Since the mid-1990s, crime drama has been the leading genre of post-Soviet television. In this article, Elena Prokhorova discusses various genres of recent crime series, both within the historical context and as coherent discourse (specifically, identity discourse). Her analysis draws narrative and ideological parallels between recent Russian productions and Brezhnev-era television mini-series, especially as an attempt to reconceptualize national mythology. The flourishing of popularized “narratives of control”—spy thrillers and police series—in the 1970s signaled both the crisis of Soviet identity and an attempt to give a boost to the waning ideology by mixing popular culture formulas with ideology. Likewise, recent Russian crime dramas use Soviet and prerevolutionary popular culture formulae as a testing ground for new social models. Prokhorova explores the attributes of crime series as artistic texts, such as genre conventions, choice of plots and heroes, visual representation, as well as broader cultural values that underlie those choices.

Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

In this article, Jane Costlow considers the ways in which Ivan Turgenev and Vladimir Korolenko use literary conventions—from gothic setting and narrative voice to metaphors of natural community—to reflect on poaching, violence, usufruct, and rational forestry. While both authors demonstrate concern for the fate of Russia's forests, the narratives discussed here (two stories and a travel memoir) are tempered by a sense of complex moral and political context, and the realities of property law and class both before and after 1861. Costlow considers foresters' advice and assumptions about peasant violence and the need for “enlightened” surveillance but focuses on imaginative writing that refuses simple solutions to vexed questions. Turgenev's narrative emphasizes the moral entanglements of a narrator who wants to intervene and protect, whereas Korolenko's account of the trans-Volga woodlands balances critique and ecological vision in dialogic form.

Robert Hayden is not alone in wondering why the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995 was labeled a population transfer and even justified by the logic of nation-states, while the expulsion of Muslims by Serbs in 1992-96 from an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs claim for their state was labeled genocide and justified establishing an international war crimes tribunal. Hayden wants to protect the term genocide, and its legal standing internationally, for truly exceptional instances—to wit, the Holocaust, and nothing else until, God forbid, there should be another such instance. By contrast, he argues, population transfers, even on a massive scale and forced, are not pathological. "Ethnic cleansing" of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether of Croatia or of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is unexceptional, a normal part of the history of the twentieth century. Although final solutions are not inevitable—Hayden criticizes Croatian President Tudjman for writings that seem to have justified the Serb expulsion as such—"ethnic cleansing" is a part of the history even of states that now sit in moral condemnation of the Balkan horrors and the Bosnian Serbs.

It is commonly reported in the West that the representation of women in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is far below their representation in the population at large, and that although there are slightly increasing rates of admission, continuation of the large disparity seems to constitute a relatively permanent feature of central recruitment policy and procedures. In 1970, for example, women formed 53.9 percent of the general population and 22.2 percent of the CPSU. However, that aggregate figure masks a considerable degree of regional variation. Publication of data from several regional party archives provides the opportunity to examine more closely the process of female mobility within the party and to advance more precise notions about determinants of that process than had previously been possible.

During the Crimean War, Crimean Tatars were charged en masse with collaborating with the Allies. At the war's conclusion, nearly 200,000 Tatars left the peninsula to relocate in the Ottoman empire. Mara Kozelsky contributes to an understanding of this critical episode in the Crimean War by examining secret surveillance documents, a collection that records complex state attitudes toward Tatars from the Allied landing on the Crimean coast to the Treaty of Paris. These documents reveal that intelligence operations provided no evidence of a collective Tatar guilt and instead testified to the diversity of pressures on state policies toward subject populations on the front lines of battie. Shifting wartime conditions, religious tensions, and repeated crises at the front highlighted unresolved debates about religion and loyalty to the state. Some officials recommended deporting the Tatars, others encouraged their migration, and still others advocated on the Tatars’ behalf.

In a recent article in the Slavic Review, George G. Weickhardt undertook to demonstrate that Russia "gradually developed a concept of private property for land which more or less approached that of the English 'fee simple' and that the only significant limitations on individual property in [pre-Petrine] Russia were in favor of the clan rather than the state" (665). This thesis runs counter to virtually the entire historical literature in Russian as well as foreign languages.

In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs, increasing numbers of peasants left their native villages for cities and industrial centers, in response to a growing need for cash and declining opportunities to earn it at home. At least until World War I, the vast majority of these migrants were men; women were the more stable element in the village. In the words of one student of peasant life, women “cling to the family and the land, and need particularly unfavorable circumstances to compel them to move somewhere else.“ Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close the economic circumstances that prompted peasant men to leave villages increasingly caused women to leave as well. Like their husbands, fathers and brothers, migrant women often chose urban destinations. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 650 peasant women per 1,000 peasant men in Moscow, and 368 migrant peasant women for every 1,000 migrant peasant men in St. Petersburg; by 1910, the proportion in St. Petersburg had increased to 480 per 1,000.

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

Focusing on the funerals of two populist political prisoners, this article examines how Petersburg's radical youth expropriated an allegedly unchanging, sacred ritual to extend the parameters of public discussion and social critique in late imperial Russia. Drawing on their experiences of Russia's religious and revolutionary past, the youth who accompanied their peers to the grave used the special, “sacred” time and space effected by the performance of customary burial rituals to offer their fellow citizens revolutionary alternatives to the existing regime.

There were no guarantees in the Russian absolute monarchy against arbitrary arrest, arbitrary search, or violation of the secrecy of mail (three main aspects of personal inviolability) before the reform of the judiciary in 1864. As there was no separation between the administrative and the judicial powers, no difference existed between an arrest or search decided upon as a judicial measure and an arrest or search ordered by the police, whether to prosecute an already committed offense or to prevent a violation of law and order. The statutes of 1864 organized justice as an independent power, and to assure this independence they established guarantees of due process of law.

A great many available statistics describe the population history of Russia, but explanations for these statistics are limited or nonexistent. The useful studies of fertility and migration that have appeared are primarily accurate reports of what happened. Studies of Russian mortality are wholly lacking, an understandable situation, since as late as 1913 only thirteen out of fifty provinces of European Russia had medical statistical bureaus. Despite all past efforts the history of Russia's health remains obscure.

While the health of the Russian people today is comparable to that of other Europeans, before the Revolution of 1917 it was extremely poor. In 1897, the year of the first national Russian census, the infant mortality rate for European Russia was 260 for each 1,000 births, compared to 222 for Germany, 164 for France, 156 for Italy, 156 for England and Wales, and 109 for Ireland.

Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.

In Poland the writing and teaching of history is not merely an academic discipline. In times of adversity history has served as an affirmation of national values. It is therefore not at all surprising that in the fall of 1980, when the movement for free association swept the country from Gdańsk, the liberation of history and historians from political constraints became an integral part of the efforts for renovation. For some thirty-five years the recasting and rewriting of Polish history had been central to the process of imposing and legitimizing Communist rule. Reform of the system in 1980 required, among other things, a coming to grips with the mendacious political mythology the system had spawned in striving to create the appropriate historical antecedents for a People's Poland.

The story of Polish historiography since 1945 demonstrates the tenacity of cultural patterns and habits of mind that have made it impossible to impose an interpretation alien to the national sense of identity and a methodology at odds with the canons of objective scholarship. And the regime failed to reshape the traditional interpretations despite the seemingly overwhelming advantages it enjoyed in terms of power, institutions, and funds.

The war of conquest presents the conqueror with two major problems: first, the isolation of the adversary by diplomacy and his liquidation by force; second, the justification of such aggression to his own supporters and to the outside world. Two tasks of the historian follow: the first is to fit into an understandable pattern what happened before, during, and after the conquest; the second is to tell us how the conquerors explained why the conquest should have happened, why it had to happen as it did, and—whenever there is evidence—how the conquered viewed the same sequence of events.

It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.