In the summer of 1994, political parties in Poland debated yet again the content and form of Poland’s first new constitution since the end of Communist Party rule. These arguments continued a process that had begun in 1989 and would continue until the ratification of a final document in May 1997. During the 1994 debate, each party offered its own version of a constitution, which was closely tied to its particular vision of the ideal new Polish republic. One of these groups was NSZZ Solidarity, the trade union successor to the social movement that had dominated opposition politics in the 1980s. In Solidarity’s version of the constitution, the state’s legitimacy was based on a community of Poles unified by a shared Catholic tradition. Political commentators who supported Solidarity’s constitution described it as follows: “Under the NSZZ Solidarity and presidential drafts [of the constitution] the Republic is the commonweal of the citizens.

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were “fathers” to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.

The Baltic countries, which were absorbed by the Russian Empire between 1721 and 1795 (Estonia and Livonia in 1721, Latgale in 1772, Lithuania in 1793 and 1795, and Courland in 1795), have played a significant role in Russian economic life, and have been regarded as an important, if not a vital Russian outlet to the Baltic Sea. Before the First World War 20.6 per cent of all Russian imports and 28 per cent of all Russian exports passed through the Latvian territory alone. This was not only because Latvia is situated on the most direct trade routes between Russia and Western Europe but also because of her excellent harbors—Riga, Liepaja (Libau), and Ventspils (Windau). Three of Russia's principal railroad lines converged on these ports. In 1912 the port of St. Petersburg handled 2,500,000 tons of shipping.

Using survey data from 900 rural households, this article assesses the degree to which Soviet-era workplace inequality between rural males and females has been remediated by the introduction of democratic and market reforms. The overall effects of reform institutions are mixed. Concerning male-female workplace inequality, three continuities were found with the Soviet period. First, rural males have larger total incomes than do rural females. Second, equal pay for equal work does not exist: females holding similar positions to males earned less in all categories of employment. In addition, males continue to dominate numerically the ranks of farm managers and leaders. Third, managers and leaders of both sexes are the most entrepreneurial, measured by income from private business. Male managers, however, have over three times the income from private business as do female managers. Concerning intragender inequality, it was found that females with advanced education and specialized knowledge or skills have significantly higher incomes than women with lower skill sets.

Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) is considered by most critics—even by those who condemn his subsequent politics, judging them a mixture of vacuous pronouncements and ineffectual gestures—a genuine liberal statement. Literary critics who do not go so far as to claim that the work contributed directly to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861—a view Turgenev himself occasionally espoused—at least assert that Notes of a Hunter is as biting and affecting a criticism of serfdom as literature could level at the time. There is, I believe, a serious objection to this position. I am not referring to the argument that a cycle of twenty-two sketches mainly about a man out hunting with his dog can hardly have much to do with politics; there are so many references to social injustice that even the narrator's most seemingly mundane observations, such as his disquisitions on various hunting techniques, must be read as willful efforts to distract himself from the corruption of Russian life.

In this article, Robert Weinberg explores the visual representation of Judaism and observant Jews in the Soviet journal Bezbozhnik u stanka (The atheist at the workbench), which appeared in the 1920s. In their efforts to promote atheism and undermine organized religion, the artists responsible for the images in this journal singled out the Jewish god to be depicted with inhuman, bestial, and bizarre features such as a single eye and a nose made out of a fist. This portrayal of Judaism and religious Jews drew upon the pervasive antisemitic tropes and motifs in Russian culture and society and served to demonize Judaism and its adherents.

The gestation period of Marxism in Bulgaria before a Marxist party came into existence in 1891 is one of the least studied periods in the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, where most of the work on BCP historiography has been done, attention has primarily, and understandably, gone to the activities of Dimitŭr Blagoev, the so-called father of Bulgarian Marxism, whose early career as propagandist and organizer of the new movement included a notable effort while he was a student at the University of St. Petersburg to form the first Marxist group in Russia. The story of the penetration and dissemination of Marxism in Bulgaria, however, is by no means exhausted with accounts of Blagoev's life to 1891. Yet, Bulgarian Marxist historians have done little to date to reconstruct this story in monographic investigations of the kind they have produced for other phases of their party's history. Of the general accounts they have produced, the best one, relatively speaking, is in the latest Istorita na Bŭlgarskata Komunisttcheska Partiia, which devotes fifteen pages (out of 699) to Blagoev's early activities and the party's prehistory, including the founding congress of 1891.

The nurturing bed of russian intelligentsia ideas and values in the 1890's was the kruzhok. The one infallible earmark of intelligenty since the time of the Masonic Lodges of the eighteenth century was their instinctive propensity, in whatever situation they found themselves, to coagulate into small kruzhki. In these kruzhki literature was assembled, exchanged, and discussed, referaty containing theses were presented and heatedly debated, and sooner or later kruzhki became the spring-board for more organized activity of an illegal or conspiratorial nature. If an individual did not manifest this penchant for kruzhkovshchina, it was a sign that somehow he did not belong to the intelligentsia.

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians’ language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.

The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation in content. As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which “routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…” Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of “two interdependent but opposed codes,” one for “the ritualized world of public life” and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

In the eighteenth-century, European rulers embraced a common policy of enlightened centralism aimed at undermining the prerogatives of local self-government, a trend that even reached the decentralized Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this article, Curtis G. Murphy investigates an example of an Enlightenment centralist policy that failed. A new reformist king sought to convert the burghers' right to produce alcohol, known as propinacja, into a state-controlled monopoly, but the effort produced only chaos and the diminishment of self-government. Contrary to the center's complaint that insufficient force undermined a beneficial effort, Murphy argues that the law failed because the priorities of the locals did not align with the government's goals and the habits of selfgovernment clashed with the bureaucratic methods of enlightened centralism. Historians of Poland have often praised the centralizing reforms of the late-eighteenth century, but the case of the propinacja law questions whether such efforts justified the costs of destroying self-government in the towns.

Recent memoirs published in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and Podgorica offer glimpses into how the principals would like their roles in the events connected with the Yugoslav breakup and war to be remembered. The most indispensable of the ten memoirs under review are those by Janez Drnovšek and Janez Janša, who have differing perspectives on developments in Slovenia between 1988 and 1991; by Martin Špegelj, who outlines in detail his argument that Croatia should have laid siege to the Yugoslav Army barracks much earlier than was done; and by Raif Dizdarević, who provides interesting details on how Serbian leader Slobodan Milosević subverted the Yugoslav federation and put his protégés in charge of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Vojvodina. Sefer Halilović, Branko Mamula, and Špegelj challenge observers' usual conceptions of events, while Alija Izetbegović, Davorin Rudolf, and Zdravko Tomac offer more standard accounts. Hrvoje Šarinić provides details of his secret conversations with Milošević and other figures.

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.

The paper investigates past and current research on the executions at Kurapaty, in the northern suburbs of Minsk, Belarus, in 1937–41, covering the period from the discovery of mass graves in the 1970s to the establishment of an official monument in late 2018. It deals with several issues: archaeological excavations of the site in the 1980s and 1990s; the numbers, ethnic origin, and identities of the victims; the continuing debates between the authorities, scholars, and the nationalist opposition; the protection of the site from various incursions; and the role of Kurapaty as an alternative national symbol to the Great Patriotic War victory. It also looks at Kurapaty victims in the context of the Stalin Purges in the USSR as a whole. The authors conclude that while the number of deaths and the scale of repressions did not differ significantly from the Soviet average, the impact on the modern state has been largely concealed because of the politicization of the event, and the tardiness and unwillingness of the post-independence government to peruse the harsher aspects of the Stalin era.

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

The artist Kazimir Malevich once called Vladimir Maiakovskii's lyric “Iz ulitsy v ulitsu” the best example of “versified cubism.“ Although Maiakovskii's early poetry has often been linked to developments in the pictorial arts, the precise nature of this connection requires more detailed examination. Investigation of the role of the visual arts in a literary interpretation appears exceptionally intriguing considering that Malevich, both a contemporary of Maiakovskii and a painter of high caliber, paid special tribute to this poem in painterly terms.

Lithuania’s 2000 parliamentary elections were the first in the post-Soviet era to fail to produce a majority government. Further, neither the Homeland Union nor the Democratic Labor Party entered into the ruling coalition. In this article, Terry D. Clark and Nerijus Prekevičius explore two different ways of explaining why this occurred. To answer the broader question, the first approach focuses on the particular events that occurred in the run-up to the elections. To consider why particular parties fared better or worse than expected, the second approach evaluates a set of rational choice approaches, including spatial analysis. Neither approach is preferable to the other; instead, they are complementary, each helping to resolve certain questions that are appropriate to the particular approach. To conclude, they consider the implications of their findings for the consolidation of Lithuania’s party system.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state turned out to be pretty adept at authoritarianism, and the voters have appreciated it. That, at any rate, is the broad upshot of these three articles.

Following what has seemed the dominant tendency in the Anglophone political science literature on contemporary Russia, Henry E. Hale and Timothy J. Colton examine not governance but elections. The two scholars confirm “arguments that Putin draws a great deal of vote-winning power from how people view his performance and that the economy is a large part of this.” Readers may have believed this before encountering this article (I did), but Hale and Colton demonstrate the point marshaling evidence.