connection with the different use of verbal aspect in the imperative in the Slavic languages.  Attention is concentrated on the fact that in imperative forms the verbal aspect may have pragmatical implications as regards interlocutor distance and politeness (or impoliteness) resulting thereof. Requests for actions that are expressed with the perfective aspect are more neutral, “correct”, formal, because of the interpersonal distance that characterizes them, while those expressed with the imperfective are more informal, direct and therefore potentially impolite. The research, first and foremost carried out on Russian language material, has in a second stage been expanded to include all living Slavic standard languages. From a comparison between these languages interesting observations arise on the different codification of the grammatical category of verbal aspect in the various Slavonic languages.

Bermel, Neil
Representativity in the Czech National Corpus and Acceptability Judgments
Two components of the Czech National Corpus – the 100-million-form SYN2000 and the newer SYN2005 – are said to be “representatively constructed” (Králík 2001, Šulc 2001).  In this particular instance, “representativity” means that their composition reflects research conducted into the sort of texts Czechs read, publish and have at their disposal.  What purpose does a corpus’s representativity thus have?  On one account, the frequency and distribution of items in the corpus should be more or less similar to the frequency with which items are seen in standard written texts and their distribution among texts, and thus should bear a close relation to normative judgments about these forms – if normative judgments correlate at all to the input that the average native user of a language receives on a daily basis (see Oliva and Doležalová 2004).  On another account, the link between representativity and acceptability is rejected, as multiple other factors not linked to the frequency or distribution of a form’s occurrence are said to play a more decisive role in shaping aesthetic judgments. The weight we can ascribe to corpus data is of more than theoretical interest.  In a major project run out of the Czech Language Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences) in Prague, scholars have been using data gleaned from the Czech National Corpus as the basis for a large-scale descriptive grammar of Czech.  A central unresolved concern of those working on this project is whether a description of the state of affairs in the corpus will result in a normative grammar or one divorced from and unrepresentative of “native intuition” or “what every native speaker knows” to be true about Czech.  A scale agreed by the project’s morphology team has set frequency thresholds of 10% – 40% – 60% – 90%, which team members believe constitute relevant usage information about forms in free or conditioned variation.  The 10% threshold describes the difference between sporadic forms and those that are merely marked.  The 40% threshold describes the difference between marked forms and variant forms (i.e. where no single form prevails overall).  The 60% threshold describes the difference between variant forms and prevailing forms, while the 90% threshold describes the difference between prevailing forms and dominant (i.e. virtually unchallenged) forms.  While some of these thresholds have been earlier explored in the use of corpora (see e.g. Halliday 1991a, 1991b, 1992 on relative frequency and information theory), the usefulness of these data remains to be tested. To test the relevance of corpus data to acceptability judgments, I will subject examples of variation in Czech nominal and verbal morphology (discussed in Bermel 2004a, 2004b, 2006 and drawn from the Czech National Corpus) to acceptability tests by native speakers pinned to a Liffert scale with points mirroring those in the frequency thresholds.  The results will show the extent to which corpus frequency data and other statistical information from the corpus on these same examples of variation yield information congruent with acceptability judgments passed by native speakers.  Difficulties presented by the selection of examples and the judgments obtained about them will also be mentioned. 

Bjørnflaten, Jan Ivar
The Form of the Present Gerund and the Formation of the Russian Standard Language
The present paper will focus on the circumstance that a number of verbs in Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) do not form the Present Gerund (PrG), e.g. *pi£á, *spjá, *vja¢á, b’já, *gásnja. The reasons for this situation will be sought clarified on the background of the formation of Standard Russian as an amalgam of Russian East Slavic and Russian Church Slavic. It will be sought demonstrated that this amalgam proposed by Lomonosov had unforeseen consequences for the subsequent development of Standard Russian. For while Lomonosov prescribed that one set of verbs, the slavenskie glagoly, were to form the PrG by means of the morpheme –a and another set, the rossijskie glagoly, by means of a morpheme -™i, the form of the present participle active (PPA) could only be formed with Church Slavic verbs, slavenskie glagoly, by means of the marked Church Slavic suffix - £™ij. This implies that in the prescriptions of Lomonosov, the PrG was thought formed by every verb, while the PPA should only be formed by some verbs. The situation in CSR is, however, the opposite: a considerable number of verbs do not form the PrG, while all verbs in CSR form the PPA. The present paper will address this issue and provide an interpretation.

Blacker, Uilleam
The Contemporary Ukrainian Essay: reviving the Central European discourse in the postmodern context
The paper will look at recent developments in Ukrainian literary essay writing, and will attempt to show how Ukrainian writers take on the ideas of the 1980s Central European dissident writers, but develop them in the postmodern context. In recent years the essay has become a popular genre among Ukrainian writers. Some authors, such as Iurii Andrukhovych, have made essay writing a central part of their literary output. The presentation will trace how a striking number of the tropes developed by 1980s dissident writers, such as Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz and Gyorgy Konrád, have re-appearred in contemporary Ukrainian literature. The paper will not only look at influence, but will also attempt to demonstrate how this literary Central Europeanism has developed in new directions in Ukrainian literature. I will argue that, through the ground-breaking and prolific essayistic works of Iurii Andrukhovych, the Central European essay has taken on a specifically Ukrainian, postmodern incarnation. I will take the essays of such writers as Iurii Izdryk, Taras Prokhasko and Igor Klekh as examples of how postmodernist ideas and literary techniques have been embraced and utilized by Ukrainian authors in conjunction with the ideas and approaches they inherited from their Central European counterparts. The paper will attempt to demonstrate that not only do Ukrainian writers engage with the trends of the recent literary past of their region, but also that they are open to worldwide postmodern intellectual trends, and in fact combine these two discourses to create a fresh and innovative form of essayistic.

Blackwell, James
The Warsaw Uprising: the View from Lublin
Much ink has been spilled on the Warsaw Uprising and the attempt to establish an administration loyal to the London-based Polish Government in Exile before the Red Army was firmly established on Polish territory. The situation elsewhere in Poland is little studied, and yet in Lublin the Polish Home Army was already confronting the Red Army before the events in Warsaw began, and those events were to have disastrous consequences for the Home Army’s one solid base in the Lublin region.

Bocale, Paola
Broker or Brokerka? Factors governing Bulgarian derivation of feminine personal nouns
The aim of this work is to provide a perspective of the linguistic factors motivating the use and formation of feminine personal nouns in Bulgarian. The analysis is based on original empirical data, collected in the summer of 2007 among native speakers of Bulgarian via a questionnaire on nouns indicating professions and activities. In order to test the variations, nouns were placed in different syntactic environments. The results suggest that one of the most significant factors governing the use of sex-specific forms may be the syntactic function of the word, with subjects favoring the use of feminine forms. Another variable which can influence the use of a derived feminine form is the order controller – target, an hypothesis suggested by Corbett. Percentages of use of a feminine form are significantly higher in targets following their controllers. Definiteness and focusing strategies are also factors in predicting the morphological derivation of a feminine noun. Data show that there is a stronger tendency toward the use of feminine derived forms in definite noun phrases and in focused elements of a sentence. Finally, the morphological form of words is not the primary factor in deciding which masculine nouns will have an equivalent feminine form. Results point to the conclusion that the choice that speakers make in using a sex-specific form can be influenced by the semantic content of the word itself: feminine forms indicating jobs or activities not of high social status are derived or used more significantly than those describing a position of prestige.

Bochsler, Daniel and Gherghina, Sergiu
The shakedown of the urban-rural cleavage in post-communist Romanian party politics
The geography of elections has become a widely studied field, and territorially based social cleavages are one of the main explanatory factors (Caramani 2004; Tucker 2006). Following previous research that shows the ethnic cleavage to be an important denominator of territorial structures of political parties in Central and Eastern Europe (Bochsler 2006), we analyse the electoral geography of post-Communist Romania. Whereas in the early 1990s, territorial patterns of voting behaviour were very strong and voters aligned mainly along the ethnic and urban-rural cleavages, the latter difference has substantially declined by 2004. Solving this puzzle, within a single-case study, is theoretically relevant for understanding cleavage evolution and electoral behaviour in post-Communist democracies. We explain this change through the general disappointment of voters with their governments, re­sul­ting in a lack of trust into governing parties and the failure to establish long-term ties between parties and social groups of voters, high inter-election volatility and changes of governments after each election. This provides the basis for the shakedown of territorial cleavages: in every election, the opposition and newly emerging anti-establishment movements win substantial ground and push forward into the governing party’s strongholds. Not doing a better job in government, they lose the forthcoming elections. After a few circles, regional differences and strongholds are levelled down and voting behaviour becomes homogeneous across the regions. Our database with district electoral data from Romanian national elections and socio-cultural data by districts allows us to analyse the Romanian electoral geography and territorial dynamics of party system change.

Boobbyer, Philip
What went wrong with Russia's reform process: Vladimir Bukovsky's interpretation of Russian politics, 1989-2008
Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the most famous of the Soviet dissidents, helping to launch the human rights movement of the 1960s, and proving central to the exposure of the Soviet abuse of psychiatry in the early 1970s. After his exile to the West in 1976, he was involved in many anti-communist initiatives, as well being a prominent Cold War commentator. This paper focuses on Bukovsky’s interpretation of the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent trajectory of Russian politics. Never an admirer of Gorbachev, Bukovsky thought perestroika was bound to fail. However, although supportive of Yeltsin, he was also frustrated at Russia reform process after 1989, believing that it was inherently flawed and likely to encourage a restoration of Soviet-style rule. He was particularly disappointed that there was no Nuremberg-style trial of Soviet crimes after the fall of communism, and no lustration policies. Politically a conservative libertarian, Bukovsky’s programme for the 2008 Presidential elections reflected a belief that the roots of Russia’s current political tensions lay in the events of 1989-1993.

Bouilov, Vassili
The Semiotics and the Language of the Totalitarian System in the Context of Andrei Platonov’s Prose
One of the main features of Andrei Platonov's language is concerned with the reflection of all typical elements of the language of the Soviet epoch. This quasi-language of utopia can be relatively distinguished as “an annex” to the literary Russian language created for an exceptional purpose in a certain political and ideological socium. This is a language of declarations and prescriptions, slogans and propaganda posters - a convenient language for the proclamation of a new “ideal society”. The natural cognitive process of creating thoughts turns into a mechanical substitution of planned a limited set of ideological, communicative and behaviorist clichés. Platonov's specific word usage which is based on bizarre semantic and syntactic deformations in his “coded” language makes it possible to speak about an anti-utopian nature of his principal prosaic texts. Andrei Platonov's talent reflects this “zombie effect” in one of the most representative examples of his mature style - in the short novel The Foundation Pit (written in 1929-1930). The Foundation Pit semiotically interacts with other texts, including other Platonov's poetic and prosaic texts. This process can be defined by the term “intertextuality” that designates the establishment of the relation “text in text”. Platonov’s characters can be considered as “guinea pigs” by means of which he introduced ideas in order to test them in the symbolic space of a fictional text. In the text of The Foundation Pit the symbolism of Andrei Platonov's early works and other literary sources are converted into a conceptually new, full-scale semiotic system.

Bouveng, Rebecca
The Role of Russian Messianic Discourse in Contemporary Politics and Identity
Whereas Russian messianism is often seen as a cliché, this paper will define it as a discursive regime, as a framework holding a wide range of contesting discourses in which Russian identity has been constructed and reconstructed for centuries, and in which the state and status quo have found legitimisation. Russian messianic discourses vary from imperialist ideologies to ‘Holy Rus’ isolationism and sacrifice, to esoteric spirituality and even anti-Semitism, but are all defined by exceptionalism, missionism and the perennial East-West dichotomy defining Russia in ambiguous, conflicting relation to ‘the West’, accompanied by various binary couples such as spiritual-materialistic, natural-artificial, collectivist-individualist and so on. Based on analysis of contemporary political literature, TV-show transcripts and other sources, it will be argued that Russian political discourse is becoming increasingly unified; that a master-discourse, mainly based on neo-Eurasianism but incorporating various old and new variants of messianic discourse can be discerned, forming the ideological basis for New Russia. The resonance among the Russian population of this political master-discourse will be explored, based on the analysis of semi-structured interviews with 160 elite and ordinary Russians, ranging from clergy, businessmen, academics and journalists, to students, house-wives, pensioners, manual labourers, immigrants and prostitutes. It will be shown that Russian messianism is not exclusive to groups of the Russian intelligentsia but that a significant part of Russians at all levels of society consciously and unconsciously draw upon messianic discourse as they seek to make sense of themselves and their country.

Briggs, Jane
Dostoevsky’s women: the symbolism of clothing and the role of the seamstress
Clothing is significant in both practical and ecclesiastical terms, ranging from ordinary items of daily wear to priestly vestments, weddings gowns, and shrouds for the dead. These all had to be made by someone, usually a woman, and the motif of the seamstress appears frequently in the novels of Dostoevsky. The provision and care for clothing is seen as a particularly female occupation, and there are examples in Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, and Brothers Karamazov. Varvara (Poor Folk) is the first of Dostoevsky's poor seamstresses who struggle to earn a living; and her life is compared with that of Grushenka (Brothers Karamazov) whose clothing confirms her status as a successful woman of business. The modes of dress adopted by Sonya (Crime and Punishment) on the first two occasions where she appears to the reader show the contrast between her 'working clothes', and her 'best clothes' which she wears for her first visit to Raskolnikov. There is a clear correspondence between respectability of dress, and the reputation and social standing of the wearer. The role of Lizaveta, as a dealer in second-hand clothes, is to help poor people to dress respectably. Social and political aspects of women's work are discussed, including the use of the dressmaking workshops to spread revolutionary propaganda among the seamstresses; and comparisons are drawn between the presentation of the seamstress in the novels of Dostoevsky, and in English evangelical literature of the time, such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Ruth.

Brosig, Malte
A Plan for Future? The Estonian State Integration Programme on National Minorities (2000-2007)
Events surrounding the replacement of a Soviet bronze statue in spring 2007 in Tallinn and subsequent international turbulences between the EU and Russia marked a low point in inter-ethnic relations between Russian-speakers in Estonia and ethnic Estonians. The question appears as to what extent current integration efforts directed to Russian-speakers have been successful. The paper analyses the development of the Estonian State Integration Programme (SIP) (2000-2007) from its earliest moments in the 1990s to its current form. It is argued that although its theoretical basis follows a two-way integration concept allowing reducing inter-ethnic fractions by involving both, majority and minority population, its actual focus fails to do so. Rather it takes a unidirectional action-plan targeting Russian-speakers without a prior need-assessment at the grass-root level and superficial minority participation during the drafting period of the SIP. Furthermore, the paper highlights the influence the legal-restorationist concept maintains on the implementation of the SIP keeps partly re-enforcing inter-ethnic alienation.

Buckley, Mary
Russian public opinion on the politics of human trafficking
This paper discusses the results of a nationwide public opinion poll of June 2007 on attitudes towards forced labour and human trafficking.  It examines views about the seriousness  of the problem, what should be done about it, by which political or social institutions and how.  The paper also explores the results of two focus groups on the subject held in Moscow and Vladimir. It considers which concepts Russians use in their discourse on trafficking, who they blame for its occurrence, the degree of their knowledge about it and what future strategies they favour.  Work was done in collaboration with the Levada Center, funded by the British Academy.

Budnikova, Natalia
Linguistic Battle in Austrian Galicia
This paper is focused on the unique and incongruous phenomenon of Russophiles in Austrian Galicia during the nineteenth century, and the language they employed. At the time of the construction of national consciousness and national identity, language had a very important meaning. Two main wings – Russophiles and Ukrainophiles – played considerable role in the political and cultural life in Galicia. Ukrainophiles stated views supporting the development of the Ukrainian literal language on the basis of vernacular, whereas Russophiles offered the Russian language and used so called “jazyčije”; which contained a large amount of Russisms. In Galicia_, the outcome of the battle between “jazyčije” and vernacular was not so evident in the nineteenth century, while in the Russian Ukraine, the Ukrainian standard language had already been formed on the basis of folk language tradition by that time. Consequently, the development of the Ukrainian language in Galicia has remained unstudied hitherto. At the same time, contradictory relationships between Ukrainophiles and Russophiles and their language war, express a complex building of national self-consciousness in this region. Studying this issue is essential for understanding modern relationships between Eastern and Western Ukraine, as well as between Russia and Ukraine.

Buncic, Daniel
The role of dialect features in the Ruthenian literary standard of the 16th/17th centuries
Scholarly tradition has taken it for granted that “Ukrainian” and “Belarusian” authors of the middle period wrote in their own mother tongues or native dialects. Dialect features belonging to other of the two modern nations were regarded as “foreign” interference due to the close political and cultural ties between the “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians”. Ever more scholars recently acknowledged the existence of a common Ruthenian literary standard at that time. However, the relationship between this language standard and the diversity of Ruthenian dialects is still rather unclear. The problem of a dialect basis for the standard variety has never been discussed explicitly (mainly because of the overwhelming importance of Polish and Church Slavonic in the local metalinguistic discourse). The paper deals with the role of intermediate dialects (e.g., Polissian), dialect mixing (Vilna and Galicia), acceptability of individual dialect features, and linguistic conservatism (in orthography) for the standardization of Ruthenian.

Bylok, Katarzyna
Evangelising the Polish Nation: Radio Maryja and ultra-conservative religious Right in Poland
Ultraconservative Religio-political rhetoric is a powerful unification theme for the section of society that feels dispossessed in the wake of ideological and economic reforms in post-communist Poland.  Radical Roman Catholic Media provides a voice for this group by promoting and creating a group identity based around key discourses framed in conservative Christian-values and radical-right political ideology.  This paper examines and provides some preliminary findings on the group know as ‘Family of Radio Maryja’ which is formally associated with Radio Maryja (a national Roman Catholic radio station) TV Trwam (national TV station owned by Radio Maryja), and informally associated with ‘Nasz Dziennik’ (national daily newspaper). This is a subaltern group, and although marginalized it is widely acknowledged that it represents an important part of the electorate. The group is centered on the charismatic personality of the founder of the radio station, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. Polish Press sources have attributed the November 2005 Polish parliamentary election results to the actions taken (rallies, public debates etc) by radical Roman Catholic media – such as Radio Maryja - and its promotion of the League of Polish Families and Law and Justice political party prior to and during the elections.  The themes of anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and historical falsification have been causing concern within the Polish and international Mass Media and academia.  This paper will examine the media setting and analyse ideologies, religious nationalism, and charismatic leadership of Father Rydzyk and group identity representations of ‘Family of Radio Maryja’ in the radical Roman Catholic Media in Poland.