Journal articles on the topic 'Abdication, 1947'

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, from a socio-semiotic perspective, the manner in which the political regimes installed after the forced abdication of King Mihai I (on 30 December 1947) used the Throne Hall in the former royal palace in Bucharest to meet their own needs. In December 1947, Romania was illegally turned from a constitutional monarchy into a popular republic, with the help of the Red Army. Then, the popular republic was transformed into a socialist republic, in fact, a communist dictatorship. In December 1989, the communist regime collapsed and was replaced by a post-communist one, a regime which did not seem willing to leave behind the communist ideological legacy, manifest, in the 1990s, in the brutal repression of anti-government protesters in University Square in Bucharest, or in the Romanian Mineriads of 1990 and 1991. The political regimes that succeeded to power after 1947 deprived the Throne Hall of its monarchic symbolism and used it in ways incongruent with its inherent function, albeit for official purposes. The manner in which the communist regime made use of this particular place is indicative of its intent and success in reinventing traditions or adapting older traditions to its ideological goals, in order to alienate Romanians from their recent past, in disrespect for the nation’s heritage. Although the former royal palace was completely transformed into a national museum of art after 1990, a cultural institution meant, by its very purpose, to save at least part of the nation’s memory, political decision makers ignored the symbolism of a national museum such as the National Museum of Art of Romania, known to many Romanians as the former royal palace. In bewildering, yet not unprecedented fashion, the Throne Hall has been recently used, by the Romanian government, as a dining hall in a series of events that preceded the takeover of the presidency of the EU Council by Romania in January 2019. We claim that the government’s decision can be circumscribed to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of consumerism, characterized by the rule of sign value as a status symbol. In addition, Jan Blommaert’s and Barbara Johnstone’s taxonomies further the argument that the Throne Hall is not a mere space, but a place, its function having been perverted by both ideological manipulation and aggressive consumerism.

The aim of this study was to achieve an evolutionary-temporal analysis of demographic evolution, ethnic and confessional structure in Apusenii Sălajului. The period subjected to the study begins with the abdication of King Mihai I and the establishment of communism in Romania in the year 1948. The two demographic structures have undergone significant influences from the regime, contributing decisively to their modification. Unfortunately, the confessional structure had the most to suffer because of the atheism promoted by the communists. In Apusenii Sălajului there is an important confessional diversity due to several ethnicities that populate the mountain space. The most destructive confessional community in the Apusenii Sălajului was the Greek Catholic. In the year 1948, the regime banned this confession, with the population constrained to convert to the Orthodox confessional. Priests who did not obey, were arrested and convicted, many dying in prisons, as was the case of bishops. Because of these repression, the population passed to the Orthodox confession. All confessions were compelled to pass to the Orthodox cult, being the only cult accepted by the regime. Five censuses were used to carry out the study, from 1941, 1956, 1977, 1992 and 2011. The census of 1956 and 1977 are those of the Communist period that did not record the confession. Thus, in order to be able to analyze and observe the significant changes we used the data from the census in the year 1941.

The aim of this study was to achieve an evolutionary-temporal analysis of demographic evolution, ethnic and confessional structure in Apusenii Sălajului. The period subjected to the study begins with the abdication of King Mihai I and the establishment of communism in Romania in the year 1948. The two demographic structures have undergone significant influences from the regime, contributing decisively to their modification. Unfortunately, the confessional structure had the most to suffer because of the atheism promoted by the communists. In Apusenii Sălajului there is an important confessional diversity due to several ethnicities that populate the mountain space. The most destructive confessional community in the Apusenii Sălajului was the Greek Catholic. In the year 1948, the regime banned this confession, with the population constrained to convert to the Orthodox confessional. Priests who did not obey, were arrested and convicted, many dying in prisons, as was the case of bishops. Because of these repression, the population passed to the Orthodox confession. All confessions were compelled to pass to the Orthodox cult, being the only cult accepted by the regime. Five censuses were used to carry out the study, from 1941, 1956, 1977, 1992 and 2011. The census of 1956 and 1977 are those of the Communist period that did not record the confession. Thus, in order to be able to analyze and observe the significant changes we used the data from the census in the year 1941.

AbstractMohammad Ali Khan, Zokā’ al-Molk, later Forughi, became Minister of Justice in December 1911 (until June 1912 and again from August 1914 to April 1915), following Moshir al-Dawla Pirniā and continuing the legal reform the latter had initiated in 1911. Forughi also served as Prime Minister of Iran several times, lastly in 1941-42 (1320), when he arranged the abdication of Reza Shah and the succession of his son, Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, shortly before his death in November 1942. This lecture was given at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the new University of Tehran is an important historical document that throws considerable light on the early stage of the modernization of Iran’s legal system. We are therefore publishing it in a translation which preserves the lecture format with only slight abridgement. Forughi’s informed account of legal modernization is prefaced by acute observations on the intrusion of modernity into the culture of Iran in the early twentieth century. (The Editor)

In Ruling Oneself Out Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusual but not unique development in two cases of the utmost significance for World War II: the March 1933 decision by the German Reichstag to give power to Adolf Hitler to modify the Weimer constitution without further recourse to parliament, and the French National Assembly’s decision in Vichy in July 1940 to transfer all state powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain.Ermakoff has woven a fabric of many threads—some historical, some methodological, some theoretical—drawn together in complex patterns. His analysis begins by artfully turning what in many books would be a historiographical review of previous work into a deep and thorough consideration of three alternative explanations of abdication.

The establishment of the institution of constitutional oversight in Russia has a long history. With the adoption of the «Fundamental State Laws» on April 23, 1906 (the first constitution of Russia), the functions of constitutional supervision were assigned to the First Department of the Governing Senate. In this paper, we examined the key decisions of the Governing Senate as a body of constitutional oversight during the Monarchy after the Coup of June 3, 1907; as well as February Revolution; and October Revolution. Our research has shown that at the said critical moments in Russian history, the First Department of the Senate adopted political decisions that did not comply with the provisions of the «Basic State Laws» on April 23, 1906, and had long-term negative consequences for the history of Russia. This concerned both the publication of the electoral laws of June 3, 1907, and the acts on the abdication of Nicholas II as emperor and on Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich’s refusal of power. In the last ruling, which was held by the Governing Senate on November 23, 1917 as a body of constitutional supervision, the Soviet power was considered to be illegal and criminal. The Senate refused to obey its pending of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The decisions of the Governing Senate analysed in the article make it possible to conclude that it is necessary to observe the principle of legality when exercising constitutional supervision.

Ivan Ermakoff ’s Ruling Oneself Out focuses on two major instances of voluntary surrender of power in Western history: the March 1933 bill that empowered Adolf Hitler with the right to amend the Weimar Constitution and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional authority to Marshal Philippe Pétain in July 1940. The first event inaugurated the Third Reich, the other Vichy France. Much ink has been spilled over these events. But Ermakoff finds various problems with the existing accounts and advances his own theory of collective abdication in their stead. Moreover, his theory is geared to analyze all kinds of political crises and breakdowns where collective abdication plays a role—as it often does in such contexts. Ermakoff ’s theory is a formal one. It can hold for any situation in which a group confronts the possibility of collective persecution and has to decide whether to resist or abdicate. It is not confined to formally defined collectivities or to parliamentary settings: the dynamics that it reveals are independent of specific group configurations and institutional contexts.

AbstractContemporary Russian scholars usually try to abstain from any criticism to Russian Orthodox Church' actions in past and present. Meanwhile a situation in 1917 was very confused: the Holy Synod supported the abdication of its formal head – the Tsar. So historians discussed: what it was – "revolutionary Church" or "revolution inside Church"? One of them insists that bishops become "liberals", another argue that they operated accordingly old religious canons. In reality the full scale revolution inside Church took place: believers tried to overthrow the "reactionary" and "counterrevolutionary" bishops and priests as "serfs of old regime", rank and file clergy supported them.

The focus of the article is the South Russian Youth Union (SRYU) - the organization of Kiev gymnasium pupils, which appeared soon after the February Revolution of 1917. Having united the Kievan youth with monarchist views, in late April 1917 SRYU organized the demonstration, which became, perhaps, the only legal pro-monarch public act during the first months after the abdication of Nicholas Ii. The article dwells upon the biography of the leader of the Union B.V. Sokolov, the programme of SRYU and its attitude to the Ukranian question. The names of certain high gymnasium pupils-members of the organization are also mentioned. The author of the article pays particular attention to the involvement of SRYU members in the defence of Kiev against Petliura’s troops in late 1918, drawing certain analogies between Kiev gymnasium pupils-monarchists and the characters of M.A. Bulgakov’s “White Guard”.

Abstract Kerenskii was the most important actor in assuring the success of the February Revolution. He organized underground organizations to push the workers’ strike movement that began on February 23 in Petrograd, and appealed to his Duma liberal colleagues to support the strike. When the soldiers revolted on February 27, he led the insurgents into the Tauride Palace, thus turning the Duma building into the epicenter of the revolution. He ordered the arrest of tsarist ministers, and created Kerenskii’s headquarters to take revolutionary actions before the Duma Committee decided to take power. He helped create the Petrograd Soviet, and, after election as its vice-chairman, he straddled the Soviet and Duma Committee. Having learned of Nicholas ii’s abdication in favor of Grand Duke Mikhail, he played a major role in persuading Mikhail to renounce the throne, thus, in ending the monarchical system. The February Revolution elevated him to the pinnacle of power as the undisputed leader of the revolution.

Abstract Ron Suny’s Stalin: Passage to Revolution traces Stalin from a young revolutionary in the Caucasus to his ascent to the top of the Bolshevik hierarchy. Discovered and promoted by Lenin, the young Stalin agitated among the workers of the giant factories in Baku, Tiflis, and Batumi as Russian socialists split between Menshevism’s social democracy and Bolshevism’s Marxist revolution. Between 1902 and 1917, Stalin was arrested or exiled six times, escaping five times. Rushing to Petrograd in the wake of the abdication and formation of the coalition government, Stalin managed the Bolshevik press and served as the main Bolshevik figure in Lenin’s absence. Although not among the most popular political parties, the Bolshevik’s “ground game” among workers and soldiers proved decisive once Lenin concluded to begin the Bolshevik coup.

Tiberias was unique among Palestinian mixed cities for its unusually harmonious Arab-Jewish relations, even during periods of extreme tension like the 1936--39 Arab Revolt. Yet within hours of a brief battle in mid-April 1948, the town's entire Arab population was removed, mostly across the Transjordanian border, making Tiberias a wholly Jewish town overnight. In exploring how this took place, this article focuses on the Arab community's rigid social structure; the leadership's policy of safeguarding intercommunal relations at all costs, heightening local unpreparedness and isolating the town from the rest of Arab Palestine; the growing involvement of the local Jewish community with the Haganah's plans; and the British authorities' virtual abdication of responsibility as they began withdrawing their troops in the last month of the Mandate and as Plan Dalet was launched, engulfing the country in all-out war.

The question of actions of the Russian Emperor Nicholas II during the February Revolution, and in particular, of his willingness or unwillingness to make concessions to the Duma opposition is a controversial issue in the historiography. Thus, Soviet and ?migr? historians believed that the tsar agreed to reforms under pressure of the military elite, which collaborated with the State Duma in those rebellious days. However, in modern historical science, an opposite opinion is gaining foothold, according to which in February – March 1917 the monarch showed a conciliatory attitude towards the opposition and was ready to agree to an actual limitation of his power by introducing a responsible ministry. The roadblock is assessment of sufficiency and reliability of the source corpus (mainly memoirs) for drawing the conclusion about the tsar's readiness for reforms. The lack of “documentary” evidence makes the narrative of the tsar’s desire to establish a “ministry of confidence” vulnerable. However, documents of the period of the February Revolution that have been identified in the State Archive of Russian Federation (fond 97 “Office of the Palace Commandant of the Ministry of the Imperial Court”) allow us to come nearer the end of this historiographical discussion. They are two typewritten paragraphs on a single sheet of paper, without a title or any additional information on its author, time, and place of creation. Source analysis has concluded that the documents are drafts of tsar’s telegrams prepared by the palace commandant V. N. Voeikov on March 1, 1917 to be sent to the ex-chairman of the State Duma M. V. Rodzianko. The content of these drafts clearly indicates that the tsar was ready to provide a “ministry of confidence” even before his arrival at the headquarters of the Northern Front on the evening of March 1, that is, de facto to establish parliamentarism in Russia. The author's reconstruction of the events has showed that the first draft of the telegram is tsar’s delayed response to the appeal of the Duma leader encouraging him to reform public administration (dated February 26-27, 1917). The second telegram is supposed to be sent to Rodzianko inviting him to Pskov for final decision concerning the head of the new “government of confidence.” Despite the fact that they for some reasons had never been sent to the addressee, these “messages,” nevertheless, are the “documentary” evidence of Nicholas II’s consent to a gradual introduction of parliamentarism in the country during the February Revolution.

The article considers the main events that occurred in Russia in 1917. In February 1917, a revolutionary crisis arose in the country, which led to the overthrow of the 300-year-old Romanov`s empire. The old state apparatus was broken. At the end of winter of 1917, at a meeting of the State Duma, the Provisional Committee of the State Parliament (Duma) was created. The Provisional Government headed by Duke G.E. Lꞌvov had been formed by March 1. On March 2, Emperor Nicholas II signed the “Manifesto on the abdication of the throne of the Russian state and the resignation of the Supreme power.” As early as February, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies was created, it being headed by N.S. Chkheidze. Thus, dual power was established in the country. The newly formed government was unable to resolve the most important issues related to the life of the peoples of Russia. In early October 1917, V.I. Lenin began preparing an armed uprising in order to seize power. A course was taken for an armed coup. The conspiracy of the Bolsheviks was a success: the Winter Palace was taken, the ministers of the Provisional Government were arrested. At the II Congress of Soviets, a new government was created – the Council of People’s Commissars. The first decrees were adopted – the Decree on Peace, the Decree on Land, the decree on Power, proclaiming the establishment of the power of the Soviets. There was the only task on the agenda – the retention of power. The Constituent Assembly, for which alternative parties had high hopes, was dispersed by the Bolsheviks in early 1918.

In a book written more than four hundred years ago (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1548), La Boétie conveyed his astonishment about people “acquiescing to their own servitude.” Ruling Oneself Out restates the problem: why do groups legitimize the prospect of their political incapacity and, by way of consequence, the possibility of their servitude? I address this question by considering two parliamentary decisions of crucial historical significance: the parliamentary surrenders of constitutional authority in Germany (March 1933) and in France (July 1940). These events have paradigmatic value because they are clear-cut cases of collective abdications and because they lend themselves to explanations that seem as obvious as they are commonsensical. People abdicate because they face coercive pressures. They abdicate because they misjudge the consequences of their action. Or they abdicate because their ideology predisposes them to do so.

Abstract Postcards, long used to mark significant occasions in the lives of individuals, were deployed in early 1917 to herald wholesale change in the life of the nation. Following the downfall of the Tsar, censorship was nominally abolished and amid a fast developing market economy, many different publishers sought to take advantage, both to profit and to persuade. Within days of Nicholas II’s abdication, postcards carrying revolutionary imagery were being offered in shops and kiosks, and within a few months, a wide range of different photographic, artistic, and satirical cards had also become available. This article focuses on commercially produced caricature postcards, adopting a broad remit to examine both anti-tsarist images satirizing the Imperial Family, and artist-drawn cards commemorating and critiquing the February Revolution. To this end, it has two main aims; first, to analyze the role of postcards as a political bridge between contemporary events and the Russian population; and second, to examine the key part played by private and commercial publishers in disseminating a broadly liberal interpretation of revolutionary events in the months after the Tsar’s overthrow.

Since 1970 Cambodia has experienced a coup d'état, civil war, saturation bombing, revolution, genocide, invasion, occupation, and famine. This spring is the tenth anniversary of the Communist revolutions that swept Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos in 1975. For Cambodians, and anyone concerned with that much-punished country, it is an opportunity to reflect—and mourn.No name is more closely tied with Cambodia's postwar history than that of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Placed on the throne by French colonial authorities in 1941 at the age of nineteen, Sihanouk gained international fame during his Croisade Royale pour l' Independence, which reached fruition with the Geneva Accords of 1954. Abdicating shortly thereafter, Sihanouk formed a political party that swept the first National Assembly elections. He ruled without interruption until 1970.

By the 1930s, the Iranian society was driven toward modernization. Consisted with the concept of modernization, feminism ushered a whole new era in Iranian history. Besides, the outbreak of World War II and the consequent abdication of Reza Khan afforded women a golden opportunity to fight for their rights and emancipations. This movement was also supported by the famous male writers of the time among whom Jalal Al-e-Ahmad marked a prominent place. He was keen enough to properly explore women's situation in his works and notice the drastic effect of modernization upon women's situation. Hence, in this study, we try to investigate Al-e-Ahmad's short story entitled “Pink Nail Polish” 1948 with respect to Bakhtin's Carnivalesque's theory. Furthermore, it is shown how Bakhtin's new literary mode can create the excellent chance of studying Iranian women's situation properly. Finally, we explain that due to the drastic change of Iranian women's situation towards modernity, they may lead a double life if their rights are not respected. This can lead to a disproportionate relationship between the husband and the wife as the marital infidelity becomes rampant.

As the Italian anti-fascist exiles reorganised after the establishment of a full dictatorship in 1925, they were confronted by a series of difficult issues that no longer could be dealt with in the national context. The overriding need to heal the divisions within the Italian left now would be conditioned by choices made on the international level. The abdication of the Western democracies at Munich meant to many on the left that the Soviet Union was the essential bulwark against fascism. Within the Italian Socialist Party Pietro Nenni defended the alliance with the Communist Party and support for the Soviet Union. Alternatives offered by Angelo Tasca questioned both the exclusive alliance with the Communists and unquestioning support for the Soviet Union. Tasca also developed a European perspective which tended to marginalise the Soviets both ideologically and diplomatically. These positions put him at odds with Nenni. Tasca's position was complicated by his parallel membership of the French SFIO, his French citizenship and, in 1940, his decision to support Vichy. Tasca's defection and Nenni's triumph made the Italian Socialist Party more hostile after the fall of fascism to new thinking on European unity and alternatives to unity of action with the Communists.

The article highlights the issues of formation and activity of the Ukrainian Navy in Crimea (March 1917 – December 1918) in modern Ukrainian historiography. It is noted that in the writings of modern Ukrainian historians, the material and technical base in the Black Sea, which existed as of 1917, was characterized, the prerequisites for the construction of the Ukrainian military fleet were revealed, the processes of the struggle for its creation during the days of the Ukrainian Central Rada (UCR) and the Hetmanate of P. Skoropadskyi were highlighted. In particular historical, geographical, ethnic, political, material and technical components for the creation of this military structure were investigated. The works of modern Ukrainian scientists were considered, in which they emphasize a complex of mistakes on the part of the leaders of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the government in the field of naval construction, their inconsistent defense of Ukrainian national interests regarding the Black Sea Fleet, which significantly affected the activity of Ukrainian forces in Crimea and Sevastopol and disorientated their further state-building activities. It was stated that during the existence of the Ukrainian State of Hetman P. Skoropadskyi, the government immediately took a course to join Crimea to Ukraine. Despite the indignation of the Germans, a complete economic blockade of the Crimean Peninsula was announced. The leadership of the Ukrainian State did everything to return the Black Sea Fleet under its jurisdiction, and it finally succeeded, but only after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the beginning of the anti-Hetman uprising on November 14, 1918, the abdication of power by P. Skoropadskyi a month later, and the eventual capture of Black Sea Fleet by the Entente countries.The author also focuses on the wishes of many Ukrainian researchers of this period to the power structures of modern Ukraine, especially in the current conditions of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, taking into account the positive and negative experience of the state and military construction of Ukrainian state entities in 1917–1921.

In this essay, Jack Schneider and Andrew Saultz offer a new perspective on state and federal power through their analysis of authority and control. Due to limitations inherent to centralized governance, state and federal offices of education exercised little control over schools across much of the twentieth century, even as they acquired considerable authority. By the 1980s, however, such loose coupling had become politically untenable and led to the standards and accountability movement. Yet, greater exertion of control only produced a new legitimacy challenge: the charge of ineffectiveness. State and federal offices, then, are trapped in an impossible bind, in which they are unable to relinquish control without abdicating authority. Schneider and Saultz examine how state and federal offices have managed this dilemma through ceremonial reform, looking at two high-profile examples: the transition from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, and states’ reaction to public criticism of the Common Core State Standards.

The subject of the study was the updated part of the theoretical and legal heritage of the outstanding Russian lawyer of the late XIX - early XX century, professor, senator of the I Department of the Governing Senate Eduard Nikolaevich Berendts (1860-1930). In this article, the main attention was paid to the memoirs of E. N. Berendts about the work of the Governing Senate in the conditions of the revolutionary transformations of 1917, about the change in the system of public administration, about the transformations in the mechanism of the state in general and the state apparatus in particular, about the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II for himself and for the heir, about the legality of coming to power The Provisional Government. When writing the article, universal, general scientific (primarily systemic, structural and functional, modeling, forecasting methods), special (primarily sociological) and private (primarily formal legal, comparative legal, reconstruction and interpretation of legal ideas) methods were used. The scientific novelty is determined by the absence of comprehensive studies in domestic and foreign legal science devoted to the theoretical legacy of E. N. Berendts. The works of E. N. Berendts, which were not translated into Russian earlier, archival materials, which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, are used. For the first time in historical and legal science, the analysis of E. N. Berendts' views on the role and place of the Governing Senate of the Russian Empire in the mechanism of the state, on the problems of the revolutionary transformations of 1917 and the subsequent changes in the work and functional purpose of the Governing Senate, on the formation and activities of the Provisional Government was carried out

“Why would a group legitimize its own subservience and, in doing so, abdicate its capacity for self-preservation?” is the question asked at the start of Ruling Oneself Out (p. xi). Focusing on the Center Party's vote for the enabling act of March 1933, which gave Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution, and on the Vichy parliament's vote to grant full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain in 1940, Ivan Ermakoff studies how these decisions looked to the actors themselves, and finds that the pervasive uncertainty that characterized the situation leading up to each vote, and the actors' tendency to look to their peers for guidance, complicate monocausal accounts of groups marching to their death. Many prevalent attempts to explain these seemingly inexplicable collective actions tend to emphasize coercion, miscalculation, and collusion. Each of these explanations has its merits, and some are more persuasive than others. Yet each has its problems. Coercion, for example, which is the most compelling explanation of the lot, might lead one to expect those threatened to submit, yet fear just as often causes consolidation and vigorous collective resistance to the challenger.

<p>The Second World War brought significant political changes to European monarchies. Immediately after the war, six kingdoms ceased to exist and became republics. This concerned Eastern European countries in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as Italy, where Victor Emmanuel III had to pay for years of cooperation with the fascist regime. Before the outbreak of the war, at least three European monarchies had considerable power, holding the most important prerogatives in their hands: this was the case in Romania, Bulgaria and Albania. Such a political model failed to survive the war, as after 1945 the kings and princes of the Old Continent only “reigned, but did not rule” (only Louis II, Prince of Monaco kept a stronger position until the end of the 1950s). It used to happen during the war that in countries with an established parliamentary system the monarch played a greater role than during the years of peace (the most prominent example being Wilhelmina, the Queen of the Netherlands). The article also presents other issues important to the royal authority – the functioning of monarchs in exile, the threat to their lives, the exercise of sovereignty (usually only in a ceremonial capacity) over the armed forces, and abdications forced by the circumstances.</p>

The review assesses the documents collection Vladimir Gubernia and the Russian Revolution in Documents: 1913-1918 prepared by the staff of the State Archive of the Vladimir Region and notes the novelty of the publication and its significance in the light of the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. The compilers strove to select and make available to researchers the more informative and multifaceted documents that had been ideologically unapproachable in the Soviet era. The reviewer briefly describes documentary composition of the anthology and informative value of its documents. According to the reviewer, the published documents from the Vladimir gubernia clearly show growing discontent of the population and weakness of the central government on the eve of tsar’s abdication, weak efficiency of the democratic institutions formed in 1917, and revolutionary violence required to transform old administration and organize new power in the periphery. This development opened the door to the Civil War. Official documents in the collection are felicitously supplemented with personal provenance sources (memoirs of revolutionary events’ participants), which, according to the reviewer, immerse the reader in the context. The reviewer underscores the value of illustrative material included in the anthology. Color copies of documents (including telegrams, which are particularly difficult to read) add to appreciation of archival sources, not all details of which can be presented in a popular science edition. The significance of the collection, from the point of view of the reviewer, is in its being a source base for historical research: it has the necessary reference apparatus. The collection is most useful to school and university students.

The analysis undertaken in the article concerns the position of the president in the political system of Vietnam. The analysis begins with the period of formation of Vietnamese statehood after colonial era. In 1946, Vietnam’s first constitution was adopted. Following the abdication of Emperor Bao Dai, the first president acting under it was Ho Chi Minh. The constitution gave the president considerable powers which were amended in subsequent constitutions. Vietnam’s political system was strongly influenced by the international situation at each stage ending with adoption of a new constitution. Beginning with the second constitution, in 1959, the Communist Party of Vietnam remained the leading force in the state. The victory with the United States of America sealed this state of affairs. A feature of the entrenched party system in Vietnam was that the ruling party based on collegial leadership. This collegial leadership also applied to the president’s position in the political system. It was no longer the president himself, but the collegiate bodies that indicated the directions of development of the socio-economic system. The glue remained the Communist Party of Vietnam, which controlled, supervised and fed these collegiate bodies. Changes came after the doi moi reforms, when it was decided to liberalise the economy, but with limited changes to the political system. The entire current ruling elite of the country comes from the CPV. The last constitution was adopted in 2013, while personnel decisions were made at the 13th Congress of the CPV – a return to a power-sharing structure based on the “four pillars”: the secretary general of the party, the president, the prime minister and the speaker of the National Assembly.

This article is aimed at determining Mongolia’s status based on historical documents and contemporaries’ evaluation. It discusses the change in the legal status of Mongolia from the collapse of Qing Empire till the mid XX century. As it is shown, Mongolia was not part of China but was in vassal — suzerain relationship with the Manchu Dynasty of Qing Empire. Qing ‘new policy’ of Chinese colonization destroyed this relationship which led to national liberation movement of Mongols. Dynasty abdication and the formation of the Republic of China gave new legitimate ground for independence Mongolia. Declaration of independence of Mongolia on December 29, 1911 as the culmination of this movement was legitimate and was not a revolution. The treaty signed in 1912 between Russia and Mongolia may be considered as de jure recognition of the independence but not the autonomy of Mongolia. The rightful recognition of the autonomy was recorded in the agreement of 1915 between Russia, China and Mongolia. Outer Mongolia became the state under the formal suzerainty of China and the protectorate of Russia. The abolishment of autonomy and occupation of Outer Mongolia by China in 1919 was illegal. In 1921 baron R. F. Ungern reinstated the autonomy and in fact the independence of Outer Mongolia. From the take-over of the Mongolian People’s Party until adoption of constitution by the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924 the country status was undefined. From 1924 until recognition by China in 1946 the Mongolian People’s Republic was de facto independent country with the implied (silent) recognition by the USSR. Reunion of Inner Mongolia and Barga with the Outer Mongolia / Mongolian People’s Republic was the historical choice of their peoples.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Romanian society was marked by two events that had a profound impact on its destiny: the establishment of the communist regime after the abdication of King Michael I in 1948, and the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which marked the end of this regime. The Byzantine monody has had a millenary tradition in this part of Europe, and the contribution of the local chanters to the perpetuation of Orthodox church music – also through their own compositions – is evidenced by the numerous manuscripts written by Romanian authors and by the works printed in the last two centuries. In 20th-century Romania, the music written in neumatic notation specific to the Orthodox Church manifested itself discontinuously due to the historical events mentioned above. The church chant in the traditional psaltic style managed to survive, despite being affected by the Communist Party’s decisions regarding the Church, namely the attempt to standardize the church chant. This paper captures the way in which the preservation of tradition and the perpetuation of church music succeeded through the difficult times of the communist period, with special emphasis on the religious music written in neumatic notation and on certain peculiarities of the period, due to the political regime. The musicians trained before the establishment of Communism – by teachers concerned with the preservation of the good tradition of church chanting, in monastic schools and prestigious theological seminaries of the interwar period – were the binding forces who ensured the rapid revival of the music of Byzantine tradition in the last decade of the 20thcentury and who enriched the repertoire of the Romanian churches with valuable original works.

“The Empire at the end of the decadent days…” Nicky, Alix, Grigori, and others in journal entries, letters, telegrams, memoirs: Parts I and IIThe first part of the essay is an attempt to identify the primary motivating factors for the February Revolution and, consequently, the Bolshevik coup and the abdication and execution of the last Romanov ruler. In this part, I have discussed a handful of the most often advanced hypotheses of various credibility — from those formulated by historians, historians of ideas, sociologists, and political scientists protracted warfare, rising dissatisfaction of Petrograd “line standers”, incompetence of the political elites, continuing desacralization of the ruler figure, a process set in motion during the reign of Tsar Alexander II, up to those widely considered irrational, shrouded in mysticism or conspiracy-minded the curse of the Ides of March, the unearthing of Lermontov’s prophecy, Rasputin’s last will and testament, and the machinations of “The Grand Orient of Russia’s Peoples” masonic lodge. My attention, however, has been focused primarily on the egodocuments important for the understanding of the empire’s decline and erosion — the journals and correspondence of Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna.The second part of the essay focuses primarily on the appearance or its lack of the February and October events in the journals of Russian writers including Bunin, Gippius, Ivnev, Korolenko, Kuzmin, Blok, Chukovsky, Merezhkovsky. All of them rather than only those that suffered the regime’s repressions shared a lack of compassion or empathy for the overthrown monarch, a dislike sometimes turning into outright hatred and hostility of the Bolsheviks, and a proclivity for mourning pre-Revolutionary Russia, a feeling of having witnessed the collapse of a prior, better world. The new definitely not brave — built by peasants clad in military garb, “the pale, tall Barbarians”, and mobs running rampant through post-October streets of Moscow and Petrograd — had a gloomy, hostile face of the “boor”, the “troglodyte”, who had nothing in common with the bucolic, paper characters of Turgenev or Tolstoy, and rather resembled clones of the inhabitants of Bunin’s apocalyptic The Village.In the conclusion, I have discussed the possible reasons behind Vladimir Putin’s decision to abandon the idea of official state celebrations of the centenary of the events of February and October of 1917. „Pимский мир периода упадка…” Ники, Аликс, Григорий и другие в дневниках, письмах, телеграммах, воспоминаниях Первая часть эссе представляет собой попытку назвать главные причины Февральской революции и охарактеризовать некоторые ее последствия: большевистский переворот, отречение от престола и казнь последнего императора из династии Романовых. Я привел несколько чаще других выдвигаемых по этому поводу гипотез с разным уровнем достоверности — начиная с тех сформулированных в публикациях историков, историков идей, социологов, политологов продолжающаяся война, нарастающее недовольство „людей из очередей” в Петрограде, некомпетентность политической элиты, усиливающийся с времен царствования Александра II процесс десакрализации монарха, а заканчивая иррациональными, окутанными мистикой, иногда остающимися в кругу теорий заговора зловещее проклятие мартовских ид, вышедшее из забвения Предсказание Лермонтова, завещание Распутина, козни масонской ложи „Великий Восток Народов России”. Однако свое внимание я сосредоточил прежде всего на эгодокументах необходимых для лучшего понимания процесса эрозии империи — дневниках и переписке Николая II и его супруги Александры Федоровны.Во второй части я писал в основном о при/от/сутствии февральских и октябрьских событий в дневниках русских писателей в том числе Бунина, Гиппиус, Ивнева, Короленко, Кузмина, Блока, Чуковского, Мережковского. Объединило их отсутствие сострадания, эмпатии для свергнутого с престола царя не только у репрессированных режимом, негативное иногда переходящее в ненависть, враждебность отношение к большевикам и всеобщее оплакивание дореволюционной России, чувство потери старого мира. У нового но не дивного — создаваемого крестьянами в военной форме, „варваров роями”, „чернью” на послеоктябрьских улицах Петрограда и Москвы — было угрюмое, недружелюбное лицо „хамов”, „пещерных людей”, которые не имели ничего общего с идиллическими, бумажными персонажами вымышленными Тургеневым или Толстым, а, скорее, были клонами героев, населяющих апокалиптическую Деревню Бунина.Наконец, я упомянул о причинах, по которым Владимир Путин отказался от торжественного празднования сотой годовщины Февраля и Октября.

It is appropriate, thirty-six years after the publication of None Is Too Many, to reconsider 1944 from the perspective of Canadian Jewry. As Canadians, they were swept up in the war effort, at home and in combat. As Jews, they were frantic about the destruction of Jewish life. In consideration of the questions raised in the title of this paper, we present, somewhat in contrast to Abella and Troper, the following assessment. First, the organized Jewish community, in the context of Canadian ethno-cultural minorities, had a voice. Second that information about the Holocaust, while often inaccurate, was widely published, especially in the Yiddish press. Third, that despite Canada’s complete abdication of political will in providing opportunities for Jews to flee Europe and find a refuge in Canada, the reality of the war, the absence of historical precedent, and the impossibility of foreseeing the calamity, ensured that a comprehensive plan of meaningful rescue could not have been attempted, let alone considered.

The American Century began in 1941 and ended on January 20, 2017. While the United States remains a military giant and is still an economic powerhouse, it no longer dominates the world economy or geopolitics as it once did. The current turn toward nationalism and “America first” unilateralism in foreign policy will not make America great. Instead, it represents the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of severe environmental threats, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges.In this incisive and forceful book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity―not nationalism and gauzy dreams of past glory. He argues that America’s approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development. Our pursuit of primacy has embroiled us in unwise and unwinnable wars, and it is time to shift from making war to making peace and time to embrace the opportunities that international cooperation offers. A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the “America first” mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

1. Make a list of things to do2. Copy list of things left undone from previous list3. Add items to list of new things needing to be done4. Add some of the things already done from previous list and immediately cross off so as to put off the feeling of an interminable list of never accomplishable tasks5. Finish writing list and sit back feeling an overwhelming sense of listlessnessIt started so well. Get up: make list: get on. But lists can breed listlessness. It can’t always be helped. The word “list” referring to a sequence of items comes from the Italian and French words for “strip”—as in a strip of material. The word “list” that you find in the compound “listlessness” comes from the old English word for pleasing (to list is to please and to desire). To be listless is to be without desire, without the desire to please. The etymologies of list and listless don’t correspond but they might seem to conspire in other ways. Oh, and by the way, ships can list when their balance is off.I list, like a ship, itemising my obligations to job, to work, to colleagues, to parenting, to family: write a reference for such and such; buy birthday present for eighty-year-old dad; finish article about lists – and so on. I forget to add to the list my necessary requirements for achieving any of this: keep breathing; eat and drink regularly; visit toilet when required. Lists make visible. Lists hide. I forget to add to my list all my worries that underscore my sense that these lists (or any list) might require an optimism that is always something of a leap of faith: I hope that electricity continues to exist; I hope my computer will still work; I hope that my sore toe isn’t the first sign of bodily paralysis; I hope that this heart will still keep beating.I was brought up on lists: the hit parade (the top one hundred “hit” singles); football leagues (not that I ever really got the hang of them); lists of kings and queens; lists of dates; lists of states; lists of elements (the periodic table). There are lists and there are lists. Some lists are really rankings. These are clearly the important lists. Where do you stand on the list? How near the bottom are you? Where is your university in the list of top universities? Have you gone down or up? To list, then, for some at least is to rank, to prioritise, to value. Is it this that produces listlessness? The sense that while you might want to rank your ten favourite films in a list, listing is something that is constantly happening to you, happening around you; you are always in amongst lists, never on top of them. To hang around the middle of lists might be all that you can hope for: no possibility of sudden lurching from the top spot; no urgent worries that you might be heading for demotion too quickly.But ranking is only one aspect of listing. Sometimes listing has a more flattening effect. I once worked as a cash-in-hand auditor (in this case a posh name for someone who counts things). A group of us (many of whom were seriously stoned) were bussed to factories and warehouses where we had to count the stock. We had to make lists of items and simply count what there was: for large items this was relatively easy, but for the myriad of miniscule parts this seemed a task for Sisyphus. In a power-tool factory in some unprepossessing town on the outskirts of London (was it Slough or Croydon or somewhere else?) we had to count bolts, nuts, washers, flex, rivets, and so on. Of course after a while we just made it up—guesstimates—as they say. A box of thousands of 6mm metal washers is a homogenous set in a list of heterogeneous parts that itself starts looking homogenous as it takes its part in the list. Listing dedifferentiates in the act of differentiating.The task of making lists, of filling-in lists, of having a list of tasks to complete encourages listlessness because to list lists towards exhaustiveness and exhaustion. Archives are lists and lists are often archives and archived. Those that work on lists and on archives constantly battle the fatigue of too many lists, of too much exhaustiveness. But could exhaustion be embraced as a necessary mood with which to deal with lists and archives? Might listlessness be something of a methodological orientation that has its own productivity in the face of so many lists?At my university there resides an archive that can appear to be a list of lists. It is the Mass-Observation archive, begun at the end of 1936 and, with a sizeable hiatus in the 1960s and 1970s, is still going today. (For a full account of Mass-Observation, see Highmore, Everyday Life chapter 6, and Hubble; for examples of Mass-Observation material, see Calder and Sheridan, and Highmore, Ordinary chapter 4; for analysis of Mass-Observation from the point of view of the observer, see Sheridan, Street, and Bloome. The flavour of the project as it emerges in the late 1930s is best conveyed by consulting Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, and Britain.) It was begun by three men: the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, the poet and sociologist Charles Madge, and the ornithologist and anthropologist-of-the-near Tom Harrisson. Both Jennings and Madge were heavily involved in promoting a form of social surrealism that might see buried forces in the coincidences of daily life as well as in the machinations and contingency of large political and social events (the abdication crisis, the burning of the Crystal Palace—both in late 1936). Harrisson brought a form of amateur anthropology with him that would scour football crowds, pub clientele, and cinema queues for ritualistic and symbolic forms. Mass-Observation quickly recruited a large group of voluntary observers (about a thousand) who would be “the meteorological stations from whose reports a weather-map of popular feeling can be compiled” (Mass-Observation, Mass-Observation 30). Mass-Observation combined the social survey with a relentless interest in the irrational and in what the world felt like to those who lived in it. As a consequence the file reports often seem banal and bizarre in equal measure (accounts of nightmares, housework routines, betting activities). When Mass-Observation restarted in the 1980s the surrealistic impetus became less pronounced, but it was still there, implicit in the methodology. Today, both as an on-going project and as an archive of previous observational reports, Mass-Observation lives in archival boxes. You can find a list of what topics are addressed in each box; you can also find lists of the contributors, the voluntary Mass-Observers whose observations are recorded in the boxes. What better way to give you a flavour of these boxes than to offer you a sample of their listing activities. Here are observers, observing in 1983 the objects that reside on their mantelpieces. Here’s one:champagne cork, rubber band, drawing pin, two hearing aid batteries, appointment card for chiropodist, piece of dog biscuit.Does this conjure up a world? Do we have a set of clues, of material evidence, a small cosmology of relics, a reduced Wunderkammer, out of which we can construct not the exotic but something else, something more ordinary? Do you smell camphor and imagine antimacassars? Do you hear conversations with lots of mishearing? Are the hearing aid batteries shared? Is this a single person living with a dog, or do we imagine an assembly of chiropodist-goers, dog-owners, hearing aid-users, rubber band-pingers, champagne-drinkers?But don’t get caught imagining a life out of these fragments. Don’t get stuck on this list: there are hundreds to get through. After all, what sort of an archive would it be if it included a single list? We need more lists.Here’s another mantelpiece: three penknives, a tube of cement [which I assume is the sort of rubber cement that you get in bicycle puncture repair kits], a pocket microscope, a clinical thermometer.Who is this? A hypochondriacal explorer? Or a grown-up boy-scout, botanising on the asphalt? Why so many penknives? But on, on... And another:1 letter awaiting postage stamp1 diet book1 pair of spare spectacles1 recipe for daughter’s home economics1 notepad1 pen1 bottle of indigestion tablets1 envelope containing 13 pence which is owed a friend1 pair of stick-on heels for home shoe repairing session3 letters in day’s post1 envelope containing money for week’s milk bill1 recipe cut from magazine2 out of date letters from schoolWhat is the connection between the daughter’s home economics recipe and the indigestion tablets? Is the homework gastronomy not quite going to plan? Or is the diet book causing side-effects? And what sort of financial stickler remembers that they owe 13p; even in 1983 this was hardly much money? Or is it the friend who is the stickler? Perhaps this is just prying...?But you need more. Here’s yet another:an ashtray, a pipe, pipe tamper and tobacco pouch, one decorated stone and one plain stone, a painted clay model of an alien, an enamelled metal egg from Hong Kong, a copper bracelet, a polished shell, a snowstorm of Father Christmas in his sleigh...Ah, a pipe smoker, this much is clear. But apart from this the display sounds ritualistic – one stone decorated the other not. What sort of religion is this? What sort of magic? An alien and Santa. An egg, a shell, a bracelet. A riddle.And another:Two 12 gauge shotgun cartridges live 0 spread Rubber plantBrass carriage clockInternational press clock1950s cigarette dispenser Model of Panzer MKIV tankWWI shell fuseWWI shell case ash tray containing an acorn, twelve .22 rounds of ammunition, a .455 Eley round and a drawing pinPhoto of Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire)Souvenir of Algerian ash tray containing marbles and beach stonesThree 1930s plastic duck clothes brushesLetter holder containing postcards and invitations. Holder in shape of a cow1970s Whizzwheels toy carWooden box of jeweller’s rottenstone (Victorian)Incense holderWorld war one German fuse (used)Jim Beam bottle with candle thereinSol beer bottle with candle therein I’m getting worried now. Who are these people who write for Mass-Observation? Why so much military paraphernalia? Why such detail as to the calibrations? Should I concern myself that small militias are holding out behind the net curtains and aspidistra plants of suburban England?And another:1930s AA BadgeAvocado PlantWooden cat from MexicoKahlua bottle with candle there in1950s matchbook with “merry widow” cocktail printed thereonTwo Britain’s model cannonOne brass “Carronade” from the Carron Iron Works factory shopPhotography pass from Parkhead 12/11/88Grouse foot kilt pinBrass incense holderPheasant featherNovitake cupBlack ash tray with beach pebbles there inFull packet of Mary Long cigarettes from HollandPewter cocktail shaker made in ShanghaiI’m feeling distance. Who says “there in” and “there on?” What is a Novitake cup? Perhaps I wrote it down incorrectly? An avocado plant stirs memories of trying to grow one from an avocado stone skewered in a cup with one “point” dunked in a bit of water. Did it ever grow, or just rot? I’m getting distracted now, drifting off, feeling sleepy...Some more then – let’s feed the listlessness of the list:Wood sculpture (Tenerife)A Rubber bandBirdJunior aspirinToy dinosaur Small photo of daughterSmall paint brushAh yes the banal bizarreness of ordinary life: dinosaurs and aspirins, paint brushes and rubber bands.But then a list comes along and pierces you:Six inch piece of grey eyeliner1 pair of nail clippers1 large box of matches1 Rubber band2 large hair gripsHalf a piece of cough candy1 screwed up tissue1 small bottle with tranquillizers in1 dead (but still in good condition) butterfly (which I intended to draw but placed it now to rest in the garden) it was already dead when I found it.The dead butterfly, the tranquillizers, the insistence that the mantelpiece user didn’t actually kill the butterfly, the half piece of cough candy, the screwed up tissue. In amongst the rubber bands and matches, signs of something desperate. Or maybe not: a holding on (the truly desperate haven’t found their way to the giant tranquillizer cupboard), a keeping a lid on it, a desire (to draw, to place a dead butterfly at rest in the garden)...And here is the methodology emerging: the lists works on the reader, listing them, and making them listless. After a while the lists (and there are hundreds of these lists of mantle-shelf items) begin to merge. One giant mantle shelf filled with small stacks of foreign coins, rubber bands and dead insects. They invite you to be both magical ethnographer and deadpan sociologist at one and the same time (for example, see Hurdley). The “Martian” ethnographer imagines the mantelpiece as a shrine where this culture worships the lone rubber band and itinerant button. Clearly a place of reliquary—on this planet the residents set up altars where they place their sacred objects: clocks and clippers; ammunition and amulets; coins and pills; candles and cosmetics. Or else something more sober, more sombre: late twentieth century petite-bourgeois taste required the mantelpiece to hold the signs of aspirant propriety in the form of emblems of tradition (forget the coins and the dead insects and weaponry: focus on the carriage clocks). And yet, either way, it is the final shelf that gets me every time. But it only got me, I think, because the archive had worked its magic: ransacked my will, my need to please, my desire. It had, for a while at least, made me listless, and listless enough to be touched by something that was really a minor catalogue of remainders. This sense of listlessness is the way that the archive productively defeats the “desire for the archive.” It is hard to visit an archive without an expectation, without an “image repertoire,” already in mind. This could be thought of as the apperception-schema of archival searching: the desire to see patterns already imagined; the desire to find the evidence for the thought whose shape has already formed. Such apperception is hard to avoid (probably impossible), but the boredom of the archive, its ceaselessness, has a way of undoing it, of emptying it. It corresponds to two aesthetic positions and propositions. One is well-known: it is Barthes’s distinction between “studium” and “punctum.” For Barthes, studium refers to a sort of social interest that is always, to some degree, satisfied by a document (his concern, of course, is with photographs). The punctum, on the other hand, spills out from the photograph as a sort of metonymical excess, quite distinct from social interest (but for all that, not asocial). While Barthes is clearly offering a phenomenology of viewing photographs, he isn’t overly interested (here at any rate) with the sort of perceptional-state the viewer might need to be in to be pierced by the puntum of an image. My sense, though, is that boredom, listlessness, tiredness, a sort of aching indifference, a mood of inattentiveness, a sense of satiated interest (but not the sort of disinterest of Kantian aesthetics), could all be beneficial to a punctum-like experience. The second aesthetic position is not so well-known. The Austrian dye-technician, lawyer and art-educationalist Anton Ehrenzweig wrote, during the 1950s and 1960s, about a form of inattentive-attention, and a form of afocal-rendering (eye-repelling rather than eye-catching), that encouraged eye-wandering, scanning, and the “‘full’ emptiness of attention” (Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order 39). His was an aesthetics attuned to the kind of art produced by Paul Klee, but it was also an aesthetic propensity useful for making wallpaper and for productively connecting to unconscious processes. Like Barthes, Ehrenzweig doesn’t pursue the sort of affective state of being that might enhance such inattentive-attention, but it is not hard to imagine that the sort of library-tiredness of the archive would be a fitting preparation for “full emptiness.” Ehrenzweig and Barthes can be useful for exploring this archival mood, this orientation and attunement, which is also a disorientation and mis-attunement. Trawling through lists encourages scanning: your sensibilities are prepared; your attention is being trained. After a while, though, the lists blur, concentration starts to loosen its grip. The lists are not innocent recipients here. Shrapnel shards pull at you. You start to notice the patterns but also the spaces in-between that don’t seem to fit sociological categorisations. The strangeness of the patterns hypnotises you and while the effect can generate a sense of sociological-anthropological homogeneity-with-difference, sometimes the singularity of an item leaps out catching you unawares. An archive is an orchestration of order and disorder: however contained and constrained it appears it is always spilling out beyond its organisational structures (amongst the many accounts of archives in terms of their orderings, see Sekula, and Stoler, Race and Along). Like “Probate Inventories,” the mantelpiece archive presents material objects that connect us (however indirectly) to embodied practices and living spaces (Evans). The Mass-Observation archive, especially in its mantelpiece collection, is an accretion of temporalities and spaces. More crucially, it is an accumulation of temporalities materialised in a mass of spaces. A thousand mantelpieces in a thousand rooms scattered across the United Kingdom. Each shelf is syncopated to the rhythms of diverse durations, while being synchronised to the perpetual now of the shelf: a carriage clock, for instance, inherited from a deceased parent, its brass detailing relating to a different age, its mechanism perpetually telling you that the time of this space is now. The archive carries you away to a thousand living rooms filled with the momentary (dead insects) and the eternal (pebbles) and everything in-between. Its centrifugal force propels you out to a vast accrual of things: ashtrays, rubber bands, military paraphernalia, toy dinosaurs; a thousand living museums of the incidental and the memorial. This vertiginous archive threatens to undo you; each shelf a montage of times held materially together in space. It is too much. It pushes me towards the mantelshelves I know, the ones I’ve had a hand in. Each one an archive in itself: my grandfather’s green glass paperweight holding a fragile silver foil flower in its eternal grasp; the potions and lotions that feed my hypochondria; used train tickets. Each item pushes outwards to other times, other spaces, other people, other things. It is hard to focus, hard to cling onto anything. Was it the dead butterfly, or the tranquillizers, or both, that finally nailed me? Or was it the half a cough-candy? I know what she means by leaving the remnants of this sweet. You remember the taste, you think you loved them as a child, they have such a distinctive candy twist and colour, but actually their taste is harsh, challenging, bitter. There is nothing as ephemeral and as “useless” as a sweet; and yet few things are similarly evocative of times past, of times lost. Yes, I think I’d leave half a cough-candy on a shelf, gathering dust.[All these lists of mantelpiece items are taken from the Mass-Observation archive at the University of Sussex. Mass-Observation is a registered charity. For more information about Mass-Observation go to http://www.massobs.org.uk/]ReferencesBarthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Fontana, 1984.Calder, Angus, and Dorothy Sheridan, eds. Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology 1937–1949. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Psychoanalysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory of Unconscious Perception. Third edition. London: Sheldon Press, 1965. [Originally published in 1953.]---. The Hidden Order of Art. London: Paladin, 1970.Evans, Adrian. “Enlivening the Archive: Glimpsing Embodied Consumption Practices in Probate Inventories of Household Possessions.” Historical Geography 36 (2008): 40-72.Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge, 2002.---. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.Hubble, Nick. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory, Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2006.Hurdley, Rachel. “Dismantling Mantelpieces: Narrating Identities and Materializing Culture in the Home.” Sociology 40, 4 (2006): 717-733Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation. London: Fredrick Muller, 1937.---. First Year’s Work 1937-38. London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938.---. Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986): 3-64.Sheridan, Dorothy, Brian Street, and David Bloome. Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literary Practices. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2000.Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1995. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009.