Unlike the English term “stylization,” Russian stilizatsiia figures prominently in literary theory. Emerging out of debates around Vsevolod Meierkhol'd's theatrical innovations and subsequently elaborated by “Silver Age” writers (Valerii Briusov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin), formalists (Iurii Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Gofman), and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian concept must be distinguished from cognate terms in other languages—something missing from both Russian and non-Russian discussions. In Russian, stilizatsiia is invoked in two distinct senses: as a critical value judgment (dismissing works considered artificial or “lifeless”) , and as a complex and well-developed strategy of borrowing another's style (thus a sense related to parody and skaz). Works accepted as representing the “voice of the people” have often been exempted from analysis as stilizatsiia; J. Alexander Ogden argues, however, that “peasant poets” (Nikolai Kliuev, Aleksei Kol'tsov, Robert Burns) can best be understood precisely as stylizers in the sense elaborated by Bakhtin and others.

To map out a convincing genealogy of the Russian revolutionary Marxist movement (and, from 1903, of its Bolshevik wing) was always a concern of its leaders. Revolutionary Marxism made its Russian debut with Plekhanov's booklet Socialism and the Political Struggle only in 1883, some thirty-five years after the Communist Manifesto and almost sixty years after the Decembrist uprising. It was thus a latecomer both to European Marxism and to the Russian revolutionary movement. How was it to define its own relationship to these forerunners? To emphasize only the Marxist heritage meant to isolate the young movement from the formidable tradition of revolt already built up in Russia. But to identify the emergent Marxist movement too fully with this tradition would undermine its claim to be possessed of a new message, to be the prophet of a new age.

Despite the fact that the relationship between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church had an important influence on the course of events in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, no monographic study has been devoted to the subject. Works dealing with church history, the nationality question, or the Kulturkampf have given a certain amount of attention to the problem, but without elaboration of the issues involved and as a rule with limited reliance on primary source material. This article may well be the first attempt to grapple with the problem during the period 1871 to 1914. In addition to the standard published works on the subject, numerous archival sources have been consulted, especially those of the Prussian state and the German Empire.

Some of the few moments of comic relief to be found in Muscovite historical texts are provided in Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin's description of the Muscovite government. Kotoshikhin was an undersecretary (pod'iachii) of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Posol'skii prikaz) who defected to Sweden and in 1666-1667 wrote an account of Muscovy's court and administration. He is the source of the dubious assertion that the tsar's daughters (tsarevny) were not married outside the country because they were stupid and illiterate and would bring shame on the tsar's family. Kotoshikhin also relates a comical episode in which a leading boyar refused to sit at a banquet next to a man he considered his social inferior. The protesting boyar was forcibly held at his assigned place while he kicked and screamed and finally wriggled out of the grasp of the tsar's attendants and slid under the table, rather than sit by a demeaning dinner partner.

One book, one article, and a series of archaeological finds have contributed the largest part to the progress of Cyrillo-Methodian studies in the past thirty years. The book was by Father Dvornik: Once and forever its author established the reliability of the Vitae of the Slavic Apostles—our two principal sources for their mission—by carefully fitting them into the framework of Byzantium’s history in the ninth century. The article was by Fathers Meyvaert and Devos: In a few pages it demonstrated more mathematico what many foremost scholars had already suspected—that the Vita of Constantine–Cyril was in existence by 882 (before Methodius’ death), and that, by this time, it existed in Slavic. The latter demonstration was a hard pill for Byzantinists to swallow. The archaeological finds were made in Southern Moravia. By unearthing several ninth-century towns, archaeologists were able to provide an explanation for the strength of the Great Moravian state; by discovering a number of early churches, they were able to demonstrate how well established Christianity was in Great Moravia even before the Cyrillo-Methodian mission had arrived.

The Kazan Square demonstration of December 6, 1876 was one of a number of attempts by revolutionary intelligenty to forge an alliance with the common people. Two striking features of this demonstration have often been noted. First, participants in the demonstration included not only members of the radical intelligentsia but also urban workers, an unusual feature for the first socialist street demonstration in Russia. Second, fewer workers took part than the radical intelligentsia had hoped, given their active propagandizing among factory workers. Some critics have found fault with the “abstract” nature of the propaganda, to use Georgii Plekhanov's later term. He and others blamed the limited worker participation on the failure of the populists to express concretely the real, immediate interests of the workers. Plekhanov later wrote that the workers of St. Petersburg could only have been drawn to the demonstration because it was a “new spectacle, not seen before.” The workers had no tangible reason for active participation in it. “For this reason they did not go to it.”

The merchant is a shadowy if not invisible figure in the accounts of the political and economic life of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. Apart from a few exceptional cases, very little is known of his commercial dealings. His political-administrative activities rarely appear in discussions of the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and his immediate successors. Because few sources survive that permit an investigation of the merchant's place in the Russian economy, some scholars have concluded that the part the merchant played was minor.

This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failures of eastern Europe alongside those limits of refugee/migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. The essay proposes that in order to understand the European political landscape in relation to migration, it is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the different configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, as well as analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between these configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

This article discusses the Red Army’s behaviour in Yugoslavia in 1944 and 1945, focusing on the issue of rape. It explores the magnitude of the sexual violence that the Soviet troops perpetrated in the country by comparing it to their conduct in the countries which fought against the Soviet Union, arguing that the Red Army behaved with relative restraint in Yugoslavia. In order to explain the Soviet soldiers and officers’ behaviour there, the article focuses on the high command’s propaganda line about Yugoslavia, the army leadership’s disciplinary policies towards rapists and other criminals in the ranks, the frontline troops’ attitudes towards the Yugoslavs, the emergence of large number of stray soldiers behind the frontlines, and some Soviet soldiers’ tendency to abuse alcohol.

The Seventh World Congress of Sociologists in Varna, Bulgaria, held in September 1970, marked a major stage in the development of social science, particularly sociology, in the one-party states of Eastern Europe. Taking place in the most orthodox country of an increasingly diverse bloc, the congress was characterized by the largest and best-organized participation to date of sociologists from Eastern Europe. One country in the area—Albania—did not participate at all; and Yugoslavia, which is probably the country with the most developed social science community and institutions, had a notably small delegation. Yet the fact is that for prestige reasons, if no other, the East European countries and the Soviet Union did their best to show the state of their current development of sociology. This was shown in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most delegates presented papers.

The post-Stalin (or, as it is generally referred to by Soviet citizens, post–Beria) regime has already made far–reaching concessions to popular dissatisfaction with the Stalinist system of law and justice, and is preparing still further reforms. To appreciate the significance of this movement, it is necessary to understand the place held by law in the daily lives of Soviet citizens and in the running of the economy. It is a popular misconception outside of the USSR that Soviet law, and especially Soviet courts, are only window dressing to conceal the fact that the Communist Party and the secret police run the country by command and by force.The truth is that although there are certain areas of Soviet life–particularly in top-level politics–where law does not penetrate, there are hosts of problems which are resolved in the judicial process according to general standards declared in statutes and codes.

In this article, Rozita Dimova examines the rearticulation of class and ethnicity and how class distinctions produced by a free market and neoliberal economy in Macedonia have affected the interaction of Albanians and Macedonians in postsocialist Macedonia. Dimova highlights the ethnic dimensions of changing patterns of consumption by exploring the class mobility of one ethnic group (Albanians) and thus combines class, commodities, and consumption with notions of ethnicity. The process of articulating ethnicity and class is induced by the larger neoliberal context of the post-Cold War world in which the political economy of the "free" market and privatization inform local subjectivities. The domain of consumption, therefore, offers a place from which we can understand the complex interactions of multiple actors in Macedonia and see the various economic, performative, and symbolic significance of consumption in which the social mobility of the nouveaux riches Albanians has contributed to the loss of class privileges experienced by many ethnic Macedonians.

The Yugoslav nationalities question has always been a source of fascination for Western scholars. Inevitably, discussion has centered on the differences between the major Slav nationalities—the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. Less attention has been paid to the problem of the national minorities, although this issue has bedeviled the Yugoslav state since its formation in 1918. Minorities make up approximately a fifth of the Yugoslav population. In times of peace they have been the object of discrimination and exploitation. In times of crisis, the minorities have been the greatest single threat to the internal security of the Yugoslav state.

Over the years since 1918, four nationalities have proven particularly troublesome for the Yugoslavs: the Albanians, Hungarians, Germans, and Italians. The majority of the Albanians live in the autonomous oblast of Kosovo-Metohija (Kosmet) and are Moslem, belonging to the northern, Gheg, Albanian clan.

Russia's peasants and their culture in postreform Russia have enjoyed the attention of an ever-increasing number of scholars over the past two decades. One central aspect of that culture, however, has remained virtually unexplored: Eastern Orthodox Christianity as it was practiced and understood by peasant believers, and especially by peasants who considered themselves members of the official Orthodox Church. At least two explanations may exist for such scholarly neglect. First, historians of Russia have traditionally viewed "official" Orthodoxy as somehow forcibly imposed on the people by secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

As Pål Kolstø explores in this article, attitudes towards Lev Tolstoi's religious teaching differed wildly among Russian Orthodox believers at the turn of the last century. Some felt that his philosophical notions were remarkably congenial to church doctrine, while others saw Tolstoianism as the radical negation of everything the church stood for. An image often conjured up was Tolstoi as the Antichrist. To some, it was precisely the features that made others see Tolstoi as an Orthodox double that led them to this conclusion: The Antichrist will manage to lead the faithful astray precisely because he will seem to imitate Christ himself. This was the point where the most extreme positions in the Orthodox debate on Tolstoi and Tolstoianism converged. All told, some 85 books and booklets and 260 articles on Tolstoi were published by professed Orthodox authors, many of them laymen. Taken together, they bear witness to the breadth and vitality of Orthodox public opinion.

Among the chief problems in determining the boundaries of the early modern period in Russian history is die reign and reforms of Peter I the Great. In this article, Russell E. Martin situates Peter's reign within the context of dynastic marriage politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He argues that the centuries from roughly 1500 to 1800 constitute a single, coherent period. Court politics were dominated by concerns of kinship and marriage: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the search for a domesdc bride for the Russian rulers through bride shows; then, in the eighteenth century, by the gradual transformation of court politics away from domestic brides and toward a more traditional use of dynastic marriage as a tool in foreign policy. The early modern period ends, Martin argues, only with the promulgation of a new law of succession by Paul I (as modified by Alexander I). The so-called Petrine divide, then, is elided in a periodization of Russian history that very much mirrors the boundaries that are conventional in the west.

Architectonics designates those compositional principles that define a novel's structural and thematic coherence. The Greek term arkhitektonike, as glossed by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, has the additional merit of offering a useful shorthand for my eclectic approach to Vasilii Grossman's novel: a pre-Saussurean concern for referent, parole, and authorial intent, combined with a structuralist focus on design and pattern–a search for the binary oppositions and governing motifs that make the work an integrated linguistic construct. I argue that Zhizn' i sud'ba requires such an approach and that only through coming to grips with the novel's architectonics shall we understand its meaning and appreciate its artistic energy.

How deep and how long-lasting Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms will be remains an open question. Obstacles to the realization of some of his goals may be built into Soviet life. Soviet resources may limit economic development; industrial managers (however willing they may be) may lack the knowledge and skills necessary to operate in a market environment and continuing state orders may absorb the productive capacity of the factories and may limit the extent to which they can respond to market forces.