Soviet statements of policy on nationality relations traditionally have expressed a commitment to equalize economic development among the union republics of the USSR. As early as the 1920s, Soviet leaders promised to reduce differences between more advanced and more backward republics. The program adopted in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the intention of “devoting special attention to those areas of the country which are in need of more rapid development.” The goal of economic equalization among union republics is said by Soviet sources to have broad social and political significance, and the elimination of disparities in the economic base is thought to be necessary for the achievement of harmony among Soviet nationalities.

In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat appears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other, druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples) and mnogonatsional'nost’ (multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion of Absurdistan (2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.

Modernist prose forms often present the reader with the paradox of cerebral, structurally complex works which express an irrational or antirational content. These works seek an almost geometric perfection of form while simultaneously rejecting intellect as a totally inadequate means of conceiving contemporary experience. Strikingly often it is a witch of a rather special breed who provides the essential thematic and narrative elements without which the intellectual pattern of the novel could not crystallize out. That voyantes and sorceresses should people the prose of Western surrealists such as Andre Breton is not too surprising, but it is surely a nice problem that two of the most self-consciously modernist Soviet novels, Fedin's Cities and Years and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, should depend for both their compositional and moral energies on witches.

The present study is intended as an over-all view of teaching and research in the Slavic and East European Field. Almost ten years had elapsed since Coleman's third survey, published in 1948, and the need for a new study became increasingly apparent. The writer's survey was begun during the academic year 1954-1955, and certain phases of the investigation continued until the present. During 1954-1955 questionnaires were sent to all the 183 American and Canadian institutions reported as teaching Russian by the Modern Language Association of America. The list, compiled as the result of a survey, appeared in the September, 1954, issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association (LXIX, 29-30).

The first book of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains an episode from the Allied War Council at Olmütz, on November 27, 1805, five days before the Battle of Austerlitz. With the Council over, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes Prince Boris Drubetskoy, a new aide-de-camp, to present him to Tsar Alexander. Coming out of the emperor's room as they approach is a tall man in civilian dress who has a striking face and sharply projecting jaw, which gives him a peculiar vivacity and keenness of expression. “Who was that ?” asks Drubetskoy. “He is one of the most remarkable but to me most unpleasant of men—the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski,” replies Bolkonsky.

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.

In 1892, as Moscow prepared to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergei of Radonezh, an article appeared in the Moskovskiia vedomosti which suggested that one appropriate way to mark the occasion would be to erect a replica of the small wooden Church of the Holy Trinity built by Saint Sergei at the site of his famed monastery north of Moscow. The article further urged that the project be a cooperative effort and that the proposed church be constructed in one day (that is, a twenty-four-hour period), in the tradition of the obydennye khramy of old.’ The tradition which the civic-minded writer of the article tried to revive dated back to the late fourteenth century. The early Russian chronicles record nineteen one-day votive churches built between 1390 and 1552, all as a response to the pestilence then raging. Ten of these were constructed in Novgorod, nine in Pskov. In addition, four others, one each in Moscow, Iaroslavl', Vologda, and Viatka, can be documented from other sources. All were built of wood in a twenty-four-hour period by communal labor.

Charges from Peking that Moscow no longer follows the true Leninist position on disarmament are probably among the reasons why Moscow is now publishing new documentary and interpretive material concerning Lenin's views on disarmament and other issues of war and peace. The new materials, coupled with other documents long available, make this an opportune time to review the development of Lenin's views on disarmament and their effect on Soviet policy during his lifetime.

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.

While a central policy of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II called for the removal of “Serbs,” the majority of people who identified themselves (or were identified by the regime) as Serbs in Sarajevo—the second largest city in the state—remained “safe.” In order to understand why this was the case, Emily Greble Balic examines the interplay between local identity politics and state policies of genocide and nation-building. In so doing, she sheds light on such broad issues as the ambiguity of national identity at the local level; the limitations of traditional understandings of “resistance”; and the options open to members of the victim, or “foreign” group, as a result of the disjunction between national and local agendas.

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."

The Bolshevik Revolution had little immediate effect on the periodicals, news-papers, and publishing houses that were already in existence in 1917. During the first few months after the takeover, Communist Party papers appeared along with satirical journals, such as The Scourge (Bich) and The New Satyricon (Novyi satirikon), that remained steadfastly opposed to the new regime. Then, in the middle of 1918, the government ordered the closing of all opposition news-papers and magazines, and authors suddenly discovered that the places where they could publish were limited. The civil war brought further hardships; shortages of food and firewood plagued everyone in the cities, but writers also suffered from the paper shortage that made publishing virtually impossible.

Despite the harsh material conditions of the next several years, a vigorous cultural life endured in Petrograd, thanks in no small part to a number of organizations that aided artists, musicians, writers, and scholars.

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

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.

This article addresses the role that the legacy of the pre- and post-WWII past has played in ongoing identity debates among the inhabitants of Kaliningrad oblast of the Russian Federation. Since 1991, interest in preserving this legacy has been on the rise, influencing the inhabitants’ feeling of regional distinctiveness in numerous ways. While the pre-war legacy is important for a considerable number of Kaliningraders, others believe that it threatens the Russian and Soviet mien of the Oblast, both in cultural and political terms. They favor taking greater care of Soviet-era buildings, monuments, and other commemorations of war heroes. This viewpoint disparity has recently widened due to both internal and external factors, including the deterioration of Russo-western relations. A March 2015 incident in the village of Veselovka is used to reflect upon the way in which pre-war and post-war legacies are used in the above-mentioned identity debate. The author examines the direction of identity construction in the oblast through the officially-acknowledged vision of Russianness as pursued by President Vladimir Putin, in particular, and the Russian government, in general.