Russian peasants do not appear to welcome children with particular enthusiasm, but once a child is born it is protected to the greatest possible extent from hunger and cold, often at the cost of considerable parental sacrifice. The infant and young child is fed by its mother generously and frequently, and for a very long period, often up to two years; if the mother is absent, a crying baby is given a comforter made of chewed and sweetened bread tied up in a rag by the person looking after it, typically a woman of a generation older than the parents—a babuška—though sometimes its older brothers and sisters have this duty.

One of the consequences of the revival of sociology as a distinct discipline in the Soviet Union has been the appearance of empirical studies of prevailing attitudes toward the major occupations in Soviet society. These studies have been accompanied by discussions in Soviet newspapers and in the educational and economics literature of the problems associated with the popular perception of various occupations, particularly among student youth.

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.

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.

Though The Persian Cossack Brigade, which played such a fateful role during the revolution of 1905-1911, has attracted attention, relatively little is known of its origins and early development.

George W. Curzon devoted to the Brigade only a few of the 693 pages which make up the first volume of his monumental work on nineteenth-century Iran. Edward G. Browne, while discussing at length the role of the Brigade in the events of 1905-1909, erroneously fixed the date of its formation in 1882 and named Colonel Kozakofski (sic) as its first commander. Russian historians have done no better.

In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.

The career of the Soviet historian, E. V. Tarle, bears testimony to both the methods and effectiveness of Soviet demands for conformity in historical writing. Unlike many of his colleagues, who confined their research to obscure topics or resorted to the editing of collections of documents, Tarle treated events in Russian history which carried important political implications. Outstanding among these were his works on the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Between 1936 and 1952 Tarle wrote three basically different interpretations of this invasion, each of which reflected the current trend in Soviet historiography at the time it was written. Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union bore an obvious resemblance to Napoleon's campaign in Russia, and Academician Tarle, under pressure, changed his story to conform to the changing “party line.“

Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.

It is an established fact that the so-called "Southern" (mainly Odessabased) school of writers enriched Soviet literature of the 1920s with a number of "European" dimensions neglected by the then dominant Russian realist tradition, such as (to name but a few) intertextuality, a focus on language and style, and a sharpened sensitivity to plot and composition. It can be said that in Babel' criticism some of these aspects are just beginning to receive the full measure of attention that they merit. However, the rich fabric of Russian and western cultural subtexts in Babel''s prose and its intricate relationships with various literary and mythological prototypes remain largely unexplored. Among recent studies that begin to fill this gap, the forthcoming monograph in Russian by Yampolsky and Zholkovsky deserves special mention as one of the most comprehensive to date.

Chingiz Aitmatov's recent novel I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ provides an excellent case study of the way the socialist realist canon can generate new paradigms out of itself. At a time when it is widely assumed in the West that all reputable Soviet authors have gone “beyond” socialist realism, the appearance of this novel is particularly instructive.

Aitmatov's book has had greater impact in the Soviet Union than any other novel published there in recent years. It covers subjects that are both highly topical and sensitive politically. Yet it does so by using the conventions of socialist realism to a greater extent than has been seen in the major Soviet writing of the past fifteen years. Indeed, Aitmatov has somehow contrived to weave into the fabric of his text patterns reminiscent of every period in the development of socialist realism.

In the half-century after the Polish insurrection of 1863, the Russian government applied many restrictive measures to Lithuanian culture, including the prohibition against printing Lithuanian except in Cyrillic letters. Some have argued that St. Petersburg aimed to wipe out the culture and language of Lithuanians in this period. A close look at the archival sources shows, however, that the Russian authorities were very little concerned with the Lithuanians per se and far more worried about Polish influences in the region. In the end, the Russian government saw Lithuanians only as a pawn in the “age-old struggle” between Poles and Russians. The failure of official Russians to take Lithuanian nationalism seriously meant that the Russian empire was quite unprepared to deal with this popular movement in the early twentieth century.

Astonishingly, we still do not have a history of collaboration in Poland during World War II. Klaus-Peter Friedrich shows that the building blocks for such a history already exist, however. They are scattered throughout the contemporary Polish press and studies on the Nazi occupation regime. Examples include institutionalized cooperation (Baudienst, Polish Police), ethnically defined segments of the population (Volksdeutsche), informal support of Nazi projects on ideological common ground (anti- Semitism and anticommunism), and the stance of the Polish peasantry as well as the Roman Catholic Church. Friedrich concludes that collaboration eludes study because of a mental image according to which ethnic Poles were the foremost victims of the occupiers and heroically resisted them. Questionable views of national self-interest keep Polish society from coming to terms with the past. Nevertheless, debates on “Polish collaboration” continue to recur—as they have since 1939.

Change in the Stalinist system, and stubborn resistance to change, have been the central features of Soviet political life since Stalin's death in 1953. The rival forces of “innovation and tradition,” to use the language of the official press, have become “two poles” in Soviet politics and society, which are expressed through “sharp clashes between people standing on both sides of the psychological barrier.“

Between 1991 and 1996 Russia underwent a precipitous economic and social decline with decreases in production, gross national product, and wages, and increases in inequality, crime, and corruption. Most people experienced a decline in their standard of living, and many fondly recalled the security and stability of the communist era. Nevertheless, in the two main cases when the Russian electorate was confronted with a choice of directions in economic policy–the referendum of 1993 and the presidential elections of 1996–the majority chose reform. Writing about Boris Yeltsin's surprising victory in the 1996 presidential elections, a Pravda commentator mused: “Logically, he should have lost, since he was unable to fully solve any of the problems that have piled up: the stagnation of production, the impoverishment of a majority of the people, growing unemployment, the chronic nonpayment of wages, the decline in science, culture and education, the continuing conflict in Chechnya, etc. Nevertheless, Yeltsin received a majority of the electorate's votes.”

Collectivism was a Utopian dream that flourished in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and later became part of Soviet ideology. Eisenstein's early films, conductorless orchestras, and mass workers' choruses all aimed at inculcating the view that a collective—be it the party, the proletariat, or the masses—was to replace the individual as the determinant of social and political values. The popular "proletarian culture" movement that flourished during the civil war (1918-21) was one form of collectivism, but there were many others. Yet, as a body of ideas, collectivism in Russia preceded the 1917 Revolution by a decade or more and made a crucial contribution to bolshevism. Indeed, in the years after 1905, collectivism had as much a claim to bolshevism as did the party-centered authoritarianism of Lenin.

In this article, Paul Manning explores the metaphoric and metonymic valuations of western brands as symbols of revolutionary change during the recent Rose Revolution and especially during the transition of the early 1990s in Georgia. Using an ethnographic reading of a Georgian novel about the early 1990s, The Dogs of Paliashvili Street by Aka Morchiladze, Manning examines in detail how a single ubiquitous western brand of cigarettes, Magna—often deployed in opposition to local socialist brands like Kolkheti (“brand totemism“)—came to stand metaphorically as a “meta-symbol” for the period of the transition in Georgia as a whole, “the Epoch of Magna.” At the same time, the new capitalist conditions of consumption and the proliferation of western brands of cigarettes made differences between brands into metonymic resources for indexing emergent forms of social differentiation and transformed certain brands, like Marlboro, into indexes of the general collapse of public urban order after socialism (“brand fetishism”).

Classical Marxism, in contrast to various forms of Utopian socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism, treated anti-Semitism with utter contempt. The German Social Democratic leader August Bebel summed up the prevailing attitude of classical Marxism when he dubbed anti-Semitism the “socialism of fools.” Lenin was even sharper in his denunciation: “Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews,” he cried in March 1919. Yet fifty-five years after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union has become the principal exemplar of the “socialism of fools,” with anti-Jewish discrimination practiced in various areas of politics and employment and in the ethnic-cultural field. Especially disquieting is the massive anti-Zionist propaganda campaign which incorporates the traditional negative stereotypes of Jews.

This article examines the takeover of the Perm’-36 Gulag museum as emblematic of the dynamics of patriotic legitimation in Russia. The museum was dedicated to preserving the memory of the victims of Soviet political repression and it grew in popularity into the 2000s, emerging as an opposition platform and target for self-styled patriots who accused it of distorting Soviet history. The regional government soon joined the battle, finally forcing the museum's takeover and transforming it into a site honoring the Gulag rather than its victims. Drawing on interviews conducted with the museum's former director and scientific directors in 2015 and extensive local press materials, this analysis of the struggle over Perm’-36 demonstrates the significance of patriotism in sustaining the regional government's attacks even in the absence of federal patronage. The findings thus challenge prevailing understandings of authoritarian regime politics as driven primarily by patronage and power-maximizing elites.