The History of Liberalism in Russia

Notes on Translation

xi Regarding the transliteration of Russian terms and names, I have followed the U.S. Library of Congress system, with the notable exception of proper names, where I have preferred to use the -sky ending rather than -skii. On the other hand, I have retained the palatalization marker (’). I have tried to use this system consistently , but where there are mistakes or discrepancies, these are entirely my own. One idiosyncrasy is the transliteration of the name of the Kadet journal Reč (Speech), in my view avoiding the ungainly Rech or Riech. As explained in his preface, Victor Leontovitsch quoted at length from his sources, and so to make things easier for the reader I have isolated longer quotations from the main text. Another feature of the book is a significant number of quotations in French, as well as a sprinkling in Latin and Italian. I have retained these as in the original but have provided translations in the text or in the footnotes. Victor Leontovitsch embedded a number of Russian terms in parentheses in the text, in both his own material and in quotations, particularly in the section on the emancipation of the serfs, where he was not always sure the German translation rendered the exact meaning, allowing the specialist reader to cross-check. I have retained these to give a flavor of the original text. A number of key Russian terms were used by the author throughout, and I have kept these—for example, duma, ukaz, volost’, zemstvo. Regarding the last of these, I have, however, used zemstvos for the plural rather than zemstva. Similarly, I have used desiatin uninflected to stand for both the singular and the plural. Bracketed interpolations are my own. I have referred to the Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917, by S. G. Pushkarev and G. Vernadsky (Yale University Press 1970), to find the best English equivalent of specialist words, but a number of leading books on Russian history have also proved invaluable in this respect. As there can be some variation among the English versions, I have sometimes had to make a choice—for example, whether to use “editing commission” or “editorial noTES on THE TRanSLaTion commission” when discussing the emancipation of the serfs. I have also chosen “legislative commission” over “law code commission” when discussing Catherine the Great’s reign. The nonspecialist reader may be unfamiliar with the use of the term estate to mean a social class with a political or legal status—a system that persisted in Russia into the early twentieth century. As this book deals with issues of land ownership , the term estate is also used to mean a large landholding, mainly owned by the gentry. Occasionally, I have qualified estate with landed or social to make clear which meaning is intended. Regarding citations, Victor Leontovitsch in many instances gave the Russian title only once and then used a German version in subsequent references. I have largely followed this, except that I have substituted an English version for the German . Most citations appear in footnotes, but where there are a large number of references from one source, the author embedded these in the text. The author’s footnotes and my additional translator footnotes are numbered sequentially in each chapter, with my notes clearly marked as such. This translation includes the author’s original preface and an index of names based on the German version. Finally, I wish to thank a number of people for their help and encouragement : Denis Briggs, for his patient perseverance in checking the translation; Julia Oswalt, for her help with specialist terms and the translation in general; Maria Manley, for her help and her corrections of my transliteration and general proofreading ; Peggy Troupin and Sylvia Juran, for their invaluable advice and assistance ; and last but not least, the Solzhenitsyn Estate for its permission to translate Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s foreword to the Russian edition. I would welcome any feedback regarding the translation. Please send any comments by email to parmen.leontovitsch@gmail.com. Parmen Leontovitsch xii • notes on the translation The History of Liberalism in Russia ...