The Georgian state, almost destroyed by two secessionist wars, a civil war, and an economic catastrophe, had by 1997 reestablished an orderly political life. The messianic rhetoric of the early postindependence years was replaced by a new language of civic values and pluralism. The former Soviet nomenklatura—never really ousted by the revolution or subject to lustration laws—had joined old cultural elites, industrial managers, new entrepreneurs, and intellectually minded modernizers in a heterogeneous political class. Though fractious and facing new challenges to its authority from the media, international nongovernmental organizations, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this new political class began to mediate Georgian economic and political life. Society remained fragmented, but structural changes in the economy, the Georgian leadership's restoration of order, and the activities of international nongovernmental organizations, generated embryonic interest groups and indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with claims on government policy. Today, policy conflicts are no longer just the domain of autonomous state structures, but multicornered fights—albeit unequal ones—that extend into Georgian society.

The building of socialism, in its concrete and metaphorical sense, has been in a state of constant decay—in ruins—from its very foundation. For those who inhabited it, endurance became a way of life. It is precisely this endurance that explains the resistance, by both people and the landscapes in which they live, to the market. Nostalgia for socialism has become a commodity, but not for those who still live in its ruins, because they are home. This essay by Thomas Lahusen explores this ruined landscape, from the vanishing Palace of the Republic in Berlin and the decrepit-looking buildings made of precast concrete slabs of real socialism, to its culture, which shares decay and ruin with its built structures. Lahusen juxtaposes this landscape to philosophical essays on the collapse of communism and to recent histories, some of which yield new fetishes and new commodities.

Historians have not been at their finest in attempting to measure standard of living, and late imperial rural Russia is no exception. Given the absence of reliable measures for personal or household income or even of real wage trends—the most common proxy for the standard of living—scholars have been forced to employ a variety of other surrogates, often with unfortunate results. For Russia, recourse has been made to peasant tax arrears, mass consumption of “luxury” or nonfood items, and rye-wages. Shifts in the size of land allotments, numbers of livestock and patterns of land tenure often have been the focus of study; others have emphasized trends in net national product, grain retained in the village or grain yields generally. Diet has been assessed both quantitatively, in terms of caloric intake or protein derived from meat products, and qualitatively, underscoring harvest variability. Still other studies have looked at population trends, at times addressing the malthusian dilemma and suggesting that Russia was overpopulated. And frustration has recently led one historian to suggest we give up.

The almost continuous conflict between the interests of the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire in the Near and Middle East, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, gave rise to several attempts on the part of Pan-Slavs and some Slavophiles to win the English over to the Russian point of view. It was the opinion not only of such a prominent Slavophile as Ivan Aksakov, and the militant independent, Mikhail Katkov, but also of certain officials, that a “great understanding” with England would be more advantageous to Russia than “a great war.” Many, even before 1878, sought to woo England by interpreting to the English public Russian objectives in the Balkans and Central Asia. With the aid of sympathetic English journalists and encouragement from leaders of the Liberal Opposition, these Russian groups sought to explain Russia's past sins and honest motives. It was, in effect, a strange alliance of the anti-imperialist and democratic Western Liberals and the imperialist Pan-Slavs and a small group of reactionary Slavophiles, united by a common desire for peace.

Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “man-made” or “artificial.” The Stalinist leadership is presented as having imposed harsh procurement quotas on Ukraine and regions inhabited by other groups, such as Kuban’ Cossacks and Volga Germans, in order to suppress nationalism and to overcome opposition to collectivization. Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population. Robert Conquest, for example, has referred to a Soviet study of drought to show that conditions were far better in 1932 than they were in 1936, a “non-famine year.” James Mace, the main author of a U.S. Congress investigation of the Ukraine famine, cites “post-Stalinist” statistics to show that this harvest was larger than those of 1931 or 1934 and refers to later Soviet historiography describing 1931 as a worse year than 1932 because of drought. On this basis he argues that the 1932 harvest would not have produced mass starvation.

Rallying, which originated in France soon after the birth of the automobile, has remained a popular sport in Europe and elsewhere, serving to showcase developments in automotive technology and the skillfulness of professional drivers. These, in addition to demonstrating the variety of road conditions and peoples within the country and choosing the most appropriate vehicle to import, were the main objectives of the all-Russian (1923) and all-Union (1925) rallies (avtoprobegy). But in 1929, hard on the heels of the agreement with Ford to build a car factory in Nizhnii Novgorod, Nikolai Osinskii, president of the Society for Cooperation in the Development of Automobilism and Road Improvement (Avtodor), undertook a journey that inaugurated a new kind of avtoprobeg. Expeditionary rather than sporting, it drew on and reinforced a discursively constructed geography of the Soviet Union, relying on two “moving metaphors“ central to Bolshevik discourse: the storming of fortresses and the road to socialism. The avtoprobegy of the 1930s lent themselves to narratives of adventure and accomplishment not only for the rallyists themselves but also for the peoples through whose lands they traveled. This was especially true of the most publicized road trip in Soviet history—the Moscow-Kara Kum rally of 1933.

Russia can only be considered an electoral democracy to the extent that its constituent parts also fit this classification. In this article, Bryon J. Moraski and William M. Reisinger assess how well competing theories drawn from the literature on democratization explain the variation across Russia's regions in their progress toward competitive electoral politics. Their analysis reveals that distinctions among the regions in their social structure, arising from developments in the decades before 1991, help explain political competition in a manner unanticipated not only by existing literature on democratization but also by existing studies of Russian democracy at the national and individual levels. Moreover, they find that the divergent experiences of the regions during the 1990s—in their economies and levels of crime, for example—and variations in party development also help us discern which regions have moved furthest along the path toward electoral democracy.

In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled all the way across Siberia, spending five months in transit and three more in residence, to visit the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. The trip was enormously eccentric—it was dangerous, arduous, ill-advised for someone of Chekhov's delicate constitution and uncharacteristically adventuresome for someone so sedentary. Its eccentricity is heightened by the battery of cavalier explanations advanced by the writer, who justified his trip first as an attempt to erase a portion of his life, then as an effort to produce the only halfyear worth remembering, now as a mere change of pace, then as a pressing need to flee a romantic entanglement, at times as a scientific enterprise, at other times as a symptom of "Sakhalin mania."

The Soviet mathematical logician Aleksandr Vol'pin is often credited with introducing the post-Stalin dissident strategy of attempting to hold the Soviet government to its own laws. In this article, Benjamin Nathans asks how Vol'pin himself arrived at the deceptively familiar rhetoric of civil rights and rule of law and how that rhetoric functioned in emerging dissident circles in the 1960s. Rather than approaching rights through classic liberal notions of social contract and self-interest, Vol'pin drew on the strikingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary ferment of Soviet intellectual life during the thaw years, putting logic, philosophy of language, and the burgeoning field of cybernetics to unexpected purposes. The result, Nathans suggests, was a counterintuitive blend of idealism and literalism that became an indispensable element of dissident thought and practice within late Soviet culture.

In this essay Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone examine some of the paradigms of selfhood that western scholars have used to understand Soviet subjectivity. They start with an analysis of how racialized western discourses about the backward Russian national character were transformed into representations of the totalitarian Soviet self seen as a passive receptacle for the ideological excesses of the regime. Revisionist historians have argued against this model and have shown how the pragmatic Soviet subject both internalized and resisted the Soviet norms of selfhood. In the third wave, scholars have used the model of the normative self to plot the internal processes through which citizens attempted to align their souls with the demands of Stalinist ideology. Chatterjee and Petrone conclude with the scholars’ analysis of the banal self, or the situation of Soviet selfhood in intimate and private spheres of existence that necessitated multiple negotiations and compromises with the theoretical norms of statesponsored subjectivity.

Although there has been significant change in the content of the category of “Montenegrin” identity, the policies adopted by the government of Montenegro within its nation-building project have been only partly successful. This study examines popular support for the policies that have helped to reconstruct Montenegrin identity in the decades following the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia. The specific focus here is on the symbolic reconstruction of identity parameters in Montenegro after the split of the ruling party in 1997 and the start of political divisions in this tiny Balkan state. Relying on original quantitative and qualitative data, the analysis associates the divide related to the question of statehood with perceptions of identity and shows how the content of "Montenegrin" identity changed as a result of people's support for or opposition to independence.

In this article, Susan Larsen argues that the plot lines, aesthetic choices and marketing strategies of the four most commercially successful Russian films of the last decade—Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun and Barber of Siberia and Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother and Brother-2—are shaped by anxieties about Russian national identity and cultural authority that these films articulate in gendered terms as threats to paternal bonds and fraternal communities. Aiming both to emulate and to displace the Hollywood films that dominate the Russian film market, Mikhalkov and Balabanov exploit the conventions of the historical melodrama and the crime thriller to construct an explicitly Russian and emphatically masculine heroism in stories of charismatic, vanished fathers and dangerous, but irresistible brothers who defy the moral decay, crass materialism, economic imperialism and cultural solipsism that all four films associate with the west and, in particular, the United States.

Ever since the early days of Bolshevik rule, Soviet leaders have promised to equalize socioeconomic development among the union republics. Their reasons, as I. S. Koropeckyj notes, have ranged from the ideological to the purely political. Equality is deemed an ideological necessity: every region must achieve a similarly advanced stage of development in order to pave the way for communism. Regional equality is also viewed as a way to defuse the nationality issue—in the short run by minimizing the socioeconomic disparities inherited from tsarist days and in the long run by creating a new climate in which local nationalism will disappear. The benefits of equalization should also spill over into the international arena, where the advances of traditionally underdeveloped Soviet regions highlight the “appeals of the Soviet development model for impatient revolutionary modernizes.”

The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-1 September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine's Instruction to her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such as Pravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of Stalinist policies.

In the 1860s the Russian government carried out a series of major reforms that had important consequences for key dimensions of Russian society—its economy, judiciary, local administration, army, censorship, and education. Historians have generally agreed that these reforms exerted a profound influence upon Russian historical development, but they have not arrived at an analogous consensus on how the reforms of the 1860s affected the general development of the country as a whole or the peasantry in particular. In this article I seek to analyze the immediate effect of the reforms of the 1860s on the fundamental institution of the peasantry—the commune. I shall employ a sociological approach, a mode of analysis for which the specialized literature is both rich and diverse, in an attempt to determine the underlying structural principles of the commune and to construct an analytical model for the functions and the development of the repartitional land commune.

When Bulgarians elected a parliament dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in their first, free postcommunist election, they were considered the mavericks of eastern Europe. As Misha Glenny critically points out, “Bulgaria bucks the trend” was a recurrent phrase in English-language reports of the 1990 contest. But four years later, after an intervening non-socialist government, a second socialist victory seemed to be following trends set in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. In a front-page article in The New York Times several months before Bulgaria's 1994 election, the east European trend towards embracing ex-communists is described as beginning in Lithuania, with no mention of Bulgaria's earlier socialist victory and its continual socialist electoral strength. Then, following the election, the Washington Post reported that the results “brought the fourth former Communist Party to power in Eastern Europe, after Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.“

In the mid-1920s the Soviet government singled out about 150,000 ; citizens for an administrative category designated the "small peoples of the north." These were the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of the Soviet Union who subsisted on hunting, fishing and reindeer herding and who were seen by bolshevik officials as the most backward peoples of the new republic, languishing in a pitiful and unacceptable state of "semi-savagery and outright savagery." As such, they needed to be understood as a peculiar phenomenon and governed differently from their more "cultured" countrymen.

Since the heady, early days of the Gorbachev reform period, the Russian people have become not only subjects of historical transformation but also, increasingly, objects of opinion surveys. Western researchers, new Russian commercial operations, and local academics recently freed from the restrictions of stagnation (zastoi) have been asking Russians much more probing questions than they were previously able to. Rather than provide a detailed description of how they spend their leisure time, Russian citizens have been asked to evaluate their political leaders, to project their nation's future, and to offer opinions on emerging democratic and market systems. Many Russians have responded to this barrage of questions with “I don't know.” For instance, in a 1992 survey headed by Richard Rose, when Russians were asked whether the words Marxism-Leninism evoked positive or negative feelings, 46 percent answered “I find it hard to say.” An identical percentage declined to evaluate the word capitalism.

Aleksandar Bošković argues that the Yugonostalgia in the Lexicon of Yu Mythology should be taken, not as a regressive idealization of the Yugoslav socialist past, but as a critical intervention in both the contemporary postsocialist politics of memory and the politics of emancipation. Bošković identifies the Lexicon as an exhibition catalogue of the virtual museum of all “things Yugoslav,” a self-reflective postmodern hybrid emerging from the semantic overlapping of different genres and threaded with various memories, per-Slavic Review 72, no. 1 (Spring 2013) sonal and collective, nostalgic and ironic, of everyday life in Yugoslav socialism. Bošković contends that by evoking visual and textual reflections on the meaning of the past for the present, the Lexicon appears to have a materiality akin to that of a ruin: it exhibits a blend of affectionate and ironic nostalgia for the Yugoslav past, while simultaneously performing and reaffirming the socialist modernity's prospective perspective as its emancipating impact on the social imagination.