Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

The article analyzes the relationship of conservatives to the political order that arose after the 1905 revolution. It suggests that by the start of World War I, a dissatisfaction with the status quo had become a characteristic feature of Russian conservatism. The archaic formula “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” was the quintessential conservative discourse, both for nationalist supporters of conservative reforms and for opponents of any innovation such as Dubrovin’s All-Russian Union of the Russian People. But this formula existed in sharp contradiction to the realities of “renewed Russia.” Conservatives continually underscored the lack of correspondence between reality and their conservative dogma. In conservative circles, the growth of social tensions on the eve of the war was also understood as evidence of the inadequacy of the new political order. Because of this, Russian conservatives did not aspire to preserve the Third of June system and did not try to restore it after February 1917.

A country’s multinational diversity does not by itself predict the way this diversity will be reflected in the party system. The pattern of party politics also depends on the context: electoral and institutional rules, differential political assets, and different incentives to cooperate or dissent. To demonstrate variations in the dynamics of ethnic politics, this article examines the divergent ways in which Slovak political parties were organized within the larger political system in two periods—the interwar unitary Czechoslovak state and the postcommunist federal state. Differences in political resources and institutional setting help explain why interwar Slovakia had a hybrid party system composed of both statewide and ethnoregional parties, while the postcommunist state saw the emergence of two entirely separate party systems in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In turn, differing patterns of party politics in these two cases had different consequences for the management of ethnonational conflict in the state.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

This article uses the Soviet state and party archives to describe the workings of a key Soviet economic institution and is designed to serve as a bridge between historical and economic research in the archives. Drawing on the archival records concerning the People’s Commissariats for Heavy and Light Industry, Paul R. Gregory and Andrei Markevich examine how these commissariats interacted with both superiors and subordinates. The principal/agent conflict between vertical orders and "economic rents" from unsanctioned horizontal dealings provide the theoretical framework. Gregory and Markevich explore such disfunctionalities as the tendency to conceal information, to act opportunistically, and to build autarkies as well as the primary measure used to combat these tendencies: splitting the commissariat up.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

The 1999 Ukrainian presidential election took place during a period of extreme political turmoil. The excitement of democracy had waned, the economy spiraled ever downward, and charges of corruption among the administration seemed the harbinger of communist victory. Nevertheless, Ukrainian voters returned Leonid Kuchma to the helm. Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller, and Gwyn Erb investigate this curious result, using a model that combines economic evaluations, the candidates’ personalities, and ideology. Relatively well-developed partisanship is present in Ukraine and was a major influence on voters’ choice. Surprisingly, economic evaluations had little impact on the Ukrainian vote. Instead, party identification, ideology, and leadership trait assessments led Ukrainians to vote for the “democrat.”

This essay analyzes Adam Zagajewski’s recent memoir W cudzym pigknie (Another beauty), in which he reflects particularly on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a student and young poet in Kraków. The essay addresses Zagajewski’s perspective on the city of Kraków, his reflections on communism in Wladyslaw Gomulka’s Poland, his sense of the relations between older and younger Polish generations, and his efforts to negotiate a personal balance between poetry and politics. Zagajewski’s memoir is discussed in the context of his own poetry, of Polish intellectual life, and of Kraków’s cultural history from the 1890s to the 1980s. Intellectual points of reference and comparison range from Tadeusz “Boy“ Żeleński and Stanisław Wyspiański in fin-de-siècle Kraków, to Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Michnik in later twentieth-century Polish letters and politics. The essay, finally, attempts to assess the significance and implications of communism for Polish poetry, literature, and intellectual life.

In this article Pamela Davidson identifies a range of literary strategies that evolved in response to the disparity between the high standard of moral purity, which was a prerequisite for the Hebrew prophet, and the much laxer moral standards of Russian writers who adopted this role model. Strategies designed to reinforce the moral credentials of Aleksandr Pushkin, commonly regarded as the prototype of the poet-prophet, include the substitution of artistic for moral integrity (Nikolai Gogol'), the treatment of literary accounts of purification as evidence of the writer's moral standing (readings of “The Prophet”), the cult of martyrdom as an aspect of the writer's biography, derived from his suffering in life (Mikhail Lermontov) and extended to the interpretation of his death (Vladimir Solov'ev). Although these strategies enabled such later writers as Fedor Dostoevskii to assume the role of prophet, the blurring of the moral dimension of the prophetic ideal had long-term consequences for the development of Russian society and culture.

In the last few prerevolutionary decades, dachas (summer houses) became an amenity accessible to wide sections of the population of Russia’s two main cities. Dachas offered middle-income urbanites unprecedented scope to free themselves from the workplace, cultivate new lifestyles, and create new communities and subcultures. Dachas thus constitute an important element in the history of late imperial leisure, entertainment, consumption, everyday life, and urban development. They also illustrate the complexity and hybridity of urban culture in this period. The dacha public was diverse in its tastes and sociocultural allegiances; it blended the intelligentsia’s commitment to the simple country life with a more “petit bourgeois” interest in diversion and domestic comfort. As an isolated bridgehead of urban civilization in an undercivilized rural hinterland, the dacha provides an important focus for discussing the middle strata of Moscow and St. Petersburg. If the tag “middle-class” could be applied to anyone in late imperial Russia, it was to the dachniki.

In this essay, George Enteen reviews two studies of Soviet historiography, one Russian and one western, as well as a Russian who’s who of historians. The Russian study, which examines the establishment of censorship in the 1920s, is based on archives that have usually been overlooked. The western study examines the struggle against intellectual controls in the years from 1956 to 1974 and draws on archives and extensive interviews. This latter study receives most of the attention. Enteen takes issue with the study’s author on a number of points concerning Stalinist historiography. By posing questions that arise from a comparison of the studies, Enteen seeks to make an observation about the state of Soviet studies.

The rapid expansion of the Russian press at the turn of the 1860s had a profound effect on how literary texts were written and read. Fedor Dostoevskii was among the writers most closely involved in the changing discursive environment. The vicissitudes of his precarious position in the field of letters put him under pressure to adopt the most successful discursive strategies and to open his work to the popular genres (feuilleton, local news, courtroom reports), themes (crime, the identity of the new man), and characters (struggling university students, who are also writers or translators) that were enjoying the greatest popularity in the Russian press of the time. By opening his text to the press, Dostoevskii became the first Russian writer to investigate die effects of the media on the personal identity of writer and reader in the new context of uncontrolled discursive proliferation.

In Notes from the Dead House, fictional narrator Aleksandr Petrovich Gorianchikov appears as wife murderer in the preface and as a political prisoner in the memoirs. In the preface, Gorianchikov experiences moral anguish over his crime. But the memoirs actively employ social analysis to shift the burden of guilt from convicts onto the social structure. This authoritarian structure, which divides society into an underclass of ignorant “children” ruled by violent “fathers,” notably excludes women. The murder of a second wife in an inset tale brutally enacts this exclusion: while Gorianchikov's social analysis helps him understand many of the prisoners, it cannot account for the convict Shishkin's murder of his wife Akulka. Gorianchikov's personal guilt for murdering his wife constitutes a response to—and a repetition of—the moral bewilderment that emerges out of Akulka's death. Seen in this light, the formal tensions between preface, memoir, and inset tale are motivated by and demonstrate a conflict between social analysis and individual responsibility.

The terms metaphor and metonymy, as defined by Roman Jakobson, produce important insights when applied to the novels of Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi. The oeuvre of each novelist constitutes a remarkably consistent whole because it emanates from the creative unconscious, rather than from conscious thought processes. In Jakobson’s view, metaphor involves the “combination of heterogeneous elements”; such elements in Dostoevskii include contrasting styles, genres, and references to other art forms such as painting. Windows juxtapose interior and exterior space, as the reading of letters juxtaposes private to public communication. By contrast, metonymy involves the linking of similar elements. As a metonymical writer, Tolstoi tended to take the opposition between self and other that he inherited from the romantic tradition and transform it into a relationship between self and self. The purpose of his well-known device of estrangement is to create just such transformations. In courtship, the self-other relationship is that of man to woman; Tolstoi minimizes this relationship by avoiding all sincere expressions of desire that lead to marriage.

In this article, Sheila Fitzpatrick investigates the phenomenon of Soviet conmanship in the Stalin period through the medium of conman stories, both real (as reported in newspapers and archives) and fictional. While attention is paid to the distinctive characteristics of conman stories as a discursive genre, die main emphasis is on the social. The article explores the sources and processes of the Soviet confidence trick, as well as showing how conmen and their exploits illuminate social, bureaucratic, and cultural practices. In the comparison of prewar and postwar periods, the “Jewishing” of the conman in postwar representation is discussed and related to the broader phenomenon of officially encouraged anti-Semitism in the late Stalin period.