The trial of Rudolf Slánský and his thirteen codefendants in Prague in November 1952 represented the culmination of Stalinist political terror in postwar central and eastern Europe. Ever since, it has attracted much scholarly attention focusing largely on the origins, processes, and outcomes of the trial. In this article, Kevin McDermott examines a crucial, but almost totally unresearched aspect of the affair: Czech popular reactions to Slánský's arrest and trial. Using documents from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and secret police reports from the Ministry of Interior archives, McDermott demonstrates that popular opinion was extremely diverse, ranging from strident and selective support of the official version of the court proceedings; to passive compliance and resigned accommodation; to apathy, guarded dissent, and overt opposition. Two findings are particularly noteworthy: first, virulent antisemitic sentiment was endemic; and second, many workers, rankand- file party members, and even lower-level functionaries were highly critical of the country's communist leaders. In conclusion, McDermott proposes that the archival record reveals the relatively broad diffusion of antisemitism in Czech society, the limits of the “Stalinization” process in the Czechoslovak party, and the failure of Stalinist terror to intimidate the population into submission and eradicate independent thinking.

Historians of quite diverging orientations have interpreted the February revolution of 1917 in Russia as a “democratic” revolution. Several generations of Marxists of various stripes (tolk) have called it a “bourgeois-democratic revolution.” In the years of perestroika, the contrast between democratic February and Bolshevik October became an important part of the historical argument of the anticommunist movement. The February revolution was regarded as a dramatic, unsuccessful attempt at the modernization and westernization of Russia, as its democratization. Such a point of view was expressed even earlier in some historical works and in the memoirs of participants in the events—liberals and moderate socialists. For example, just such a description of the revolution is given by Aleksandr Kerenskii, whose last reminiscences are especially significant. Kerenskii thought that “the overwhelming majority of the Russian population…were wholeheartedly democratic in their beliefs.”

How was terrorism first remembered when it surged up from the Russian underground in the third quarter of the nineteenth century? In this article, Lynn Ellen Patyk argues that memory is indispensible to terrorism and that historians’ attribution of the “invention of modern terrorism“ to Russian revolutionaries in the mid-nineteenth century is as much a testament to these revolutionaries’ mnemonic savvy as to their tactical innovation. The revolutionary-litterateur Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii (1852-1895) was at the avant-garde of this innovation, and this article analyzes his mastery of the implicit mnemonics of the terrorist deed and then of its literary commemoration in Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (1882). Stepniak-Kravchinskii uses historical narrative to perform essential plot revisions and linguistic reclamations (for example, of the word Nihilist) and employs the device of “personal recollections” to authenticate and lend emotional and sensual immediacy to his representation of “the Terrorism” and its place of origin, Underground Russia.

This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 “Meeting of Openness” coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.

The largest metropolis in Galicia was known to its Austrian rulers as Lemberg. The Poles, who dominated the city after 1867, referred to it as Lwόw, while the Ukrainian minority called it L'viv. German, Polish, and Ukrainian-speaking inhabitants constituted the officially recognized national groups, but there also existed a large Jewish element, which in 1900 made up approximately 30 percent of the population. Appearing in Austrian and Polish statistics only as adherents of the Mosaic faith, the Jews differed from their neighbors in far more than religion. Though formally emancipated in 1868, Galician Jewry resembled in all other respects that of Russia. The combination of a very large Jewish minority and a very backward social and economic structure, in Galicia as in the Pale of Settlement, placed great obstacles in the path of cultural assimilation.

This article traces the structural roots of the current crisis in US-Russia relations (the weakening of US hegemony and the resurgence of Russian power), and chronicles the series of contingencies that accompanied Donald Trump's rise to the presidency and his chaotic first few months in office. The details of Russia's influence over the results of the election through the release of hacked Democratic Party emails, and over the composition and policy of the new Trump Administration, are still emerging. The chances of a “grand bargain” between Trump and Putin look increasingly remote, however. Russia's efforts to dabble in American politics seem to have blown back, and made rapprochement between Moscow and Washington more difficult. This is unfortunate, since cooperation between the two sides to resolve a number of pressing global problems, from the wars in Ukraine and Syria to climate change, is urgently needed.

In his account of the military organization of the Turks (= Magyars), the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Sage repeatedly compares the Magyars with the Bulgarians, and in doing so emphasises that the customs of the Magyars differed from those of the Bulgarians only in so far as the latter had embraced the Christian religion and, adapting themselves to Byzantine morals, had abandoned both their savage and nomadic characteristics and their paganism. By this he alludes to the fact, on the one hand, that the Bulgarian prince Boris and his people had become Christians as early as 864, which means that they had merged in the community of Christian peoples, and to the negative fact, on the other hand, that the Magyars, whom he had come to know during the war in 894-95 but who, at the time of his work was written (between 904-912), were already living in their present country, had not as yet been converted.

Before the 1917 Revolution, about one hundred and thirty thousand people of Finnish origin lived on Russian territory on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland—from the Narva River in the west to the Neva River in the east, and in the region north of St. Petersburg. Their numbers remained fairly constant during the 1920s and early 1930s, but, after the Second World War, a great decrease was evident in the total Finnish population of the region, with only about twentyfour thousand recorded in the 1970 Soviet census. This drop in population is attributable not only to the ravages of the war but also to movements of people, including deportations that took place during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Bolshevik revolution represented a remarkable opportunity for many academics and professionals. The demands of governing a region as vast as the new Soviet state necessitated official patronage of the sciences, and the party and government provided sources of support for disciplines that had been underfunded, underdeveloped, or completely nonexistent before 1917. After the revolution, cartographers, linguists, geographers, ethnographers, social hygienists, and others found themselves the beneficiaries of a regime eager to learn about the lands that it had suddenly inherited and to spread the news of revolution to the backward peoples of the former empire. As much recent scholarship has shown, far from being the mere conduits for policies devised at the center, these specialists were professionals of variable talent and training with interests, projects, and agendas of their own. Government policy toward the nationalities, and perhaps toward scientific research in general, emerged not simply as a result of Moscow's diktat, but as a complex interplay among the center's patronage and attendant demands, the professional interests and programs of the specialists dispatched by the center, and the local interests of their colleagues and subjects in the outlying reaches of the Soviet state.

Judging by most indexes of modernization, Joseph Stalin's long cherished dream of the socialist East overtaking the capitalist West remains unfulfilled. Ironically, however, the states of Eastern Europe may be close to preeminence in one unwelcome area: environmental pollution. Atmospheric emissions of sulfur dioxide in Czechoslovakia and Poland reportedly approximate similar emissions in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. Many waterways in Yugoslavia are said to be “polluted beyond all domestic, European, and world standards,” and in East Germany and Romania less than 20 percent of the main water-courses are sufficiently pure to provide potable water. The Slovak capital of Bratislava allegedly possesses the “worst environment among our own and other European cities,” while Western experts consider air pollution levels in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia to be among the highest in the world.

In 1991, the Supreme Soviets of both the Soviet Union and the RSFSR approved legislation that was a decisive departure from the tentativeness about individual initiative that had characterized the Gorbachev era until then. Between January and July, a series of laws was enacted which pointedly endorsed entrepreneurship and outlined aspects of a program to remove a broad spectrum of enterprises from state control. Scholarly analysis, however, highlighted a potential obstacle to the incipient transition toward a market economy: public opinion. During the period that the 1991 laws were being enacted, most Soviet and foreign scholars studying the subject were maintaining that the Soviet people generally opposed private enterprise and that historical suspicion about capitalism would probably make the transition away from state ownership particularly difficult.

A state's power, indeed its very survival, is closely related to the adequacy of its military organization to meet foreign policy needs. Not only is this adequacy dependent upon manpower and other economic resources, plus efficiency, training, and morale factors; it is also greatly affected by weapons technology.

Alexander Gerschenkron has noted that the requirements of external war compelled Russia to seek the most advanced military techniques even though it lacked a comparable level of economic and technological development. Russia's attempts to meet these needs deeply involved the government in the country's economic development, with the result, Gerschenkron argues, that this development was “peculiarly jerky,” because the government's intervention in the economy fluctuated according to military exigencies. During periods of great military need the government would place heavy burdens on the population; then, when the emergency passed, the government would relax its intervention in the economy, leaving the country disorganized and exhausted.

Recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is awash with emotions. Affective social science, the cognitive poetics of emotion, the philosophy of emotions, the history of emotions, and the outer markers of institutionalization and professionalization—conferences, research clusters, dissertations, publications—together create a solid impression: this is a “turn,” if there ever was one.

It appears that this turn has reached Slavic studies. That it has taken so long may seem surprising. After all, in the western European imagination, “the east,” and Russia as a part thereof, has long been linked with emotion—so unmediated and untrammeled that an indication of quantity sufficed as a description: too much emotion, extreme emotion, rather than a different kind of emotion. Whence the current emotional turn? Let me briefly map some of the roads that led to it.

A significant factor in the history—and one of the bones of contention in the historiography—of the Slovene minority in the Austrian province of Carinthia is what is known as the Windischentheorie. This pseudoacademic “theory“ was developed, on the basis of popular beliefs, during the interwar years and promulgated by those with fascist, later Nazi, sympathies and was an apparently very effective weapon in the Germanization process. The Windischentheorie changed over time; according to what may be called its “canonical” version, the language of the Carinthian Slovenes was quite different from Standard Slovene and the Carinthian Slovenes themselves were therefore ethnically distinct from Slovenes in Slovenia. Other versions of the “theory” are described below. The meaning of the word Windisch, which had been used by German speakers to mean “Slav” for many centuries, was thereby changed radically and with important political effect.

In recent years, Soviet officials and scholars have expressed increasing concern about the "lack of discipline" among industrial workers in the USSR. Labor productivity remains low, and it is improving at an unacceptably slow pace. At the same time, "shirking," "idling," on-the-job drunkenness, and industrial accidents are widespread. But the most troublesome manifestation of the Soviet worker's lack of discipline is the high rate of labor turnover.

The development or lack of development of private property rights in Russia commands interest and significance far beyond the narrow confines of legal history. The institution of private property serves not only as a bulwark of stability but also as a limit to the state's authority. In the words of Richard Pipes, “Ownership of property creates a commitment to the political and legal order since the latter guarantees property rights: it makes the citizen into a co-sovereign, as it were.” Elsewhere Pipes notes that in the west private property “confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority.”

Historians have Described the gentry as the most powerful and influential social group in eighteenth-century Russia. The gentry developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a social class, or estate, from the fusion of the old feudal aristocracy with the younger military and administrative service class. The view that the gentry was the pillar of absolutism and of the Russian state was virtually unchallenged during the eighteenth century. The special status of the Russian gentry derived principally from the fact that its members constituted the first social group that could not be treated arbitrarily by the state. The Russian state recognized certain rules of conduct in respect to the gentry, and by and large observed those rules, at a time when other social groups possessed no safeguards, as individuals or collectively, in their dealings with the state.

A war frontier in Lithuania was engendered by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in March of 2014 and the beginning of the undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. This essay explores how the new war frontier emerged in Lithuania, becoming an integral part of the public sphere and civic life. I argue that the war frontier is a social institution of sovereign uncertainty, which engenders divisive politics of historical justice, protection of the majority’s rights, and dangers to liberalism. The geopolitical insecurity and sovereign uncertainty that define this Baltic frontier are essential to understand how Lithuania can be a strong ally of NATO and the EU, a proponent of democratic politics and liberalism, a claimant to regional security expertise to lead western countries, and at the same time undermine liberal ideals of tolerance, multiculturalism, and pluralism.