Throughout the post-World War II period, the prevailing paradigm of international politics among Western scholars has assumed that the major task confronting the decisionmakers of all states is achieving security in an anarchic state system. It follows from this assumption that relations between relatively equal superpowers constitute, in Arnold Wolfers's phrase, “the relationship of major tension” in the postwar world. In the 1970s, however, there has been a revival among Western scholars of an alternative perspective on world politics: the theory of economic imperialism, or, as it is usually labeled in the 1970s, “dependency theory.” It is a perspective which focuses on unequal relations between states. In that perspective, “the basic model of international politics [is] the imperialist system that was centered upon states of unequal economic development,“ where “the relationship of major tension was between the developed and underdeveloped economies.“

It is clear that the global impact of the Russian Revolution over the last century has been immense. What is less clear, however, is the global impact on the revolution. Historians have appreciated that contemporaries made immediate comparisons with previous revolutions, especially the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, but considerations of broader global influences on the revolution have been rare. This article explores how historians can study these global influences, exploring the circulation of ideas and their influence on people and policies. Whilst not denying the continuing primacy of traditional “internal” factors in explaining the nature and process of the revolution, the article argues that globalizing 1917, as contemporaries did, helps historians to better understand the widespread belief in progress that fueled developments as people sought to create a new country, and to appreciate how people tried to make sense of the tumultuous events of revolution.

Soviet law is the law of a society of a new type. That society is an ideocracy, or a society allegedly ruled not by men, but by an idea, the idea in question being, of course, Marxism in its Leninist-Stalinist interpretation. An ideocracy seems, however, to require as much enforcement as any other type of society. Nobody questions the fact that, in the Soviet Union, coercion, both on the legal and extralegal level, reaches high levels of intensity.

In so far as Soviet law expresses the ideocratic nature of Soviet society, it must be, and actually is, unique. But not all is unique in that law; there are also many elements in which Soviet law differs only slightly from pre-Revolutionary Russian law. Since Imperial Russian law belonged to the family of Western law (in contradistinction to the Chinese, Hindu, Islamic and other families of law) and more exactly, to the class called “civil law” (in contradistinction to the common law of the Anglo-Saxon countries), European jurists and even American jurists, though not so easily, can find in that law many traits with which they are familiar.

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.

American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

In the eighteenth and more particularly in the nineteenth century, Russia enjoyed a reputation for unusually strong currents of religious spirituality. Most frequently these mystical currents have been traced to peculiarly native traditions, such as the Eastern patristic literature and the “naturally” mystical bent of the Russian mind. The influence of Western mysticism has been minimized, if not entirely overlooked. Actually, Western mysticism and theosophy were eagerly absorbed in Russia by religiously oriented thinkers from the reign of Peter the Great on into the era of romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Finally, Western mystical sources provided the chief inspiration for the leading theologian and philosopher in late nineteenth-century Russia, Vladimir Soloviëv (1853-1900), whose thought in turn had a decisive impact on the intellectual currents of the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture before World War I.

This article focuses on Soviet policy toward genealogically defined identity groups in the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. For Soviet authorities, kinship loyalties were problematic chiefly because they hindered the emergence of class consciousness among the Turkmen. Soviet officials pursued two essentially contradictory policies in their attempt to eliminate “tribalism” in the Turkmen republic. First, they sought to undermine the economic basis of genealogical affiliation by dismantling the existing system of collective land tenure. Second, they devised a policy of “tribal parity”, which attempted to suppress kin-based conflict by guaranteeing fair and equal treatment for all genealogical groups. Instead of allowing class consciousness to supplant kinship loyalties, however, Soviet rule tended to increase the salience of distinctions based on genealogy. Because of the close linkage between genealogy and socioeconomic standing in Turkmenistan, Soviet attempts to foment class conflict inadvertently exacerbated descent group conflict.

The revival of Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the century coincided with a wave of anti- Semitism, and many Russian intellectuals of the time, following Vladimir Solov'ev, understood the defense of the Jews as their Christian duty. For Solov'ev, however, interest in the Jews went beyond ethical considerations and ran deeper through his philosophy than even his Utopian vision of a theocracy based on Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the expression of what may be Solov'ev's central concept–the Divine Sophia–achieved clarity through his selective reading of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The argument that follows does not seek to prove influence, for Solov'ev approached the study of Kabbalah with well-formed philosophical convictions. Rather, Solov'ev's fascination with Jewish mysticism arises from affinity and recognition, as the Russian theologian sought a vocabulary with which to explain his own mystical intuitions.

The Western ideal of journalistic objectivity, influenced by liberal principles of the rulers' accountability to the ruled and the empirical skepticism of science, developed as an occupational response by journalists to marketplace competition among commercially or politically motivated suppliers of information and came to define the journalist's professional ethic of impartiality and independence. At the same time the term professionalism must be used advisedly. Journalism is a field with some but not all of the attributes of a profession. By the usual tests of the freedom of the practitioners to govern entry and exit from the field, to possess an exclusive right to carry on their trade, and to set the standards of performance, journalists are not as autonomous as, for example, physicians and attorneys. If they sought to close the shop to outsiders or to set standards of writing and reporting, they would be infringing upon the prerogatives of “management”—editors and publishers.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) elicits extreme and contradictory audience responses. Some filmgoers find it amusing and clever, while others consider it repulsive, even obscene. Analyzing the film's hero as a traditional and archetypical trickster figure, a master of contradictions, a violator of boundaries, can help explain audience reaction. But while traditional folklore tricksters act in a fantasy world, Sacha Baron Cohen entered the lives of real people in trickster (dis) guise. For theater audiences removed from the interactions that created Borat, this film might serve the function of traditional trickster narratives, even as those appearing in the film feel exploited. By using real people and real situations, Baron Cohen has also precluded a follow-up or sequel: folkloric tricksters adapt with time, but a person immediately recognizable as a Hollywood figure cannot reassume trickster (dis)guise.

In 1832, an imperial manifesto established a new social estate (soslovie) of “honored citizens.” The new status was granted to successful merchants, professionals, and artists, and gave them permanent (and sometimes inherited) privilege. Honored citizens have been largely forgotten or discounted, both by literary authors of the nineteenth century and by historians. They were, however, a conscious effort on the part of the imperial state to create a middle class in the context of an estate-based social structure, an effort that followed several decades of previous experimentation and discussion. Thousands of subjects of the Russian Empire took on the new status, to the point that by 1897 honored citizens outnumbered merchants. They understood themselves as having an honorable place in the social structure, and were understood as a sign of the status of Russian towns. Honored citizen status gave a certain amount of stability to the new middle class, although not every honored citizen prospered. As a social estate, honored citizens were unique, for they were not unified in opportunity, and because they did not have a collective association—they were individuals in the law. They were, as a result, present and important but paradoxical: while defined by estate law, they were closer to individual subjects or even citizens than almost anyone else in imperial society. In addition, their lack of a collective voice muted their radical potential, masking them from contemporary and historical view.

This paper examines Poland, Hungary, the UK and the US the most surprising cases of populist reaction. It argues that the social polarization caused by the failures of hyper-liberal reforms to the state, and the association of Social Democratic parties with those reforms, has provoked alienation from liberal democratic politics.

There are many and different types of racism in contemporary Russia: institutional racism, far-right racism, everyday (bytovoi) racism, and a fourth kind to which this essay will be devoted, the racism of the liberal intelligentsia. Russian liberal media's reaction to the BLM protests of 2020 has offered abundant material for the study of its social base, main tropes, and underlying logic. This article attempts to historicize it, locating its origins in the anti-Soviet pro-western dissidence of the stagnation era and illustrating its workings through some statements made by Joseph Brodsky and his milieu. Furthermore, the article identifies the intersection of two main ideas from which this racism emerges. In the first place, this is Cold-War rejection of real or perceived Soviet alliances with newly decolonized countries of Africa and Asia or with African Americans during the Civil Rights era. In the second place, this is dissident civilizational hierarchies that placed the west at the top and saw the east or the south as a backward space best avoided.

A case study of the Danube Commission is particularly interesting because the documentation on the Commission is more complete than for any other Soviet-controlled international organ and because within its operation have been reflected most of the basic political problems of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the Soviet maneuvers to eliminate all Western influence in the area, the Danube Commission was involved in the feud between Stalin and Tito, the reduction of intersatellite relations to a minimum, except those dictated directly from Moscow, and the Soviet disinterest in the economic development of Eastern Europe. In the post-Stalin period it was in the Commission that the first signs of rapprochement with Tito and an interest in multilateral cooperation and long range development of the Soviet sphere became apparent. Finally the present operation of the Commission shows the current character of Soviet bloc relations with Tito, condemned as a revisionist.

The mass migration of millions of minority peoples from their homelands during and after World War II was a surgeon's solution to a problem of long standing for many East European countries and especially for Hungary. As a result of this drastic attempt to eliminate completely the historic conflicts between national minority groups and the dominant people of the state in which they lived, the efforts of earlier regimes to reduce national friction may seem to have lost importance for the current politician. Such friction is admittedly no longer part of a live and sometimes sensitive problem, the more so since the states of Eastern Europe as they existed between the wars have ceased to exist, and since the domestic factors which gave rise to Hungarian policies of the time have changed radically. Yet, there may come a time again when the solutions of the present are subjected to review. An analysis of the policies and experience of the past may then be helpful in reaching conclusions. It is in this spirit that this study is presented by one who shared in the execution of some phases of the policy.

Beth Greene discusses the media portrayal of sales and marketing activities in the early phase of the Hungarian market reforms in the late 1960s. Using articles from the popular and specialist press and archive sources from Hungarian Radio and Television, the author argues that under the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), sellers were elevated as symbolic figures of market socialism and thus the modern socialist economy. The media portrayed sales activities as addressing endemic problems of the command economy, mediating production and consumption, and creating a buyer's market in which sellers would compete for customers. This article provides a unique approach in examining the role of sellers and selling under the market socialism, adding to the rich literature on state socialist consumption and challenging the traditional view that Soviet bloc governments sought to control production and consumption independently and irrespective of their connection to the market.