Some time ago a leading biographer of Joseph Stalin observed with a touch of irony that de-stalinization was a process “not only made possible but actually initiated by the death of Stalin.” Accordingly, some have turned to events in the final months of the dictator's life for evidence that, to the last, Stalin retained a firm grip on the levers of power; others have pointed to the new era of moderation in agriculture, literature and criminal justice which appears to have set in following Stalin's death. It was, so it seems, only with the conclusion of Stalin's reign that the hopes for stability and liberalization first raised at the end of World War II could finally be met. Only the dictator's death, it has been argued, could have put an end to absolute autocracy and opened the way for a new era of oligarchical rule.

Any Survey of Russian economic history has two serious barriers to surmount. The first is a tendency to assume that this history either began or ended in 1917; the second is a tendency, induced in part by the remoteness of the country and in part by the difficulty of pronouncing Russian geographical names, to assume that the Soviet Union is a homogeneous steppe evenly populated throughout. This article will survey the growth of the Russian railroad network on the assumption that there is a considerable measure of continuity in Russian economic development, and that regional factors are very important in explaining the course of that development.

Problems of ownership and control are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but it may be helpful to the general reader to have some idea of the history of the ownership of the Russian railroad network. Ownership and construction of railroads in nineteenth-century Russia were handled in various ways.

In April 1965, an illegal demonstration brought an estimated twenty thousand people to the streets of Yerevan to call for the official recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the return of “Armenian lands.” While this event is traditionally seen as “dissident” and “anti-Soviet,” in this article I draw attention to the demonstration's particularly Soviet character, as it followed rules and practices central to Soviet rituals and the official revolutionary narrative. Party officials and petitioners expressed similar views on past national suffering and its implications for the Soviet community and the communist future, all of which were in turn to be affirmed by the construction of the first genocide memorial ever built on Soviet soil. These local reinterpretations of the Soviet project do not just point to developments that help explain the Soviet system's longevity. They are also a reminder that the constant reimagining of communities not only pertains to the “nation” but also concerns and often intermingles with the reimagination of other communities, such as the Soviet one.

In this article, Sheila Fitzpatrick investigates the phenomenon of Soviet conmanship in the Stalin period through the medium of conman stories, both real (as reported in newspapers and archives) and fictional. While attention is paid to the distinctive characteristics of conman stories as a discursive genre, die main emphasis is on the social. The article explores the sources and processes of the Soviet confidence trick, as well as showing how conmen and their exploits illuminate social, bureaucratic, and cultural practices. In the comparison of prewar and postwar periods, the “Jewishing” of the conman in postwar representation is discussed and related to the broader phenomenon of officially encouraged anti-Semitism in the late Stalin period.

Historical studies of the Russian empire in upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century have tended to be animated by a narrow centralist bias or an equally narrow regional one. Although it is clear that the primary impulse for revolutionary situations in 1905 and 1917 resulted from events in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a Russocentric approach to a society that was less than 50 percent Russian is surely inadequate. At the same time, studies of individual minority nationalities, however thorough, tend to view these groups in isolation. A comparative perspective, which could identify broader uniformities as well as local peculiarities, is usually lacking. In this article I shall present a synthesizing and comparative overview of the Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. Although these areas constituted only 2 percent of the land area of the Russian empire and had less than 4 percent of its population in 1905,2 they were among the most modernized in the country, and their ethnic diversity and differing histories provide abundant material for a comparative case study.

Scholars use a variety of terms to refer to the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Some prefer communist, while others use socialist or state socialist. In this article, Andrew Roberts argues that communism is the better choice. Using socialism or state socialism to refer to these regimes stretches the concept unnecessarily, making one label refer to two regimes with little in common. This conceptual stretching has two negative consequences. First, it impedes efficient scholarly communication. Second, it impoverishes political debate by diminishing the achievements of democratic socialists. A solution to this problem is to use the term communist to refer to Soviet-style regimes.

The “other archipelago” of “special setdements” was a cornerstone of the evolving gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei) order. Scholars have paid relatively scant attention to the special settlements, which emerged first to isolate and exploit the labor of the dekulakized peasantry and within a short time would house a variety of other state-defined social and ethnic aliens through the course of the Stalin years. This article explores the history of the other archipelago in the year 1930, its founding and perhaps most difficult year, focusing on the NortiV ern Region. It was here that the state chose to send over a quarter of a million peasants, the single largest contingent of dekulakized peasant families in 1930. Against this icy backdrop, the special setders—men, women, and children—built the villages of the other archipelago within the wilderness.

The American and British periodical publications have devoted considerable attention to reporting the contents of Eugene S. Varga's Changes in the Economy of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War and to the discussion and criticism in the Soviet Union centering on this work. The time is ripe for a more full account of this important development on what in Soviet terminology is called the “theoretical front” than brief journalistic treatments have been able to provide. The basic materials both for ideological and for political interpretation are now available. Further developments may, of course, occur, particularly in the sphere of administrative measures applied by the Party authorities to economists who hold erroneous and harmful views.

This article explores narratives surrounding child soldiers in Poland, with a particular focus on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. My discussion examines a variety of contexts in which this figure appears, such as urban spaces, press debates, popular literature, and educational games, and unpacks the taboos associated with cultural constructions of childhood. The article points to the complex interaction between the enduring narratives of resistance and the struggle for independence which characterize Poland and the international humanitarian discourse on the use of children in war which goes beyond the local context. More generally, I show that the representations of Warsaw's young insurgents speak less of the children and their rights and more of contemporary notions of Polish national identity, the nation's wished-for or projected development, and collective hopes and fears in the wake of its accession to the European Union.

So far in the twenty-first century, triumphalism has dominated Russian culture. As manifest in popularized history and film, this wave has often been described by recourse to interpretive paradigms derived from a neo-Soviet or neo-socialist realist orientation, particularly when the subject is war. While understandable, this interpretive practice cannot account for salient productions that upstage Soviet conventions by reconfiguring the Russian historical experience along a narrative trajectory anchored by two scenarios diat constitute the alpha and omega of national achievement and pride: Aleksandr Nevskii and the Time of Troubles. Tapping into deep structures of myth, contemporary reproductions of these two tie their significance explicitly to the post-Soviet period. Supported by the state and church, their increasing traction in war narratives facilitates a new discourse of nationalism that supersedes Soviet precedent, reconfigures traditional domains of triumphalism, and sets a standard for future constructions of Russian history that eclipses key problems of the real or imagined past.

The period 1917-21 in Russia found the fledgling Bolshevik government engaged in desperate military struggles with imperial Germany, with several White Russian armies assisted in varying degrees by foreign troops and supplies, with national movements for independence, and with a newly restored Poland. Yet despite an ever-present military threat to the very existence of the new government, many Bolshevik leaders remained constantly aware that theirs was a revolutionary regime, with the goal of achieving a radical trans? formation of the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions they had inherited. Consequently this same period witnessed, in addition to the crucial military conflicts, several experimental efforts to achieve thoroughgoing institutional change.

Higher education was one such target of reform, and this paper will describe succeeding attempts undertaken during 1917-21 to implement three radically different blueprints for reform of the higher educational system.

The report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in România, issued in December 2006, is the most serious attempt to understand România's communist experience ever produced. Coordinated by the American political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, the report covers virtually every aspect of communism as a lived system, from the installation of Communist Party officials during the postwar occupation, through the instruments of coercion, to the fate of religious institutions, the economy, national minorities, and education. The release of the report also contributed to a major political crisis, during which the parliament attempted to unseat the president, Traian Basescu, who had lauded the report and officially condemned communism as an illegitimate system. The question now is whether the commission's report will be used as yet another opportunity to reject history or as a way of helping Românians learn, at last, how to own it.

Between 1956–68 economic expertise became Poland's key export product in the decolonizing world. India, a broker of social science in the Cold War, became a geopolitical gateway for Polish economists’ spread of developmental thinking that revived heterodox Marxism and peasant studies. In this article, Małgorzata Mazurek investigates epistemic and intellectual effects of Polish – Indian encounters and how they evolved separately from Soviet Third World politics. Mazurek argues that during de-Stalinization and decolonization, failures and obstacles to planning and land reforms came to be seen as a common ground between eastern Europe and South Asia. This shared perception also revived the historical legacy of central and east European social science, which was internationalized in new ways both because, and in spite, of the Cold War.

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic “empire of knowledge.” It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.

Historians have had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the debacle wrought by Operation Barbarossa. How could the Red Army, a large and heavily equipped force, be so thoroughly decimated by the Wehrmacht, especially when evidence of the impending attack was plentiful? Most commonly, explanations have focused on the unexpectedly rapid success of the Blitzkrieg in western Europe, the impact of the Great Purges on the Soviet officer corps, the problems of reequipping the Red Army with modern weaponry and protecting newly expanded borders, the lack of adequate training for the rapidly growing Soviet armed forces, the confusing nature of available intelligence, and, most of all, the nearly fatal self-delusion of Iosif Stalin, which prevented the implementation of proper defensive measures. Although Stalin certainly realized that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was no more than a temporary truce and that a German attack was ultimately inevitable, he deluded himself that Adolf Hitler could be appeased until Soviet forces had grown strong enough to meet the Nazi assault. Soviet shipments of petroleum products, various raw materials, and foodstuffs were critically important to the German war machine and, thus, the key element in Stalin's strategy of appeasing Hitler.

In this essay Galina Yankovskaya explores the economic aspects of Soviet artistic life, which were often as important as political factors or censorship in determining the formal features and content of art production. Yankovskaya considers a complex of multisided trends: Russian artists' egalitarian imagination, the expectations of a new art audience, and the authorities' intentions. Exploring the confusing history of art institutions (mostly Vsekokhudozhnik, but also the Union of Artists and the Artistic Fund) within the everyday routines of the Soviet planned economy enables Yankovskaya to examine the clash of economic, ideological, and political motives in Stalinist culture and to look at how artists escaped from official ideology or exploited it for their own goals of appearing “busy.” Certain specific practices from this system of art production and distribution, such as the state's financial support as well as regulation of the art market, copyright law, and the mass production of handmade copies, survived into the post-Stalinist period.

The main argument presented in this essay is that the politics of Ataka, the most successful and influential populist party in Bulgaria, should be construed as a form of left-wing radicalism. Originally a nationalist formation, over the last decade Ataka has evolved into a broader social movement that blames free markets, neoliberalism, and US led neocolonialism for the country's misfortunes. Today its activists routinely assault liberal democracy as a political system unable to cope with the evils of capitalism, and seek to marginalize political actors and social constituencies identified as pro-western.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and the other successor states lost much of their collective strategic significance for the international community. Russia's role as a new member of the nuclear club is potentially destabilizing but does not present the overriding nuclear threat once posed by the USSR. Although Russia is attempting to reestablish its traditional roles in Eurasia, the Balkans and eastern Europe, its political importance has generally decreased commensurate with the collapse of the Soviet military machine; Russia is important economically only insofar as it is a powerful magnet for western aid and investment. While this perception of gradual marginalization, apparently shared by western diplomats, academics and journalists, may be largely accurate, it is incomplete. It overlooks Russia's potential role as a source of natural resources.

Very close ties exist between Soviet belles-lettres and the official “line” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The organizations of Soviet writers are important connecting links between individual authors and Party authorities; before a literary work is submitted for final approval to the Glavlit, the official Government censorship, it is frequently discussed by the relevant committee of the Union of Soviet Writers.

The propaganda value attached to literature by the Soviet leaders was once eloquently expressed by Karl Radek, who said that although the pen cannot replace the rifle, it can mobilize and multiply these rifles. Perhaps some such sentiment, rather than aesthetic insight, was behind the statement generally attributed to Stalin, in which a writer is called “an engineer of the human soul.”