When Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, carrying out the decision of the military council Peter I had called at the time of the siege of Nienshants, placed an earthwork fortress on one of the islands of the Neva Delta, it is highly unlikely that anyone suspected what the consequences of this step would be. It was simply a timely move that made it possible to cut off the Neva’s channel by artillery fire, so that the Swedish fleet could not aid the beleaguered town by sea. The fortress proved useless in all respects: It never had occasion to beat back the enemy, whereas defending the Admiralty Wharf on the other side of the river was beyond its reach. It seemed appropriate to build another fortress around the wharf as quickly as possible. On all sides of both fortifications a small town began to spread out irregularly, and it bore the name of the tsar’s heavenly guardian, the apostle Peter.

In recent years Poland's political life has produced a genuine and interesting revival of the Polish parliament, the Seym. It has been especially significant in the area of legislative committees, which not only grew in number but enlarged their sphere of activities and became more independent. The development had its sources in the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin in 1953 and culminated in Poland in the so-called “October Revolt” of 1956.

The impact of neither Andrei Belyi nor Velimir Khlebnikov has been fully comprehended, and their legacies are joined in unusual combination in the work of the contemporary visual poet Elizaveta Mnatsakanova. Her poetry appeals to both eye and ear, expanding on innovations introduced by Belyi and Khlebnikov, and it raises broad questions about the integration of sensory experiences by readers of visual poetry. Mnatsakanova uses illustrative handwriting, calligraphy, and images of a hand or a face in her one-of-a-kind albums and books, and her poems are set out in symmetrical columns or other spatial arrangements. Repetition is the central rhetorical device in her work, yet her unique albums emphasize individualized aesthetic production and anticipate highly charged reader reaction. Special attention is paid to “Das Hohelied,” a part of Das Buch Sabeth, which engages both the literary tradition and the immediacy of a reader's experience with the text.

During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of Western Europe was caught up in the phenomenon known as the witch craze. Before it finally ended in the early eighteenth century this mass hysteria had claimed a goodly number of victims, mostly women, who were seized, tortured, tried, and executed, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence, for alleged maleficia against their neighbors and heresy against the church.

Once the accusation of witchcraft was leveled against someone the judicial process, either formal or informal, was set in motion to determine whether the suspect was indeed a witch. On the Continent this was facilitated by torture and the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual of procedure compiled by the two German Dominicans Sprenger and Krämer and published in 1486.

Archbishop Antonii’s Kniga Palomnik (circa 1201-4) is the earliest extant account of a Novgorodian pilgrimage to Constantinople. The work has long been valued by historians as a document of the Byzantine capital's treasures on the eve of the Latin invasion and by philologists as a model for the literary genre known as the khozhdenie. Recent scholarship suggests that Kniga Palomnik’s readership was far wider than previously supposed and that Archbishop Antonii’s literary skills should not be underrated. But when it comes to analyzing the appeal of the work, the critical consensus ends. Some view Kniga Palomnik as an exemplary account with a few insignificant breaches of etiquette. Others contend that the author’s talents are most apparent in rhetorical exhortations, where he lapses from the genre’s decorum. There are grounds for both positions. Kniga Palomnik is indeed typical, in that it consists of a series of descriptive essays framed between exordial and concluding topoi. At the same time, Antonii’s fondness for rhetoric undeniably signals a break with tradition. My own findings indicate a third alternative, namely, that the rhetorical “lapses” and the “normative” passages conform to a system of etiquette compatible with but distinct from that of the account of the journey per se.

In the particular case of Hungary, neo-serfdom is to be seen as an economic, political, and social evolution in which the political power of the nobility, especially that of the gentry, grew considerably; the demesne lands of the lords disproportionately increased at the expense of the serfs' rustical lands; the lords' seigneurial jurisdiction over their peasants increased; and the lords' management of their economy shifted from receiving rents to producing for markets. It was a system of social stagnation in which the evolution of cities and an urban middle class, a potential counterbalance to the nobility, was made impossible, and the serfs had no way out of their degrading environment and status. These conditions developed rapidly after the suppression of the Dózsa revolt of 1514, the greatest peasant movement of discontent in Hungary. As a result, the peasants were bound to the soil. The national Diet of 1547, however, enacted the serfs' right of migration, a freedom which was re enacted several times more.

Officially the one-centeredness of the Communist world ended in 1943. In that year the Communist International, which had recognized the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the hegemon, was dissolved, because the new political situation demanded the “great flexibility and independence” of the various “sections.“ The people's democracies that a few years later came into being in Eastern Europe emphasized, as Brzezinski has noted, that they “were to be sovereign—not Soviet. Their relations with the USSR were to be, naturally, ‘friendly’ but founded on mutual recognition of the principles of independence and noninterference in internal affairs.“ Thus ideologically the transformation of international communism into a complex with many allegedly independent power-holding and power-seeking Communist parties was proclaimed long before Togliatti in 1956 asserted that the Communist world was becoming “polycentric.”

This article demonstrates that it was the public sphere shaped by the Kazan city duma and the local press, rather than the tsarist state alone, that strengthened Muslim identity among the urban Tatars. Norihiro Naganawa argues that the invocation of the empire's ruling principle of religious tolerance split the duma along confessional lines and undermined its arbitrating role. He also examines the political discussions among the local Tatar intellectuals over the timing and meaning of Islamic holidays. While the Spiritual Assembly, the long-standing hub of Muslim-state interaction, provided leverage for the mullahs in their efforts to maintain a secure domain for religion, this security dissipated as it became entangled in the competition for authority among increasingly numerous actors speaking for Islam and nation. Naganawa also suggests that late imperial Russia was confronted by the profound theoretical challenge of religious pluralism, to which not tsarism, nor liberal democracy, nor secularism had or have easy answers.

'Violating the Canon” makes the case for an alternative Jewish and literary space in the context of Soviet war literature by comparing works by Vasilii Grossman, Il'ia Erenburg, and the Yiddish author Der Nister. In this article, Harriet Murav distinguishes the question of literary value from the question of identity and separates out the problem of determining the typicality or representativeness of a work from the problem of engaging the complexity of its meanings. Jewish literature from the Soviet Union ought to be recovered from the constraints that subordinate it to Cold War-era sociological and political constraints. Mikhail Bakhtin, Werner Sollors, and Michael Warner provide approaches that allow access to more fluid and open-ended readings.

This article examines debates, scholarly studies, and literary representations of the phenomenon of racism in socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs’ relationship to whiteness in the 1960s and 70s. I argue that the persistent activism of black African students helped provoke official, scholarly, and public discussions about the thorny question of racism in Yugoslav society during this time. The salience of black students’ accusations eventually made something that was taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s—namely, entertaining the prospect that anti-black racial prejudice existed in non-aligned, socialist, and anti-racist Yugoslavia—into an active subject of debate by the end of the decade. Importantly, the relative candidness with which academic studies and popular literature addressed racism indicates a reflexivity about “racial” questions on the part of socialist Yugoslav society, something that scholarship has largely neglected in favor of focusing on the suppression or elision of race and the inadequacy of state socialist responses to the problem of domestic expressions of prejudice.

The KGB and the rest of the Soviet intelligence and policing apparatus are commonly portrayed as having been among the staunchest of conservative opponents to the reform process in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1980s. But while key leaders of the August 1991 effort to oust General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, did come from the security services, this characterization obscures how the KGB rank-and-file responded to and participated in the reforms. This article uses their own words and experiences, recorded in the KGB΄s top-secret in-house journal, Sbornik KGB SSSR, to examine how everyday KGB officers navigated liberalizing reforms in which they in fact played an active and evolving role implementing and shaping. In these firsthand accounts, which cover topics from nationalism to environmentalism, a sense of loss of control is clear, both over events unfolding in the Soviet Union and over their own leading role and privileged position within it.