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.

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.

The final conquest of the Kazan khanate by Muscovite armies occurred in 1552. The periods immediately preceding and following this event—that is, the years between 1547 and the late 1560s—were of paramount importance to the history of Muscovite political thought, for they witnessed the appearance of a considerable number of significant historical and ideological works. Most of these works were written in one of the two centers, that is, either at the tsar’s court or the metropolitan’s chancery. The former produced official court chronicles, while the latter—particularly under the direction of Metropolitan Macarius—compiled interpretative works of a historical and religious character.

It seems clear that there is a common ideological foundation linking Putin, Le Pen, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Kaczyński, and others, but labeling that ideology has been difficult. Many in the media have called them “populists,” but this term can be misleading and imprecise. This essay focuses on Poland in order to propose a genealogy that transcends conventional divisions between left and right. The phrase “exclusionary egalitarianism” helps us recognize the intertwined commitments to both racism and nationalism on the one hand, and an opposition to inequalities of wealth and status on the other. While the analogy to the radical right of the 1930s is helpful, there is an even closer link to the “national communists” of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the past, newspaper accounts and many scholarly articles have made dire and sweeping predictions about the imminence of civil war or the collapse of the Yugoslav federal state following the death of President Tito. The substance for these apocalyptic visions generally stems from Yugoslavia's nationality tensions, regional inequalities, and external pressure from both the Eastern and Western blocs. The widely accepted forecast is that the three factors will reinforce each other and exacerbate existing societal cleavages, leading to chaos or strict military rule. But most of the “dismal school” analyses of post-Tito Yugoslavia ignore the profound changes that have occurred in the country since 1945 and assume that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) is unwilling or unable to take steps toward increasing the probability of political stability after Tito's death. In this article I shall critically evaluate the societal changes that have occurred and the LCY's response to them.

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.

Russia Never Renounced its rights and the Soviet Government never gave anyone its authorization to dispose of territories discovered by Russian seamen.” These words were uttered during the 1949 meeting of the All-Union Geographic Society of the USSR by its president, L. S. Berg, a prominent geographer and historian of Russian discoveries in the Pacific. He spoke in connection with the extensive claims to the Antarctic which were voiced at that meeting and which were based on the explorations and discoveries of the Russian Bellingshausen expedition of 1819–1821.

It seems to have become the fashion in the USSR to claim for its own citizens of present and bygone days more and more of the inventions and discoveries of Western civilization. Meant chiefly for home consumption, such claims probably are not very important or dangerous to the non-Soviet world, except as they point toward a systematic building up of a national superiority complex and consequent aggressiveness.

All’s quiet now. Summer vacation has started, the halls and classrooms are deserted. Almost. It is 10 July 1992 and I am inside Moscow’s School No. 175 with Vladimir Dmitrievich Nikolaev, a pupil here from 1933 to 1941. Once this was School No. 25, hallowed ground, from 1931 to 1937 the most famous school in the Soviet Union, where a talented teaching corps instructed the children of Stalin and other representatives of the Soviet elite. The winner of many awards, School No. 25 was the object of my research for several years. It's a bit unnerving to imagine the sounds and images of the people who worked and played in these very rooms sixty years ago. Nikolaev interrupts, then enhances the experience: “This was the library; the deputy director’s office was here; Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, and I were in the same literature class there.”

The interpolation of other-language material into the primary language of discourse is a well-known phenomenon in the speech of bi- and multilinguals. Social scientists studying bilingualism have termed this practice “code-switching.” In literature, code-switching is potentially available to any writer who commands another language besides his own and is not restricted from its use by literary canon. Practitioners of code-switching in the West include Petronius and Cicero, medieval translators, Rabelais and Montaigne, Sterne, Tolstoy, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, e. e. cummings, Hemingway, and Anthony Burgess. The motives for literary code-switching are many—terminological precision, connotative nuance, citation and allusion, display of erudition, an illusion of verisimilitude, irony, and word play.

In the search for meaning which its conclusion provokes, a life, inevitably, is scrutinized for patterns, symbols, and general themes; it is read, in short, as a text. Suicide becomes a bloody signature on the bottom of a ragged page, the final and incontrovertible assertion of authorial control over one’s own life. At the same time, however, the suicide relinquishes all future control over everything, including future interpretations of his or her life-as-text. As a Pyrrhic means of giving the planned, narrative structure of a text to life, suicide functions as an uncanny fulcrum between “meaningful” life and “meaningless” death; hence its fascination. The supreme instance of human will triumphing over cruel nature’s whims is also the moment of greatest surrender to death’s lack of meaning. Witnesses and analysts rush in to provide interpretation and theory.

Recent interpretations of the first Five-Year Plan have taken two main approaches. One has emphasized the exploitation of workers and peasants by the party elite throughout the years of the first two Five-Year Plans. In explaining the evolution of labor policies and laws that bound the workers to jobs, Robert Conquest and Solomon Schwarz emphasize the personal responsibility of Stalin, who demanded rapid expansion of industrialization and brooked no questioning of his views. To obey him and to protect their political futures, his officials used tough policies designed to produce quick, visible results. Both authors describe a linear development of ever harsher proscriptions and penalties, and they attribute greater coherence to the process and greater effectiveness to the laws than actually existed. Both see the process from the viewpoint of the capital, disregard the competing ideas among the leaders, and neglect the local level where policies had to be executed and were often changed or ignored.

“The attitude toward the national question always constituted in Czechoslovakia the touchstone for political understanding of the defense of revolutionary positions,” the Czech-German-Jewish historian of communism in Czechoslovakia, Paul Reimann, wrote in 1931. In these few words Reimann expressed the dilemma of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. And to this dilemma my study is also devoted.

The peace treaties concluded after the First World War buried the multinational empire and created in its place a multinational republic. The Communists in Czechoslovakia labored hard to define their stand in relation to the national question. The purpose of this paper is to describe closely the policies of Communists toward Slovakia. We shall argue that confusion, inconsistency, ideological perplexities, and opportunism characterized the party's dealings with problems of nationalism and nationalities in that country.

This essay takes the October Revolution's centennial as an occasion to consider Soviet state practices in an international context. Many features of Soviet governance reflected an interventionist ethos that first arose in western Europe and subsequently informed programs of population management around the world. From this perspective, we see that Soviet methods of rule derived not from socialist ideology but rather from pre-existing state practices. Communist Party leaders used these practices to pursue ideological goals, but both ambitions to reshape society and the means to do so originated elsewhere. This comparative approach also highlights ways the Soviet case resembled that of other late-developing countries, where educated elites similarly relied on state interventions to transform their populations. For many of them, the Soviet Union offered an alternative model of socioeconomic advancement, albeit one based on extreme state violence.