Chancellor A. Merkel's “Secret of Power”: Genesis (2005 ‒ 2013)

The article is a study of the political phenomenon of German Chancellor A. Merkel, her special style of governance, objective factors and personal qualities that contributed to the construction of a long and successful career. The author analyzes in detail the period of governmental coalitions of the CDU/CSU with the SPD (2005‒2009) and the FDP (2009‒2013). It was the experience that had the greatest influence on the shaping of her image as a first female Chancellor of Germany. The theory of the difference between women's leadership and men's leadership is used in this paper. Through the prism of this theory we analyze the ways of struggle for leadership. The beginning of Merkel's career and the period of her ministerial activity were characterized by a harsh treatment of her rivals. Later she learned to do it in a softer way. The image of a consensual, supraparty leader, who knows how to find a compromise, is the result of Merkel's conscious work on herself. The need to be chancellor of a “grand coalition” and to cooperate with the SPD, an almost equal partner in terms of strength, contributed greatly to such a leadership style. The second legislative period helped A. Merkel to acquire the qualities of a “crisis manager”. In the conclusion of the article it is concluded that the basis of A. Merkel's political survival was the ability to learn quickly and adapt during various difficulties. From this point of view, the Frau Chancellor's main “teacher” was her first rival, the Social Democrat H. Schroeder. It was his political fate that allowed Merkel to come to a conclusion about the need to combine the post of chancellor and party leadership, which allowed her to stay in power for 16 years.

Discipline, not punish

After the economic and financial crisis, the Commission was given strong powers to intervene in the national budgets of eurozone members. In this first of two chapters on budgetary surveillance, I explain how partisan politics came to neutralize the Commission, which never applied the sanctions written in the treaties. With their “smart reading of the rules,” Juncker and Moscovici succeeded in imposing a politically contextualized reinterpretation of the Stability and Growth Pact, without however challenging the institutions. Their political work, however, would have been impossible without the complicity of conservative and social-democrat actors in the Council and in the Commission.

Peasant Oaths, Furious Icons and the Quest for Agency: Tracing Subaltern Politics in Tsarist Georgia on the Eve of the 1905 Revolution. Part II: Agents and Items of (Counter)Insurgent Political Theology on the Imperial Borderland

This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The second part of the article delves into Uratadze’s account of the aftermath of the inaugural oath and the conflicts it triggered between peasants, intelligentsia and the Tsarist administration.

Peasant Oaths, Furious Icons and the Quest for Agency: Tracing Subaltern Politics in Tsarist Georgia on the Eve of the 1905 Revolution. Part I: The Prose of the Intelligentsia and Its Peasant Symptoms

This two-part transdisciplinary article elaborates on the autobiographical account of the Georgian Social-Democrat Grigol Uratadze regarding the oath pledged by protesting peasants from Guria in 1902. The oath inaugurated their mobilization in Tsarist Georgia in 1902, culminating in full peasant self-rule in the “Gurian Republic” by 1905. The study aims at a historical-anthropological assessment of the asymmetries in the alliance formed by peasants and the revolutionary intelligentsia in the wake of the oath as well as the tensions that crystallized around the oath between the peasants and Tsarist officials. In trying to recover the traces of peasant politics in relation to multiple hegemonic forces in a modernizing imperial borderland, the article invites the reader to reconsider the existing assumptions about historical agency, linguistic conditions of subjectivity, and the relationship between politics and the material and customary dimensions of religion. The ultimate aim is to set the foundations for a future subaltern reading of the practices specific to the peasant politics in the later “Gurian Republic”. The first part of the article starts with a reading of Uratadze’s narration of the 1902 inaugural oath “against the grain”.

Konstantin Andreevich Popov and the Last Provocation of the Omsk Gendarmes (January 1917)

This article analyzes Ivan Dmitrievich Krasilnikov’s letter to the Social Democrat Konstantin Andreevich Popov (1876–1949) in Omsk on the eve of revolutionary events in 1917. In this letter, Krasilnikov offered assistance and cooperation due to his unwillingness to serve his leadership. As an act of goodwill, Krasilnikov reported that the Social Democrat P. F. Mikhailov was a secret employee of the state and supplied the gendarmerie with valuable information. Subsequent revolutionary events showed that the information about P. F. Mikhailov and Krasilnikov’s intentions did not correspond to reality. Using unpublished sources from the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region (which contains documents from the Omsk Gendarme Office on the work of secret officers), this study identified and analyzed available historical sources, contents of the letter, conditions and reasons of its appearance, and goals and consequences of this action. This is the record keeping documentation of the. This work allows us to show a previously unknown episode of the life path of K. A. Popov and specifics of the specifics of the Omsk gendarme administration. This should be of interest to a wide range of readers; researchers in the history of the revolution and the Civil War in Russia, as well as specialists in the history of the domestic special services.

Was Lev Trotsky the leader in the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in 1905?

The article reexamines the role of famous revolutionary and Social Democrat L. D. Trotsky in the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. One claim in the scholarly literature is that Trotsky was the leader of the Soviet, but this is based on his or someone else’s memoirs. This article analyzes this position: first, memoirs about the thesis on Trotsky’s prominent role as speaker during meetings of the Soviet, and the argument about Trotsky’s support in the Soviet; also, the question about the rating of the formal chairman of the Soviet, G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, is discussed. This examination is based on archival documents: records of the interrogations of participants of the Soviet’s meetings written between the end of 1905 and the spring of 1906; letters written by Trotsky (mostly in the pre-revolutionary period); and the works of G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar. Analytic and comparative methods suggest that these sources are more objective than memoirs written many years after 1905 and in another historical context. The article concludes that Trotsky’s role in the Petersburg Soviet is exaggerated: memoirs are subjective or analyzed only from one point of view, and sources closest to the time show that Trotsky was a participant and even the prominent speaker in Soviet meetings, but he did not find wide ideological support there. The formal chairman of the Soviet, G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, had enough authority, denying the claim that Trotsky was the one and only leader of the Soviet.