Abstracts Osteuropa 4/2007

Carsten Goehrke
The Russian empire in slipstream. Geography, history, and the global dynamic of development

Why does a world power like Russia – with its enormous wealth of raw materials, its respectable level of education, and its partially advanced technology – continue to produce an average income typical of a moderately developed industrialized country? The causes are, first of all, its geographical and geopolitical conditions for development. In the global competition among empires for colonies overseas, continental Russia’s starting point was a poor one. Furthermore, expansion into the thinly populated expanses of northern Asia did not force an intensification of the economy. More important are cultural influences, especially the understanding of state and society in Orthodox Europe. In Muscovy, the balance of power between prince, nobility, church, and cities shifted in lopsided fashion to an autocracy along the lines of the Byzantine model. In competition with Western industrial powers, autocracy and a “state-fixated society” proved immobile. Over the course of the modern period, the global dynamic of development moved from the Islamic orient and China to the realm of the North Atlantic, where state, ethnic, and religious polymorphism helped find the right balance between too much and too little state.

Lilia Shevtsova
Russia’s will to world power. Autocracy, energy, ideology

Russia’s foreign policy resembles a zigzag course. The Kremlin’s policy moves between cooperation and confrontation, the West is simultaneously partner and opponent. Despite common economic interests, differences in values are becoming clearer. Their agendas collide above all in the post-Soviet space. Increasingly, Russia and the West imitate a “strategic partnership”. At fault for this is the consolidation of bureaucratic authoritarianism under Putin and the lack of coherence in Western policy. To create a stable partnership, it is necessary for the United States to step back from its drive for a hegemony based on military strength and for Russia to make the transition to democratic standards.

Vlad Ivanenko
Russia’s place in the world market. Export structures and integration options

Russia is striving for greater integration into the world market. There are many open doors. The EU states Finland and Germany are willing to intensify economic cooperation. Russia also remains an economic centre of gravity for the successor states of the Soviet Union. Finally, the presence of Russian entrepreneurs in markets outside of Europe is growing. However, since Russian companies often have poor negotiating positions and the interests of individual sectors vary considerably, the state should become active and support them with intergovernmental agreements.

Folkert Garbe
Energetic integration? Russia’s conflict over energy with Belarus

At the start of 2007, the conflict over energy between Russia and Belarus – which had been brewing for years – escalated. Moscow imposed a drastic curtailment of economic privileges which Belarus had enjoyed for years at Russia’s expense. This does not fit the scheme of things by which Russia punishes disagreeable governments and rewards loyal regimes. After several years of effort, Russia seems to have given up the project of political integration in the form of a union with Belarus and is following considerations of economic interests. For the independence of the Belarusian economy and the Lukashenka regime, this has serious consequences.

Andrej Dyn’ko
Economics matter! The ignorance of the opposition in Belarus

The national opposition in Belarus is making a crucial mistake: It is underestimating the importance of the economy. Instead of concerning itself with the country’s real economic problems – problems which represent a threat to independence – it is fighting over national symbols and noble ideals. It is thus failing to win over to its side entrepreneurs and factory employees, who have a mundane but real interest in an independent Belarus. If the opposition wants to win its struggle for freedom, it must not just squint at Ukraine with envy and lament the historical weaknesses of the Belarusian national movement. It must forge a broad coalition along the lines of the Ukrainian example.

Irina Tochitskaya
Price shock. The consequences of the increase in natural gas prices for Belarus

The Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom is seeking to gradually raise the price of natural gas in the newly independent states to western European levels. Since January 2007, Belarus has had to cope with an increase in the price of natural gas from US$ 46 to US$ 100 per thousand cubic metres and, starting 2011 at the latest, will no longer receive any special conditions. The Belarusian economy is very energy intensive and highly dependent on imported natural gas. Therefore, an increase in the price of natural gas has clear consequences. A recession can be avoided only if energy efficiency is boosted or the share of natural gas in the country’s energy mix is lowered.

Artur Klinau
Something new from the partisan forests. Artur Klinau on subversive culture and the culture of the subversive

One year after the protests against the manipulated presidential election in Belarus were defeated, Belarusian artist and writer Artur Klinau feels his country has again fallen into a lethargic slumber. But hibernating under adverse conditions is nothing new for Belarusians. The wars and devastations which again and again rolled through the country, from the east and the west, have helped create a partisan mentality which has kept the nation from disappearing. Under dictator Lukashenka, the opposition is not holding the country open to Europe. This role is being taken over by modern, subversive art and literature, which are being done justice in, for example, Klinau’s magazine pARTisan.

Kerstin Holm
Pilgrimage to the low tide of reason. A speech in honour of Gerd Koenen and Mikhail Ryklin

This year’s Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding honours Frankfurt historian Gerd Koenen for his diagnosis of the German “Russia complex” and Moscow philosopher Mikhail Ryklin for his trial dossier “By right of being stronger”. Koenen resurrects affinities between German nationalism and Bolshevism, while Ryklin shows how civil rationality in Russia is being dismantled by legal logic. For speaker Kerstin Holm, both also make clear why Russia seeks to be a cultural part of Europe and at the same time is forever distancing itself from it.

Florian Grotz
Stable government alliances? Determinants of coalition policy in central eastern Europe

In 2006, disturbing government alliances were formed in several new EU states, or serious political crises erupted. This cannot be interpreted across the board as a sign of instability in central eastern European systems of government. In Hungary and the Czech Republic, the party systems are highly concentrated, and the parliamentary groupings were able to consolidate themselves for the longer term, so that coalition stability has proved noticeably higher than in Poland and Slovakia. In these latter two states, conflicts among the elites have so far encumbered a programme-oriented competition among parties. Even EU accession has not had the same effect on government stability in all four states.

Timothy Snyder
The life and death of Jews in Volhynia

Volhynia was for many centuries one of the centres of Jewish life in eastern Europe. Under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, and the Polish state of the interwar period, a situation of cooperation and conflict developed in the multi-confessional and polyethnic region of Catholic Polish landholders, Orthodox Ukrainian peasants, and Jewish merchants. Religion, social stratification, language, and ethnic self-identification were interwoven in a complex way. Stereotypes about the relationship to Soviet rule (Jewish Bolshevism) and the role of Ukrainians and Poles in the annihilation of the region’s Jews between 1941 and 1943 misrepresent reality.

Ziko van Dijk
A language for the world from Warsaw. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, Esperanto, and eastern Europe

L.L. Zamenhof is the founder of Esperanto. In Poland, he is considered one of the country’s most prominent sons; however, he understood himself to be a trans-national man. Even Zamenhof’s constructed language cannot be separated from his experience as a Jew in a Slavic environment. Zamenhof was one of the first Zionists and a humanist with political and strangely “non-political” thoughts. Under National Socialism and Stalinism, adherents of the Esparanto movement were persecuted; under Socialist regimes, Esperanto associations moved between manipulation and encouragement.

Doris Kaufmann
“Good Russians” in the memory of Germans. Letters to Lev Kopelev, 1981-1997

Lev Kopelev’s autobiography, To Be Preserved Forever, was very well received in West Germany, above all for its chapter on East Prussia. There, the former Soviet propaganda officer depicted acts of violence committed by the Red Army during the invasion of East Prussia. With that, the Russian human rights activist and specialist in German studies opened up a realm in which individuals could remember guilt – especially former Wehrmacht soldiers – which they admitted in numerous letters. For girls and young women who had fallen victim to Red Army sexual violence while fleeing, Kopelev’s account meant the revelation and recognition of their suffering. For both groups, the encounter with individual “good Russians” provided a central figure of memory, which made it possible to channel their own burdensome past into a “good story”.