In early December 1994 in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs, a new category appeared in the Page of Records–a sophisticated guide to the “best” places and services in Budapest: “The Most Unsighdy Square in Europe.” This award went to Budapest's Moszhva tér (Moscow Square). No other contender for this title has yet been found. On the last pages of his monograph on the current architectural transformation of Budapest, art and media critic Péter György reveals in parentheses how the book was inspired by the sight of this area: “I have been crossing the square every day for ten years, and in the last couple of years I would stop ever more frequendy–unable to move on–and fixedly stare at the decay.”

This new reading of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog challenges the two lines of thought that dominate existing interpretations. Cold Warinspired critics saw in the banned novella an anti-Soviet political allegory and ignored its astute treatment of Soviet debates on biosocial issues. Most other critics have cast Preobrazhenskii as a mad scientist in the Frankenstein tradition, unleashing forces he himself cannot control. Putting aside false antitheses, Bulgakov's novella emerges as a fictional exploration of ideas in eugenics, hormone replacement therapy, and the nature-nurture debate that had real urgency for early Soviet geneticists struggling for ideological support, and for Bolshevik policymakers trying to create a “New Soviet Man.” In this article, Yvonne Howell describes the competing scientific paradigms that provide a backdrop to Bulgakov's work and shows how attitudes from across the “nature-nurture” spectrum appear and interact in Heart of a Dog through the voices of its principal characters.

The legacy of ancient writers to western culture since the Renaissance has long been acknowledged as a cornerstone of contemporary humanism. Yet within the vast territory of studies of the classical tradition there remains a large piece of uncharted terrain, and that is Russia, the significance of whose participation in the reception of antiquity has been largely excluded from investigation by foreign scholars and has only recently energized Russian scholars, particularly in the field of medieval studies.

The question of the perpetrator is largely uncharted territory in the history of the Soviet Union. The term is rarely used in the historiography of the Stalinist Soviet Union. In part, this omission is based upon a reluctance to go beyond Iosif Stalin in assigning agency or responsibility for the immense crimes of his reign. In part, the omission derives from decades-long restrictions on archival access. Lynne Viola begins with an exploration of the postwar trajectories of the historiographies of the mid-twentieth century's classically paired “totalitarian” regimes in order to understand the relative absence of “perpetrator studies” for the Stalinist 1930s. She then examines the question of the Soviet perpetrator, less to demarcate who the perpetrator was than to offer a conceptualization of the range of factors that enabled, conditioned, and shaped their violent acts. Intended to raise questions for further study, Viola's article is complemented by comments from Wendy Goldman and Peter Fritzsche.

Shrouded behind a veil of semisecrecy, the making of policy decisions in the Soviet Union has been a fertile source of endless speculation and research. From time to time, happily, it becomes possible to penetrate rather deeply into the arcana of the process and turn up some illuminating materials. The decision to cultivate the virgin lands is a good case in point, and now the older Western analyses of the politics surrounding that event can be expanded substantially on the basis of information published in recent years.

Early nineteenth century military drafts severely tested the cohesiveness of Russia’s peasant communities. Because a conscript served for twenty-five years, he rarely returned to his community. His household lost a family member, a worker, and often part of its land allotment. The threat of such losses heightened the potential for abuse of community rules determining the selection of conscripts. A serf owner observed this problem when visiting his new estate in 1837: “The draft duties were determined by some sort of calculation, that, in spite of all my desire and mental exercises, I could not master. I only knew that it worked to the profit of the village head and to the loss of the peasants”.

This article examines why Ukrainian women participated in the 2013–14 anti-government protests, widely known as the EuroMaidan. Based upon in-depth interviews with female protesters, the study uncovers a wide range of motivations for women's engagement in the revolution, including dissatisfaction with the government, solidarity with protesters, motherhood, civic duty, and professional service. Political discontent was the most cited reason for protesting. Solidarity with protesters was another major catalyst for political engagement. In addition, women who were mothers invoked the notion of mothering to provide a rationale for activism. The study contributes to the growing literature on women's participation in contentious politics in non-democracies.

It is widely accepted that Russia's failure in the Great War derived from the fact that its peasants were not “citizens.” Peasants remained isolated and particularistic, in part because Russia's elites had failed to integrate them politically or culturally into anything resembling a “nation.” When Russian peasants dreamed, it was not as members of an “imagined community” but as peasants, with their own agenda of land and local power and in their own language and cultural codes. As a result, Russia did not represent a “nation at arms,” and most peasants lacked deep commitment to or understanding of their country's war effort.

The object of this article is to revisit the themes originally explored in this journal thirty-five years ago in a discussion somewhat misleadingly entitled, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917.”’ As older readers of the Slavic Review may recall, this discussion set off heated debates centered on the theses presented in this article about the dual processes of polarization that I distinguished in the dynamics of the political and social crisis in urban Russia even before the outbreak of war: polarization between the industrial workers employed in Russia's urban centers and the well-to-do strata of urban “society,” including those of the professional intelligentsia; and polarization between both the upper and lower strata of Russia's urban centers and the bureaucratic circles that sought to represent the interests and will of the sovereign.

In the wake of the 2003 revolution in Georgia, the speed of reform in the sphere of psychosocial aid meant that a range of international donors left the country, believing that the services provided by local NGOs, whom they had been supporting, were now taken over by the state. However, many of the reforms and institutional changes officially initiated during this period were never implemented. Hence, an array of present-day problems remained unresolved or untreated because they would be addressed by the state “in the future.” In this article, I refer to this as a would-be state: the condition of that which will be in the future and a state that gains its legitimacy by promising a better tomorrow. By rendering certain issues as unproblematic in future, the Georgian state has managed to make them appear to be unproblematic (and thus absent) in the present. I use this framework to engage in a wider discussion of the measures of success in eastern Europe's new democracies.

This article provides an analysis of the locus of fear in military psychology in late imperial Russia. After the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, the debate coalesced around two poles: “realists” (such as the military psychiatrist Grigorii Shumkov) argued that fear was natural, while “romantics” upheld the image of constitutionally fearless soldiers. Jan Plamper begins by identifying the advent of modern warfare (foreshadowed by the Crimean War) and its engendering of more and different fears as a key cause for a dramatic increase in fear-talk among Russia's soldiers. He links these fears to literature, which offered—most prominentiy in Lev Tolstoi's Sevastopol Sketches (1855)—some of the vocabulary soldiers could use to express their fears. Mikhail Dragomirov's fear-centered military theory during the Great Reforms was the next milestone. Plamper closes by sketching the history of fear after World War I, from Iosif Stalin's penal battalions to the rehabilitation of military psychology under Nikita Khrushchev and beyond.

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

Scholars generally agree on the relationship between the physical stature, or height, of children and adults, and their quality of life, or their biological status, including diet, illnesses, intensity and conditions of work, availability of medical care, living conditions, psychological well-being, climate, water, air, and other environmental factors that have impinged on their lives prior to the point at which their height is measured. Genetic factors have an important effect on individual height, but genetic distinctions lose their significance when masses of individuals are measured and average heights are compared. The same effect holds at the level of entire populations: differences in height are determined, not by ethnic or racial attributes, but by living conditions.

By drawing on materials in Soviet legal and party archives, James Heinzen explores the phenomenon of bribery in the decade between 1943 and 1953. Bribery, the prototypical type of corruption, enveloped people from all walks of Soviet life. Heinzen examines bribery as a mode of negotiation between common people and officials in the political and social context of late Stalinism, in a time of scarcity, reconstruction, and mass arrests. Discussing the diverse varieties of bribery, Heinzen illustrates how law, Stalinist ideology, popular attitudes, and everyday practices often stood in conflict. Graft had its own subculture with shared attitudes, rituals, and venues. Attitudes differentiating between accepting and offering bribes are explored, as is the existence of a veritable “market” for bribery, in which intermediaries played an important role.

One frequently discussed problem in Western approaches to postrevolutionary Russian literature has been the temptation to identify “rebels against the system” and to praise their work out of proportion to its merits. Writers attacked in the Soviet Union for their heretical views have a good chance of being lionized in the West. A strange and notable exception to this pattern is Viktor Shklovsky, one of the earliest and most outspoken defenders of creative freedom in the Soviet Union. Though his books and articles were viciously attacked by the Marxist critics throughout the twenties, Western critics, viewing those same books and articles from the distance imposed by time and place, have seen them as a series of surrenders which hastened or even precipitated the collapse of the Formalist movement.

In this article, Beatrice Farnsworth suggests that Aleksandra Kollontai, Old Bolshevik, socialist-feminist, and former leader of the Workers' Opposition, survived Iosif Stalin's terror largely because in her effort to assure Stalin that she was no longer an oppositionist, she nurtured a friendly dynamic with him. Indeed, in their conversations, she pursued a gendered strategy of warm deference and flattery. Yet, while publicly serving the Soviet regime, even ingratiating herself with the party leadership, Kollontai, in diaries written for history, privately, and at risk to her life, mourned the regime's failure to develop "communist humanism." With their interlocking themes of emotion and personalities, her diaries not only provide insight into Kollontai's uncanny survival and the personal responses of an Old Bolshevik to political changes and people but offer a rare and intimate portrait of the internal life of Soviet politics at their highest level.

From 1928 to 1933, the Soviet Union underwent a radical metamorphosis. Almost overnight the economic order of N E P was abandoned in favor of an untested system of economic relations commonly referred to today as command planning. The magnitude of this transformation, the ideological passions it aroused, and the questionable character of official Soviet statistics during the First Five-Year Plan have all made it exceedingly difficult to conceptualize the process of Soviet industrialization in its entirety. As a consequence, most analyses of Soviet industrialization have been highly eclectic, predicated on assumptions which only appear plausible because they have not been interpreted from the standpoint of a closed model, or of an encompassing theory.

Among the guiding preoccupations of postcommunist Latvia and its east European neighbors is the desire to be “normal.” A unifying notion in the period of opposition to Soviet communism, “normality” became a site of political contestation after the restoration of independence in Latvia. The fields of political and social life have been dominated by two competing narratives of normality: temporal normality, a restorationist narrative that elevates the experiences and institutions of independent interwar Latvia as a model for postcommunist change, and spatial normality, which takes the western (European) road of capitalist modernity as a map for the future. Although frequently at odds with one another in the field of political life, the temporal and spatial narratives share a nation-centered orientation that both reinforces and, arguably, expands women's subjugated status in society and submerges the “woman question” beneath the "national question." That is to say that although women as members of the body of the citizenry share in the benefits that accrue to this group in the forms of free speech, voting rights, and the right to own property, women as women have not benefited and, in fact, have suffered the consequences of the dual trends of commodification and domestication that have accompanied, respectively, the push toward economic modernity and the elevation of tradition in social life.

On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.

The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Karelia only 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.