If, in a nation where comprehensive statistics on social problems are rarely if ever published, legislative action and press attention to such problems may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they are regarded, then the Soviet Union's alcohol problem is serious indeed. On April 8, 1967, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved a decree, On Compulsory Treatment and Labor Re-education of Habitual Drunkards (Alcoholics). This decree, which went into effect on September 1 of the same year, provides for one to two-year terms in special “treatment-labor” medical institutions for excessive drinkers who violate “labor discipline, public order, and the rules of the socialist community.” The new institutions were subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the RSFSR Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order (MOOP, now renamed MVD). While it contained a number of significant departures from earlier legislation, the decree's most important point was its “preventive” emphasis. Previously an offending drunkard had to be on trial for a crime in a people's court before proceedings for compulsory treatment could be instituted.

In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.

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.

The application of Marxist concepts to Russia has long served to obscure some of the main lines of Russian development, for there is probably no country in Europe in which Marxism has so little relevance as in Russia. Marxist studies of the labor problem in Russia are particularly subject to great confusion, since two of Marxism's fundamental tenets are directly contradicted by any realistic study of Russian labor. It has, for example, been no secret to specialists who have read something on Russian labor other than the works of Lenin and Stalin that Russia did not have a proletariat in the Western sense of the term. The workers in Russia were for the most part peasants who remained members of a village commune and possessors of allotment land. Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings from the land, a part of them were seasonal workers, who came to seek work in the factories in the fall and winter, and regularly returned to their land in time for the harvest.

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.

Spurious documents may not change the course of history. But they do have their consequences—as the history of imperial and Soviet Russia vividly demonstrates. The most notorious modern forgeries spring to mind: “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” “The Sisson Documents,” “The Zinov'ev Letter,” “The Litvinov Journal,” and the oldest and most perdurable of them all, “The 'Testament' of Peter the Great,” his supposed grand plan for Russia to win world domination through conquest of the Near and Middle East. All of these forgeries have had their day and then passed into the lumber room of history—all, that is, except the “Protocols” and the “Testament.” Despite their notoriety, these two forgeries still find proponents today. But it is the most marginal, disreputable, and genocidal elements or states that pass off the “Protocols” as genuine, while some of our most respected officials, scholars, and journalists give credence to the “Testament.”

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.

Czechoslovakia has undergone revolutionary changes in its political and institutional structure several times in the twentieth century. In 1918 the leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks decided to sever their political umbilical cords to Vienna and Budapest, giving birth to the Czechoslovak Republic, a democratic state that differed considerably from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had emerged. In 1938 this democracy gave way to a semiauthoritarian regime, the so-called Second Republic. The Second Republic existed for a few months at Hitler's sufferance, only to be divided into two parts, both controlled by the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. In 1948, after a three-year attempt to harmonize Communist and non-Communist parties in a left-leaning National Front government, Czechoslovakia became for twenty years an autocratic Communist state. During these two decades the methods of rule varied from totalitarian (1948-53) to what might be called moderately authoritarian (1963-67).

The ancient tale of Joseph, son of Jacob, and Zulaykha was a "best seller" on the Silk Road from Russia to China. Before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Tatars, a Turkic-speaking people living in the middle Volga, used this tale to propagate Islam among the animistic and Eastern Orthodox Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples. Tatars drew upon this famous tale to address the internal communal fractures caused by Russian colonization, which opened the doors to Eastern Christianity, a far stronger competitor than the local indigenous religions. While scholars have shown interest in the tale's literary value and linguistic history, there has been no effort to investigate its readership. Yet the story of Joseph and Zulaykha as presented in popular poems and religious books empowered both men and women on the Volga frontier to refashion their religious and national identities. Today proponents of national revival call for the reappropriation of such tales to restore boundaries between Tatars and Russians.

In the 1950s the Soviet school system stabilized and teachers incorporated non-Russian national histories into the elementary curriculum. Shoshana Keller argues that in Soviet Uzbekistan teachers defined Uzbek nationhood partly through historical narrative, which told children that the Uzbek people had existed continuously from ancient times but the nation achieved independence only under Russian/Soviet leadership. Children learned that for millennia Uzbek hero/martyrs had fought losing batdes against foreign invaders. The best Uzbeks were from the lower classes, but the nation had also produced high culture. Above all, children were taught to imagine themselves, not within Eurasian Islamic historical time, but within European historical time as envisioned by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Iosif Stalin. What children learned about Uzbek history in school was central to the formation of a personal sense of national identity and to the larger Soviet project of nation building.

How Russia transformed itself from a relatively small principality on the steppe frontier in 1450 to a major Eurasian empire by 1800 is one of the fundamental questions of Russian historical study. The two main views posit a central role for Peter I (1682–1725) in that transformation either by singled-handedly “changing everything” and bringing Muscovy into the modern age through embracing contact with Europe and with the western enlightenment or by accelerating the pace of changes already occurring. In this article, Donald Ostrowski proposes that Russia's transition during this period can be better explained by examining the general trends of historical development and influences across Afro-Eurasia. This essay also raises questions about the use of the term modernization and examines eight categories of historical development: contact with the world; establishment of an empire; court politics; military; society and economics; governmental administration; church relations; and culture and education. Ostrowski concludes that in the early modern period one finds no turning points in Russian history, only more or less continuous trends, and that only roughly around 1800 do fundamental changes begin to occur within these eight categories.

Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.

The nineteenth-century Hungarian dance floor provides an invaluable tool for mapping the contours of both an emerging civil society and the political practices of Hungarian nationalism. During the 1840s, consciously “national” costumes, music, dances, and language became de rigueur in all areas of social life, and especially on die dance floor. Because associations and newspapers linked such cultural practices to opposition politics, these balls allowed a large number of men and women usually excluded from public life to display their patriotism and political allegiances. In this way, the diffuse set of ideas, feelings, and allegiances connected witii nineteenth-century liberalism and nationalism spread more widely in Hungary. These developments did not occur without conflict, and an examination of debates surrounding the dance floor reveals widely divergent views on participation in civil society and the boundaries of the nation.

The construction of a cable car in 1935 by Minister Aleksander Bobkowski halted the proclamation of a Polish National Park in the Tatra Mountains near Zakopane. A press and letter-writing campaign organized by Polish environmentalists, headed by Professor Wladyslaw Szafer and the Tatra Society, subsequently convinced the government to create a park. This debate also concerned the architectural aesthetics of the cable car buildings. The episode sheds light on the development of environmentalism in Poland during the partition era and in interwar Poland, as well as related discussions on the role of technology in modern life and aesthetics. Overall, the episode reveals the existence of two competing views of modern society.

Glasnost has made available to scholars many of the postwar files of the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs. These files, covering the activities between World War II and 1966 of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs and the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, have been deposited in the Central Governmental Archives in Moscow. Five thin volumes of indexes refer to thousands of pages of material, including signed original documents, initialed carbons, and reports from individual inspectors and district commissioners. The materials appear to be genuine, even though they are not complete.

The Soviet Union, as an administrative state par excellence, is a Parkinsonian nightmare. Although the leadership is armed with broad powers and unhampered by formal restraints in its control of the bureaucracy, it is nevertheless hard pressed to keep the huge administrative structures of the Soviet system efficient and responsive to central direction. The success or failure of a regime depends in large measure on how effectively it can get its policies translated into action by the bureaucracy.

Most schematic descriptions of the Soviet system by Western commentators, especially those written in the early 1950's, emphasized the division of the state into several highly centralized, vertically structured, and functionally specialized administrations—party, police, armed forces, and the economic bureaucracy. Within these broad categories there was frequently even further vertical-functional fractionization. For example, within the industrial bureaucracy there were various specialized ministries and a separation between planners and managers.

During the last months of 1918 profound political and social changes took place throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the dissolution of Habsburg administrative authority in late October, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Rumanians organized national councils that eventually were to determine the political future of these former subject peoples. Ruthenians living in the northeastern counties of Hungary also participated in this process, and from November 1918 to May 1919 they formed many councils which proposed various political alternatives: autonomy within Hungary, complete independence, or union with Russia, the Ukraine, or the new state of Czechoslovakia. Although these choices reflected the political and cultural allegiances that were traditionally attractive to Ruthenian leaders, the particular international situation in 1919 proved favorable to only one—union with Czechoslovakia.