Of the many crises that Europe faces today, it is the migration crisis that most profoundly defines the changing nature of European politics. It is also a turning point in central and east European societies’ attitudes to the European Union, and it signals the return of the east-west divide in Europe. The article argues that what Brussels describes as a lack of solidarity is actually a clash of solidarities: national, ethnic, and religious solidarity chafing against our moral and legal obligations with respect to the refugees. The east-west divide over migration has its roots in history, demography and the twists of post-communist transition, while at the same time representing an east European version of popular revolt against globalization. The attitude divide between Europe's west and east on issues of diversity and migration strongly resembles the divide between the big cosmopolitan capital cities and the countryside within western societies themselves.

Little study has been devoted to the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity. While some attention has been paid to the Crypto-Christians of Asia Minor, who were numerous, lived in groups, and endured a long time, the Crypto-Christians of the Balkans have been largely neglected, with the exception of an occasional work referring to only a single nationality, particularly the Greeks.

When World War II came to an end, vast portions of Germany and Poland lay in rubble. And, as if this were not enough, both countries were immediately inundated by large waves of migrants. In the years from 1944 to 1949, displaced persons, refugees, and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany. For the purpose of this article, expellees (or forced migrants) are Germans or Poles who had been living in the eastern territories of both countries as defined by their borders in 1937 and who were forcibly and permanently removed from their homelands between 1944 and 1949.

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.

After the 2008 war with Russia, many internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia complained that they had nothing, despite the fact that international donors gave more than $450 million in humanitarian aid. What was nothing? How was it related to forced migration? Why did humanitarianism continually focus the IDPs' attention on what they had lost rather than the help they had been given? In this article, I use the work of existentialist philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that humanitarianism creates four forms of absence: anti-artifacts, black holes, imaginary numbers, and absolute zero. These forms of nothingness force displaced people into having nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing, which in turn prevents them from reassembling the fragments of their previous lives into meaningful forms of existence in the present.

Through a detailed examination of institutional discourses in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article demonstrates that formal political institutions may play a more layered role than is allowed by existing theories of nationalist and ethnic conflict. Competing institutional preferences of Bosniak, Serb, and Croat elites are not simply instruments for the achievement of collective or individual goals. They are symbolically salient expressions of collective identity as well. For Bosniak elites, the stated preference for a non-ethnicized territorial framework and majoritarian central government suggest the vision of a multiethnic, but not institutionally multinational, Bosnian political community. Their Serb and Croat counterparts, by contrast, insist on the continued “ethnicization” of the territorial architecture and the central government apparatus. These preferences express an understanding of Bosnia as a state of three discrete political communities. Any attempts at comprehensive institutional reform must thus reckon with the opposing and deeply embedded visions of institutions-as-symbols. The theoretical implications of this work go well beyond the Bosnian case.

One of the firmest popular conceptions of the Soviet Union in the United States is of a system diat categorically banned private enterprise. Embraced by specialists and the general public alike, this conception reflects the official Soviet stance diat the private sector was eradicated during losif Stalin's “great break” of 1929-30. Indeed, over the course of diose two years, individual peasants were compelled to collectivize, private stores forcibly shut, private manufactures socialized, and even doctors and dentists pressured to cooperate or to close shop. The concept of an interdiction against all private economic activity found support in the words of the dictator–Stalin's assertions that the Soviet Union was a society “without capitalists, small or big,” that socialist, not capitalist, property was the “foundation of revolutionary legality,” and many other statements of a similar ilk. Stalin proved his commitment to this model by his readiness to resort to coercion against its violators: at his instigation, repressive laws threatened entrepreneurs with five to ten years in prison camp for profitable private business. Such developments appeared as unequivocal as they proved lasting; when commentators discussed perestroika in the late 1980s, the only historical precedent they could identify was Lenin's New Economic Policy six decades before.

Empire has become a common analytical frame through which the Soviet state and its collapse are interpreted. Commenting on the other contributions to this forum, Mark R. Beissinger examines the limits and utility of this concept, arguing that empire needs to be understood, not as a clearly bounded transhistorical model, but as a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” whose meaning and referents have altered significantly over time. The article then probes the ways the concept of empire has been redeployed in the Soviet context, addressing in particular the role of nationalism in the making of empire, the injustices associated with empire, and the contested boundary between the multinational empire and the multinational state. It concludes by arguing for a more interpretive approach to Soviet empire as a way of relating to authority rather than a common set of political practices.

Research on the sources of support for the communists in interwar Poland has emphasized the role of ethnic minorities, especially the Jews. To what degree did Poland's national minorities vote for the Communist Party? Using census data and electoral returns on interwar Poland's 2*72 districts, as well as a new technique for inferring individual level behavior from aggregate level data, Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg generate reliable estimates of ethnic group voting behavior for the Sejm elections of 1922 and 1928. The results show that it is incorrect to speak of a unified minority vote. Communist parties received disproportionate support from Belarusans. By 1928 Ukrainians voted overwhelming for ethnonational parties. The bulk of Jews drifted into establishment politics, disproportionately supporting the pro-government bloc. Contrary to the myth of the “Jewish communist,” Jews provided only a small fraction of the electoral support for the communist parties. The evidence shows that not only were the overwhelming number of Jews not communist supporters but the vast majority of communist voters were not Jews.

Based on fieldwork (primarily in southern Romania), this article treats identity-construction among professional male Romani musicians, investigating in particular the discourse that they generate as they maintain their exclusive vocational niche on the boundaries of intersecting ethnic communities. Seeking to establish the influence of Romani musicians as agents in the construction of their own identity, Beissinger discusses notions that Romani musicians provide of non-Roms and other Roms (including other musicians), as well as how they portray surrounding cultural and political phenomena as expressions of their syncretic occupational and ethnic sense of self. Beissinger argues that Romani musicians are unquestionably enclosed by socially inflicted boundaries but are themselves also agents of boundary-making as they articulate connections with and distinctions from the world around them. Throughout, she draws pertinent comparisons with Romani musicians in other east European countries.

This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the first Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia and Africa (1968). It offers an account of the festival as a highly heterogeneous and productive site for better understanding the complex relationship between the Soviet bloc and the Third World in the crucial moment between the victory of post-colonial independence movement and the end of the Cold War.

National women's organizations were a ubiquitous feature of all of the eastern European communist nations. Although the specificities of these organizations varied from country to country, they were all state-run mass organizations variously charged with mobilizing domestic women and representing their nations at international forums concerning women's rights. In the west, these state women's organizations were treated with suspicion; they were often viewed as tools of authoritarian control, mobilizing women to fulfill party goals. It is rarely considered that eastern bloc women may have used their privileged relationship with the Communist Party to promote policies that actually helped women, or that they could push back at male patriarchal elites by appealing to higher communist principles regarding the woman question. This article is a case study of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement. It demonstrates that this organization, despite its entanglement with the state bureaucracy, was relatively successful in pressuring the Bulgarian Politburo into expanding rights and entitlements to women between 1968 and 1990.

For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.

Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

The article analyzes how the nationalist segment of the Russian public has engaged in attempts to interpret and evaluate the Crimean annexation and the war in Donbass. The Crimean annexation was justifi ed in the Kremlin by a novel use of nationalist rhetoric. Initially, this rhetoric paid off particularly well—boosting Putin’s popularity ratings and endearing him to virtually all Russian nationalists. He could present himself as the foremost defender both of ethnic Russians abroad and of Russia’s state interests, stealing the thunder from Russian ethnonationalists and the state-centered nationalists alike. However, in spite of the initial euphoria, the war in Eastern Ukraine has antagonized the nationalist segment of the Russian public which had been won over by the Kremlin only months earlier. Russian TV footage of burned houses in East Ukrainian towns and hamlets prompted questions about why Putin was not doing more to defend them.

In this article, Malgorzata Fidelis analyzes the role of gender in postwar Polish employment policies and shop floor culture and casts a new light on east European Stalinism and de-Stalinization. Focusing on the reconstruction and implementation of protective labor legislation for women, Fidelis argues that the communist definition of gender was a recast version of the western liberal notion of immutable sexual difference positioned in the body. At the same time, Polish society participated in defining gender at the site of production, most visibly in the de-Stalinization backlash against women, who had entered male-dominated skilled jobs in heavy industry under Stalinism. The party-state's use of women's reproductive function as a justification to remove women from men's jobs suggests that east European de-Stalinization needs to be reexamined in light of its different meaning for women and men.

Sir George Buchanan, Great Britain's ambassador to Russia during World War I, published his widely read memoirs in 1923. In those pages, he provided an influential account of the response of the Russian people to Germany's declaration of war: