The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

Based on a detailed analysis of Belarusian politics and the rise of Aliaksandar Lukashenka in the early 1990s, this article explores the sources, character, and impact of authoritarian incompetence and skill on regime outcomes after the Cold War. One type of incompetence—deer in headlights—emerges out of the disorientation and persistence of older regime practices in the face of rapid political change. This type of incompetence was one important but largely unrecognized source of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and other parts of the developing world in the early 1990s. Rapid change in the international environment that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War created novel demands that existing autocrats often did not know how to deal with—even when they had the structural resources to survive. The result was greater contestation and more incumbent turnover than would have existed otherwise.

This is a participant's account of the movement in Soviet history during the 1970s and 1980s known as “revisionism,” which Sheila Fitzpatrick understands as an iconoclastic challenge by social historians to the dominance in Sovietology of political scientists and the totalitarian model. Particular attention is paid to the debates on the nature of Stalinism, which in the context of the Cold War became highly politicized and bitterly polemical, as well as to internal arguments: for example, between Marxists and non-Marxists and between first- and second-generation revisionists. Revisionists’ early interest in questions of social support and later focus on resistance is discussed. The essay offers an assessment of the intellectual and historiographical contribution of revisionism, including an appreciation of contingency, a new approach to power and the interplay of government and society, new standards of historical professionalism, and an emphasis on archives and primary sources. Finally, a line of continuity between revisionism and its 1990s challenger, “post-revisionism,” is suggested. Comments are provided by Robert V Daniels, J. Arch Getty, Elena A. Osokina, and Jochen Hellbeck.

The article examines the controversial book AZ i IA (1975) by the Russian-language Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov. Ostensibly a study of the Russian medieval classic The Song of Igor's Campaign, the book was quickly understood to be a pointed commentary on the history of Russo-Turkic relations and a vindication of the Central Asian nomads, who were seen as oppressed by imperial domination in the field of knowledge no less than in politics. While Soviet critics noted the tension between the book's scholarly premises and its ideological claims, they chose to ignore the deeper implications of AZ I IA as a hybrid genre that conflates the devices of poetry with the scholarly methods of historiography and linguistics. While earlier critics chose to hail or dismiss Suleimenov's ideas on the basis of their scientific accuracy, this article interprets his poetics and ideology as characteristic of a “Eurasianist” tradition in Soviet letters, represented in this case by the linguist N. Ia. Marr and the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, both of whom can be said to anticipate essential aspects of Suleimenov's linguistic vision and epistemological orientation.

The words Obshchina and Mir should be familiar to all students of nineteenth-century Russia. Yet most Russian historians would probably be hard pressed to distinguish properly between the two terms. Current scholarship offers scant help regarding precise definitions and usages of these nouns. Semantic as well as historical questions are raised by their use, and the semantic questions are compounded by the fact that both Russian words are usually translated into English as “commune.” Each of these words does have its own history and a meaning which separates it from its counterpart, however, and this article attempts to eliminate some of the confusion surrounding the use of the two terms.

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.

Assessing the change in the level of Soviet welfare in the first half of the twentieth century presents many problems. There are the problems associated with the reliability and accessibility of Soviet statistics, and there are those associated with the problem of understanding the peculiar nature of the Soviet situation in which a trend toward rapid secular improvements in welfare and life expectancy were accompanied by massive shortterm welfare and mortality crises. These problems are made even more complicated by the intense politicization of this question. In this paper I address all of these problems.

With a focus on Gintaras Beresnevičius's book The Making of an Empire (2003) and the marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages, this article explores the rise of national ideologies that promote an "eastern" and "Soviet" identity in Lithuania. Both during the nationalist movement against the Soviet Union and later in the 1990s and 2000s, the west and Europe were seen as sites of prestige, power, and goodness. Recently the reinvented "east" and "Soviet" have become important competing symbols of national history and community. In this article Neringa Klumbytė argues that nationalism has become embedded in the power politics of Europeanization. National ideologies are shaped by differing ideas about ways of being modern and European rather than by simple resistance to European Union expansion. The resulting geopolitics of provinciality, a nationalist politics of space, thus becomes an integral part of the story of European modernity and domination within a global history.

Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

From Prague to Ulan Bator, the decade since 1989 has witnessed a revolution both deep and broad. It was simultaneously a national revolution that created new nation-states, a political revolution that sundered the most fully institutionalized authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century, and an economic revolution that replaced administered systems of production and distribution with markets. Separate national, democratic, and capitalist revolutions that had rocked western European countries in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries swept almost in an instant across nine countries that quickly became twenty-eight.

If upon occasion in the past Nikita Khrushchev took an indulgent view of the Stalinist process of natural selection in the Party apparatus, it would hardly have been surprising. He was, after all, a most prominent product and beneficiary of it. Yet, without in any way criticizing the process as such, Khrushchev constantly manifested a nagging concern over its end results. In part this concern may be attributed, as it often has been, to a readiness to regard personnel changes as a panacea for difficulties in reality stemming from deep structural flaws in the Soviet economy and administrative system. And it can hardly be denied that in 1962 and 1963 Khrushchev was confronted with serious difficulties in agriculture and industry. But there is also little reason to doubt that he was genuinely worried about the effectiveness— and hence the quality—of Party cadres, or, furthermore, that there were grounds for his uneasiness.

In this piece, we develop a more complex picture of the East-West divisions that have characterized much analysis of the region since the crisis began. By examining how differently positioned actors have responded, the migration flows become a heuristic for other important but less visible processes in post-socialist state formation and Euro-integration. We use the complexity of Serbia's reception as an empirical ground to create a new analytic framework that moves beyond over-simplified dichotomies. Doing this allows us to bring seemingly unrelated kinds of political action into the same frame to reveal an emerging trend in citizen and noncitizen political engagement.

What happens when the modern world intrudes upon an isolated mountain region, particularly one that is a borderland par excellence? Patrice Dabrowski examines the moment of “discovery” of the most remote corner of Habsburg Galicia, the Carpathian Mountain region known as the Eastern Beskids and identified with its rugged yet artistically talented highland inhabitants, the Hutsuls. The discovery was facilitated by an ethnographic exhibition in Kołomyja, organized by the Czarnohora branch of the Tatra Society (Towarzystwo Tatrzańskie), which gained renown thanks to the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph at its opening in September 1880. The transformation of the region from terra incognita into a tourist destination for Poles, Ukrainians, and others has local, regional, national, and international dimensions and sheds light on interethnic relations within multiethic Galicia and beyond. This article represents a historiographical meeting point of studies of nations and nationalism, environmental history, and the study of tourism.

In this article, Diana Mincyte looks at subsidiary farming during the years of intense collectivization and political repressions in Soviet Lithuania, 1948-1953. Through an analysis of how peasants imagined, experienced, and interacted with their environments, Mincyte constructs agricultural labor as a site through which Lithuania's peasants negotiated their relationship to the state and nature. She argues that because the peasants’ physical survival during this period depended solely on the harvests from the farms, the peasants constructed themselves primarily as subjects of land and nature, rather than as citizens of the Soviet state. Instead of focusing on how individuals reinvented themselves according to the ideologies of the New Soviet Man/Woman, the environmental approach she develops here shows that creative agricultural labor played a significant role in the processes of building socialism in Lithuania's villages.

Bakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative. For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live. Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin accounts of life found in philosophical tracts, they offer a rich and “thick” description of human thinking and action.

“The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvelously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison.” This oft-quoted line was written by General A.A. Veliaminov in 1828 in a memoir which advocated the use of powerful military force to subdue the tribes of the north Caucasus. To take this fortress, a wise commander must “lay his parallels; advance by gap and mine and so master the place.” The extension of a fortified line further and further towards the mountains, using it as a base for attacks, was essential to Veliaminov's strategy of conquest.

The golden era of the study of folklore in the Soviet Union was the first decade after the Revolution, when the party and government, occupied with more urgent tasks, let the literary scholars and folklorists do their work relatively undisturbed. In 1925 the so-called “magna charta libertatis” for Soviet writers was issued by the Central Committee of the party, which permitted “free competition of various groups and currents.” As a result, the 1920s turned out to be rich and fruitful in literary scholarship, including folkloristics. In the study of folklore, different trends could freely coexist and thrive side by side. The most important of them were the historical school, Formalism, and the so-called Finnish school. The historical school continued the traditions of its leader Vsevolod Miller, whose first concern had been to find reflections of concrete historical reality in Russian byliny (epic songs). Thus the tendencies of the historical school are found in the commentaries to some bylina collections in 1918 and 1919, and also appeared strongly in the works of the brothers Boris and Iurii Sokolov, both of them disciples of Miller.

In this article Theodora Dragostinova examines the interplay between official policies and popular demands in the nationalization of the Greek minority in Bulgaria. She explores why national activists and ordinary people chose to “speak national” in the context of the conflicting national interests and territorial aspirations of Bulgaria and Greece. At the official level, the national discourse and practice showed the co-existence of essentialist and constructionist understandings of nationhood; while the rhetoric of the primordial nation was ubiquitous, politicians realized that certain policies could “improve” the national body. At the popular level, the profuse use of national rhetoric functioned as an “emergency identity,” or a discursive strategy that allowed individuals to claim social legitimacy in emergency situations. Thus, despite the fact that people were forced to adopt clear-cut national allegiances, national side-switching remained a frequent phenomenon.