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РЕДАКЦИЯ / EDITORIAL BOARD
РЕДАКЦИОННАЯ КОЛЛЕГИЯ
Елена Богданова
Вероника Давидов
Олеся Кирчик
Анна Парецкая
Ксения Пименова
EDITORS
Elena Bogdanova
Veronica Davidov
Olessia Kirtchik
Anna Paretskaya
Ksenia Pimenova
РЕДАКТОР ОТДЕЛА РЕЦЕНЗИЙ
Ксения Пименова
ШЕФ-РЕДАКТОР
Анна Исакова
РЕДАКЦИОННЫЙ СОВЕТ
Александр Бикбов
Ольга Бредникова
Роджерс Брубейкер
Майкл Буравой
Виктор Воронков
Михаил Габович
Оксана Запорожец
Елена Здравомыслова
Константин Иванов
Оксана Карпенко
Бруно Латур
Владимир Малахов
Елена Омельченко
Хилари Пилкингтон
Олег Паченков
Мишель Ривкин-Фиш
Михаил Рожанский
Ирина Тартаковская
Лоран Тевено
Анна Темкина
Илья Утехин
Сергей Ушакин
Олег Хархордин
Софья Чуйкина
Марк Эли
Алексей Юрчак
Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg
Monmouth University, New Jersey
National Research University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum
BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR
Ksenia Pimenova
MANAGING EDITOR
Anna Isakova
Центр Мориса Хальбвакса, Париж
Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Калифорнийский университет в Лос-Анджелесе
Калифорнийский университет в Беркли
Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Эйнштейновский форум, Потсдам
Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики», Москва
Европейский университет в Санкт-Петербурге
Институт истории естествознания и техники РАН, Москва
Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Институт политических исследований, Париж
Московская высшая школа социальных и экономических наук
Научно-исследовательский центр «Регион», Ульяновск
Манчестерский университет
Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Университет Северной Каролины в Чапел-Хилл
Центр независимых социальных исследований и образования, Иркутск
Институт сравнительных исследований трудовых отношений, Москва
Высшая школа социальных наук, Париж
Европейский университет в Санкт-Петербурге
Европейский университет в Санкт-Петербурге
Принстонский университет
Европейский университет в Санкт-Петербурге
Университет Париж 8
Центр российских, кавказских и центрально-европейских исследований, Париж
Калифорнийский университет в Беркли
© 2014 Laboratorium
Центр независимых социологических исследований, Санкт-Петербург
Университет Монмаут, Нью Джерси
Национальный исследовательский университет
«Высшая школа экономики», Москва
Университет Висконсина, Мэдисон
Центр исследований религии, Рурский университет, Бохум
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ADVISORY BOARD
Alexander Bikbov
Olga Brednikova
Rogers Brubaker
Michael Burawoy
Marc Elie
Mischa Gabowitsch
Konstantin Ivanov
Oksana Karpenko
Oleg Kharkhordin
Bruno Latour
Vladimir Malakhov
Elena Omelchenko
Serguei Oushakine
Oleg Pachenkov
Hilary Pilkington
Michele Rivkin-Fish
Mikhail Rozhansky
Irina Tartakovskaya
Sofia Tchouikina
Anna Temkina
Laurent Thévenot
Ilia Utekhin
Viktor Voronkov
Alexei Yurchak
Oksana Zaporozhets
Elena Zdravomyslova
ВЫПУСКАЮЩИЙ РЕДАКТОР
Елена Богданова
ВЫПУСКАЮЩАЯ РЕДАКЦИЯ
Редактор
Корректор
Верстка
КОНТАКТЫ
Россия, Санкт-Петербург, 191040,
а/я 193, ЦНСИ
aisakova@soclabo.org
Тел./факс: +7 (812) 718-37-96
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Светлана Николаева
Ольга Карпова
Максим Богданов
Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris
Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Berkeley
Centre for Russian, Caucasian, and Central European Studies, Paris
Einstein Forum, Potsdam
Institute for the History of Science and Technology,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg
European University at Saint Petersburg
Paris Institute of Political Studies
Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences
“Region” Research Centre, Ulyanovsk
Princeton University
Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg
University of Manchester
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Centre for Independent Social Research and Education, Irkutsk
Institute of Comparative Labor Studies, Moscow
University of Paris VIII, Vincennes–Saint-Denis
European University at Saint Petersburg
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris
European University at Saint Petersburg
Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg
University of California, Berkeley
National Research University–Higher School of Economics, Moscow
European University at Saint Petersburg
LEAD EDITOR
Elena A. Bogdanova
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CONTACTS
Russia, St. Petersburg, 191040,
PO Box 193, CISR
aisakova@soclabo.org
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Подписной индекс в объединенном каталоге «Пресса России»: 87448
На обложке использован коллаж Елены Богдановой.
Дизайн: Татьяна Загоскина, Александр Ходот
Cover photo by Elena A. Bogdanova
Design: Tatyana Zagoskina, Alexander Khodot
© 2014 Laboratorium
Barbara Andersen
Anna Paretskaya
Maksim Bogdanov
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
4 Elena A. Bogdanova. Researching Complaints:
Traditions and Perspectives
ARTICLES
13 Katherine Lebow. Autobiography as Complaint:
Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars
27 Amieke Bouma. Strategies of Complaint: Interest
Organizations of GDR Staatssicherheit Coworkers
after German Reunification
55 Elena A. Bogdanova. Religious Justifications
of Complaints Addressed to the President in
Contemporary Russia
ESSAY
ВВЕДЕНИЕ
8 Елена Богданова. Исследования жалоб: традиции
и перспективы
ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
157 Кэтрин Лебоу. Автобиография как жалоба:
польский социальный мемуар межвоенного
периода. Резюме
161 Амике Баума. Стратегии жалоб: общественные
организации сотрудников государственной
безопасности ГДР после объединения Германии.
Резюме
167 Елена Богданова. Религиозные оправдания
жалоб, адресованных президенту, в современной
России. Резюме
ЭССЕ
80 Milla Fedorova. “Give Me the Book of Complaints”: Complaint in Post-Stalin Comedy
REVIEW ESSAYS
ОБЗОРЫ
93 Marianna Muravyeva. The Culture of Complaint: Approaches to Complaining in Russia—An Overview
105 Freek van der Vet. Protecting Rights in Strasbourg: Developing a Research Agenda for Analyzing International
Litigation from Russia
BOOK REVIEWS
РЕЦЕНЗИИ
119 Stephan Merl. Politische Kommunikation in der Diktatur: Deutschland und die Sowjetunion im Vergleich.
Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2012. Beate Fieseler
122 Luc Boltanski. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Lisa Knoll
126 Люк Болтански, Лоран Тевено. Критика и обоснование справедливости: Очерки социологии градов / Пер.
с фр. О.В. Ковеневой, под ред. Н.Е. Копосова. М.: Новое литературное обозрение, 2013. Григорий Юдин
130 Kak sud’i prinimaiut resheniia: Empiricheskie issledovaniia prava. Sbornik statei, edited by Vadim Volkov.
Moscow: Statut, 2012. Marina Kurkchiyan
133 Elise Giuliano. Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2011. Виктор Шнирельман
137 Madeleine Reeves. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2014. Boris Pétric
140 Virág Molnár. Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Post-War Central Europe.
London: Routledge, 2013.
Kimberly Elman Zarecor. Manufacturing Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960. Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Nicolette Makovicky
144 About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North. Edited by David
G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Vera Skvirskaja
148 Mark Solovey. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013. Sergei I. Zhuk
151 Joy Rohde. Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Christian Dayé
154 Richard Münch. Academic Capitalism: Universities in the Global Struggle for Excellence. New York: Routledge,
2013. Léonard Moulin
172 Authors
174 Авторы
176 List of article manuscript reviewers, 2014 / Список рецензентов научных статей 2014
178 Guidelines for authors and reviewers
184 Информация для авторов и рецензентов
ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ
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4
R
ESEARCHING COMPLAINTS:
TRADITIONS AND
PERSPECTIVES:
Elena A. Bogdanova
Elena A. Bogdanova is Laboratorium’s coeditor and this special issue’s editor.
Address for correspondence: CISR, PO Box 193, St. Petersburg, 191040, Russia.
bogdanova.nova@gmail.com.
The author is grateful to Serguei A. Oushakine whose valuable comments helped
in the preparation of this introduction.
In this issue, we publish several papers presented at the international conference
“Complaints: Cultures of Grievance in Eastern Europe and Eurasia” that took place
on March 8–9, 2013, at Princeton University.1
Organized by the Program in Russian,
East European, and Eurasian Studies in collaboration with the Program in Law and
Public Affairs,2
this conference aimed to examine the concept of the so-called people’s
law from an interdisciplinary perspective. The idea was to separate grievances
from a variety of other letters to the authorities and to consider them as a specific
genre. Complaints are a peculiar phenomenon, as they represent a form of citizens’
epistolary dialogue with the powers that be. In communicating their demands,
their discontent, or their indignation, complainants frame their letters according
to what they think is appropriate in a given sociopolitical context. In other words,
a complaint is a peculiar social mirror, an idiosyncratic, culturally determined
translation of legal ideas into the language of the law’s users. Even though this law,
as reflected in complaints, does not have any explicit norms, it nevertheless allows
us to see the terms and rhetorical constructs expressing subjectivity and legal
competency.
1 See the conference’s website: http://culturesofgrievance.wordpress.com/. The conference’s
call for papers elicited over a hundred responses, from which the organizing committee
selected 22.
2
The organizing committee included Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor of Sociology and International
Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center
for Human Values, Director, Law and Public Affairs Program, Princeton University; Serguei A. Oushakine,
Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Director, Program in Russian,
East European, and Eurasian Studies, Princeton University; Kathryn Hendley, Professor of Law
and Political Science, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Law and Public Affairs Fellow, Princeton
University; Michael Gordin, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Director, Fung Global
Fellows Program, Princeton University; Irena Grudzinska Gross, Research Scholar, Department of
Slavic Languages and Literatures and Department of History, Princeton University, Professor, Institute
of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences.
A
n
I
ntr
oduction
© Laboratorium. 2014. 6(3):4–7
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ELENA A. BOGDANOVA. RESEARCHING COMPLAINTS: TRADITIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
A complaint is a complex and multifaceted subject of study, for it is not an unequivocally
defined analytical category. As Katherine Lebow notes in her article, “the
idea of complaint is hard to disengage from its rich, sometimes contradictory associations
in colloquial usage, which are always historically and culturally contingent”
(Lebow, this issue, 15). A researcher studying complaints inevitably faces the necessity
of learning how to deal with the semantic complexity of this phenomenon and
how to consider complaints in context.
Filling the communicative space between a citizen and powerful institutions, a
complaint tells a lot about both sides. The conference meant to draw attention to
this peculiarity of complaint and to treat grievances as a rich source of information
both on the institutions of power and on the complainants.
A complaint reflects its author’s notions of how the authorities might fix the
situation. The act of complaining demonstrates the author’s belief in the addressee’s
ability to help, confirming his authority and legitimacy. At the same time, by choosing
to petition the powers that be, the writer reveals not only his or her notions of
authority but also the general view of the world in which the complainant wishes to
be localized. In a sense, a complaint is a form of discursive self-fulfillment and selfrepresentation.
The
language of complaint is a separate field of study in its own right. On the
one hand, this language is determined by contemporary political discourse: those in
power should be spoken to in their own language (Kotkin 1995; Fitzpatrick 1996;
Kozlova and Sandomirskaia 1996; Nérard 2004). On the other hand, a complaint is a
proprietary document grounded in a certain (either clearly stated or merely implicit)
narrative, legal, and civic viewpoint informing the text. While studying the texts of
complaints, one inevitably asks the following questions: To what extent have the
authors internalized the values of the political clichés in which they write? Accordingly,
how rationally do the authors inscribe their requests in the framework of the
legitimate? Probably the best answer to these questions is the one given by Israeli
historian Igal Halfin, discussing how political discourse and the author of a subjective
text mutually influence each other: “A historical actor is capable of creating new
linguistic forms by interpreting and modifying existing political language, but his ‘I’
inevitably changes through this activity, and it is not up to him to foresee the nature
of these changes” (Halfin and Hellbeck 2002:245).
The phenomenon of complaint, with its mighty cultural and emotional components,
goes way beyond the limits of an official address to the authorities. Nancy Ries,
an American researcher of everyday language who analyzed Russian narratives of the
perestroika era, dubs daily grievances a “shorthand” of social ontology (1997:1). Considered
from this angle, complaint emerges as an independent discursive genre, more
immediately connected to society’s history and culture than to any political regime.
The reality proves that regimes come and go, while complaints remain.
Due to its multifaceted informational value, complaint makes for a prime subject
of interdisciplinary study. Letters to the powers that be serve historians, sociologists,
political scientists, and linguists to address all sorts of research questions.
However, addresses or complaints are most often used as an instrument—a source of
5
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6
INTRODUCTION
information helping to develop and explain popular social concepts of subjectivity,
social justice, power relationships, and the like. In contrast, the Princeton conference
attempted to zero in on the complaint, to examine this phenomenon in all its
complexity, and to pay particular attention to the methodology of studying and understanding
this specific genre. While preparing this issue, we followed the same
guiding principles. The authors of the texts published in this issue use complaints to
solve diverse research problems, so that the reader can see both the potential and the
methodological limits of studying complaints.
Katherine Lebow presents her study of social memoirs penned by the marginal
groups of Polish society of the 1930s. The channel opened by the contest for best
autobiography, arranged by Polish sociologists, overflowed with grievances from
peasants and the unemployed. Complaint in this case emerges as a means for the
socially deprived to establish their existence in the present and future. Autobiographers
used the contest as an opportunity to make public the difficulties of demanding
social justice and a way to memorialize their distress for posterity, to leave testimony
which will once be heard by the moral community.
Amieke Bouma dedicates her article to the sociopolitical transformations occurring
in Germany after the country’s unification. Here, complaints replace or compensate
for the unsatisfactory legal system. Examination of this habitual function of
grievances under new sociopolitical conditions allows the author to touch upon the
problem of status devaluation, the meaning of the past, and the transformation of
the practice of complaining in response to the changing sociopolitical context.
Elena Bogdanova’s article looks at contemporary Russia, where the practice of
complaint writing thrives and acquires new features regardless of developing legal
means for conflict resolution. Her scrutiny of petitions addressed to the president permits
her to trace the penetration of religious discourse and to establish the function of
religious justifications in complaint writing. By applying the sociology of critical capacity
to an analysis of the texts of complaints, one can ascertain the grammar of the
critical argument produced in a complaint, which is different from the grammar of the
critical argument as produced in a dispute between equal actors.
Milla Fedorova in her essay “‘Give Me the Book of Complaints’: Complaint in PostStalin
Comedy” focuses on how Soviet subjectivity shaped complaint as a moral dilemma.
Using popular Soviet comedies as her source material, the researcher reconstructs
normative notions of what could be criticized in Soviet society and how it was
to be done. In particular, complaint is seen as a moral choice. At the same time, the
discursive understanding of the status of complaint and the image of a complainant
transformed over the Soviet period: from a highly positive attitude in the Stalin era,
to a more critical one during Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw period. By analyzing satirical
comedies, the author demonstrates that the authorities could manipulate the democratic
and pseudodemocratic opportunities complaint offered, whereas the complaint
itself was more of a subject than an object of Soviet propaganda.
In addition to the articles and the essay, the issue includes two review essays.
Marianna Muravyeva looks into the methodological aspects of studying the culture
of complaint. Her survey of petition culture traces the formation of methodologies
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