‘Modernity’ has long been a working category of historical analysis in Russian and Soviet studies. Like any established category, it bears a history of its own characterised by founding assumptions, conceptual possibilities and lasting interpretive habits. Stephen Kotkin's work has played a special role in framing the kind of scholarship this category has enabled and the kind of modernity it has assigned to twentieth-century Russia. Kotkin's 1995 Magnetic Mountain introduced the concept of ‘socialist modernity’. His continued work with the concept in his 2001 Kritika article ‘Modern Times’ and his 2001 Armageddon Averted marked crucial moments in the history of the discipline and have positioned the author as a pioneering and dominant voice on the subject for nearly two decades. Given the defining nature of Kotkin's work, a critical discussion of its impact on the way the discipline conceives of Soviet modernisation and presents it to non-Russian fields is perhaps overdue. Here, I approach Kotkin's work on modernity as the field's collective property in need of a critical, deconstructive reading for its underlying assumptions, prescribed master narratives, and resultant paradoxes.

Did population policy under Stalin differ, in any fundamental respect, from those of inter-war France or other Western countries? In a radical rethinking of the Soviet experience, Stephen Kotkin said no. Magnetic Mountain moved the field of Soviet history past an increasingly sterile cold war standoff between the so-called new social history and the totalitarian school. With the social history generation, Kotkin insisted on seeing the Soviet project from the perspective of ordinary people, subject to the same kind of forces that applied throughout Europe. He had no truck with ideas like oriental despotism or Russian exceptionalism, but, with the totalitarian school, he took ideology seriously, presenting everyday life and high politics within a single analytical frame. To do so, he drew eclectically on a range of theoretical perspectives, above all on the work of the late Michel Foucault. Foucault often implied that Auschwitz and the Gulag were the logical outcome of the Enlightenment project, but his primary goal was to illuminate the corrosive, coercive nature of liberal reform efforts in Western Europe, to puncture their claims to universality. The vast bulk of his corpus avoided the twentieth century. Kotkin, by contrast, used Foucault's perspective directly on the Soviet system itself.

It is hard not to be struck by the continuing interest in the concept of ‘modernity’ or ‘the modern’ for making sense of the economic, cultural and political transformations of twentieth-century Europe. Seemingly laid to rest by the early 1980s for its association with modernisation theory, modernity as a concept was revived during the late 1980s and 1990s largely by European historians working on countries, especially Germany and Russia, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories that modernisation theorists deemed models of developmental backwardness or case studies in the failure to modernise and its consequences. But, like its striking re-appearance in scholarship on those areas of the world – especially Asia and Africa – written off as the most irredeemably un-modern or ‘traditional’ by modernisation theorists, this renewed interest in modernity derives from very different interventions in post-structuralist theory and cultural and postcolonial studies, which have generated new definitions, and critiques ‘modernity’ and its ‘dark side’ from the vantage point of ‘postmodernity’.

Returning to Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization almost two decades after its publication allows us to take stock, from a slight temporal distance, of the reception in our discipline of the work of Michel Foucault. Magnetic Mountain is the one of the books that came out of a project that Kotkin and a number of other students began under Foucault's direction at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983 (p. xviii). Foucault's work in California occurred during a particular turn in his political thinking, a moment when he experimented with liberal alternatives to the left theories of the first decades of his career. Kotkin's book is not simply an application of a general Foucauldianism, but rather of a specific California Foucault.

Using the case study of Montpellier, this article explores the relationship between local political actors and postcolonial minorities since the end of the Algerian War – particularly, the city's pied-noir, harki, Moroccan and Jewish populations. It examines the discourses used to secure the electoral allegiances of these groups and the myriad ways in which they laid claim to certain civic and political spaces. It employs diverse oral, archival and audio-visual sources to demonstrate how postcolonial minorities have gained important concessions from local authorities and how identity politics has developed under the Fifth Republic, despite France's strong republican tradition.

The Italian left has always perceived 1956 as an extraordinary year, because of the succession of international events that supposedly shocked many Italian militants and convinced them to abandon communism and the Italian Communist Party. On the contrary, this article claims that the real reasons for the crisis of communism in Italy had little to do with international events and must be found instead in the momentous economic and social changes that Italy was experiencing at the time. Unforgettable 1956 was therefore only a moment in a longer-term process that was destined to change communism in Italy. The article is based on previously unused documents now available at the Italian Communist Party Archive.

Historians of sexuality are uniquely placed to act the flâneur. Loitering in an archive's seedier or more obscure files, they tour the marginal landscapes of the past. They can vicariously experience deviant activity while maintaining historical detachment, writing histories which titillate as much as educate. Fun though this may be, there is the danger that producing such texts benefits only the writers themselves. Michel Foucault famously suggested that writing about the history of sexuality occurs purely for the ‘speaker's benefit’. Historians have thus sought to prove that ‘marginal’ histories are of true academic, not just voyeuristic, significance. This quest has been particularly fruitful for histories of sexuality – stories which are fascinating not least because they are simultaneously marginal, or unspeakable, and utterly central to human life.

Writing in 1997, Britain's leading historian of tourism John K. Walton lamented that ‘tourism has not been accepted into the charmed circle of acceptable themes in European history’. While it would be premature to suggest that tourism has now been welcomed into this select inner circle on equal terms with more traditional fields of research, there is nevertheless much for historians of tourism to be positive about. Over the course of the last two decades, a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated not only that tourism needs to be taken seriously as a factor that shaped the modern world but also that the study of tourist practices has the potential to shed new light on seemingly familiar historical issues and debates. The complex range of factors that have enabled and hindered tourism's rise towards respectability within historical studies have been discussed in detail elsewhere by prominent exponents of the genre and will not be reiterated here. However, three flourishing and interconnected fields of historical inquiry, to which historians of tourism are making valuable contributions, deserve particular mention. Each of the works discussed below can be situated broadly within these three historiographical trends.