This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.

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.

In Serhiy Zhadan's recent novel Internat (2017), the protagonist epitomizes the quintessential east Ukrainian under scrutiny today, while his journey depicts working through trauma. His transformation portrays the ultimate shedding of melancholy when, in response to violence, the past is replaced by the present. I elicit some of the key symbols and features of this process, which I call triggered mourning, and attend to the role of real-time menace in initiating it. This article draws connections not only between the story's plot arc and the ongoing war, but also between Ukraine's past and present from the perspective of trauma theory. The four sections of the article (on the transformation, the void, the defect, and the antidote) propose and expand upon the notion that Internat is a synchronous war novel—a narrative that emerges parallel to, and closely entwined with, unfolding warfare—and examine its significance for scholarship on Ukraine, for Slavic studies, and beyond. Trauma studies in the context of literature are central to this analysis, with postcolonial studies providing some helpful illustrative parallels.

How did the reading material enjoyed by Nicholas I differ from that of one of his stokers? This article focuses on the novels enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers at the court of Nicholas I, from the tsar himself and the members of the imperial family to their servants, shedding new light on certain mechanisms of court culture. Based on archival sources such as the loan registers and the correspondence of the tsar's and the palace staff's libraries, this paper shows how, despite social and cultural differences, these two communities of readers actually often ended up reading the same authors and novels. What distinguished them was less their consumption of different texts than the way in which they read and interpreted the same books and, more generally, the different purpose that they attributed to reading. Based on their position at court and what they experienced in the Winter Palace—a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etiquette, or a place where servants could find otherwise unobtainable books—reading novels could constitute either a form of social control, escapism, or a school of good taste and proper behavior.

This article analyzes Soviet Woman, the main publication of the Komitet Sovetskikh Zhenshchin (Committee of Soviet Women), during the 1950s and 1960s. Approaching it as a medium of international outreach, the article illustrates how the magazine reflected official Soviet strategies toward developing countries and propagated “peaceful coexistence.” Specifically, it delineates the ways in which Soviet Woman presented Soviet women (especially those in the “Soviet East”) as models of female emancipation so as to persuade women in the Third World of the potential of socialism to effect social and economic progress, and to sustain national liberation. Assessing also reception among readers of its messages about advancement, international friendship, and solidarity, it concludes that Soviet Woman provided women in decolonizing countries an alternative to a return to traditional modes or a shift to western ones by demonstrating the possibilities that the Soviet system held for realizing gender equality and modernization.

This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia's most famous realist painter, Il΄ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin's stay in Paris from 1873–75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist, not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin's letters and the work itself shows him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet. Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of west European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.

This article expands our knowledge of nationality policies, center-periphery relations, and Jewish life under late Stalinism, a period which has heretofore been viewed predominantly through the lens of Stalin's terror and marginalization. By focusing on Soviet Moldavia, the article demonstrates that developments in this region followed a different trajectory from those displayed in the center. Local expediencies, derived from the needs of a newly Sovietizing territory with “suspect” locals, encouraged the professional advancement of ethnic Jews to positions of power and prestige previously unmatched in this region. The study explores both the opportunities and limitations faced by Jews in this peripheral region, while placing these phenomena inside the framework of Soviet nationality policies and its accompanying policy toward government professionals. Simultaneously, the article highlights both the legacy of Romanian official antisemitism within this region of postwar Soviet society and the role of the “neo-korenizatsiia” program in displacing Jews within Soviet state structures.

From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction. My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two “cooperating” states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return. I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.

In art historical scholarship, inasmuch as he is considered at all, the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi has long been viewed as a peculiar outlier. His landscapes, with their coloristic drama, light effects, and simplified forms, hardly fit the accounts of Russian nineteenth-century painting that focus on the development of the realist school. Questioning the artist's anomalous status, this essay discusses his canvases from the 1870s and 1880s within the broader framework of nineteenth-century popular visual amusements, discourses on realism, and the physiology of vision. Considered through this wider lens—beyond the institution of easel painting and beyond Russia—Kuindzhi is revealed to be an innovator whose approach to painting was profoundly modern and aligned with the aesthetic preoccupations of many west European artists. His painterly pursuits and exhibition practices, furthermore, force a reconsideration of the biases associated with the established narrative of modern art in the west.

The influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Russian symbolism has not been adequately explored in the significant body of scholarship dedicated to it. To give but a few examples, Pre-Raphaelite motifs such as the enigmatic female figure, a jewel-toned palette, and elements drawn from a mythical European past widely appear in Russian symbolist poetry and painting. Drawing upon archival research, this article demonstrates that the symbolists did not simply borrow these motifs in passive imitation, but that they arose out of the symbolists' substantive engagement with modernity itself. Tracing the genealogy that links symbolism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the article develops a transactional model of influence that encourages us to think of the development of Russian modernism with greater nuance. By destabilizing the notion of the Russian symbolists' marginal position in relation to western Europe, this investigation provides a theoretical challenge to the notion of Russia's peripheral modernity.