Commentators on the imperial Russian polity have regarded the Security Law of 14 August 1881, which invested administrative officials with broad discretionary powers, as the keystone of the developing Russian police state, the virtual cause of the 1905 revolution, even “Russia's de facto constitution.” In truth, it merely codified and, in many respects, actually limited the powers granted by emergency measures adopted in the late 1870s, at the height of the terrorist campaign to murder Alexander II. The Judicial and Zemstvo Reforms of 1864 had marked the beginning of the development of the rule of law and a respect for civil rights in Russia, and the emergency legislation adopted between 1866 and 1881 was an only partially successful attempt by administrative Russia to return to traditional patterns of arbitrariness, or proizvol. Late imperial Russia's emergency legislation, in other words, was not a turning point on the path toward a modern “police state“ but a sign of that country's uneasy transition from an absolutist to a constitutional order.

Through a comparison of post-Franco Spain and post-Soviet Ukraine, Oxana Shevel examines state responses to the challenge of dealing with divided historical memory. Both countries embarked on the transition from authoritarian rule divided by the memory of the recent past, but each dealt with this similar challenge very differently. This article discusses Spain's “democratization of memory” policy centered on the state's refusal to define a common historical memory for the society as a whole and on the official recognition of the multiplicity of “personal and family” memories and examines why no comparable policy has emerged in Ukraine so far. Shevel considers the potential applicability of the Spanish solution to Ukraine in light of both social realities and theories of nation building, in particular the debate over whether national unity necessitates a cultural nation and shared collective memory, or whether unity in a democracy can be built on other foundations.

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.