RECENT POPULATION CHARACTERISTICS AND GROWTH IN THE USSR

Data from the preliminary results of the 1989 census and Naseleniye SSSR 1987 permit analyses of age-sex structures of the Soviet population and distributions by civil divisions of natural growth rates, total population growth, urban growth, rural growth, percent urbanization, and growths of cities. The paper complements the treatment of census results by macroregions appearing in the November 1989 issue of Soviet Geography (Rowland, 1989) by summarizing trends emerging at a finer scale of analysis and providing recent background information on demographic components of population change.     

INTENTION AND IRONY: THE MISSED ENCOUNTER BETWEEN HAYDEN WHITE AND QUENTIN SKINNER

No contemporary intellectual historian has produced more influential reflections on the historian's craft than Hayden White and Quentin Skinner, yet their legacy has never been meaningfully compared. Doing so reveals a surprising complementarity in their approach, at least to the extent that Skinner's stress on recovering the intentionality of authors fits well with White's observation that irony is the dominant rhetorical mode of historical narrative in our day. Irony itself, to be sure, has to be divided broadly speaking into its dramatic or Socratic variants and the unstable and paradoxical alternative defended by poststructuralist critics. The latter produced in White an anxiety about the anarchistic implications of an allegedly inherent undecidability in historical interpretation and narration, which threatened to conflate history entirely with fiction. By recovering the necessary role of intentionality as a prerequisite for a more moderate version of Socratic and dramatic irony—in which hindsight provides some purchase on a truth denied actors at the time history is made—it is possible to rescue an ironic attitude that can register the frequency of unintended consequences without surrendering to the conclusion that no explanation or interpretation is superior to another. Against yet a third alternative, which tries to reconstruct the past rationally as a prelude to the present, acknowledging the ironic undermining of intentions avoids giving all the power to the contemporary historian and restores a dialogic balance between actors in the past and their present‐day interpreters.     

THE POPULATION DYNAMICS OF EAST SIBERIA AND PROBLEMS OF PREDICTION

A review of population trends in the USSR and in East Siberia suggests that net in-migration will become a negligible source of labor over the next 25 years until the year 2000 because past labor surpluses no longer exist in the western regions of the Soviet Union and because living conditions in the eastern regions are inferior to conditions in the west. East Siberia will therefore have to depend increasingly on the regional rate of natural increase. The region's population is expected to grow from 8 million in 1970 to 10–12 million by the year 2000. The slow predicted growth of population is not expected to become a constraint on the region's economic development because of rising labor productivity and a regional emphasis on energy-intensive and raw-material-oriented industries rather than labor-intensive activities.     

PERCEPTIONS OF AND RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCENE FLOODING OF THE NORTH SEA LOWLANDS

This paper explores how the drastic landscape changes that took place in the North Sea basin during the Holocene affected the lives of those dwelling in that area. Previous contributions to the discussion of the Holocene inundation of the North Sea have tended to concentrate on the timings. This paper discusses the ways people could have perceived and responded to these events, emphasizing that climate change should not be viewed apart from social factors. It is also argued that sea-level rise was not something externally imposed on communities but an integral part of their world.     

北方的雪——金建国黑白摄影

<正>欣赏这组名为《北方的雪》的作品,不由自主地被一幅幅质朴无华但却又饱含着对"北方的雪"的深情厚意的影像所吸引。金建国镜头里恢弘的林海雪原,神奇的不冻河,童话世界般的雪乡村里……构成了一个优美的黑白雪世界,向观众展示着黑白摄影的魅力。金建国习惯使用标准镜头,要求相机按照他的旨意"平和"客观"地看世界,尽量避免刻意去制造影像的夸张和变形。他善于透过作品"平淡"的表面,向读者呈现出大自然和社会生活的美感和内涵,他     

MAP OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF ESKIMOS AND NATIVE CREENLANDERS IN NORTH AMERICA

RÉSUMÉ. Cette carte de caractére pédagogique montrela répartition des esquimaux et natijs groenlandais de l'Amérique du nord. Les autorités concernées out gracieusement fourni les données nécessaires à la compilation de cette carte, bien que celle-ci aille au-delà des statistiques déjà publiées. Parmi certaines difficultés, on note celles engendrées par la localisation de ces emplacements rapportés lors du dernier recensement, mais dont on a pas retrouve trace depuis.
l'emploi de symboles circulaires s'est avéré inéfficace dans ce cas-ci, la vérité des dimensions des localités obscurcissant outre mesure la représentation graphique de la population. Un systéme multicirculaire jut dont adopté même si celui-ci tend à jausser quelque peu le nombre des villages. Un tableau dans le texte montre les données de la population selon le recensement, de même que la position géogra-phique de chacun des endroits. Des remercie-ments sont adressés à l'endroit des officiers du recensement des trois gouvernements concernés, ainsi qu à tous ceux qui ont rendu possible la préparation de cette carte.     

POPULATION GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC PLANNING

Population geographers are urged to get involved in the program of socio-economic planning that is expected to supplement the present economic planning process in the Soviet Union. So far socio-economic plans have been drawn up only for a few large cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk. In general, there is a need for integrating the social planning process with purely economic planning, and to supplement the present sectoral planning system with an integrated system of spatial planning entities. At the present time, city and regional plans are derived by simply collating sectoral data at the city and regional level rather than by a separate integrated spatial planning procedure. A system of intra-oblast regions, or okrugs, numbering perhaps 500 or more, is recommended as a new level suitable both for government administration and for socio-economic planning.