In mid-October, 1878, an outbreak of the plague occurred in the obscure village of Vetlianka on the Volga. Eruptions of various virulent diseases were no rarity in the region of the lower Volga, but this particular calamity made a forsaken village world-famous. It embroiled Russia in a violent diplomatic and press campaign with Germany and Austria; it played a major role in the growth of a legacy of mistrust and suspicion of German motives in Russia; it once again made Russians and foreigners painfully or joyfully aware of the lamentable inadequacies of Russian administration; and, above all, it presented Bismarck with a welcome weapon in his campaign for the conclusion of the Dual Alliance of 1879. A purely domestic event, seemingly devoid of any international significance, thus came to play a major role in the development of the foreign policies of a number of great powers.

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

The mention of “gastronomy and Gogol” may immediately make us think of the good-natured pair in Old-Fashioned Landowners, who, if they were not eating, were sure to be sleeping. Or perhaps what comes to mind is that remarkable five-by-five figure of Peter Petrovich Petukh, whom Gogol appropriately described as a “round watermelon.” And who can forget how Sobakevich ever so quietly and “innocently” alone dispatched that noble sturgeon at the breakfast party given by the chief of police, or how the thoroughly tipsy Khlestakov bragged about the “dream of a soup” that was delivered to him in St. Petersburg from no other gastronomic paradise than Paris itself. Nor can we forget Khlestakov's other soup—the one more like the River Nile (with feathers)—which was so ill-received and yet eaten with such alacrity by the starving braggart. Perhaps only Vladimir Nabokov did not laugh at Puzatyi Paciuk and his ingenious way of transporting varenyky to his mouth without moving an inch—and he first had to dip them into a dish of sour cream that was placed on a low barrel in front of him. And what about that pan of fried eggs that was rushed onto the stage in Meyerhold's production of Gogol's The Marriage, in which one of the suitors for the hand of the merchant's daughter—much to the confusion of the others—is called “Fried Eggs.”

S. S. Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 to 1849, is usually described as a reactionary. The reason for that judgment is clear. Many of the steps Uvarov took as minister seemed designed to block the realization of the liberal goals set by the reformers who assisted Alexander I in founding the modern Russian educational system in 1801-4. One important aspect of that liberal, modern, system was its “all-class” character. An educational system which admitted students of all classes was perceived by “reactionaries“ as a threat to the established order, despite the relatively small numbers of people involved. Thus, “Uvarov was disturbed by the trickle of students from lower classes who were finding their way into the universities. As in secondary schools, the admission of such students was hindered by legalistic formalities and an increase in tuition fees.“

The following article, a translation of an essay by Romanian historian David Prodan, summarizes his research concerning three and a half centuries of serfdom in Transylvania, a subject on which he has worked in minute detail for fifty years. The essay presents a global image of the Transylvanian variant of European serfdom, a variant that shows serfdom in its gravest form–that of personal servitude, in which the peasant is bound to both the lord and the soil–and considers how this bondage came about. In this brief introduction, I will place the essay within the context of Academician Prodan's writings and of other work on serfdom in Eastern Europe.

The St. Petersburg Passage—a shopping arcade and recreation complex, comprising restaurants, exhibitions, amateur theater, and the Literary Fund—was a remarkable center of public life in imperial Russia. Contemporary journalists wrote incessantly about the Passage, celebrating the various forms of popular entertainment that it offered. In his strange unfinished story “The Crocodile,” which also takes place in the Russian arcade, Fedor Dostoevskii parodies this trivial discourse of the daily press. Urban spectacles and their refraction in the mass-circulation media are the main targets of his caricature of westernized popular culture in Russia. The writer's response to Russian modernity, as it was taking shape in the age of the Great Reforms, is expressly negative. Dostoevskii believed that in a decade defined by the rise of civic consciousness, the Russian press should address vital social concerns at home instead of celebrating ephemeral cultural imports, such as the arcade and the newspaper feuilleton.

Since the 1930s, the zealous, idealistic proponents of musical revolution in Soviet Russia, the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov (Russian association of proletarian musicians, RAPM), have served primarily as an embarrassing footnote to the history of Soviet music and cultural politics. Scholarly opinion of RAPM is remarkably consistent in its condemnation, as Russian-Soviet scholars and westerners alike dismiss the organization for its "simplistic" (western) or "vulgar" (Soviet) ideology and aesthetics. This consensus suggests that RAPM deserves its place in the dustbin of history alongside the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (Russian association of proletarian writers, RAPP) and other militant advocates of cultural revolution. But the condescending (western) and embarrassed (Soviet) dismissal of RAPM is itself simplistic. Seeing members of RAPM as undertalented and unwitting tools of the regime's agenda, or misguided if well-intentioned deviationists, obscures the important role the proletarian musicians played in the evolution of Soviet musical culture and aesthetics.

Today, no less than in the days of Lomonosov and Schlozer, the question of the ethnic identity of the early Kievan rulers is a controversial one. The late Adolf Stender-Petersen's criticism of the Normanist school, “that it replaced a real, well-founded historical view of the course of things by an a priori plan, in which things were arranged as well as possible,” also applies—mutatis mutandis, of course—to the historical-sociological method of the contemporary Soviet anti-Normanist school. What is needed in the field are good editions, with detailed, objective commentary, of all the sources known to us. Eventually these may lead to the “comprehensive edition of all the sources from which we can acquire knowledge as regards the Varangian problem” envisaged by Stender-Petersen. The edition of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio by Gyula Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins and the commentary edited by the latter may be cited as an important step toward this goal.

Based on a comparison of the prison experiences of Ekaterina Breshko- Breshkovskaia, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, revolutionary and Hindu fundamentalist, I ask two central questions: How did Breshkovskaia's story about exile and punishment help establish the tsarist genealogy of the gulag in the western consciousness, while the suffering of political prisoners in British India, as exemplified by Savarkar, were completely occluded? How and why did the specificity of incarceration in the Russian empire eclipse systems of punishment designed by other European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this article, I argue that the penumbra of modernity was darkened not only by the savagery of the Holocaust and the gulag but also by the brutal violence of western imperialism. Placing the Russian prison and exile system in comparative global perspective opens up new avenues of research in a field that has relied excessively on the intellectual binaries of a repressive Russia and a liberal western Europe.

This essay, with a focus on Baku, Azerbaijan, demonstrates that the need to secure and hold energy resources—and the infrastructures that support them—was critical to the formation of the Soviet Union. The Azerbaijani statesman Nariman Narimanov played a pivotal role in the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan by attempting to use Baku's oil to secure prerogatives for the Azerbaijan SSR. In part, Narimanov gained his position by striking a deal with Vladimir Lenin in 1920, an arrangement that I am calling the oil deal. This deal lay the foundations of Soviet power in the south Caucasus. Lenin charged Narimanov with facilitating connections between the industrial stronghold of Baku and the rural countryside of Azerbaijan and Narimanov agreed to do what he could to help supply Soviet Russia with oil. Lenin put Narimanov in charge of the Soviet government of Azerbaijan, with the understanding that he would be granted significant leeway in cultural policies. Understanding the role of the south Caucasus in Soviet history, then, is also understanding how the extraction and use of oil and other natural resources were entangled with more familiar questions of nationalities policy and identity politics.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

In Serhiy Zhadan's recent novel Internat (2017), the protagonist epitomizes the quintessential east Ukrainian under scrutiny today, while his journey depicts working through trauma. His transformation portrays the ultimate shedding of melancholy when, in response to violence, the past is replaced by the present. I elicit some of the key symbols and features of this process, which I call triggered mourning, and attend to the role of real-time menace in initiating it. This article draws connections not only between the story's plot arc and the ongoing war, but also between Ukraine's past and present from the perspective of trauma theory. The four sections of the article (on the transformation, the void, the defect, and the antidote) propose and expand upon the notion that Internat is a synchronous war novel—a narrative that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare—and examine its significance for scholarship on Ukraine, for Slavic studies, and beyond. Trauma studies in the context of literature are central to this analysis, with postcolonial studies providing some helpful illustrative parallels.

Russia is embarking upon a new path of historical development. Today, as the country gradually liberates itself from the vestiges of a nondemocratic society, it seems especially propitious to trace the subordination in the 1920s and 1930s of Russia's most important social institutions to a nascent totalitarian regime. The Russian Orthodox Church belongs on the list of such institutions. During its long history it frequently exerted a stabilizing, consolidating effect on the nation, especially during times of national crisis; even during the civil war it maintained a neutral position.

This article analyzes Soviet Woman, the main publication of the Komitet Sovetskikh Zhenshchin (Committee of Soviet Women), during the 1950s and 1960s. Approaching it as a medium of international outreach, the article illustrates how the magazine reflected official Soviet strategies toward developing countries and propagated “peaceful coexistence.” Specifically, it delineates the ways in which Soviet Woman presented Soviet women (especially those in the “Soviet East”) as models of female emancipation so as to persuade women in the Third World of the potential of socialism to effect social and economic progress, and to sustain national liberation. Assessing also reception among readers of its messages about advancement, international friendship, and solidarity, it concludes that Soviet Woman provided women in decolonizing countries an alternative to a return to traditional modes or a shift to western ones by demonstrating the possibilities that the Soviet system held for realizing gender equality and modernization.

One of the characteristics of Soviet industry is perpetual reorganization of its management. Reorganization has become unusually frequent since the war, for nearly every year some industrial ministries have been abolished, while others have been created. Still others have been split apart or merged. The same processes have occurred at the intermediate and local levels, that is, with the bureaus of ministries, the trusts, and the factory administrations.

Soviet interest in Sinkiang is a legacy of Tsarist Russia. Although the new Soviet government formally renounced, in 1917, all claims to the Russian spheres of influence in China, it soon reasserted its interest in Sinkiang, and by the mid-thirties, after the construction of the Turksib Railway, it held a virtual economic monopoly there. Soviet attempts to work out a permanent agreement for the "joint" exploitation of Sinkiang's mineral resources date back to October, 1931, and at various times at least four or five agreements were concluded or proposed by Moscow. None, however, ever became fully operative; most of them were short-lived and were concluded without the knowledge of Nanking.

For more than twenty years George of Poděbrady, the leader of the Hussites and king of Bohemia, strove for the pacification of his country and the restoration of diplomatic relations between Prague and other courts of Europe. In the early years of his career he met with opposition at home. A group of the Catholic nobility in Bohemia and Moravia, with the richest Bohemian magnate, Oldřich of Rožmberk, at their head, followed with unfriendly eyes the rise in power of the representative of the Hussite party and retarded his work by hostile actions or intrigues. Among the German-speaking Catholics of Silesia and of both Lusatias the opposition against George was fomented by the deep-rooted racial antagonism which had been accentuated during the Hussite period and hindered thereafter the collaboration of the incorporated provinces with Prague. By his tolerant policy George allayed to a great extent the fears and suspicions of his adversaries, and secured their support or, at least, acquiescence in his elevation to the royal throne in 1458.

In no other country of twentieth-century Europe have matters of local government played more havoc both with domestic peace and external security than in Czechoslovakia. Nor does modern history offer a more frustrating story than the process by which an honest, though slow and hesitant, endeavor to meet claims for more local self-government was cunningly and ruthlessly exploited for the very opposite, i.e., for crushing liberty and establishing a rigid totalitarian centralism.

The birth of the Republic itself was met with the bitter opposition of the bulk of its German minority, whose desire, however unrealistic, was to join the new Austrian state. The majority of the Sudeten Germans had scarcely begun to show a change of heart, leaders of their major parties had scarcely begun actively to cooperate with the Czechoslovak Government, when Hitler came to power in Germany, and the Nazi acid quickly corroded the delicate fabric of the fresh Czech-German cooperation.

The Russian Revolution inaugurated a period of unprecedented social agitation in Spain, which shared notable structural similarities with Russia. The instability of this period, often referred to as the trienio bolchevista (three Bolshevik years), paved the way for military dictatorship in 1923, and revealed grave defects in the Spanish political and social edifice (the national question, the land question, the inefficiency and corruption of the state, the militancy of the labor movement), which would re-emerge again with even greater virulence in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution provided a powerful stimulus for these upheavals, and the myth of Bolshevism helped spur both revolution from below and counterrevolution from above. This paper will provide a synopsis of the turbulences of these years and will gauge their ulterior significance, setting them in a transnational context. In particular, the paper will assess the specific impact of the Russian Revolution in Spain.