Browse results
Abstract
2020 saw an unprecedented pro-democracy mobilization in Belarus. Indeed, protest actions against the grossly falsified presidential election and the authoritarian rule of Aliaksandr Lukashenka were impressive in many respects: number of participants, durability, frequency, and diversity. However, that year was also remarkable for mobilization of supporters of Lukashenka’s authoritarian rule: car rallies, pickets, and small-group marches in support of the incumbent lasted for months. Though far from being ubiquitous, a demand for autocracy does exist in Belarusian society. It can be explained by four factors: a tendency towards an economic trade-off, axiological Euroscepticism, the activity of pro-autocracy intellectuals, and the global decline in democracy.
Abstract
The 1820s and 1830s saw the beginnings of the modern social-scientific study of urban life. In Great Britain and France, these years gave rise to the “Dickensian” anxiety about cities as squalid, disease-infested slums. This article examines how the physical space of St. Petersburg and Moscow was represented during these years by four pioneers of the study of Russian urban society – Vasilii Androssov, Aleksandr Bashutskii, Semen Gaevskii, and Andrei Zablotskii-Desiatovskii. Drawing on ideas and methodologies of Western contemporaries, especially Alexander von Humboldt and the French hygienist Louis-René Villermé, they depicted Russia’s capitals on three spatial scales: that of the individual house or street, the city as a whole, and the entire planet. Rejecting the pessimism of their Western counterparts, they depicted St. Petersburg and Moscow as wholesome cities managed by a wise government and inhabited by a benign population. However, they also argued that the forces driving the development of both cities were partly independent of the imperial state and could only be understood by trained experts. They thereby contributed to the rise of a public opinion engaged in critical discussion about Russian society, and bolstered both Nicholas I’s nationalist ideology of Official Nationality and his government’s cautious efforts at socioeconomic modernization.