Over the last twenty years Russia has experienced significant fluctuations in sentiments regarding the prospects and urgency of relocating the Russian capital city. In this article, Vadim Rossman examines the public debates on this topic, which have involved important Russian politicians, intellectuals, and members of various expert communities. In these debates, one can recognize several distinct new visions of society that emerged in the post-Soviet period. This article provides an overview and a critique of these debates and suggests that they should be viewed in the context of nation building, the slow emergence of the nation that was historically suppressed under the weight of the imperial ambitions of Russian statehood. In the background of these debates, the concept of self-identity looms large. National capitals can serve as catalysts for nation building and an instrument of the nation as it constitutes and constructs itself.

A number of recent comparative works have drawn attention to parallels and similarities between the Soviet Union and the early Turkish Republic. In this article, Samuel J. Hirst takes a firmly transnational approach to Soviet-Turkish interactions in the 1930s to demonstrate that the similarities were not merely circumstantial. The manifest ideological conflict between nationalist Turks and internationalist Bolsheviks has led many historians to dismiss Soviet- Turkish cooperation as a necessary response to geopolitics, a pragmatic alliance against the west. Hirst argues that opposition to the western-dictated international order was a coherent element in Soviet-Turkish exchanges that stretched beyond diplomacy into the economic and cultural spheres. The antiwestern elements of Soviet-Turkish relations suggest that convergence was more than a case of homologous responses to similar conditions; it was part of a broader narrative that, in the Soviet case at least, continued to shape international relations beyond World War II.

The importance of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii in Soviet science fiction has been thoroughly examined. A less-explored question concerns how they have continued to inspire post-Soviet authors who muse on an environment that differs drastically from the one that gave rise to their works. Sofya Khagi explores how prominent contemporary writers—Garros-Evdokimov (Aleksandr Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov), Dmitrii Bykov, and Viktor Pelevin—examine the Strugatskiis to dramatize their own darker visions of modernization, progress, and morality. They continue the tradition of science fiction as social critique—in this case, a critique of society after the collapse of socialist ideology with its modernizing projects of historical progress, technological development, and social improvement. According to their parables a contrario to the Strugatskiis, the dreams of modernity embodied by the classics of Soviet fantastika have been shattered but not replaced by a viable alternative social scenario. As they converse with their predecessors, contemporary writers examine stagnation, not just in post-Soviet Russia, but in global, postmodern, commodified reality.

On occasion of his first lecture tour of India in 2010, Źižek sparked off a debate with Nivedita Menon, a leading postcolonial feminist scholar. The debate revolves around Menon's contention that Źižek's emphasis on European, Christian Universalism as the most proactive model for countering capitalism is ignorant of the heteroglossiac postcolonial histories of South Asia. Menon's response (“The Two Źižeks”) suggests that what Źižek appears to be missing is knowledge of the fallibility of Eurocentric discourses in negotiating the colonial and postcolonial situations particular to the subcontinent. Though Źižek's debates with Badiou and Butler are well known, few outside India are aware of the Menon-Źižek debate. This paper will occasion this little known debate to consider some of the major points raised by Menon against the applicability of Źižek's theoretical arguments toward reading and understanding postcolonial politics and culture.

Aleksandar Bošković argues that the Yugonostalgia in the Lexicon of Yu Mythology should be taken, not as a regressive idealization of the Yugoslav socialist past, but as a critical intervention in both the contemporary postsocialist politics of memory and the politics of emancipation. Bošković identifies the Lexicon as an exhibition catalogue of the virtual museum of all “things Yugoslav,” a self-reflective postmodern hybrid emerging from the semantic overlapping of different genres and threaded with various memories, per-Slavic Review 72, no. 1 (Spring 2013) sonal and collective, nostalgic and ironic, of everyday life in Yugoslav socialism. Bošković contends that by evoking visual and textual reflections on the meaning of the past for the present, the Lexicon appears to have a materiality akin to that of a ruin: it exhibits a blend of affectionate and ironic nostalgia for the Yugoslav past, while simultaneously performing and reaffirming the socialist modernity's prospective perspective as its emancipating impact on the social imagination.

In May 1828 the authorities in eastern Siberia uncovered plans, hatched by the Decembrist Ivan Sukhinov, to stage an armed rebellion among the penal laborers of the Nerchinsk mines. Sukhinov was planning to march on Chita in order to liberate his fellow Decembrists from captivity. Found guilty of the charges, the ringleaders were executed and Sukhinov committed suicide. Yet the conspiracy was a fantasy, conjured into being by the chaotic conditions of penal labor and official fears of exiled revolutionaries directing insurgencies in Siberia. The state's destruction of Sukhinov and his alleged co-conspirators created the fictional memory of a revolutionary hero and a noble, if doomed, rebellion. In their memoirs published in the postreform era, the Decembrists offered contemporaries an inspiring tale of insurgency and martyrdom in Siberia. The “Zerentui conspiracy” articulated new possibilities of revolutionary protest in exile

In the north Caucasus, collective dance has long been an expression of communal identity and a forum for political dissent. In this article Sufian Zhemukhov and Charles King examine the emergence and transformation of a communal dance form known as adyge jegu (roughly, “Circassian festival“) in the Russian republics of Adygeia, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. They chart the history of the adyge jegu after 2005, elucidate debates over the meaning of authenticity in contemporary Circassian nationalism, and provide a detailed archaeology of the specific decisions that enabled this cultural artifact to get constructed in one way but not another. While attention typically focuses on elite-driven narratives of border security and terrorism, the adyge jegu highlights grassroots debates over the meaning of right behavior, the boundaries of communal identity, and alternatives to Russianness in either its russkii or rossiiskii varieties.

By tracing a pattern through Fedor Dostoevskii's early stories–especially The Double, “The Landlady,” and Netochka Nezvanova–in which characters are bound to each other as interacting aspects of a larger personality, Yuri Corrigan explores the problem of individual identity. Entering into debate with classical studies of the self in Dostoevskii from Mikhail Bakhtin to Nikolai Berdiaev, Corrigan explores how the active suppression of memory and interiority in Dostoevskii's early characters gives rise to the mechanism of intersecting selves, in which the inner architecture of one personality is extended throughout numerous consciousnesses. Through an analysis of these relationships, Corrigan examines how Dostoevskii synthesizes two traditions of doubling in his early writing–the “cognitive” dualism of self-consciousness and the “psychic” dualism of the unconscious–to form a tripartite model of personality that will be important for his later novels.

Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their “autobiographies“—stories about themselves—and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states’ narratives about themselves—stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system—come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, or simply, inexplicable. Subotić specifically addresses ways in which states of the western Balkans have built their state narratives around the issue of human rights. She explores, first, how a particular narrative of state and national identity produced—or made locally comprehensible—massive human rights abuses. She then analyzes why contemporary identity narratives make postconflict human rights policies very difficult to institutionalize. The article focuses specifically on the human rights discourse, practices, and debates in Serbia and Croatia.

This article combines an investigation of legal practice in late tsarist Russia with an analysis of imperial rule. The Judicial Reform of 1864 introduced new legal principles, institutions, and rules of court procedure into the empire. Focusing on legal interaction in the newly established circuit courts in Crimea and Kazan, this article explores the implications of Tatar legal involvement in state courts for both the empire's legal reform process and its policies toward ethnic and religious minorities. It discusses the courts as tools for the integration of these multiethnic regions with the imperial center and shows how legal unification developed in a context of dynamic, and locally specific, plural legal orders. It concludes that minority policies were characterized by the simultaneous pursuit of integration and the promotion of difference. The article draws mainly on court records from Kazan and Simferopol (Crimea), newspaper coverage, and on the reports and memoirs of jurists.

How the narrative dynamics of The Idiot shape and inform its ethics is the focus of this article by Alexander Spektor. The Idiot is one of the most radical of Fedor Dostoevskii's novelistic experiments inasmuch as it questions the integrity of the self created through the process of narrative representation and interpretation. Dostoevskii achieves this effect by contrasting the idea of the inherent distance between sign and meaning with Myshkin's initial belief in the possibility of the transcendental signifier. The reader is gradually forced to accept that any form of participation in the big dialogue of the novel is bound to cause intense rivalry for the control of its meaning, which ultimately leads to physical violence either against the self (Ippolit and Nastasia Filippovna) or against others (Rogozhin). Dostoevskii undermines the integrity of any narrative formation of the self, including the self of the reader, by framing it within nonverbal acts of violence and compassion. Hence, The Idiot can be read as a Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, traverses the distance between the novel's is—an attempt to secure positive ethical meaning (within an established) narrative—and the novel's ought, the silent and nonsensical acts of compassion that, ultimately, defy signification. To make sense of The Idiot requires the reader to participate in an ethically compromised endeavor. Forced to do justice to the text, the reader also has to bear responsibility for the violence inherent in any narrative construction of the self.

By 1911 it was clear that multiethnic Austrian Social Democracy could no longer resist the currents of ethnic nationalism that had already fragmented most of the late Habsburg political scene. The exit that year of most Czech Social Democrats to form their own party, along with Austrian Germans’ insensitive reactions, signaled that workers were not immune to nationalism. The relevant historical literature has either viewed workers’ nationalism as the product of elite manipulation and “bourgeois” influence, or, more recently, has questioned the extent to which nationalism actually resonated with ordinary people at society's grassroots. Jakub Benes'š article attempts to avoid the oversimplifications of both approaches and calls for more precise engagement with workers’ own discourse. To this end, it highlights an important dimension of working-class political culture—socialist popular literature—in which proletarian authors articulated increasingly ethnic nationalist positions of a class-specific sort. Examining this influential but neglected genre illuminates how and under what circumstances workers found meaning in nationalism.

As Katerina Clark argues here, Dmitrii Shostakovich's turn to the quartet form in 1938 and his account of his First Quartet should be seen in the context of ongoing debates from that time about how the mandate for socialist realism might apply in music, a problematical question since music is the least representational of the arts. In making this point, Clark does not analyze the quartets themselves, but instead probes Shostakovich's statements about them, moving out from that narrow focus to place his remarks in the context of overall developments and controversies in Soviet culture of that decade—more specifically in the context of efforts aimed at liberalizing socialist realist practice.

November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.

Kathryn Hendley argues that easy access to the civil courts in Russia is a deliberate policy choice aimed at countering the popular image of courts as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent that is propagated by the media. Judicial officials present judges as heroically struggling to cope with the deluge of cases in a timely fashion. Relying on field work and analysis of caseload data, Hendley shows that the burden on trial-level Russian judges has been exaggerated for effect. She documents the procedural mechanisms available to facilitate rapid turnaround of simple cases. She argues that the flood of cases could easily be stanched by increasing filing fees, but that judicial officials cling to the open door policy as a way of proving the value of the courts. Rather than discouraging the demand for courts, they prefer to tinker with the supply side of the equation.

In this article we present a close reading of the discursive media transformation generated by “Fashion Verdict”—a makeover reality show broadcast on Russian TV. Our analysis reveals that the adopted genre of therapeutic culture constitutes a new mode of talk about personal experience in the post-Soviet media, a mode based on pop-psychological assumptions and linked to the discursive practice of psychotherapy. However, we show that in post-Soviet popular culture the global therapeutic talking culture encounters powerful cultural counterparts. Apart from psychotherapy, the TV courtroom transformation works by shifting three other discursive frames of articulation of individual and personal life: communist Comrades' Court, soviet Kitchen Talk, and glamorous Fashion Show. Combining an anthropological approach with conversational and frame analysis, we decipher how the familiar discursive forms of talking about personal life domesticate the therapeutic discourse in the Russian communicative culture: they pave the way for its acceptance and concomitantly contest and possibly undermine the ideas that the therapeutic culture brings in.