“The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvelously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison.” This oft-quoted line was written by General A.A. Veliaminov in 1828 in a memoir which advocated the use of powerful military force to subdue the tribes of the north Caucasus. To take this fortress, a wise commander must “lay his parallels; advance by gap and mine and so master the place.” The extension of a fortified line further and further towards the mountains, using it as a base for attacks, was essential to Veliaminov's strategy of conquest.

The golden era of the study of folklore in the Soviet Union was the first decade after the Revolution, when the party and government, occupied with more urgent tasks, let the literary scholars and folklorists do their work relatively undisturbed. In 1925 the so-called “magna charta libertatis” for Soviet writers was issued by the Central Committee of the party, which permitted “free competition of various groups and currents.” As a result, the 1920s turned out to be rich and fruitful in literary scholarship, including folkloristics. In the study of folklore, different trends could freely coexist and thrive side by side. The most important of them were the historical school, Formalism, and the so-called Finnish school. The historical school continued the traditions of its leader Vsevolod Miller, whose first concern had been to find reflections of concrete historical reality in Russian byliny (epic songs). Thus the tendencies of the historical school are found in the commentaries to some bylina collections in 1918 and 1919, and also appeared strongly in the works of the brothers Boris and Iurii Sokolov, both of them disciples of Miller.

Stalin must have known better. A non-Russian and the author of Marxism and the National Question, he was surely aware that his slogan of “socialism in one country“ obscured the USSR's profoundly multinational character. To the degree that he really built socialism, Stalin clearly did so not in one country but in many simultaneously. Indeed, not only did the Soviet republics lend one another what Soviet propagandists like to call disinterested proletarian assistance, but some, such as Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, and the countries of Central Asia, may have served as the involuntary base for the “primitive accumulation of capital” as well.

Russian peasants do not appear to welcome children with particular enthusiasm, but once a child is born it is protected to the greatest possible extent from hunger and cold, often at the cost of considerable parental sacrifice. The infant and young child is fed by its mother generously and frequently, and for a very long period, often up to two years; if the mother is absent, a crying baby is given a comforter made of chewed and sweetened bread tied up in a rag by the person looking after it, typically a woman of a generation older than the parents—a babuška—though sometimes its older brothers and sisters have this duty.

In this article Theodora Dragostinova examines the interplay between official policies and popular demands in the nationalization of the Greek minority in Bulgaria. She explores why national activists and ordinary people chose to “speak national” in the context of the conflicting national interests and territorial aspirations of Bulgaria and Greece. At the official level, the national discourse and practice showed the co-existence of essentialist and constructionist understandings of nationhood; while the rhetoric of the primordial nation was ubiquitous, politicians realized that certain policies could “improve” the national body. At the popular level, the profuse use of national rhetoric functioned as an “emergency identity,” or a discursive strategy that allowed individuals to claim social legitimacy in emergency situations. Thus, despite the fact that people were forced to adopt clear-cut national allegiances, national side-switching remained a frequent phenomenon.

One of the consequences of the revival of sociology as a distinct discipline in the Soviet Union has been the appearance of empirical studies of prevailing attitudes toward the major occupations in Soviet society. These studies have been accompanied by discussions in Soviet newspapers and in the educational and economics literature of the problems associated with the popular perception of various occupations, particularly among student youth.

In this article we present a close reading of the discursive media transformation generated by “Fashion Verdict”—a makeover reality show broadcast on Russian TV. Our analysis reveals that the adopted genre of therapeutic culture constitutes a new mode of talk about personal experience in the post-Soviet media, a mode based on pop-psychological assumptions and linked to the discursive practice of psychotherapy. However, we show that in post-Soviet popular culture the global therapeutic talking culture encounters powerful cultural counterparts. Apart from psychotherapy, the TV courtroom transformation works by shifting three other discursive frames of articulation of individual and personal life: communist Comrades' Court, soviet Kitchen Talk, and glamorous Fashion Show. Combining an anthropological approach with conversational and frame analysis, we decipher how the familiar discursive forms of talking about personal life domesticate the therapeutic discourse in the Russian communicative culture: they pave the way for its acceptance and concomitantly contest and possibly undermine the ideas that the therapeutic culture brings in.

Sources of the first half of the fourteenth century provide evidence that a sharp rift in institutional continuity occurred in Muscovy. This rift constituted a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" in the evolutionary development of the Rus' political system. The political institutional structure inherited from the Vladimir-Suzdal' component of Kievan Rus' ended abruptly, and, concomitantly, a new political structure similar to that of the Kipchak Khanate was established. I contend in this article that the Muscovite princes introduced Mongol political and military institutions into Muscovy on a wide scale during the first half of the fourteenth century.

In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.

Though The Persian Cossack Brigade, which played such a fateful role during the revolution of 1905-1911, has attracted attention, relatively little is known of its origins and early development.

George W. Curzon devoted to the Brigade only a few of the 693 pages which make up the first volume of his monumental work on nineteenth-century Iran. Edward G. Browne, while discussing at length the role of the Brigade in the events of 1905-1909, erroneously fixed the date of its formation in 1882 and named Colonel Kozakofski (sic) as its first commander. Russian historians have done no better.

Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.

The career of the Soviet historian, E. V. Tarle, bears testimony to both the methods and effectiveness of Soviet demands for conformity in historical writing. Unlike many of his colleagues, who confined their research to obscure topics or resorted to the editing of collections of documents, Tarle treated events in Russian history which carried important political implications. Outstanding among these were his works on the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Between 1936 and 1952 Tarle wrote three basically different interpretations of this invasion, each of which reflected the current trend in Soviet historiography at the time it was written. Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union bore an obvious resemblance to Napoleon's campaign in Russia, and Academician Tarle, under pressure, changed his story to conform to the changing “party line.“

In 1991, Leningrad television broadcast a program that has since become infamous. The program's guest, Sergei Kurekhin, claiming to be a political figure and scientist, conducted an elaborate hoax that he presented as a serious historical exploration into the origins of the Bolshevik revolution. Using visual, textual, and scientific evidence, Kurekhin argued that the revolution was led by people who had been consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. As a result, their personalities were being replaced by mushroom personalities, and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was simply a mushroom. This fact, according to Kurekhin, shed new light on many enigmas of Soviet history. Millions of viewers were at a loss: were they witnessing a serious program, a daring prank, a case of unprecedented lunacy? In this article, Alexei Yurchak analyzes that remarkable comedic performance, its social and political effects then and now, and what it may contribute to our understanding of the relationship between politics and irony.

This article analyzes the Serbian fake news site Njuz.net, exploring the dynamics of its production, consumption, and appropriation in Serbian postsocialist, pre-EU-accession society. The increasing presence and importance of parodic media genres and the embrace of satire as a viable way to interpret and deal with social and political reality are explained in terms of both Serbia's historical trajectory and its media landscape as well as the global neo-liberal condition. Njuz.net's parody sheds critical light on various political, public, and social subjects simultaneously. Its satire communicates with multiple audiences and enables identification and detachment on several levels, a fact that makes the effects of this parody difficult to judge. The dilemmas that its writers face regarding their social activism are, I argue, a symptom of wider social anxieties and structural adversities caused by the difficulty of clearly identifying and detaching from “the enemy.” Because of how labor, consumption, and everyday practices are organized, we all inevitably contribute to the maintenance of that enemy's well-being. Seen in this light, parody is not only a form of social criticism but also a self-reflective practice.

Chingiz Aitmatov's recent novel I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ provides an excellent case study of the way the socialist realist canon can generate new paradigms out of itself. At a time when it is widely assumed in the West that all reputable Soviet authors have gone “beyond” socialist realism, the appearance of this novel is particularly instructive.

Aitmatov's book has had greater impact in the Soviet Union than any other novel published there in recent years. It covers subjects that are both highly topical and sensitive politically. Yet it does so by using the conventions of socialist realism to a greater extent than has been seen in the major Soviet writing of the past fifteen years. Indeed, Aitmatov has somehow contrived to weave into the fabric of his text patterns reminiscent of every period in the development of socialist realism.

Astonishingly, we still do not have a history of collaboration in Poland during World War II. Klaus-Peter Friedrich shows that the building blocks for such a history already exist, however. They are scattered throughout the contemporary Polish press and studies on the Nazi occupation regime. Examples include institutionalized cooperation (Baudienst, Polish Police), ethnically defined segments of the population (Volksdeutsche), informal support of Nazi projects on ideological common ground (anti- Semitism and anticommunism), and the stance of the Polish peasantry as well as the Roman Catholic Church. Friedrich concludes that collaboration eludes study because of a mental image according to which ethnic Poles were the foremost victims of the occupiers and heroically resisted them. Questionable views of national self-interest keep Polish society from coming to terms with the past. Nevertheless, debates on “Polish collaboration” continue to recur—as they have since 1939.

Change in the Stalinist system, and stubborn resistance to change, have been the central features of Soviet political life since Stalin's death in 1953. The rival forces of “innovation and tradition,” to use the language of the official press, have become “two poles” in Soviet politics and society, which are expressed through “sharp clashes between people standing on both sides of the psychological barrier.“

In this article, I analyze changes in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese labor exchange program between 1967 and 1989, specifically Czechoslovak state policies toward pregnant Vietnamese workers. In the program, the Czechoslovak state's commitment to being a welfare provider was confronted with its commitment to socialist internationalism. The policies toward pregnant Vietnamese workers constituted a part of the process through which the Czechoslovak state was redefining the limits of care it saw itself obligated to provide. The conflict between the two states over the appropriate treatment of pregnant Vietnamese workers was also an outgrowth of a more general feature of Czechoslovak state socialism: the tension between the pressure to increase (or at least maintain) productivity and the pressure to increase fertility. The gradual transformation of the program into a more decentralized and market exchange-like form shaped the nature of the conflict, the attempts to resolve it, and the limited efficacy of the solutions.

The year 1928 was a turning point not only for Soviet cultural policy but for policy in all fields. It was the beginning of a new revolution which overturned everything but the Stalinist leadership, an upheaval so violent that it seemed that the ruling party had revolted simultaneously against the society it governed and its own governing institutions. Among these institutions was the Commissariat of Enlightenment, headed by A. V. Lunacharsky and responsible for implementing policy in the sphere of education and the arts. In 1928 the Commissariat was accused of “softness” in its dealings with the intelligentsia, lack of “Communist vigilance,” and failure to understand the significance of “class war on the cultural front.” This “softness” was not peculiar to the Commissariat, except in degree. Right deviation in the party, it was said, had led a bureaucratized government apparat in retreat from true communism to liberalism; and the essence of this retreat was conciliation of the bourgeois peasantry and intelligentsia.