Karen Dawisha suggests that Cohen's argument is based on a minimalist definition of the requirements for the survival of the “Soviet Union” and that it ignores what she asserts is its most fundamental feature, the essential internalized and structural violence that was at the heart of the Soviet system. She therefore disagrees with Cohen, arguing that at the end of the day, Gorbachev's brilliance and capabilities were restricted by the fact that he was die leader of a country almost totally lacking in political, economic, or social capital.

The pagan (and future saint) Ol'ga's revenge on the Derevlians as described in the Povest' vremennykh let has intrigued generations of readers of early East Slavic literature. Using evidence from roughly contemporary Germanic sources, Francis Butler argues that Ol'ga uses intelligence and verbal dexterity to achieve good ends (the protection of her son and the defense of her people) without violating the strictures placed on women by her society. The early East Slavs seem to have disliked the idea of women as warriors but not to have seen women as intellectually inferior to men. Moreover, they regarded women's use of intelligence praiseworthy if it benefited their people, as Ol'ga's did. Ol'ga's gender prevented the chroniclers from portraying her as a warrior-ruler, thereby forcing them to create one of the most striking depictions in the Povest'.

In the formation of postsymbolist poetic movements in Russia and in the development of Osip Mandel'shtam's poetics in particular, 1912 was a pivotal year. In this article, a close analysis and establishing of the subtexts and biographical context of Mandel'shtam's highly cryptic poem, “Pust’ v dushnoi komnate, gde kloch'ia seroi vaty” (1912), illuminates a key moment in the process of Mandel'shtam's overcoming of symbolism. Through a deflation of the tragic pose of Aleksandr Blok's lyric hero, Mandel'shtam frees his own poetics from the shadow of Blok's powerful and charismatic lyric voice. This diminishing of Blok is accomplished through the collision of past and present, narrative and subtext, literary myth and biographical anecdote. Mandel'shtam's struggle with Blok is both unique and illustrative of the more universal dilemma that confronted his generation as it strove to wrest itself from the suffocating “bosom“ of symbolism.

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.

What does a postcommunist regime do with its bureaucratic inheritance? Without a replacement bureaucracy at hand, the political leadership in Russia had no choice but to govern through state employees whose values and patterns of behavior were instilled in the Soviet era. Given this reality, one might have expected Russian reformers—and their overseas supporters— to have developed an aggressive and comprehensive policy on retraining officials of state. But instead of a coordinated effort to educate new and existing personnel in a spirit of public, rather than state, service, one finds only a gradual and haphazard reform of bureaucratic training. In this article, Eugene Huskey argues that the driving force behind such training has been the market in higher and continuing education and not a conscious and consistent policy emanating from the presidency or other central institutions of state. The major player in that market is the system of state service academies, which inherited many of their faculty and facilities from the old Higher Party Schools of the communist era. But the market, taken together with the fragmentation of state power, has consistently undermined attempts by the academies to serve as the sole purveyors of training to the bureaucracy. What is as yet unclear is whether the marketization of bureaucratic education and re-education, which discourages the emergence of a coherent national approach to remaking the bureaucracy, is facilitating or impeding the modernization and liberalization of Russian officialdom.

Using Viktor Pelevin's Chapaev and Pustota and Vladimir Makanin's Underground or a Hero of Our Time, Angela Brintlinger explores the way contemporary fiction portrays the post-Soviet intelligentsia and its search for identity in postmodern Russia. These authors juxtapose contemporary heroes with literary and historical heroes of the Russian and Soviet past in a struggle to come to terms with Soviet experience and the intelligentsia's relationship to Russian literature. Both Pelevin and Makanin use the chronotope of the madhouse to examine the idea of the hero in Russian literature and history. In making such deliberate use of the Russian past, from its literary heroes to the insidious institution of the mental asylum, both authors force their post-Soviet readers to confront die fact that the flow of history is as much about continuities as it is about change.

The Romanov dynasty came to the throne in 1613 after fifteen years of pretenders, peasant revolts, and foreign interventions, but the establishment of Romanov legitimacy would require time. In this article, Russell E. Martin explores how the wedding ritual of Tsar Mikhail Romanov was carefully constructed on the basis of previous royal weddings so as to appear fully consistent with previous Muscovite tradition. But Martin also shows that many elements of the wedding ritual were choreographed anew to create the image of the Romanovs as the legitimate heirs of the old Riurikid dynasty that had died out in 1598. Viewed in light of other efforts to legitimate their rule, the evidence from the weddings of the first Romanov tsar suggests how tenuous the new dynasty's hold on power was in its first decades on the throne and the ways that symbol and ritual were exploited to help establish the new regime.

Stephen Hanson points out that there is little to no agreement among contemporary scholars concerning either the predictability of the Soviet collapse or its underlying causes; between the untenable determinism Cohen rightly attacks and Cohen’s own extreme “possibilism” are many quite sensible intermediate positions. Once this is recognized, the real question becomes at what point, exacdy, were Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet system likely to lead to change of the system itself? But to answer that question requires both a more precise, contextual definition of “reform” and a more holistic understanding of the Soviet “system” than Cohen provides here.

Georgi Derluguian writes that Cohen’s exposition of the alternatives facing Gorbachev as reformer misses key elements that would give his analysis a firm disciplinary foundation: the social mechanisms involved in formulating and spreading competing discourses, the structural coalescence of potentially contentious groups and their actual mobilizing, the institutionalization of political gains, elite and oppositional brokerage, geopolitical configuration, and shifts in economic flows. He calls for a more rigorous analysis that would incorporate these elements, and he illustrates his method by sketching a number of key nodal points in the history of the USSR that would allow scholars to examine counterfactual, alternative pasts.

Infamously, the 1991 Bulgarian Constitution contains a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” In the early 1990s, the neo-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party invoked this provision when it asked the country's Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional the political party of the beleaguered Turkish minority. In this article, Venelin I. Ganev analyzes the conflicting arguments presented in the course of the constitutional trial that ensued and shows how the justices’ anxieties about the possible effects of politicized ethnicity were interwoven into broader debates about the scope of the constitutional normative shift that marked the end of the communist era, about the relevance of historical memory to constitutional reasoning, and about the nature of democratic politics in a multiethnic society. Ganev also argues that the constitutional interpretation articulated by the Court has become an essential component of Bulgaria's emerging political order. More broadly, he illuminates the complexity of some of the major issues that frame the study of ethnopolitics in postcommunist eastern Europe: the varied dimensions of the “politics of remembrance“; the ambiguities of transitional justice; the dilemmas inherent in the construction of a rights-centered legality; and the challenges involved in establishing a forward-looking, pluralist system of governance.

Scholars use a variety of terms to refer to the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. Some prefer communist, while others use socialist or state socialist. In this article, Andrew Roberts argues that communism is the better choice. Using socialism or state socialism to refer to these regimes stretches the concept unnecessarily, making one label refer to two regimes with little in common. This conceptual stretching has two negative consequences. First, it impedes efficient scholarly communication. Second, it impoverishes political debate by diminishing the achievements of democratic socialists. A solution to this problem is to use the term communist to refer to Soviet-style regimes.

In this article Larry Wolff considers the creation of Galicia in 1772 as an act of invention, the concoction of a brand-new geopolitical entity for the ideological legitimation of the Habsburg acquisitions in the first partition of Poland. Afterwards, especially under the auspices of Joseph II, Galicia was constructed both administratively and culturally, and the arbitrarily conceived province received form and meaning. The article considers published accounts of Galicia from the 1780s, mapping the province according to the perceived distinction between "Eastern Europe" and "Western Europe," defining its imperial relation to Vienna in terms of a civilizing mission, and articulating a perspective of Josephine messianism as the redemptive legitimation of Habsburg rule. This secular messianism was sometimes inspired by the notable religious presence of the Jewish population in the province. The article analyzes the affirmation of Galician political prerogatives in 1790 and the complex relation between Galician and Polish culture in the 1790s, focusing in particular on Wojciech Boguslawski and the L'viv production of his "national opera" Krakowiacy i Górale in 1796.

In this paper Robert J. Brym and Vladimir Gimpelson analyze changes in the size and social composition of the Russian state bureaucracy in the 1990s based on official data. Although the Russian state bureaucracy grew somewhat at the regional level in the 1990s, it actually shrank at the federal level. Comparing the Russian state bureaucracy to the Weberian ideal type of bureaucratic efficiency, the authors also demonstrate the existence of strong gender and age segregation, with women and young people concentrated at lower levels and men and older people concentrated at higher levels. Furthermore, because many public officials were formally educated in the pre-perestroika era, they are poorly adapted to the needs of a modern state. Finally, circulation of new personnel through the bureaucracy, or bureaucratic “renewal,” is slow and occurs mainly at low-status levels. Circulation of personnel at high-status levels is practically nonexistent. Consequentiy, young recruits have little incentive to remain in state service and older officials confront little competition from either below or outside the state bureaucracy. Much of the inefficiency of the Russian state bureaucracy stems from these realities.

In this article, Sascha L. Goluboff investigates the development of ethnographic knowledge about Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan to provide new ways of understanding who Mountain Jews are and to provoke scholars to reflect critically on empire, ethnicity, and religion in the Caucasus. Following Nicholas B. Dirks's recent call for anthropologists to pay attention to the “textual field that is the pretext to fieldwork,” Goluboff analyzes how the work of the first ethnographers of Mountain Jews—Yehuda Chernyi (1835-1880) and Il'ia Anisimov (1862-1928)—created an image of Mountain Jews as both “savage Asians” and “primordial Jews” and how subsequent scholarship has reinforced this dichotomy as modern “fact.” Goluboff believes that by paying more attention to the intersections among ethnic groups and refraining from making moral judgments, it is possible to open up new ground for creatively researching the relations between Islam and Judaism in the Caucasus.

In this article, Irina Paert reexamines the relationship between Old Believers and officialdom. She focuses on the impact the criminalization of Old Believer marriages had on dissenting communities in Nicholas I's Russia (1825-55). Although Paert emphasizes the difference between Old Believer and official approaches to marriage, she also draws attention to endemic conflicts and contradictions within the local and central governments regarding the implementation of policies, and she identifies a variety of grass-root responses to these problems. In addition to ecclesiological disagreements between different branches of Old Belief, conflicts existed within specific congregations, which were divided along class and gender lines. Paert thus raises new questions about the boundaries separating the official culture from that of religious dissent, and Orthodox from Old Believer communities, and she questions the persistent representation of the Old Believer community as a “counter-society.”