The publication of this digest was made possible thanks to financial support from the Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation) and the efforts of the editorial staff of the journal Pchela (St.Petersburg, Russia). It’s perhaps worth saying a few words about this journal, of which, by the way, I’m the editor.

I should begin by saying that thousands of Russian newspapers and journals are literally gasping for breath for want of material and so they happily re-publish one and the same sensations from the threadbare and cruel world of show business. At the same time, though apparently still prestigious, social themes find neither enough column inches nor enough worthy coverage in majority of publications.

The reason for this is simple: social themes are regarded as "serious", even gloomy-it’s not worth wearying the reader with such stuff. But even when social reportage finds its way into print, it’s weighted down with lengthy commentary in which the reporter makes bold to set forth his own thoughts.

As I see it, these "thoughts" are the principal enemies of social journalism in Russia in that they shield the reader from the facts, from life’s fascinating texture. Thoughts aside, there are, sadly, other barriers as well: among them we should mention bad taste, which Boris Pasternak defined as bad in the sense that it is the taste of mediocrity.

So we end up with a Russian reader who is cut off from social issues, from social life, from his own life. It’s funny that in a big city like St. Petersburg the honor of filling this gap (at least in part) should fall to a publication microscopic in terms of its print run and the resources put into its making-the journal Pchela. A journal that wasn’t founded by professional writers, but rather by professional newspaper readers. We ourselves were lacking the facts; we found some of them and offered them to Petersburgers. And now we are glad to have the chance to offer some of them to the English-language reader as well.

Pchela was published and continues to be published as part of the Tacis Democracy program. It was conceived as a calendar of the activities of the city’s NGOs: we would regularly call hundreds of these organizations, and that formed the basis of our bulletin. But being passionate newspaper readers, Pchela’s authors found this simple listing of events wanting. And we discovered that outlook of the people involved in social work was quite broad, that the world of citizens’ initiatives (a very poorly structured world, as it turned out) can only in part be reduced to purely social projects.

The experts continue to debate the question of whether there is a civil society in Russia, who is part of it and who isn’t, what its chances are. This scholastic dispute has been going on for quite a while. Pchela’s editorial staff decided to cut to the chase: we focused our attention on the city’s minorities.

It’s really the case that in contemporary Petersburg it’s hard on some psychological level to separate the founder of a non-commercial music club from the founder of an association of parents against drugs, the president of an ice-fishing society from the amateur anti-fascist. Society’s marginals (including political marginals) belong to these ranks, too.

We’ve published a number of articles about the city’s fascist and communist groups. Though they are unstable to the extreme and often ridiculous, in the long run these movements are a threat precisely because of the informal influence they exercise on people, especially young people. It may sound heretical, but such is reality- political marginals are also a part of society, which cannot allow itself the luxury of ignoring their existence-which, in fact, is what happens at every turn.

Alongside the extremists, social organizations representing what we might call the old guard complicate the picture. These are people who are either unable or unwilling to shed the burden of the Soviet past; practically speaking, their organizations have remained models of Soviet state structures and are thus utterly devoid of an informal element, of initiative. In a word, the picture is hopelessly complicated, but I can say one thing with certainty: Pchela’s readership is for the most part made up of people who have come of age socially.

It wasn’t a simple task finding people to gather information and write stories: we turned to young people, most of whom had not yet turned twenty. The majority of them were graduates of the St. Petersburg Classical Gymnasium; this school’s deputy director, the historian and columnist Lev Lurye, was instrumental in shaping the direction the journal would take. It’s a pleasure to note that our effort to find a fresh take on things, to treat unusual themes, has been given its due: this year Pchela won a special prize at the "Russian Periodicals for Socially Vulnerable Sectors of the Population" competition, which was held with financial support from the Soros Foundation. We were especially glad to be nominated in the category "For Developing the Idea of a Civil Society."

The articles in this digest were gathered in the course of approximately two years-for contemporary Russia, a period more than long and event-filled. Our journal appeared and shaped up at the very end of the transitional period. Now (perhaps unnoticeably to the outside observer) this period is coming to an end, and at first glance it would seem that the zeal of articles conceived and written in the fateful days before the Russian presidential elections has dulled a bit.

But my fears that the articles in this collection would seem archaic (or, at least, that their tone would) dissipated on May 9, 1998. The 9th of May is celebrated in the post-Soviet space as so-called Victory Day, the day when Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. On this holiday-which many of us still see as a joyous occasion unsullied by the pollution of the Soviet period—a military band from the Petersburg garrison marches down Nevsky Prospect followed by a column of war veterans.

So it was this year as well. I found myself in an international crowd of rubberneckers standing on the sidewalks of Nevsky; the day was sunny and there was nothing, as it seemed to me, to remind one of the war—except, perhaps, for the blood-type badges sewn on the uniforms of the young soldiers cordoning off the public, and the opera-buffe brass of the band’s trombones and tubas. Behind the band came the governor of Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev, who had decided to kick off his election campaign in this fashion; behind him, the white-haired and touching veterans were for some reason trying to march in step; they were followed up by veterans of sport. Suddenly, amidst the large group of people walking behind the sports veterans I saw marchers bearing placards with slogans such as "We Beat the Fascists, We’ll Beat the Zionists, Too"-these were the supporters of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), a parliamentary party. I won’t bore the reader by listing all the extremist groups in attendance; I’ll only say that the parade of marchers celebrating the victory over the Nazis was brought up our own homegrown fascists from Russian National Unity and Eduard Limonov’s National-Bolshevist Party. Black banners, swastikas, "Russia is Everything, the Rest is Nothing". In short, the articles we’ve published in Pchela haven’t aged a bit. They’re still worth reading.