SUMMARY: The concept of the “frontier,” conceived by F.J. Turner for North America and applied to Eurasia by O. Lattimore and others, does not refer to a state border, but to a transitional zone between different geographic, socio-economic, political, religious and cultural spaces. From the15th to 18th centuries, the Russian steppe frontier in the south and southeast was a relatively stable military frontier between the sedentary Christian Russians and the nomadic Muslim Turks and Lamaist Mongols. The frontier was simultaneously a zone of intensive commercial and diplomatic interaction. Only during the 18th and 19th centuries did the steppe frontier become an area of settlement and extraction. Another example, the forest frontier in Siberia, was extractive frontier from the beginning, an area where an economy based on furs and precious metals pushed the frontier rapidly forward. Only its southern sections gradually became a settlement frontier. On the steppe frontier, Russians and the militarily superior nomads were generally on equal terms through the 18 th century, whereas the Siberian indigenes were quickly subjugated by Russia and had to pay tributes in furs. Along the rivers of the steppe frontier, the military frontier communities of free Cossacks emerged on the forest frontier as trappers. Cossacks, tradesmen and settlers developed a “Siberian mentality” of free, enterprising pioneers. So the famous “Turner thesis” can be applied to Russia, but only to the peripheral regions of the Cossacks and Siberia, and not to Russia as a whole.

SUMMARY: The meta-category “civil society” has become an ubiquitous common place both in politics and academics after the demise of the Soviet Union and their satellite states since 1989. However, the article argues that the civil society can be used as a heuristical device. Civil society is understood as a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of (voluntary) associations and forms of public communication. Civil society is created through forms of self-constitution and self-mobilization. It is institutionalized and generalized through laws, and especially subjective rights. Moreover independent action and institutionalization are necessary for the reproduction of civil society. The civil society is less ideologized than categories like “Bürgertum” or “middle classes”. Therefore it is very well-suited not only as an analytical category of a comparative approach of European history in order to explain the different paths to modernity in the “long” 19th century. The article argues that civil society is even better suited for regional, local or especially urban studies. With the help of the frame of a “local society” on can show how different social layers became a coherent elitist group and formed a “functional equivalent” to the “Bürgertum”. Their amalgamation took place on the basis of their self-organizing abilities, public activities and sociability in clubs, associations, their participation and publicly voiced critique in the press and finally common shared values. It is obvious that the formation of networks, their linkages and different modes of operating are easier to be analyzed on a local level.

SUMMARY: The article deals with the Tatarism-Bulgharism dispute that dominated the academic and popular landscape of Tatarstan in the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s. Beginning in 1988, the Bulgharists (who were often self-made academics) demanded that the ethnonym of the Tatar people be changed to Bulghar while their opponents demanded that the Golden Horde be rehabilitated as a manifest act to defend the traditional ethnonym. The Tatarism-Bulgharism dispute lasted for almost a decade and saw its participants draw on a wide range of scientific and non-scientific fields – from linguistics and history to political considerations. Political arguments often played the dominating role. The Bulgharists claimed that that the Tatars’ traditional ethnonym was too stigmatized and that Tatars had come to be ashamed of themselves, while the Tatarists preceived political aims behind the propagation of Bulgharist views of history. After heated debates, the dispute has lost its strength and most proponents from both sides – apart from a few Bulgharist extremists outside the academic field – seem to be prepared to integrate both the history of the Bulghars and the Golden Horde into the accepted Tartar historical heritage. In the end, the dispute has left its traces in the institutional landscape of historical research in Tatarstan: the founding of the Institute of History of Tatarstan, a branch of the Russian Academy of Science, in 1996 can be directly linked to the Bulgharist-Tatarism dispute. Moderate advocates of the Tatarist point of view now dominate the historical landscape in Tartarstan.

SUMMARY: Julia Obertreis’ article examines the history of colonial projects to master the desert spaces of Central Asia during the imperial and Soviet periods. Her analysis is focused on the territories of modern day Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, which were acutely effected by the consequences of imperial policies of irrigation, cotton production and marketing. Mastering the desert was conceptually prepared by and carried out according to modern expert discourses that dealt with problems of irrigation, the cotton industry, and the cultivation and transformation of “lifeless” Central Asian lands into modern and cultured spaces. Obertreis posits a direct continuity between imperial and Soviet discourses of turning the desert into a “flourishing garden” and civilizing the native population. The article also traces this continuity on a more technical level of specific irrigation projects and a general vision of extensive development of the cotton industry. In this respect Russian imperial policy was typical of other colonial empires. It was part of European modernity based on the ideas of cultivation and scientific taming of nature and native “uncivilized” peoples. Obertreis also studies the assimilation of this modern knowledge and discourses by the local population during the Soviet period. This led to the empowerment of local experts and state officials who became active participants in Soviet projects of Central Asia’s modernization. Beginning in the 1970s, a multiethnic community of Soviet experts was involved in the regional cotton economy and irrigation planning. Their research generated a critical discourse combining elements of a partial re-evaluation of Soviet modernity with a more global ecological approach. This article stresses that neither variant of this critical discourse contained anti-colonial rhetoric or indicated rising nationalist self-awareness. Its subversive quality resulted not from some hidden nationalism but from a critique of the Soviet version of modernity as it applied to the exploitation of natural resources, a “conquest” mentality and the romantic nature of grand projects. The article concludes that the 1960–1970’s crisis of modernity, a phenomenon general to both West and East, which in the East took the form of a crisis of socialist modernity, was not specific to Central Asia. Yet in Central Asia the price of modernization revealed itself with unprecedented clarity as the Aral Sea receded and the problems of extensive cotton economy became apparent.

SUMMARY: The events of September 11, 2001 have for the first time demonstrated to a wider public what studies of war had brought to light already some time ago. Since the end of World War II, war between states has become rare. The vast majority of wars today represent acts of violence between a state and a non-state actor/group. As this kind of modern war takes place mainly in Africa and Asia, it has hardly been taken note of by the European and North American public. Yet this dominant form of war since the middle of the twentieth century repeals the state’s monopoly on war that European states have largely been able to assert since the sixteenth century. What does this repeal of a development, in the course of which the state became the bearer of the monopoly on legitimate violence (Max Weber), mean for historical research on war? The essay discusses this question taking two approaches: one asks for the significance of anthropological constants as regards the readiness of humans to wage war. Throughout the history of humankind, dehumanizing the enemy, for example, appears to have been an important presupposition to make humans ready to accept the killing of the other as legitimate. Rules of conduct that also applied and were observed during war are being invalidated against someone culturally different. In a second approach, the essay asks for the change in conceptions and legitimization of war from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular attention is given to the question how the idea of the modern nation has changed the perceptions of war. The caesura in the legitimization of war that occurred around 1800, hitherto unsurpassed, has been put for the first time into a theoretical framework by Carl von Clausewitz. His theory, however, only applies to the kind of war that has become dominant in Europe and North America since the sixteenth century, i.e. the war between states. The wars of earlier times as well as the wars of the present do not conform to this type of war. To analyze them, interdisciplinary cooperation, in particular between historical and ethnological research, is necessary.