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.

In his 1876 Writer’s Diary, novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii wrote a series of three journalistic articles parodying both the contemporary movement of modern spiritualism and its principal critic in St. Petersburg, noted chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev. This article explores Dostoevskii’s views on spiritualism and examines the rhetorical strategy he developed to help persuade Russians away from what he perceived as a dangerous mystical fad. Mendeleev had similar goals, but the two differed on the urgency of the problem—and hence the proper rhetoric for the task—and thus both spent as much time fighting the other as the movement they deplored. This article endeavors both to analyze a Russian scientific text alongside works traditionally considered more “rhetorical“ and to explore in detail the specific involvement of Dostoevskii the journalist with contemporary issues in Russian culture.

If Old Russian literature had a typical hero, he was a superman. Whatever the field of his activity, he was able to surmount all obstacles with ease. Either he was described as predestined to success, or as so strong that his success was inevitable. This was as true of religious ascetics and martyrs, whose death was only a sign of their final triumph, as it was of princes or military leaders.

Examples of literary heroes who were not so victorious are rare, almost nonexistent until the seventeenth century. One thinks, however, of the hero of the Igor Tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve), or of the heroes of the chronicle tales which depict Russian resistance to the Tartar invaders. But, though defeated, these historical figures are still characterized as heroes in the grand style, unusual men whose tragic fate is in strange contrast to their superior strength.

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

Like their zemstvo counterparts, the municipal dumas played a major role in determining the quality of life in tsarist Russia from the Great Reforms until the Revolution in 1917. During this period of rapid urban growth, the dumas had the authority to regulate housing conditions. They bore major responsibility for ensuring an appropriate level of public health and sanitation, welfare and social services and for developing public education, transportation, parks, and recreational facilities.

The restrictive municipal “counter reform” of 1892 destroyed some of the promise of urban self-government, however, and with few exceptions, city government entered the twentieth century with a reputation for apathy, indolence, and indifference to all but the narrow concerns of the tiny propertied elite to whom local affairs had been entrusted. Perhaps Den', a leftist paper, was too harsh when it characterized the record of a St. Petersburg duma as one of “criminal indifference and cynical unconcern.” But recently historians have taken a similar, if less biting view:

In the five years since the Yugoslav-Soviet split, the ideological, political, and economic complexion of Marshal Tito's Communist state has been altered in a number of basic respects. It is still too early to attempt to say how the new Yugoslav reforms will work out in practice. Particularly one does not know to what extent the new role of the Communist Party has in fact altered the balance of political power in Yugoslavia, or whether it has altered it at all. But the major reforms now seem to have been completed, at least on paper, and it is possible to summarize them and make some tentative, over-all conclusions.

In drafts, correspondence, and diaries from the mid-1870s, Fedor Dostoevskii makes repeated allusions to Fedor Tiutchev’s paradoxical articulation of the inefficacy of the word in “Silentium!” but removes them from the printed versions of his texts. The only exception is Brothers Karamazov, where Dmitrii reproduces garbled fragments of the poem under interrogation and in commenting on Ivan’s silence-like speech. I use these “traces” of “Silentium!” to shed light on Dostoevskii’s conscious experimentation with authorial silence in novels conventionally understood in terms of the polyphonic proliferation of speech. Beginning with Mikhail Bakhtin’s own allusion to “Silentium!” in the unpublished Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, the theorist came to emphasize the role of silence in polyphony. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s acknowledgement of the affinity between negative theology and the negative path to affirmation taken in deconstruction, I show how Bakhtin comes to conceive of the history of the novel as the gradual development of apophatic strategies for approximating the unspoken interior world of the other in writing.

In a recent article in Voprosy istorii KPSS entitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.

Printing, as a German perfection, was brought to the Slavs by a German craftsman, Sweipolt Fiol, who is considered the first Slavic printer of Cyrillic characters. Fiol's printed church book, Oktoich, in Slavic language with Cyrillic characters, appeared in 1491 in Cracow, Poland. It is considered one of the first Cyrillic incunabula of Eastern Europe.

Lucia Merecka Borski, in an article dealing with the early printing in Poland, stated that "Toward the end of the fifteenth century" a "printing house was opened in Krakow by Swietopelk Fiol (Szwaybold Feyl, Fejel, Szwajpolt Fieola, Fiola) who issued five books in the Cyrillic alphabet about the year 1491."

A fictional account of the life and death of Sergei Kirov, Fridrikh Ermler’s two-part film The Great Citizen (1937 and 1939) appears unusual due to its lack of action and its fetishization of the spoken word. As an instance of what Ermler called “conversational cinema,” the film defines the outer limit of verbosity and immobility in socialist realist film. The movie’s hero Shakhov mediates between Stalin and the Soviet masses; as a result, the conflict between Shakhov and the Trotskyist opposition represents a struggle between authentic and corrupt linguistic mediation in the film. By appropriating the myth of the Russian writer's martyrdom, The Great Citizen depicts Shakhov’s demise, not merely as the result of a Trotskyist conspiracy, but more importantly as the necessary guarantor of the truth of Shakhov’s words. Ermler's film reconfigures the writer’s role in Russian society by inverting the hierarchy of the written and the spoken word, thus subjugating the myth of the martyred writer to the aesthetic and ideological goals of socialist realism. The Great Citizen demonstrates the importance of Kirov's martyrdom within Stalinist mythology and figures as a paradigmatic work of socialist realist film.

Prior to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1933, American military intelligence on the Red Army was limited to what it could glean from foreign military sources and travelers who had observed the Red Army inside the Soviet state. Thus, from 1920, the end of the period of Russian Civil War and Allied Intervention, to 1933, information on the Soviet military establishment was gathered by American military attachés from European diplomatic and military officials in Riga, Berlin, and Warsaw. To a lesser extent, intelligence on the Red Army was also available in London, Paris, Vienna, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Peking. American military intelligence dispatches and reports during the period reflected the heavy reliance upon secondary and indirect sources, although the information was often remarkably accurate. But with the American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and the opening of an American embassy in Moscow, American military intelligence gained the opportunity to supplement information received from foreign military sources with data received directly from the American military attaché.

For over a century scholars have been intrigued by one of history's most famous apocryphal works, the “Political Testament of Peter the Great.“The central theme—a warning of the danger Russia represents to all her neighbors —has always been a relevant topic for discussion. However, a satisfactory explanation of the document's genesis is yet to be given. One thing is clear: the “testament” is a forgery, an attempt to “frame” Peter I. But who is the culprit? The question has aroused the instincts of the detective in many historians and set them on the miscreant's trail.

Suspects were not lacking. Initially, circumstantial evidence pointed to Napoleon as the author or inspirer of the fabrication, since it was in 1812 in France that the first published version of this document appeared. Soon, however, suspicion fell on C. L. Lesur, one of the emperor's propagandists and the author of the work which contained the published text.