Turkmenistan holds a special place in the Russian and Soviet imagination. At the turn of the last century, especially, Turkmenistan appeared as an imaginative object shaped by both nineteenth century tropes and images of the steppe and by the modernist's revaluation and displacement of these very tropes. This article traces this intellectual history from the late nineteenth century to the fall of the Soviet empire and elicits three main narratives through which the republic was rendered alien: Turkmenistan as a “republic from outer space,” as an “arctic desert,” and as a republic whose southern border is constantly threatened by various forces that can never be successfully defeated. Based on a wide body of literary works and films, mainly from the 1920s–30s and the late Soviet period, the paper points to intertextual references that betray both shifts and continuities within these narratives. The analysis shows how notions of political integration and climatic transformations were constantly countered by alternative imaginary boundaries, contributing to an “imaginative geography” of the republic that shaped the way Turkmenistan was perceived. The development of such an “imaginative geography” of Turkmenistan as an “alien republic” was thereby inextricably linked to its steppe and desert geography, marked by a threefold dialectic between concrete and imaginary geography, a rhetoric of appropriation and of alienation, and between present and mythical time.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.

This article maps the presentation of nuclear power as valuable cultural heritage in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Drawing on the analysis of archival documents, exhibitions, site visits and interviews, it argues that the nuclear cultural heritage-making that is taking place in Russia is not limited to self-promotion by the nuclear industry but is shaped by different professional and societal groups seeking to define their identity and gain recognition in the public sphere. The selected case studies, the Polytechnical Museum (Politekh) in Moscow and Rosatom's recent attempts to institutionalize nuclear cultural heritage, add new empirical material to the existing studies of Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear culture and offer new insights into its character.

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.

Research on how faculty have attempted to subvert the casualization of academic labor, that is, the conversion of stable and well-paying jobs into temporary ones, has been going on for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have cast academic contingency in new light. Given the prevalence of contingency in Slavic and REEES, and the threat of budget cuts in the humanities, REEES faculty have a particular stake in undertaking anti-contingency efforts to protect their colleagues, institutions, and scholarship. This article will assess the conclusions of some recent studies, opinion pieces, debates, and policy recommendations with a view to their potential to address contingency in REEES and Slavic Studies.

This article examines the armed fighting that took place in Slutsk, in present-day Belarus, in November and December of 1920, primarily between local forces and the Red Army. In contrast to existing understandings of the insurrection, this article situates the incident within more recent scholarship dedicated to better understanding the post-WWI period, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and experiences at the local level. In doing so, the goals are two-fold: to detangle the story of Slutsk from existing nationalist interpretations and to examine Slutsk as a site witnessing a series of clashes between centers of power and periphery, among different ethno-national groups, soldiers, and ideas. Ultimately, those participating in the Slutsk insurrection sought to resist any outside dominance and control. Though on the surface the insurrection in Slutsk has been interpreted as rather marginal in the longer history of Belarus and the region, the events that occurred manifested as a clash of some of the most critical processes underway in the early to mid-twentieth century. Through Slutsk, this article seeks to better understand the experience of the “periphery” during this time.

How is it that Poland and Hungary, formerly regional leaders in democratic progress in east central Europe, have become widely cited cases of democratic backsliding? According to the political science literature on democratization, the path by which they exited communism should have favored stable democratic outcomes. This paper reexamines that literature and argues that it misses potential populist dangers inherent in the combination of accommodation and contention in the democratization process in both countries. The paper argues that changes in the structural conditions under which Polish and Hungarian democracy operated markedly improved the chances of success for populist actors in electoral competition, explaining the rise of PiS and FiDeSz. Particular attention is paid to the role of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

This essay provides a critical decolonial intervention into the prevalent state of racial exceptionalism in mainstream sociological research on contemporary Russia. Following critical race theory's understanding of race as relationally constituted and rooted in discourses of Europeanness, modernity, and civilization, the essay shows that race is highly prevalent but unacknowledged in sociological studies of Russia. It is argued that dismissing race as analytically irrelevant in Russia seriously limits the sociological ability to explain social inequalities, engage with current global challenges and inadvertently gives racism new legitimacy. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques of sociology as a form of knowledge production, the essay points towards some ways of decolonizing sociological research concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia and overcoming racial exceptionalism.

This essay explores the unique challenge the proliferation of adjunct labor in higher education poses to efforts at eliminating racial bias and promoting diversity in our field. Relying on published research and personal experience, I argue that the pervasive exploitation of contingent labor makes academic careers, particularly in far-flung fields such as Slavic studies, unattractive to many college graduates from the Black community, a large portion of which considers education a meritocratic means of escaping intergenerational poverty. Because the economic, social, and cultural inequalities at play in determining who obtains a tenure-track job fly in the face of this myth of meritocracy so fundamental to historic Black hopes for socioeconomic mobility, I call for a reckoning with adjunctification as a critical first step to addressing racial bias and ensuring inclusivity in our field.

This contribution examines the creative energy behind the ongoing protests in Belarus, with a focus on poetry and music. Belarus is traditionally a “versocentric” society, where poetry and music have historically played important roles in consolidating national culture. In the 2020 protest movement, fast and widespread distribution through social media has made poetry and music a crucial instrument for cementing a sense of collective identity among protestors, establishing transnational solidarity, and affecting the emotional regime of Belarusian society.

This paper focuses on the unprecedented mobilization that unravelled in the aftermath of the Bearusian elections of 2020. The argument made is that issues of agency and participation in political decision making are it its core.

The revolution of 2020 in Belarus has often been described as a new 1989 and there is no doubt that the emancipatory appeal of the Belarusian protests is similar to the one that sustained the 1989 revolutions. But will building the democratic system—the major aspiration of the Belarusian protesters—follow the scripts of liberalization and westernization in evidence in other eastern and central European countries? Will self-determination in post-Lukashenka Belarus follow a scenario modelled on the patterns adopted by other east European and post-Soviet states, where ethnocentric national identities and the memory of victims of communism became distinctive markers of east European post-communism? Examining the symbolic dimension of the protest repertoire, this article demonstrates how the protests re-arranged the system of historical and cultural references that shaped the foundation of Belarusian collective memory and identity discourses since 1994. It reveals how a broad variety of actors engaged in contention activated a process of re-signification of cultural and political symbols and ideas and led to the formation of a blended socio-cultural imaginary, which integrates previously disconnected and competing projects and ideologies.

The Belarusian protest movement that started in August 2020 has been discussed from the point of view of strategy and objectives, and as the cradle of a new subjectivity. This essay goes beyond those two perspectives by looking at the regimes of engagement, developing in interaction with the material and technological environment, that have given the protests their distinctive style. The first part looks at coordination and representation at protest events and in producing protest symbols such as flags. The second part discusses the role of Telegram and the emergence of local protest groups. Even though the movement did not grow organically out of everyday concerns, there are some signs that it has begun to reassemble local communities from above. Yet there are also indications that politics continues to be seen as distinct from everyday life, making it uncertain that the movement will lead to a deeper transformation of society.

Belarusian women stand at the forefront of post-election protests. Their participation is seen as unprecedented and is often perceived as a “revolution with a female face.” It did not start as a feminist project, however, but rather as a reaction to mass-scale arrests of male participants during the first days of protests. At the same time, is it possible to characterize female involvement in women's chains of solidarity and then regular Saturday demonstrations as a “feminist project” when one takes into account the usage of traditional feminine images and feminine aesthetics during the protests? On the other hand, even the symbolic subversion of patriarchal stereotypes present on the posters seems to have its limits when violence is inflicted by the representatives of special military forces. This essay will examine the agentic nature of female protests and the ways of expressing dignity in times when a basic sense of security is lacking. I will look at situational individual acts of agency and how these acts characterize female participants of the protests as a group that is aware of its resources and power. The text will be based on the analysis of media discourse and visual materials.

This article examines the emergence of what I call “spectral performance” in Putin's Russia. Focusing on the Immortal Regiment initiative, I investigate the growing importance of practices that ask the living to act as surrogates for the dead. My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, applying a memory studies frame, I show how the Regiment helps preserve memory of WWII in a time of significant generational change. Second, drawing on theories of political theology and biopolitics, I show how the Regiment reaffirms the Kremlin's sovereign power to regulate the boundaries between life and death while symbolically displacing sovereignty from the “flesh” of the people to a growing ranks of “immortals.” Finally, focusing on the question of representation, I show how the Regiment helps construct an oppressive distribution of the sensible that privileges the dead over the living. I conclude by examining St. Petersburg artist Maksim Evstropov's necro-activist project Party of the Dead as a cultural critique of the Regiment.

During the last years of the Second World War, some 30,000 Yugoslav refugees found shelter in the Egyptian desert from the German occupation of Dalmatia. In the camp El Shatt, the Partisan movement, the nascent UN, western aid groups, and the British Army worked together to take care of the refugees and also to negotiate future relations. The Communist Party, with victory in Yugoslavia in sight, sought to showcase its ability to organize and motivate its future citizens. Thus, the camps in Egypt became a testing ground for state-building back home. The article will explore the tensions that emerged between the self-confident Partisans, the suspicious British and UN officials, and the refugees, who experienced the end of the war in the Egyptian desert.

This paper examines the role of state prosecutors in the Stalinist dictatorship by analyzing the conflict between the Procuracy and the police in the Molotov region in the 1940s. This regional case study exemplifies how a Soviet prosecutor, by professional conviction and motivated by personal experience from the Great Terror, engaged in a daily struggle against arbitrariness, imprecise legal work, and police brutality, pressuring police authorities to prosecute their own officials. The paper demonstrates how since 1938 the procuracy articulated and defended (sometimes successfully) the principle of a justice system based on rules, even though these rules were used for the purpose of repression. This eventually enabled post-Stalinist transformation.

A vast array of research institutes and cultural organizations began to study the viewer of Soviet cinema and theatre in the years following the October Revolution. These investigations called on the techniques of sociology, psychology, and physiology to make Soviet cultural production more “efficient” and “rational.” Belying the conventional assumption that the cultural revolution of 1928–1932 brought empirical research in aesthetics to an abrupt end, this paper traces the continuation and redefinition of studies of the viewer in the Soviet Union after the “Great Break.” My analysis of the work of the “Scientific Research Sector” at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) between 1933 and 1936 outlines how Stalin-era researchers shifted their gaze from viewers’ tastes and attitudes to questions of perceptual management and effectiveness. Exploring the VGIK researchers’ attempts to determine the “laws” of aesthetic perception and optimize intelligibility, the article brings to light the developments in scientific knowledge underwriting Soviet culture's transition to a form “accessible to the millions.”