Among the approaches one might adopt in studying church-state interaction is one that endeavors to treat both church and state as active subjects and which tries to be sensitive to factional divisions within both. This approach makes it clear that just as a regime may have a religious policy, the churches may also have policies toward the regime, and that the resulting relationship reflects the interplay of both policies. If there are factions in both state and church, the policies of both will be the subject and the product of continuing debate and struggle among the factions.

Sensitivity to factionalism is not a black-and-white issue but a matter of degree. Nevertheless, Western writings on church-state relations under communism may be grouped into four general categories. In the first category are works treating both church and state as unified (nonfactionalized) entities—either explicitly (by denying factionalism) or implicitly (by ignoring it as analytically unimportant).

According to the evidence found in historical records, the first influences of the Byzantine Christian mission had reached the Magyars prior to the conquest of present Hungary while they were still on the shores of the Black Sea. As I have proved in detail in an earlier treatise, we must surmise that, when they took possession of their present land, the Magyar people had brought with them a knowledge of Christianity.

However, the Byzantine mission was not the sole factor in preparing the Magyars for their acceptance of the new faith. This acceptance was influenced also by the earlier Christian traditions of the new land which ultimately became their country. From Roman times (ancient Christian relics of which are being excavated in increasing numbers) to the appearance of the Magyars, Christianity had existed without interruption in Hungarian territory.

The Army Specialized Training Program brought to the fore numerous problems connected with Russian instruction which, on the basis of the new experience gained, may now be profitably discussed, with some thought of formulating a standard or at least generally applicable procedure. Over the last fourteen years, I have taught beginner's Russian to some twenty-five classes, ranging from the conventional three hours per week schedule to intensive courses with one, two, or three class hours daily for periods of six to twelve weeks and, finally, to the nine months’ Army program with fifteen contact-hours per week. At first glance this might seem like a respectable body of practice on which to generalize. But while the subsequent professional performances of many of our students during this period have been encouraging, I do not wish the present article to be regarded as unduly dogmatic. Looking backward, I think we should have been more ingenious in innovation, and certainly more productive of useful textbooks and other teaching aids. But here, until very recently, lack of time, money, equipment, publisher's interest, and competent assistance may serve in some sense as a valid excuse for defects in performance.

Students of the Soviet political system have frequently noted the high turnover rates and the short terms of office of middle and lower ranking Soviet party and governmental officials. Soviet leaders have striven to combat the formation of informal structures within the party and governmental bureaucracies which, if allowed to go unchecked, could erode the control of the central political leadership.

Since 1989, the question of public values has been one of the most critical and the most controversial in the study of postcommunist politics. While there seems to be a consensus that people should accept democratic and market-based norms, there is little agreement on how much they actually do so—or on how much they need to, if markets and democracy are to survive.

The 1 December 1934 murder of Soviet Communist Party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov has long been considered a pivotal event in Soviet history, not least of all because of the attention it received in the USSR. But although there is much controversy over Stalin’s role in the assassination, and on the connection between Kirov’s death and the Soviet terror of the 1930s, most observers concur that once Kirov was dead, the government attempted to orchestrate public opinion of his death as a calamity with broad implications. For days after the slaying, the Soviet leadership devoted hours of radio time and pages of newsprint to mourning the loss of the 48-year-old Politburo member, Central Committee secretary, and Leningrad regional and city party leader and to denouncing those allegedly behind the murder. In turn, local party functionaries organized meetings of workers, peasants, students, and housewives to collectively mourn “Mironych” and to reflect upon his life and work, while also exhorting citizens to make donations of cash or labor in his memory. The authorities lauded Kirov as the “truest son and outstanding leader” (deiatel’) of the party; headlines proclaimed “Kirov can never be torn from our hearts” and “Until the end of our days we will remember your life and struggle, Comrade Kirov!“

In the north Caucasus, collective dance has long been an expression of communal identity and a forum for political dissent. In this article Sufian Zhemukhov and Charles King examine the emergence and transformation of a communal dance form known as adyge jegu (roughly, “Circassian festival“) in the Russian republics of Adygeia, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. They chart the history of the adyge jegu after 2005, elucidate debates over the meaning of authenticity in contemporary Circassian nationalism, and provide a detailed archaeology of the specific decisions that enabled this cultural artifact to get constructed in one way but not another. While attention typically focuses on elite-driven narratives of border security and terrorism, the adyge jegu highlights grassroots debates over the meaning of right behavior, the boundaries of communal identity, and alternatives to Russianness in either its russkii or rossiiskii varieties.

Over twenty years ago Merle Fainsod warned against underestimating the “fluid play of bureaucratic politics” in the Stalinist political system. However, scholars have generally regarded the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) of the VKP(b) as immune to this process during Stalin’s reign as general secretary. They have assumed either that Stalin did not permit conflict between the directors of the various bureaucratic divisions in the Secretariat or that such conflict could simply not develop in the leading organ of the party’s apparat.

The national heroes of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that emerged in literary culture during the nineteenth century were warrior heroes. In the twentieth century, a series of interpretations and adaptations by leading authors disarmed and desacralized Kalevipoeg, Bearslayer (Lāčplēsis), and King Mindaugas, tempering or rejecting their violent actions and recasting these central allegories of national myth into a nonviolent mold. These heroes are part of the cultural context in which the nonviolent Baltic “Singing Revolution” emerged; they offer an intriguing example of evolving (or devolving) aggressive drives and the civilizing process in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national cultures.

In the early 1990s social scientists began to refer to migrants who retained familial and economic ties with their country of origin as transnational. The term eventually gained currency among historians who had found multiple examples of such ties in earlier decades and centuries. Although migrants traveling among former Soviet republics came to be understood as transnational, Soviet-era migrants never have been so characterized. We contend that this is due to a double blindness: that of migration scholars to the Soviet Union as a “state of nations,” and that of historians of the Soviet period to migration as a complicating element in the construction of nationality. By emphasizing the transnational dimension of “internal” Soviet migration, we seek to sharpen awareness of how nationality worked in the Soviet context, particularly in its last decades. We thus posit the maintenance of economic, familial and other affective ties across Soviet national boundaries as the Soviet version of transnationalism—transnationalism in one country. We also suggest the ways that despite its well-deserved reputation for limiting international migration and otherwise restricting its citizenry, the Soviet state facilitated transnationalism within its borders.

Organized by a Moscow learned society, the Polytechnical Exposition of 1872 helped mobilize resources for popularizing science that connected tsarist officialdom, the Moscow municipal government and business community, university scientists, and other private associations. Although the relationship between the autocratic government and society is often portrayed in terms of conflict, partnership was more typically the rule, especially in the effort to build a native science infrastructure. The grand exhibitions of science and industry of the nineteenth century were sites of modernity that displayed visions of progress, created a public culture, and fashioned national identity. Moscow's Polytechnical Exposition juxtaposed the modern and the foreign with the traditional and the Russian in order to demonstrate that Russia could have modern science and technology without abandoning its traditional culture. Paradoxically, to assert its place in European civilization in an age of nationalism and imperialism, Russia had to assert its Russianness—its cultural distinctiveness, patriotism, and imperial pride. With its emphasis on change and progress, as well as on traditional Russian culture, the exposition fostered a Russian public aware of its place in a changing world, of its place in history, of its identity as a nation.

Since the sixth century, the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodoxy has been Constantinople's Hagia Sophia Cathedral and, since the eleventh century, that of Russian Orthodoxy in two cathedrals dedicated to that same Holy Wisdom. Yet few Orthodox believers would recognize any icon of Sophia.

Vladimir Solov'ev, in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898), describes three visions of Sophia—each a somewhat indistinct image of feminine beauty, suffused in a “golden azure” light. Possibly, Solov′ev's perception of Sophia originated in an icon he saw as a child (his first vision having occurred when he was nine); the Orthodox church, however, found his almost fanatical obsession with the divine femininity of Sophia to be highly objectionable. In particular, the Sophiology based on Solov′ev's writings, and advanced after his death first by Pavel Florenskii and then by Sergei Bulgakov, was attacked by the church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bulgakov's idea of Sophia was seen by the church as “involving a fourth feminine hypostasis in the Holy Trinity” who acted as a “gnostic intermediary between God and the world”; it was condemned as heretical. The church's unyielding position in this controversy was (and is) that only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true Sophia—the Divine Wisdom of God—in accordance with 1 Cor. 1:23-31: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”

Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the selfunderstandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri's performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri's efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri's “official” correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri's case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.

The Bolsheviks created a new system for the production and distribution of the printed word to replace the prerevolutionary print media. This innovation was in many respects the most remarkable of the early revolutionary years, since it led to the radical dichotomy between public and private codes of behavior that has plagued Soviet society ever since.

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.

For more than 135 years the “Will” of Peter the Great has flitted across the stage of history at moments of tension between Russia and her Western neighbors. Recently it turned up at a business luncheon in New York in a speech delivered before a large audience; it is being discussed by “displaced persons” in their camps throughout Central Europe; and it was circulated among the armed forces of a European nation. Anonymous and parentless as a ghost, it appears, gains credence, and then vanishes again into its forgotten grave.

Here is the text as it appears today:

1. The Russian nation must be constantly on a war footing to keep the soldiers warlike and in good condition. No rest must be allowed, except for the purpose of relieving the state finances, recruiting the Army, or biding the Favorable moment for attack. By this means peace is made subservient to war, and war to peace, in the interest of aggrandizement and increasing prosperity of Russia.

In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientific Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants’ rather heterodox conceptions of the afterlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I find that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the afterlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state’s problematic dependency on atheism. The regime’s legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could often prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.

“Lyric dialogism” is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, “Slovo v romane” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently “monologic,” as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel. He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century. On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry.

Ukrainian peasant women of the postemancipation Russian Empire, like their Russian counterparts, faced an oppressive patriarchal system in both family and village. Over the ages peasants strictly delineated tasks and functions according to gender and age in order to meet the demands of a predominantly agricultural economy. The precariousness of subsistence agriculture and the peasantry's burdensome obligations to family, community, and state reinforced inflexible and oppressive power relations in the village. Ukrainian peasants feared that any departure from the subordination of woman to man, child to parent, young to old, and weak to strong would threaten the existence of their society and culture.