From The Editors: New Journals in the New Russia

New Journals in the New Russia

The fashionable new bookstore-café "Pirogi" in Moscow lies in a pleasantly spare, cavernous set of rooms up a flight of stairs, on a side street just off Piatnitskaia ulitsa, near Novokuznetskaia. A number of ladders with wheels, which one clambers up to take in the top reaches of its towering bookshelves, line its collection of new Russian books. While the choices are noticeably stronger in literature and the arts than in history, it makes a serious addition to a city now boasting a substantial group of bookstores "for intellectuals." A small wooden bar and set of tables in the front room are almost always filled, during the day with coffee-drinkers and in the evenings more with crowds of molodezh ¢ chain-smoking and drinking beer. The place, along with other similar venues in different parts of the city, is run by OGI, the Ob ¾ edinennoe gumanitarnoe izdatel ¢ stvo, whose acronym is embedded in the second syllable of the pun "Pirogi." If upon reaching the top of the stairs you do not turn left into the café, but proceed through a small corridor into the back rooms at the top of the staircase, you will find a congenial place for seminars and small gatherings sponsored by the organization. It was here on an early evening in February that Kritika had the opportunity to take part in a gathering of editors from approximately 30 Russian historical periodicals.

Immediately interesting is the range of journals active in the field that came together that winter day. Western specialists who rely on libraries whose subscriptions to Russian historical journals have not been substantially rearranged in the last five or ten years might find many of their names unfamiliar. Many of them were a wide variety of almanacs produced annually, such as Kazus, Odissei, Sotsial ¢ naia istoriia , Ekonomicheskaia istoriia, Srednie veka, and Vizantiiskii vremennik. Others were journals that are published as frequently as six or eight times a year (Neprikosnovennyi zapas, Voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv). Some had circulations of only 300 (Adam i Eva), others as many as 20,000 (Rodina). Much of the conversation revolved around distribution networks, problems of the improved but still chaotic publishing infrastructure, the need to set aside Soviet-style conceptions of mass tirazh, and the like. Much of the meeting's novelty stemmed from the fact that no organized contact between the journals had yet been established.

All these issues are of course interesting to anyone engaged with Russian scholarship and concerned with Russian publishing. But from the point of view of Kritika, the meeting was a revelation of an entirely different sort. For the journal you hold in front of you—or so, at least, it was declared to that collegial group of politely listening Russian editors—was founded on the twin principles of internationalization and dialogue. In other words, Kritika, an American journal of Russian history with a Russian name, was in part launched in the year 2000 with the explicit aim of helping to internationalize the field of Russian history, to overcome disciplinary and national barriers through the nature of our publications and exchanges, and, ultimately, to further a new transnational historiography. As the editors went around the table, giving brief introductions to their own journals, it became strikingly apparent that at least a few of the most dynamic Russian journals conceived of their missions in ways, mutatis mutandis, that mirrored or paralleled our own. For example, the new Kazan ¢ quarterly Ab Imperio is explicitly international in its ambitions and orientation, publishing simultaneously for Russian and Western audiences in both Russian and English. The trend-setting, post-Soviet philological powerhouse Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie is pursuing a fresh interest in incorporating historical perspectives and scholarship; for over 50 book-size issues, published six times a year, it has been translating important Western works both classic and new, as well as fostering lively exchanges that aim to break down the...