Galloway, Irena
The Role of History in A. Tolstoy’s Trilogy “The Ordeal”
My paper investigates the role of history in A. Tolstoy’s trilogy “The Ordeal”.  This novel portrays historical events that occurred during World War I, the Revolution, and Civil War in Russia as a major component of the social changes in Russian society.  My paper discusses how these events influenced the lives of Tolstoy’s protagonists and the inner evolution of the characters during these great historical events.  It also talks about the various layers of pre-Revolutionary society and its morals, the political atmosphere, and the changes in the country.  While in the first book history is presented as a background of the lives of the main characters, in the second book it takes over the heroes’ personal lives.  It may seem the characters future is preordained; however, Vadim Roschin undergoes an internal crisis when his concepts of a White army officer collide with reality.  Having realized the antipatriotic actions of the White army, Roschin changes his destiny by joining the enemies and taking the side of the Reds.  By analyzing the role and place of the heroes in history, my paper states that even under the huge pressure of historical proceedings, the individual does not have to be a victim of circumstances but can make conscious choices for themselves in their lives. In the third book “Bleak Morning”, Tolstoy regards history not just as a distractive chaos; but, rather as tragic and challenging force caused by people choices which may destroy them or made them stronger.

Gillespie, David
Evgenii Popov: Satire or Despair?
This paper looks at the satirical work of the prolific writer Evgenii Popov since the collapse of the Soviet Union. An acerbic observer of the corrupting power of Soviet ideology, Popov has in recent years taken upon himself the task of defending the 'little man'  in what he calls Russia's 'stunted' democracy since 1991. Through first-person narration Popov directs his satire at a morally bankrupt political and social system that has impoverished millions, but with his tone of outraged irony he never loses sight of the quintessential fact of Russian life: the absurd. This is particularly the case in his novels 'Podlinnaia istoriia "zelenykh muzykantov"' (1998) and 'Master Khaos' (2002).

Gnedina, Elena
The EU and Russia: Clash of Neighbourhood Projects
The paper will compare the EU and Russia as foreign policy actors and look at their policies in the ‘shared neighbourhood’. It will demonstrate that both of them have been expansionist – the EU in its democratic vision of the world, and Russia in its post-imperial syndrome – and have different ideas about the post-Soviet space. The paper will look at two competing integration projects: the EU as a ‘union of democratic and prosperous states’ and the Russia-centred Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), based on the ideas of post-Soviet ‘solidarity’ and ‘competition’ with the West. It will also look at the nature of the EU and Russia as foreign policy actors. The EU relies on conditionality and consent. The 2004 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), increasing financial assistance to the EU neighbours and linking it to democratic reforms, makes use, albeit not fully, of conditionality, while in the everyday approach to its neighbours the EU favours diplomacy, negotiation and compromise. At the same time Russia relies on coercion, using rewards, sanctions and threats of sanctions. Quite famously, almost all Russia’s neighbours, including all-consenting Belarus, have been targets in Russia’s ‘trade wars’ and forced to cooperate with it. Both of them, the EU wary of giving its European neighbours a membership perspective and Russia, resented for its ‘imperialist’ agenda, have failed to promote a unidirectional agenda in the neighbourhood.

Goncharova, Natal’ia
Young people’s everyday attitudes to food and body
В середине 1980-х годов в социологии потребления и, в частности, в социологии еды, обозначилось два основных направления. Первое рассматривает культурные аспекты потребления еды в рамках социальной антропологии и этнологии (способы и образцы потребления в разных культурах). Второе  - потребление пищи в контексте современного общества (пищевые  практики рассматриваются не как естественные, врожденные, а как приобретаемые и присущие только современному обществу).  Интерес к этой теме возник относительно недавно. Его связывают, в частности, с началом так называемой «американизацией» и новой волной консьюмеризма, новыми формами продажи продуктов питания (сетями супермаркетов, фаст-фуда и пр.), расширяющимся ассортиментом и пр.. Изменения в системе труда, в структуре домохозяйства, приводят к тому, что меняется структура «традиционного питания», молодежь становится полноправными субъектами потребления. Многообразие выборов представляет молодежи возможности выбирать среди альтернатив более или менее самостоятельно и в соответствии со своими индивидуальными предпочтениями (а не с установленными правилами и предписаниями). В докладе анализируются пищевые предпочтения ульяновской молодежи, режимы и правила ее употребления. Акцент делается на знаковом характере еды и напитков (традиционных и новых продуктах, фаст-фуде, алкогольных практиках, безалкогольных напитках и пр.), молодежных пищевых брендах. Особенности исследовательского подхода заключаются в изучении пищевых практик с точки зрения воспроизводства телесности, смысла и значения, придаваемого ей в молодежной культуре.

Goyette, Stephane
The Romanization of Albanian
The influence Latin/Early Romance may have had upon the grammatical structure of Albanian has been relatively little studied. The proposed presentation aims to fill this gap, by examining a number of Latin (+Romance)-Albanian parallels whose absence in Balto-Slavic languages (the branch of Indo-European most closely related, historically, to Albanian) makes it likely that said Latin (+Romance) –Albanian parallels are in fact due to direct Latin influence upon Albanian. Among such parallels we may list the following: a tendency towards the elimination of the neuter gender through morphological merger of neuter singulars with masculine singular forms and neuter plurals with feminine plural forms; in adjectival morphology, the near elimination of Indo-European gradation-marking morphology, and the expression of gradation through analytical means; finally, we would like to draw attention to two features of Albanian whose Romance origin may be somewhat more obscure on account of the features being only residually found in Romance, but with a geographical distribution strongly suggestive of widespread use: these are: the use of analytical forms of ordinal numerals, and the use of an analytical expression for negative comparison (“less than”). All of the above features are common to Albanian and Romance, but alien to Balto-Slavic, which strongly suggests that Albanian in fact borrowed these traits from Latin/Romance. It should also be noted that the traits listed are equally alien to Greek, a language whose influence upon Albanian is accepted but which cannot have supplied the above features to Albanian.

Grabowski, Lukasz
FLT and Teaching Translation with the National Russian Corpus: Theortical Background, Current State and Future Prospects in Poland
This paper aims to introduce and discuss both theoretically and practically selected ideas related to the application of the National Russian Corpus (henceforth the NRC) in teaching Russian and Translation to Polish students of Russian at the University of Opole, Poland. The rationale behind this paper is an increasingly difficult access to contemporary Russian language teaching materials in Poland as well as scarcity of monolingual dictionaries of contemporary Russian on the Polish market. Furthermore, growing implementation of communicative and lexical approaches in Russian language teaching and resultant focus on teaching of real language used in day-to-day communication enhances the position of the NRC as a complementary teaching tool. The first section of this paper provides concise introduction to the National Russian Corpus covering its structure, types of annotation, basic statistical data and search options. Next section presents theoretical observations related to the areas of convergence between teaching and language corpora (based on general typology proposed by Leech (1997)). These areas, which cover direct and indirect use of language corpora, as well as teaching-oriented corpus development, have been reformulated and further discussed in order to reflect both current state and future prospects of Russian language teaching in Poland. Finally, the main section illustrates selected case studies featuring practical exercises completed with the help of the NRC in teaching Business Russian and Polish-to-Russian translation. The paper ends with general observations and conclusions on the viability of using the NRC for teaching or reference purposes.

Grayson, Jane
Nabokov, Siniavskii and the Literary Tradition
In this bridge paper, which straddles two papers focusing separately on Nabokov and Siniavskii, I aim (with a little assistance from Pushkin, Gogol and Bulgakov) to consider points of similarity and difference in these two writers’ engagement with the Russian literary tradition.

Grosse, Tomasz G.
More innovative EU cohesion policy in peripheral regions of the new member countries?
We can differentiate between two innovation strategies of the public authorities in less developed and peripheral regions. The first one can be describe as the modernisation of the existing internal potential. External assistance would be directed towards delivering investment resources and new organisational and technological solutions that could renew the endogenous resources. An example for rural regions could be the introduction of new organisational methods (e.g. marketing methods) as well as technological solutions into the farming and tourist industries.  The second strategy is the building of completely new resources for regional development. External assistance, thus, would be concentrated on the development of new investment directions, different from the traditional development activities undertook in this area, as well as the generation of new potential for the future development of new endogenous development trajectory. An example of such activities would be the support for technical universities and research and development centres that bring together experts with the aim to conduct development activities in the high technology segments.  I would like confront this two sort of developmental strategies with estimation of EU cohesion policy before 2006. This policy realized in the new member states and cohesion countries could not have been used as n instrument to build new endogenous potential, i.e. modern and innovative economy in peripheral regions. This is related to domination of infrastructure investments and marginal importance of the investments for R&D as well as for introducing new technologies to companies. It is also related to the mechanism of supplanting investment for R&D and the ones developing modern economy by infrastructure investments, which consume most of the investment provisions available in the public finance systems of these countries.  The EU cohesion policy before 2006 was too much directed to improve the life condition of inhabitants and supporting their revenues. It insufficiently created long-term impulses for economic growth. This is related to the risk that the cohesion policy will lead to preserving dependency of peripheral regions in the new member states on redistributing the public funding of social character. In the edge cases it may be related to creating political clientelism and corruption in a way similar to South Italy. This would be related to the processes of taking control over EU money transfers by the political parties for the sake of their own party’s objectives.      

Harrington, Alex
Painting the Whole Picture: Impressionism in the Poetry of Fet and Akhmatova
This paper addresses an underexplored aspect of Afanasii Fet’s legacy in the twentieth century by examining how his impressionistic, painterly methods are developed by Anna Akhmatova.  It can be demonstrated that their lyrics often manifest shared techniques or compositional principles, largely the result of both poets attempting to make the reader ‘see’ through a sustained use of graphic, visual imagery.  Much scholarship has already been devoted to Fet’s importance for subsequent poets, but so far it has tended to dwell almost exclusively on his reception among the neo-Romantic Symbolists, especially Bal’mont, Briusov, and Blok.  It is, consequently, Fet’s position in what has been called the ‘melodic’ line in Russian poetry that is most often remarked upon.  This paper aims to show that Fet also plays a significant role in the development of what we might call the ‘pictorial’ line in Russian poetry.  The general consensus that Fet is a fundamental precursor of Symbolism tends to obscure his significance for the development of other, post-Symbolist poets.  It also emphasises the more Romantic features of his art despite the fact that his poetry exhibits features of both Romanticism and Realism.  Scrutiny of Fet’s realist techniques reveals him to be an important forbear for poets whose work is broadly antithetical to Symbolism.  This paper therefore sets out to demonstrate, through a close reading of selected lyrics, how Akhmatova’s poetry can be seen to develop features of Fet’s, particularly in terms of economy, its orientation towards the visual, and the way in which  it explores subtle emotional states.

Heikkilä, Pauli
Russia as the other in the European unification from the Finnish point of view
My presentation deals with the programs for European unification starting from the aftermath of World War I exceeding the present day. Whilst the programs changed from the liberal Paneuropean idea to the Nazi New Europe of racial hierarchy and further to the economy led European Union, Russia has been the significant other in constructing a new, European community. I will focus on the Finnish perspective; how these programs were seen in the Russian neighbourhood, in a European periphery.  The key question for the Finns during the whole period has been how to on the other hand discern from the Russian East and on the other how to find common features with the civilized, European West but simultaneously maintain national particularities. The programs were not accepted as such. Especially in relation to Russia, the most antagonistic attitudes were mostly ignored and the most russophobic Finns paid marginal attention to the European programs. Although the Finns want to place themselves clearly to the West, they see their role more as a bridge than a barrier.

Hellman, Ben and Rogatchevski , Andrei
Casper Wrede’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”
The paper traces the history of adapting Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the big screen (1970) by the playwright Ronald Harwood and the film and theatre director Casper Wrede, with Tom Courtenay and Eric Thomson in the leading roles and Sven Nykvist as the cameraman. Harwood’s and Nykvist’s memoirs, as well as Courtenay’s interviews and Thomson’s letters to the editor of the London Times, are used. The film’s relationship with the book is explored in detail. In addition, the film’s controversial reception (including its ban at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970 and in Finland in 1972-96) is analysed on the basis of British, American, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish reviews and Wrede’s obituaries. Solzhenitsyn’s own (ambivalent) reaction to the film is discussed.

Hemment, Julie
Youth movements, Voluntary Service and the Restructuring of Social Welfare in Russia
In Russia, youth are the new subjects of state policy.  Via a national project of “patriotic education” and new pro-Kremlin youth movements, youth are encouraged into diverse forms of civic activity. Media and scholarly analyses have focused on the political import of these movements.  Youth movements such as Nashi (Ours), are commonly presented as a contemporary Komsomol, an ideological project that produces “Putin’s Generation” – loyal followers of the President who will defend him against domestic and foreign opposition.  Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic research project conducted with Russian university teachers and undergraduates in the provincial city ,Tver’, I explore new Russian youth movements from an alternative angle.  At the same time as they politicize youth, these youth movements activate them as volunteers, engaging them in diverse forms of social service provision. In this paper, I move beyond the polarized rhetoric about youth movements such as Nashi, to explore both their local manifestation and the meanings they hold for their participants. I suggest that these youth organizations – not quite state, not non-governmental - offer an ethnographically compelling site from which to view the redrawing of state/society boundaries and client categories in Russia.

Hope, John P.
“Ne brat ia tebe, gnida chernozhopaia”: The Caucasus and Caucasians in Russian Popular Culture
Some 150 years after the publication of Pushkin’s “Kavkazskii plennik,” the Caucasus once again occupies a spotwever, it is in popular culture that the most sustained discussion of the Caucasus is to be found.  Blockbuster director Aleksei Balabanov’s film “Voina,” Rogozhin’s “Blokpost,” Nevzorov’s drama “Chistilishche,” the television action series Spetsnaz, ads such as those aired by the Rodina party, elements of popular song, and works by widely read authors Viktor Pelevin and Boris Akunin are only some examples of depictions that both express and mold popular conceptions of the Caucasus and the Caucasians. In my paper I examine representations of the Caucasus in various manifestations of popular culture in order to address the following questions:  Is there an internal consistency within popular culture in the way the Caucasus is presented?  To what degree does popular culture reflect current events, and to what degree does it draw – unwittingly or deliberately – on images of the Caucasus elaborated in nineteenth-century works of “high” culture?  What does popular culture suggest about the Russian public’s view of the Chechen conflict and the Caucasus in general, and how does popular culture help to shape these views?  Drawing on the evidence of films, television programs, and literary works such as those I have mentioned, I hope to be able to make a solid step forward towards answering these questions.

Hornsby, Rob
The application of article 58-10 under Khrushchev
The paper addresses several questions relating to political repression in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev.  Despite the relatively positive historical reputation of the period as being one of ‘liberalisation’ and ‘thaw’, along with Khrushchev’s own insistence that political prisoners were a thing of the past, approximately 10,000 individuals were arrested and sentenced for what can be termed as political crimes based upon  religious, nationalist or ideological grounds.  The paper examines who was sentenced for anti-Soviet activity and why.  The paper also raises issues of the conditions in which political prisoners were held, the authorities’ and society’s attitudes towards such individuals and the factors that influenced these attitudes.  The period is contrasted and compared with those of Stalin and Brezhnev in order to demonstrate trends of change and continuity of repression and to raise the theme of how the era ought to be considered in the light of its record of political repression. Based on the original case files held in the archive of the Soviet procurator at GARF, it draws on a range of biographical details and KGB investigation protocols to demonstrate a number of important political, chronological and sociological trends in the punishment of dissent.  The work also benefits from interviews with a number of dissenters sentenced under article 58-10 in the Khrushchev era, including leading figures of the later dissident movement such as Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin and Vladimir Bukovsky.

Howlett , Jana
The life, Life and afterlife of Metropolitan Petr
According to standard accounts Metropolitan Petr was born in Volynia sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century.  He became a monk at the age of 12, founded a monastery and in 1308 he was appointed metropolitan of all Rus in Constantinople.  Sometime before his death in 1327 Petr laid the foundations of the Assumption Cathedral in the Kremlin, and was buried there, thereby also laying the foundations of the Muscovite state. The first redaction of Petr’s Life was supposedly written soon after his death and it is believed that in 1339 he was canonised by the Ioann IV Kalekas, Patriarch of Constantinople. In 1381 Metropolitan Kiprian wrote a new version of Petr’s vita, well known to historians of Russian literature as one of the finest examples of early Muscovite hagiography. The present paper has a double purpose. On the one hand it aims to question the textual evidence behind accepted narratives of Petr’s life and Житие. The second purpose is a broader one. By examining the use of Petr’s cult in the fifteenth an sixteenth centuries, this paper argues that for a real understanding of Muscovite texts hagiographies – and all texts - need to be studied in the context of the manuscripts in which they are found. Treating Жития as autonomous works leads to misrepresentations of their purpose and meaning.

Hutchings, Stephen and Miazhevich, Galina
The Polonium Trail to Islam: Litvinenko, Liminality and the Media’s (Cold) War on Terror
This paper addresses the British and Russian media’s propensity to link War on Terror and Cold War rhetoric. Analysis of BBC and Russian Channel 1 prime-time news bulletins reveals that both channels exploit Cold War lexicon to (a) set the parameters of the War on Terror according to their respective Establishments’ own interests (Britain accuses Russia of state terrorism, Russia cites Chechen warlords sheltering in London), and (b) shape the triadic national self-identification process in which the West, Islam and Russia/the USSR intersect in complex permutations. The paper’s objective, therefore, is to challenge readings of  War on Terror discourse positing reductive Self/Other binaries. Pursuing this objective via the metaphor/metonymy distinction as applied within narrative theory, we examine the convergence of the two ‘wars’ in the media’s fascination with the Litvinenko story. Litvinenko possessed liminal attributes, being both inside and outside (i) Islam (his death-bed conversion), (ii) the KGB/FSB (his prior transformation from Russian spy into ‘dissident’), and (iii) Britain (his refugee status). We argue that this accords his story an important function. For the metaphorically-inclined British ‘political unconscious’, Litvinenko’s ‘good asylum seeker’ status offsets the dual threat of the Muslim as ‘cipher’ for abstract, global Terror (troped in Litvinenko’s invisible killer, Polonium), and the Islamic fundamentalist as ethnically embodied presence threatening an over-bureaucratised national Self. For Russia, Litvinenko’s metonymic oscillation between Chechen rebel, Zakaev, and the cosmopolitan/Jewish Berezovskii, facilitates the mediation of Russia’s post-imperial identity through its Soviet past, its Western Other and its current reorientation towards a mythologised ‘Eurasia’.

Ilic, Melanie
State and Society under Khrushchev: Case Studies
Drawing on the findings arising from case studies in research on the Khrushchev era, this paper offers a reassessment of Khrushchev’s period of office as a critical turning point in Soviet history. It examines continuities and changes in the Khrushchev period in comparison with the Stalinist past, and it attempts to identify the roots, if any, of the Soviet collapse in 1991 that were evident by the end of Khrushchev’s period of office in 1964. What was the social and cultural impact of the ‘thaw’? How effective were Khrushchev’s policy initiatives? What role did the public consultation campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s play in Soviet decision making?

Jakobson, Valeria
Inequality in Access to Education  in Estonia
The complicated ethnic composition of population of Estonia (68% of ethnic Estonians versus 30% of Russian-speakers), tensions between these groups as well as vulnerable character of the sphere of education conditioned the fact, that the system of  secondary education functions in two languages. At the same time the system of higher education is functioning mainly in Estonian. As a result, while 25% of young people graduate from secondary schools with the Russian language of instruction, only 9% of students of the universities are graduates of these schools. This shows a high inequality in access to higher education between different ethnic groups. This unequality is complicated by differences in social status and incomes level between the minority and majority. According to the study “The Challenges of the Ethnic Relations and the Integration Politics in Estonia after the Bronze Crisis”, made by the University of Tartu in July 2007, 43% of non-Estonians find an inequality between Estonians and Russians in possibilities of obtaining education. The current school reform, when number of subjects are taught to the minorities in Estonian, put forward new questions: will it lead to the decrease of unequality, or bring in new inequalities, such as decrease of the quality of education, weakening of the minority ethnic identity, violation of the right for education in the minority language?  The wider background to this issue is an access of the minorities to education in Russia and various EU countries.