This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

The essay considers a twofold question: Why, until recently, has our field remained so reluctant to engage with racial epistemology, and what higher form of understanding does “race” offer to students of Eurasia? The answer to the first part of the question is located in the divergence between the “imperial” and “modernity” paradigms in Eurasian studies. With regard to the second part of the question, the essay suggests viewing “race” as one of the languages of self-reflection and modernization in the imperial space. It concludes that the discovery of “race” becomes tantamount to the rediscovery of Eurasia as an imperial space—irregularly hierarchical and heterogeneous, characterized by entangled exceptionalism and a constant renegotiation of differences, as well as the realignment of principles of belonging, subjectivities, and networks of solidarity.

My objective in this article is to examine the purpose and the performance of the Progressive Bloc, the wartime majority coalition of Russia’s Fourth State Duma. My analysis, in turn, should promote a more sophisticated understanding of the political behavior of Russia’s moderates, and in particular of Russia’s liberals, during the final years of crisis for the tsarist regime.

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.

In this article, I analyze the correspondence between state authorities and citizens in the USSR, the GDR, and Romania. As the consumerist turn spread across the eastern bloc, an important focus of the populations' appeals to the authorities concerned the appropriate levels and conditions of consumption. Their letters display growing consumer aspirations, and from the mid-1960s onward a significant number of these petitions expressed the desire to buy a car. However, when state authorities failed to deliver enough cars, they also shaped a new attitude toward consumption. On the one hand, the population asked for automobiles as favors. On the other, a new discourse of entitlement and even “consumer rights” surfaced. Citizens started to expect a certain lifestyle; moreover, they even believed themselves to be entitled to it. As a consequence, their new sense of entitlement diluted the culture of favors and privilege, thereby contributing to the crisis of legitimacy in late socialism.

1917. A revolution explodes, the most violent in history. Within a few weeks a society rids itself of all its leaders: the monarch and his lawyers, the police and the priests, the landowners and civil servants, the officers and employers. There is no citizen who does not feel free—free to make his own choices and decide his own future. Before long everyone has a plan in his pocket for remaking the country. As the bards of the revolution foretold, a new era in the history of man is beginning.

General histories give little credence to the Utopian side of Lenin's revolutionary thought, especially in relation to his only formal Utopian work, State and Revolution. Most histories pass off that book as an “intellectual deviation” resulting from Lenin's “revolutionary fever” of 1917 or as a piece of political opportunism, while offering What Is To Be Done? as the statement of orthodox Leninism. In keeping with the tone of What Is To Be Done? Lenin is generally portrayed as the political realist par excellence, a pragmatist of the first order, a “hard-nosed” strategist confined by neither intellectual theories (not even Marxism) nor human emotions. This neat and simple formula is most convenient in attributing the success of the November Revolution to Lenin's talents for organization and political astuteness.

In this article, Jenifer Presto argues that the 1908 Messina-Reggio Calabria earthquake had an impact on Aleksandr Blok no less significant than that which the 1755 Lisbon earthquake had on writers of the Enlightenment and proceeds to demonstrate how it shaped Blok's aesthetics of catastrophe. This aesthetics can best be termed the “decadent sublime, ” an inversion of the Kantian dynamic sublime with its emphasis on bourgeois optimism. Following Immanuel Kant, Blok acknowledges the fear and attraction that nature's forces can inspire; however, unlike Kant, he insists that modern man remains powerless in the face of nature, owing to his decadence—a decadence endemic to European civilization. The decadent sublime is manifested in a host of Blok's writings, ranging from “The Elements and Culture” to Lightning Flashes of Art and The Scythians; it is intensely visual and is indebted to images of ruin by artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Luca Signorelli.

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.

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.

While the presence of women—chiefly disreputable camp followers—in military hospitals was not new, during the Crimean War women of a different sort undertook to care for the patients, with the French army the first to provide this service. When the horrors of the British hospital at Scutari (Uskudar) became known, British wrath was aroused. In The Times of October 13, 1854, an article by William Howard Russell stated: “Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good … and they have the help of the Sisters of Charity These devoted women are excellent nurses.” Immediately a letter to The Times demanded: “Why have we no Sisters of Charity?”

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of “tragic realism” during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theorization of modernity and of its privileged formal companion, the Bildungsroman. Seen against the background of Hegel's post-tragic conception of contemporary “actuality,” these authors can be understood as developing a historico-formal paradox, a vision of tragic realism. Tragic realism grasps contemporary life in terms of destructive and irreconcilable collisions and presupposes the broader historiographic vision of Russia's anachronistic position vis-à-vis the Hegelian vision of modern life.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the literary journal Novyi mir in November 1962 and provoked excited debate across the Soviet press in subsequent months. In this article, Miriam Dobson uses unpublished letters to the editor to examine readers' responses to this work of literature and as a means to explore attitudes towards the process of de-Stalinization more broadly. While many historians have tended to see the Nikita Khrushchev period as a battleground between liberals and conservatives, these letters suggest a rather more complex dialogue over the legacies of Stalinism. They show that even those readers who embraced the de-Stalinizing rhetoric of the Twenty-Second Party Congress found Solzhenitsyn's text highly disturbing. Distressed by the appearance of camp slang and "vulgar" language within a literary work, readers took the opportunity to express their concerns over the large numbers of criminals released from the gulag, rising crime levels, and the perceived threat they presented to "respectable" Soviet culture.

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.

The drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture in the winter of 1930 was “spontaneous“ (stikhiinyi) in the extreme. Spontaneous, in this context, is not a synonym for voluntary; instead, it denotes the process by which collectivization was implemented from January to March 1930. This process was characterized by a deficit in organization and order, a revolutionary impulsiveness tempered by neither law nor legality, and, perhaps most of all, “teleological planning“ based on constant upward revisions of numerical indicators as plans and directives were passed down the hierarchical chain of regional command. Central control, in the traditional sense, was nonexistent or ineffective; control, central or otherwise, seemingly so pervasive in “Stalinist” collectivization, is simply a misnomer for the arbitrary coercion that prevailed at the time and was predicated, in large part, upon the very absence of such control.

This article explores democracy development efforts in the former Soviet Union as a cultural encounter between the producers and consumers of development assistance. Drawing on literature in both anthropology and development studies, Sean R. Roberts suggests that the divergent worldviews of these different actors in the development process problematizes their interaction, often leading to unintended results. Highlighting a case study of U.S. assistance to Kazakhstan's 2004 parliamentary elections, Roberts also suggests that, although democracy assistance does foster change, this change is both gradual and unpredictable. More generally, Roberts argues that the challenges of democracy development are less related to technical issues than to cultural factors. Furthermore, democracy development efforts in the long term are likely to produce a contested arena in which to negotiate the meaning of “democracy” or acceptable “good governance” in the context of globalization and today's increasingly multipolar geopolitics.

Scholarly debate in the West, and to a large extent also in the Soviet Union, concerning the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Russian monk losif (né Sanin) Volotsky (Joseph Volotsky), 1439-1515, has generally centered on his political ideas and the interpretation of his Prosvetitel' (Enlightener, or Illuminator) . The monastic side of his activities is often played down or neglected, even though the most important aspect of his daily life for fifty-five years was his serious pursuit of the monastic and (for thirty-eight years) abbatial vocation. In the provincial Volokolamsk Monastery, which he founded, he not only entered into ecclesiastical politics and composed the didactic apologetics and inquisitional invectives that comprise his sixteen-discourse (originally eleven) Enlightener but also wrote two monastic Rules, which are very important sources for his life and for the religious and intellectual history of his time.