Review of A. B. Nikolaev, Revoliutsiia i vlast’: How Has Nikolaev Changed the Interpretation of the February Revolution?

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

A.B. Nikolaev’s book has not received much attention either in the West or in Russia, but it is an important book that has significantly changed our understanding the February Revolution of 1917. Nikolaev’s meticulously researched monograph, based on a wide array of new sources, challenges the previously dominant interpretation that the Provisional Committee of the State Duma (Duma Committee) was forced to seize power only to stem the tide of the insurgency from below. He argues that the Duma Committee was from its inception clear about its intention to overthrow the old regime and to create a new power to replace it even before the Petrograd Soviet was formed. The Duma Committee played a crucial role in prompting military units to take the side of the revolution, in steering the insurgents to the State Duma, in creating the Military Commission to organize insurgents to occupy strategic positions in the city, in taking over the food supply commission to feed the insurgents, in attacking and destroying the tsarist police, while preventing and suppressing potentially dangerous anarchical pogroms, and in taking control over the imperial bureaucracy. Nikolaev also raises an interesting question about the relationship between the Duma Committee, the State Duma and the Provisional Government by arguing that the Provisional Government made a hasty and cardinal mistake in cutting its relationship with the State Duma. This book is a landmark in the interpretation of the February Revolution, and especially of the role of the Duma liberals in the revolution.

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 544-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Battera

This article argues that differences in Arab authoritarian regimes were mainly linked to the relationship between the state, the political party in power and the military. By exploring such differences in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria prior to the 2011 crisis, they are explained in the context of the political changes that ensued in the wake of the crisis. How the army played the dual role of instigating change while impeding it at crucial points in the transitional process is described. The mutual lack of autonomy between the state, the party and the military appears to have been a key factor in impeding change, whereas a clear separation of the functions of these institutions was more likely to enable political change to come about.


Author(s):  
Necati Polat

This chapter is on a set of dubious government practices following the regime change, as reflected in the OSCE reports on Turkey elections, in securing success at the ballot box, including the way in which the ruling AKP allegedly financed politics. The discussion details the unfair poll environment, which left the opposition practically crippled, and the state of the basic rights crucial for the ballot box to make full sense. The chapter also provides an account of the corruption claims from December 2013—chiefly bid-rigging and money laundering that allegedly involved Erdogan and his family, beside cabinet members—filed originally by Gulenist prosecutors relying mostly on wiretapped conversations, to be posted anonymously online from early 2014. The chapter ends with a section on the role of the military in the aftermath of the old regime, with an assessment of its possibly resilient reflexes, prior to the abortive coup of 2016.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1572-1601 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAYANIKA MOOKHERJEE

AbstractThis paper addresses how the wombs of women and the absent skin on the circumcised penises of men become the predominant sites on which racialized and gendered discourses operating during the Bangladesh War are inscribed. This is explored by examining instances of sexual violence by Pakistani soldiers and their local Bengali collaborators. The prevalence of these discourses in colonial documents about the Bengali Muslims underscores the role of history, the politics of identity and in the process, establishes its link with the rapes of Bangladeshi women and men. Through this, the relationship between sexual violence and historical contexts is highlighted. I locate the accounts of male violations by the West Pakistani army within the historical and colonial discourses relating to the construction of the Bengali Muslim and its intertextual, contemporary citational references in photographs and interviews.I draw on Judith Butler's and Marilyn Strathern's work on gendering and performativity to address the citational role of various practices of discourses of gender and race within colonial documents and its application in a newer context of colonization and sexual violence of women and men during wars. The role of photographs and image-making is intrinsic to these practices. The open semiotic of the photographs allows an exploration of the territorial identities within these images and leads to traces of the silence relating to male violations. Through an examination of the silence surrounding male sexual violence vis-à-vis the emphasis on the rape of women in independent Bangladesh, it is argued that these racialized and gendered discourses are intricately associated to the link between sexuality and the state in relation to masculinity.


Author(s):  
Chirine Mohséni

This chapter examines the ethnic tensions between Kurds and Azeris in and around the city of Naqadeh in Western Azerbaijan shortly after the Iranian Revolution. Favored by the Iranian state, the Azeris held dominant social and political positions in comparison to the Kurds, adding to the tensions between these populations. The shift to violence is the result of several elements: first, the collapse of the old regime brought into question the hitherto legitimate ethnic hierarchy. Being Shi'ite became a key element in the relationship with the state and Sunni Kurds were marginalized. Second, Kurdish political demands were a source of concern for the region's Azeri population. Finally, the new government, freshly installed, had yet to establish its authority over Kurdish areas. Ethnic violence among different groups only served to justify government intervention and strengthen state influence.


2003 ◽  
pp. 66-76
Author(s):  
I. Dezhina ◽  
I. Leonov

The article is devoted to the analysis of the changes in economic and legal context for commercial application of intellectual property created under federal budgetary financing. Special attention is given to the role of the state and to comparison of key elements of mechanisms for commercial application of intellectual property that are currently under implementation in Russia and in the West. A number of practical suggestions are presented aimed at improving government stimuli to commercialization of intellectual property created at budgetary expense.


Author(s):  
Michael Koortbojian

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city's foundation. This book explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used social practices and public monuments to assert their capital's distinction from its growing empire, to delimit the proper realms of religion and law from those of war and conquest, and to establish and disseminate so many fundamental Roman institutions across three centuries of imperial rule. The book probes such topics as the appearance in the city of Romans in armor, whether in representation or in life, the role of religious rites on the battlefield, and the military image of Constantine on the arch built in his name. Throughout, the book reveals how, in these instances and others, the ancient ideology of crossing the pomerium reflects the efforts of Romans not only to live up to the ideals they had inherited, but also to reconceive their past and to validate contemporary practices during a time when Rome enjoyed growing dominance in the Mediterranean world. The book explores a problem faced by generations of Romans—how to leave and return to hallowed city ground in the course of building an empire.


Jurnal Akta ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 463
Author(s):  
Muslim Ansori ◽  
Akhmad Khisni

With the enactment of the Education System Act no 20 of 2003 (better known as the Sisdiknas Act), the State has determined that educational institutions should have a legal umbrella in the form of a legal entity, or better known as the Legal Entity Education. As a non-profit organization, the Foundation is the right legal entity that becomes a place for educational institutions, especially private schools. Therefore, of course, Notary has a very crucial role in making notary deed in the form of establishment and deed of change, such as example how in making the right basic budget and not multi interpresatasi for stake holders in the foundation. Therefore, the role of function and authority of the organ of the foundation must be clearly stated in the articles of association, so as not to cause a dispute in the future.KEYWORDS: Notaries, Foundation, Organ Foundation,


Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden

The first chapter examines musical portraits of literary figures. It first explores Virgil Thomson’s multiple works in the genre including his portrait of Gertrude Stein, to interpret the influence of Stein’s modernist literary portraits on Thomson’s compositions. It then turns to Pierre Boulez’s orchestral portrait Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé. Analyzing Boulez’s incorporation of elements of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry as well as the complex and idiosyncratic theories regarding the relationship between poetry and music that Mallarmé developed in his essays. Through the discussion of these portraits, the chapter addresses the crucial role of language in the musical representation of identity.


Author(s):  
Daniel W. Berman

Foundation myths are a crucial component of many Greek cities’ identities. But the mythic tradition also represents many cities and their spaces before they were cities at all. This study examines three of these ‘prefoundational’ narratives: stories of cities-before-cities that prepare, configure, or reconfigure, in a conceptual sense, the mythic ground for foundation. ‘Prefoundational’ myths vary in both form and function. Thebes, before it was Thebes, is represented as a trackless and unfortified backwater. Croton, like many Greek cities in south Italy, credited Heracles with a kind of ‘prefounding’, accomplished on his journey from the West back to central Greece. And the Athenian acropolis was the object of a quarrel between Athena and Poseidon, the results of which gave the city its name and permanently marked its topography. In each case, ‘prefoundational’ myth plays a crucial role in representing ideology, identity, and civic topography.


This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.


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