Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the "Revolution from Above." Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.' The history of the massive automotive complex at Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in microcosm the many problems that often bedeviled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed up in Moscow.

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that “the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes.” It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal “wagon-tongue” during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.

This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin depicted Black subjects. Through a combination of close formal readings and broader analyses of the specific contexts in which these images were produced, the article probes a number of complex and interconnected topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan pictorial sensibilities. The article likewise pays close attention to the conceptual and material continuities and discontinuities between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century and considers how these paintings might have contributed to the evolving Russian discourses on race, nationality, and empire in the “long” nineteenth century.

From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction. My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two “cooperating” states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return. I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.

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.

This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the “Russian Revolution.” In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of “national-liberation struggle” is too reductionist and teleological. The term “Ukrainian Revolution,” which was widely used by the participants of these events, is better suited for an inclusive analysis of this period that emphasizes the significance of the national factor without ignoring the others. Rather than “nationalizing” the story of the Revolution, such an approach highlights the transnational dimensions of the Ukrainian question.

All her life Zinaida Gippius remembered how startled she was when as a young girl she was told that the Russian word predmet was devised and introduced into the language by Karamzin at the very end of the eighteenth century. The discovery left her wondering how the Russians who lived before that time could discuss all sorts of basic things without a word denoting “object” in the language. We may well be startled in a similar way when we stop to realize that the handy adjective “surrealistic” was coined only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the word did not initially mean what it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the French Surrealists during his trip to Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what their movement was about but from their behavior concluded that they must be the French equivalent of his own LEF group.

The premature death of Waclaw Borowy in October, 1950, is a great loss for Polish literary scholarship and for Polish culture in general. By common consent Borowy was the most outstanding literary historian and critic of his generation. In his work he blended the best traditions of philological study with a modern approach to literature. He was a man of huge reading both in Polish literature and in foreign literatures and he was well versed in history, philology, and the arts. His thorough knowledge of foreign languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian) enabled him to present Polish authors and Polish literary trends against a broad comparative background and to evaluate them in an objective fashion. Finally, Borowy was a master of Polish literary style, uniting perfect clarity and conciseness with charming elegance, subtle humor, and fine irony. Nothing written by him was ever dull, not even his bibliographical surveys!

In the new Czechoslovakia a Communist Party did not exist in the early days. Such a party was created only in the fall of 1921, fully three years after the independence of Czechoslovakia had been effected. At the moment of liberation it is not an exaggeration to say that communism had hardly even a foothold among Czech and Slovak workers. A substantial wave of sympathy for the Russian Bolsheviks had swept over the country following the Revolution in 1917, and a radical mood, favorable to socialism, had spread widely among the Czech masses. These circumstances had not, however, encouraged even the beginning of organizing a communist movement among Czechs and Slovaks, or among the German minority.

(And slowly, as his mind and feeling / descend into a languid dream, / Imagination takes up dealing / her motley Faro game to him.)

At a card table at the beginning of "Pikovaia dama" (The queen of spades), Tomskii recounts a tale about his flamboyant grandmother, an avid Faro player. In her youth the Countess once lost a large sum to the Duke of Orleans aujeu de laReine at Versailles. When her husband refused to pay off her debt, the Countess turned to the adventurer and wonderman Count Saint-Germain for help.