Vladimir Gel'man
Dead end
Authoritarian modernisation in Russia
Russia has to modernise. There is a widespread assumption that this can happen only by way of an authoritarian modernisation. Only the bureaucracy, the army, and the ruling party come into question as the supporters of such a course of modernisation. But in Russia, none of these institutions is interested in modernisation, to say nothing of being in a position to implement it. The Putin regime has manoeuvred Russia into a dead end. Only insight into the necessity of a simultaneous reform of the political system, the state structure, and the economy offers Rus-sia the chance of embarking on the path of modernisation.

Ksenia Chepikova, Olaf Leisse
Russia's simulated federalism
Regional policy under Medvedev
According to its constitution, Russia is a federation. But this federalism exists only on paper. President Vladimir Putin pushed through a re-centralisation of the state that relegated the regions to the political pe-riphery and the regional elites to statists in the political process. Contrary to his pronouncements, President Dmitrii Medvedev continues to strengthen the vertical structure of power by placing the communities under the guardianship of the centre as well. At the same time, the party United Russia is increasingly becoming an instrument by which the re-gions are controlled. With that, Putin, as party chairman, keeps the reins in his hands.

Winfried Schneider-Deters
The EU – not NATO!
Theses on the future of Ukraine
Ukraine finds itself caught in the middle. The EU and NATO will not open their doors. Kiev spurs Moscow's offers. But Ukraine will not be able to maintain this position for long. It risks falling under Russia's do-main again. However, NATO membership is the wrong way to prevent this. Given Moscow's opposition, Ukrainian membership in NATO would create more insecurity. A solution is at hand: The European states must open the door to the European Union for Ukraine and simultaneously negotiate a pan-European security agreement with Russia.

Helmut König
Historiography and memory
Conflicts, impositions, and interventions
Historiography and memory denote different means of approach to the past. Historiography orients itself on truth and conceptual stringency, memory on fidelity, remembrance, and narratives. The different points of view, however, do not have to come into conflict with one another. They can complement and correct each other.

Monica Rüthers
Visible and invisible Jews
A visual history of the "Eastern Jew"
Since the 1980s, it has been possible to observe an increased interest in Jewish history in Europe. Jewish quarters have been renovated, klezmer music has come into fashion, and research institutes have been founded. The public seems to have certain ideas of what Jews look like: not like assimilated urban Jews, but like traditional Jews from around 1900, especially those from East Central Europe. The renaissance of the shtetl and the "Eastern Jew" as places of memory feeds on old plati-tudes.

Tobias Rupprecht
Stranded Flagship
50 years of People's Friendship University in Moscow
The Peoples' Friendship University in Moscow celebrates its 50th anni-versary in 2010. This showpiece of Soviet internationalism cultivated the ideal of being ideologically neutral and rendering pure development as-sistance. Students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America received gener-ous full scholarships and were then to form a new, pro-Soviet elite in their home countries. The largely positive experiences of the students were confronted by the oft heard suspicion that the university was a training ground for future Communist cadres and an incubator for revolu-tionaries, something that could never be proven, however. The upheaval of the political system in Russia was accompanied by a massive in-crease in racially motivated attacks and created new conflicts.

Karlheinz Kasper
Classics, persecuted authors, contemporaries
Russian literature in German translation 2009
With 35 new translations, Russian literature once again maintained its position on the German book market last year. The stand-out achieve-ments among the new translations are several works of classic Russian literature of world-class literary ranking, such as Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, and Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karen-ina. Several new or first-time translations of works from the 20th century, such as Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N., the poems of Daniil Kharms, Leonid Aronzon, and Gennadii Aigi, and Andrei Siniavskii's A Voice from the Chorus, are by no means inferior to the classic masterworks. They also belong to those texts that fell victim to Soviet censorship, just like the narratives of Vasilii Grossman and Varlam Shalamov.

Published 2010-02-25