A number of studies of income distribution have suggested that income inequality in the United States showed some tendency to decline during the 1930's and the war years. Although the extent and timing of the decline may be in dispute among specialists in this area, and some recent studies suggest that no significant changes in income shares have occurred since 1944, the American Income Revolution has nonetheless been widely accepted and acclaimed. All the more reason, it would seem, that studies of changes in income inequality in Soviet Russia should prove of great interest. If income inequality has been reduced in the world's major capitalist economy, what has been happening to income distribution in the Soviet Union?

This article examines how a discourse on international image animated Macedonian politics following the country's 2001 conflict and how it reflected a broader cultural politics of European Union expansion. Contrasting with the continual deferral of recognition that characterized European integration in Macedonia, the Macedonian discourse on image (imidž) anchored a social imaginary where a national project of marketing could facilitate Macedonia's accession into the European Union and concretize its belonging to "Europe." The analysis developed here centers on the ambivalences in this discourse and the practices it authorized. By incorporating both orientalist distinctions and key concepts from the European Union's own process of integration, the discourse of imidž supported the neoliberal reform associated with Macedonia's postconflict restructuring and European integration. But the discourse on imidž also provided Macedonian political actors with an idiom in which to imagine, respond to, and capitalize on the larger political forces engendered by discursive constructs of Europe and the international community.

The significance of the reign of Alexander III as a turning point in the history of Russian Jewry is beyond dispute. This reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in the Jews’ economic, social, and political condition. Jewish hopes for emancipation from the prevailing discriminatory legislation were dashed. Instead of emancipation, the Jews were presented with new restrictions, on their residence rights, educational opportunities, economic and professional pursuits, and participation in the institutions of local government. Faced with starvation, many thousands of Jews chose to leave the Russian Empire. Others chose to convert to Christianity in order to throw off the yoke of persecution. Moving in the opposite direction, many Jewish intellectuals who had previously believed in the beneficial results to be achieved by assimilation began to question this assumption. Some began to turn to Zionism. Others turned to active Jewish self-defense.

Based on archival and other materials from Rostov-on-Don, a major industrial center in southern Russia, Jeffrey W.Jones examines the different representations of collaboration apparent in Soviet society during and after the war. Jones analyzes several different levels of discourse: inner party deliberations and reports on the subject, depictions of collaborators and their actions in the local party press, questions and comments of workers and others at public meetings as recorded by party officials, and Cold War and post-Cold War era memoirs and interviews. These sources overlap to a significant degree but deal with the complex issue of collaboration in nuanced ways, stressing different themes and asking different questions. The evidence reveals a subtle divide in the perception and representation of this issue between party leaders and the population at large while also showing that the party's public assurances of cossack loyalty contrasted with a widely shared assumption of cossack disloyalty.

In recent decades, the rediscovery of historical ethnography in western historiography has produced an extensive literature on "popular Christianity" in many European societies. Until recently, however, this historiographical current has exercised very limited influence on historical study in the former Soviet Union. In one sense, Russian historians had no need for such influence; the populist tradition in Russian historiography and its continuation in marxist-leninist attire meant that the study of popular attitudes and beliefs was hardly the novelty it was in other countries in recent decades.

During the last three decades of the tsarist regime the business tax system became the experimental vanguard of the entire tax structure. Thirty-one years before a general income tax on all estates (sosloviia) was confirmed in April 1916, Russia's first permanent income taxes on business were imposed in January 1885.

Sacha Baron Cohen maps a cultural background for his “Borat” character by creating a hyperreal Kazakhstan that is based, nonetheless, on gradations of a “real,” yet Orientalized, eastern Europe and Balkan region. Having no cultural connections to its actual Central Asian namesake, “Borat's Kazakhstan” is a Baudrillardian simulacrum because, for a western filmgoer, it essentially replaces the original. Scratching beneath the surface, however, we see that Baron Cohen composes his clown-journalist using exotic, yet familiar, “realities” from the “Other” in Europe's backyard. Using Edward Said's Orientalism (along with Milica Bakić-Hayden's and Maria Todorova's modifications of the idea), Dickie Wallace describes how this discursive bricolage of eastern European and Balkan music, language, folkloristic rituals, and archetypes, as well as continual tabu violations and commonsensical acceptance of violence, gives the character the sharp parodic elements that have had western audiences laughing even while wincing as they recognize themselves in this “Other.“

The return of the first wave émigrés' cultural legacy at a critical juncture of postcommunist transformation in 1990s Russia presents a case study of a dialogue between the diaspora and the homeland. The belated encounter of shared national traditions reveals a history of competing cultural monopolies, incongruous resemblances, and matching nostalgias. Contemporary diaspora and postcolonial studies in the west have addressed such key issues as diaspora's self-definition in relation to the homeland, its strategies of resistance and accommodation, and transnational networks. The first part of the article presents a brief survey of Russia Abroad, its internal discourse concerning its legacy and the dream of return after losif Stalin's death. The second part considers the emerging field of diaspora studies in Russia, focusing on the dynamics of its reception, appropriation, and domestication. The range of partisan responses to the émigré legacy is considered a touchstone for the current debates concerning Russian national and cultural identity.

This article presents a critical political ecology of the various forms of tree theft in a Bulgarian locality. Based on primary fieldwork carried out almost annually since 1992, Chad Staddon argues that even in a relatively tightly bounded space such as a single locality or forest stand, environment-society relationships are sufficiently complex to make the enterprises of analysis and theory-building quite challenging. Yet, as this case study of tree theft shows, it is precisely because environment-society relationships are so intertwined that a “symmetrical” treatment of humans and nonhuman actors is required that takes us well beyond the bounds of “traditional” political ecology. Locating the treatment of tree theft in just such a social theoretical framework offers many benefits. Staddon contends that it is not possible to really understand, or develop policy for, tree theft without carefully considering the relational networks that bind together all the protagonists, including loggers, foresters, policy-makers, and local people, as well as trees, forests, road networks, and other nonhuman agents.

In early twentieth-century Russia, personal health became a commodity in a rapidly expanding commercial culture. As medical services and products (patent medicines, gadgets, self-help books) became widely available, new advertising strategies played upon both the threat of disease and the promise of health and well-being. This marketplace helped to feed new ideas about individual and social health, including such modern concepts as life-style choices. It also promoted competing models of the modern self: images of the weak and enervated victim of modern life were countered by visions of a healthy, strong, and controlled subject, able to master life forces. Focusing upon the disease construct of neurasthenia, Susan K. Morrissey explores how “nervousness” became a mass diagnosis and an emblem of the modern era—both its illnesses and its potential for regeneration. The making of a modern social sphere, Morrissey argues, depended not just on (professional) claims to specialized knowledge and broader political forces but also on commercial culture itself.

In May 1972, Petr Efimovich Shelest, first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was demoted and transferred to Moscow in the shadowy post of deputy premier. He continued to hold his seat in the Politburo in a kind of lame duck existence, until he was prematurely pensioned off eleven months later. No official charges were placed against him immediately, and most foreign observers attributed his fall to his hard-line views on foreign policy at the moment of budding detente. He was reported to have argued heatedly in the Politburo against the Nixon visit, and his removal on the eve of that occasion was seen as a means of getting him out of the way as the President’s host in Kiev. It was also recognized that Shelest was in trouble for his failures in party administration and his inability to stem the tide of intellectual dissent in the largest non-Russian republic. But the official charges that were eventually brought against him were of a different magnitude. He was accused not only of failing to maintain the norms of Leninist nationality policy, but of actively fostering the intensification of divisive Ukrainian nationalism.

In the last decades of Imperial Russia, peasant migrants from all over Russia swelled the ranks of urban dwellers. Impelled by the increasing impoverishment of their villages and the hope of a steady wage, they poured into the cities, some to remain for months or years, others to stay for life. The number of male migrants always exceeded the number of female, although the proportion of women was growing steadily. Even so, the majority of men either remained single or left wives and children in the village.

Thus far, the attention of most social historians has focused on the migrant: his relation to the means of production; the extent to which his experiences in city and factory contributed to the transformation of his consciousness from peasant to proletarian. This approach has yielded rich scholarly results. But, with the exception of the work of Rose Glickman, that scholarship has addressed the peasant migrant almost exclusively as male and regarded his relation to his village primarily as an obstacle on the path to proletarianization.

Drawing on the experience of Russian-speaking queer migrants in Berlin, the article furthers our understanding of queer migration by analyzing the motivations and integration strategies of LGBQ migrants, as well as their attempts to maintain and perform both their sexual and national identities in the post-migration context. The risk that they could be doubly marginalized—as ethnic minorities within the host society and sexual minorities in the established diasporic community—led to the establishment of Quarteera, a forum for Russian-speaking queers to perform and maintain both their sexual and ethno-cultural identities and give and receive social and psychological support, as well as a channel for expressing feelings of solidarity towards other Russian-speaking queers in the post-Soviet homeland. A further contribution of the article is thus highlighting the benefit of “queer diaspora” as a heuristic device to think about identity, belonging, and solidarity among sexual minorities in the context of dispersal and transnational networks.

The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.

In the two decades that followed the Crimean War the local police, always crucial elements of the tsarist system, assumed a new importance. Vested with special responsibility for maintaining law and order and occupying a key position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, they were cast in a major role in carrying out the Great Reforms of Alexander II. The task of fitting the police to assume this role was one of great concern to Russia's leaders and occupied their attention throughout the reign. This essay is a study of police reform in the area of Iaroslavl Province. It examines the background, nature, and success of government efforts to revitalize an essential branch of the Russian state system.

On the eve of the period of reforms the local police in Iaroslavl as in other Russian provinces were officials of enormous influence. They were the foundation stones of a giant bureaucratic pyramid, for in addition to their special superior—the Ministry of Internal Affairs—a host of ministries, councils, and other government agencies depended on them. Matters of finance and justice, the supervision of industry and commerce, the protection of life and property—all were the concern of the police.

This paper critically examines the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that despite the Soviet legacy of rather strong institutionalization and discursive presentation of nationality, the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of ethnic distinctiveness and virtually abandoned the use of ethnic categories in official discourse. While several smaller minorities retained some institutional backing and discursive presence, the once very large group of ethnic Russians ceased to be publicly presented and popularly perceived as clearly distinct from the bulk of Ukrainians. At the same time, Ukrainian citizens differ greatly in their ethnocultural practices and ethnolinguistic identifications, hence Ukraine certainly remains ethnoculturally diverse, and this seems to be a more appropriate designation than “multiethnic.”

This essay provides a critical decolonial intervention into the prevalent state of racial exceptionalism in mainstream sociological research on contemporary Russia. Following critical race theory's understanding of race as relationally constituted and rooted in discourses of Europeanness, modernity, and civilization, the essay shows that race is highly prevalent but unacknowledged in sociological studies of Russia. It is argued that dismissing race as analytically irrelevant in Russia seriously limits the sociological ability to explain social inequalities, engage with current global challenges and inadvertently gives racism new legitimacy. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques of sociology as a form of knowledge production, the essay points towards some ways of decolonizing sociological research concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia and overcoming racial exceptionalism.

The analysis of ritual plays an important role in efforts to reconstruct medieval mentalities. Often mute and always cryptic, medieval cultures rarely provide historians widi the rich programmatic texts that facilitate the study of political ideas. In response to this relative dearth of treatises and manifestoes, scholars have turned to various forms of symbolic behavior for clues concerning the character of the medieval mind. Students of Muscovy are certainly no exception. Recognizing that Old Russia was particularly “silent” (as George Florovsky put it), historians of late have turned their attention to the iconography of Russian life in an attempt to divine the nature of Muscovite ideology, and particularly political ideology.

While scholars of the Balkans have frequently emphasized the importance of nationalism in the region, labor migration has long been a critical component of economic, social, and cultural life. In this article, Keith Brown examines the connections between two well-documented cases of the risks faced by long-distance migrants from the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia, separated by a hundred years. Putting each case into its larger context—U.S. industrial expansion in the early 1900s, and U.S. military occupation in the early 2000s—Brown argues that the study of contemporary Macedonia demands attending to imperial and colonial histories that make clear the larger systems of power in which the country and its people have long been suspended.

The hostility that met feminist ideas and gender equality issues in east central Europe (ECE) after the demise of the Communist regimes was accompanied by a notion that feminism was imported to these societies after 1989. In the Czech Republic, the record of the publishing output by feminist scholars in the 1990s, however, speaks against this myth. Drawing on existing scholarship and the author's own research on cultural discourses of gender and on socialist state science policies and censorship, this article argues that there has been a long tradition of gender critique that was present in a variety of discourses even during late state socialism. It proposes that the feminist impulse began in the 19th century and continued in some form throughout the 20th century. It then examines how the myth of the feminist import came to exist and what were the possible sources of the hostility toward feminism in the 1990s.