Subjecthood and Citizenship in Russia

In this issue we publish the first installment of our two-part special issue on "Subjecthood and Citizenship": three articles and a reaction piece on "Intellectual Biographies and Late Imperial Russia." We decided to publish this first installment separately both for reasons of space and because the three articles here form a coherent whole in that they explore—intellectually, philosophically, legally, and biographically—solutions to Russia's dilemmas by three thinkers on the eve of and during the Russian Revolution. The three intellectuals under consideration were very different, but they were all, in a sense, Russian liberals—although to say in what sense, exactly, they were constitutes one of the articles' contributions. As Richard Wortman points out in his response, each came up against the perennial intelligentsia dilemma of how to formulate solutions in the face of "Russian reality." In his words, all three found "grounds for hope in intellectual constructs that have little basis in the institutional realities of early 20th-century Russia, and it is this absence in the writings of thinkers of extraordinary intelligence and erudition that lends their thought both an evocative power and an air of pathos" (275–76).

These articles, along with the ones we will publish in the following issue, were first presented on 26–28 March 2004 at the conference "Citizenship, Nationality, and the State in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union," which was held at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University. We will devote the entire Summer 2006 issue to articles exploring political and social dimensions of "subjecthood and citizenship" in the imperial and Soviet periods.