Roland Götz
Pipeline bugbear
Fallacies of the European energy debate
In the European energy debate, an allegedly dangerous dependency on imports from Russia is evoked with growing frequency. Sometimes, there is talk of a militarisation of energy policy, that is to say, a NATO for energy. But this threat scenario misses the mark. Russia is at least just as dependent on exports of fossil fuels as Europe is on their imports. The means of increasing energy security are also inadequate. All the other providers and supply lines outside of Europe are more problematic than Russia. Therefore, instead of promoting alternative pipelines, the EU should promote alternative forms of energy. Alongside an increase in energy efficiency in the eastern EU member states and Russia, such a policy will contribute not only to securing supplies but to protecting the climate as well.

Jeronim Perovic
The Gas Farce
Russia, Ukraine, and European policy
The gas conflict between Russia and Ukraine in January 2009 left almost 20 countries in Europe without natural gas. Now Russia and Ukraine are considered problematic when it comes to European energy security. Brussels and the national governments of the EU member states have to consider which consequences are to be drawn from this crisis. Russia is, and will remain, Europe's most important gas supplier. But relations between Europe and Russia are troubled and have to be corrected. An important precondition is for the European Union to show unity. Above all, however, it is necessary to understand the complex background, causes, and motives behind the gas conflict.

Arsenii Roginskii
Fragmented Memory
Stalin and Stalinism in Today's Russia
The Stalin era is very much present in Russia today, albeit for the most part in an idealised form. When it comes to the war, Stalin stands for victory; when the Great Terror is recalled, the victims are front and centre. The crimes and the perpetrators are not part of the discussion. This has as much to do with the lack of a legal basis for prosecution as with the fact that differentiating between perpetrator and victim is often difficult. In addition, official history policy marginalises and trivialises terror as a feature of Stalinism.

Oleg Khlevniuk
The Stalinist dictatorship
Politics, institutions, and methods
New sources have enriched our knowledge about Stalinism. The dictatorship established itself in the course of the party's struggle against a large part of the population. It was the continuation of the Civil War with other means. Repression and terror formed a pillar of centralised rule, and started and ended on Moscow's orders. Campaigns were the basis of political and administrative praxis; they compensated for the weakness of traditional development stimuli, healed an apparatus under strain, and guaranteed strong centralisation. Today's attempts to smooth over the criminal character of the Stalinist dictatorship by reducing it to the modernisation of the country and the victory in the war are unacceptable.

Jörg Baberowski
Life in a state of emergency
Karl Schlögel's "Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937"
Depicting life under conditions of a state of emergency in a realistic way is a task that poses enormous difficulties for the historian. If he wants to address the variety of simultaneous events in a particular place, he must let his sources speak in a way that makes the cacophony of experiences palpable and communicable. In Terror und Traum, Karl Schlögel has made an effort to depict life in Moscow in 1937 in a realistic way. This ambitious experiment has not reached its conclusion. But it shows what a story that tries to be more than a chronology of events ought to look like.

Ulrich Schmid
The literarisation of historiography
Moscow 1937: Karl Schlögel's Masterpiece
That historiography tells stories has been known since the publication of Hayden White's methodological investigations. However, only recently have historians drawn consequences from this insight: Carsten Goehrke included fictitious scenes of pre-modern Russia into his work Russischer Alltag. Karl Schlögel goes one step further. He has designed his new book Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 as a literarily stylised grand narrative, including tragic characters, thrilling story lines, and spectacular settings.

Nawojka Cieslinska-Lobkowicz
The blind spot
Looted art, restitution, and the "Eastern Jews"
The search for Jewish owned cultural assets stolen by the National Socialists and their restitution to their rightful heirs has been occupying politicians and those directly concerned to this day. An exhibition at the Jewish Museums in Berlin and Frankfurt and the substantial accompanying catalogue Raub und Restitution are dedicated to the issue. But something is still missing; the fate of the east European Jews goes unmentioned. This is representative of the shortcomings of research in this field and the continued existence of stereotypes and ignorance. The unwillingness of some countries in east central Europe to accept their Jewish heritage and to address restitution seriously merely add to the problem. The cases of art collectors Maksymilian Goldstein and Abe Gutnajer of L'viv (Lwów) and Warsaw are well suited as symbolic additions for closing this gap.

Nikita Sokolov
The eternal Karamzin
Historical ideology from the textbook
History education in schools is fundmental for the political consciousness of a society. In Russia, the first history book date back to the 18th century. Soon Nikolai Karamzin's state-fixated construct of Russia's history became widely accepted; it provides the basis for ideas such as a special path, the fortress under siege, centralism, and the legitimation of authoritarian rule. From 1918 to 1934 and during Perestroika, different historical perspectives dominated, but now a restoration can be observed. New history textbooks are once again spreading constructs of history in the Karamzin's tradition.

Isabelle de Keghel
Guilt, faith, and salvation
Religion in the new Russian cinema
In the 1990s, the Second World War was rarely a subject in Russian films. In new productions, however, the war once again plays its part, with religious topics and characters in the centre of attention. Pavel Lungin¹s "Ostrov" from late 2006 was a box office hit, being supported by church and state. However, the film's success is primarily due to society's need for individual and spiritual confrontation with guilt and forgiveness.

Alexander J. Motyl
Russia: people, state, and leader
Elements of a fascist system
In Russia, a fascist system has established itself. Its features are hyper-nationalism, a fetish for the state, and a cult of masculinity focused on Vladimir Putin, who, even under President Dmitrii Medvedev, remains the country's undisputed leader. However, this order is not stable; once Putin¹s star fades, power struggles will break out again among the elites. Imperial overexpansion and the oncoming economic crisis merely add to the problem. Russia faces a new time of troubles.

Karlheinz Kasper
"I know my way around paradise"
Russian literature in German translation 2008
With 30 titles this year, the number of translations of Russian literature into German seems to have leveled off at an acceptable level. However, ten publications should be classified as thriller and fantasy, which mirrors their success with readers, but does not reflect the situation of contemporary Russian fiction. It shows a trend towards anti-utopian views of Russia, as expressed in books by Vladimir Sorokin and Dmitrii Glukhovskii. The number of translations of previously unknown or untapped works by Sofia Tolstaia, Ivan Bunin, Anatolii Shteiger, Leonid Dobychin, and Varlam Shalamov is an especially positive development.

Published 2009-02-05