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.

The year 1928 was a turning point not only for Soviet cultural policy but for policy in all fields. It was the beginning of a new revolution which overturned everything but the Stalinist leadership, an upheaval so violent that it seemed that the ruling party had revolted simultaneously against the society it governed and its own governing institutions. Among these institutions was the Commissariat of Enlightenment, headed by A. V. Lunacharsky and responsible for implementing policy in the sphere of education and the arts. In 1928 the Commissariat was accused of “softness” in its dealings with the intelligentsia, lack of “Communist vigilance,” and failure to understand the significance of “class war on the cultural front.” This “softness” was not peculiar to the Commissariat, except in degree. Right deviation in the party, it was said, had led a bureaucratized government apparat in retreat from true communism to liberalism; and the essence of this retreat was conciliation of the bourgeois peasantry and intelligentsia.

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.

This article examines why Ukrainian women participated in the 2013–14 anti-government protests, widely known as the EuroMaidan. Based upon in-depth interviews with female protesters, the study uncovers a wide range of motivations for women's engagement in the revolution, including dissatisfaction with the government, solidarity with protesters, motherhood, civic duty, and professional service. Political discontent was the most cited reason for protesting. Solidarity with protesters was another major catalyst for political engagement. In addition, women who were mothers invoked the notion of mothering to provide a rationale for activism. The study contributes to the growing literature on women's participation in contentious politics in non-democracies.

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.

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.”

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”).

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

When Communist elites came to power in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, they attempted to create a new social and political order. As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.

In this introduction, Birgit Beumers explains the concept of the blockbuster, examining its emergence within the context of political upheavals in Soviet history. She then discusses the relation of the blockbuster to the question of genre and defines the blockbuster as a genre film, which follows certain conventions and thereby cradles the spectator in a (false) security. Beumers closes with a chronological survey of popular Soviet films that provides the context for the remaining articles in this forum.

In this article, Svetlana Boym proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the everyday practices in the gulag at the crossroads of literature, political theory, and history. Boym places Soviet accounts of the gulag in the comparative context of the twentieth-century reflection on totalitarianism and terror by drawing on Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil, judgment, and imagination. There is something inassimilable in Varlam Shalamov's prose: it confronts the experience of extremity but does not offer redemption. It resorts to the mimicry of Soviet discourse and the technologies of the gulag, but only to challenge any coherent conception of Soviet subjectivity, either enthusiastic or defiant. Boym examines Shalamov's uses of clichés, attention to intonation, blemish, mimicry, and estrangement. Instead of performing ideology, Shalamov's Kolyma Tales expose the breaking points of Russian and Soviet cultural myths, giving new insight into reading historical documents and understanding gulag memory in post-Soviet Russia.

One of the most interesting political anachronisms of this century was the Polish demand for colonies. The movement developed rapidly in size and intensity in the early 1930s and reached its climax in 1938-39. Ironically, the Poles clamored for colonies at a time when plans were being prepared to turn Poland herself into one of the first colonies of the Third Reich. In pursuing this course of action the Poles fell victim to the spirit of voluntarism, confusing the will to power with the precondition for greatpower status.

The origin of the Polish colonial movement may be dated October 1, 1918, when an organization called Polska Bandera (Polish Flag) was founded by a group of twenty-five men for the purpose of popularizing the importance of the sea to Poland’s national interest and encouraging Polish youth to participate in inland and maritime navigation.

Memoir literature suggests that Iosif Stalin's gulag was largely populated by political prisoners and that release from detention was extremely rare. In this article, Golfo Alexopoulos notes that most gulag inmates represented criminal offenders who cycled through Stalin's labor camps and colonies in vast numbers. She argues that the gulag formed a dynamic system in which the majority of prisoners came and went and uses Stalin's largest single release of gulag prisoners to expose the movement and tension of this revolving door. Surprisingly, Stalin's amnesty occurred over the objections of the NKVD leadership and despite great cost to the gulag system; the law was not designed to address postwar labor shortages, relieve overcrowded facilities, or remove less productive prisoners. Rather, the postwar prisoner exodus constituted a political act, and one consistent with Stalinist penal practice in which most prisoners cycled through the camps, connecting the world of the gulag with the larger society.

The purpose of the present article is neither to examine in detail the state of research regarding demesne-robot farming and the “neo-serfdom” or “second serfdom” in Poland-Lithuania nor to attempt a definitive explanation of these phenomena. Rather, the author has set out to show the inadequacy of conventional views by reiterating a series of important points already raised by various Polish historians.

In June 1968, Yugoslav university students launched strikes and demonstrations condemning police brutality and university conditions and critiquing the apparent failure of self-managing socialism. The "June events" show that the demonstrators were active participants in a global movement but also heavily influenced by local context, practices, and ideas. Whereas Yugoslav youth engaged with, drew from, and ignored the activities of other student movements, authorities reacted to youth rebellion by insisting that the majority of the protesters were showing support for state policies and that the most incorrigible were influenced by, or agents of, foreign entities. Thus, the state reproduced an artificially rigid boundary between east and west as well as between good socialist youth and enemy agents. This article decenters the west as the standard of youth rebellion, considering it in conjunction with but not in comparison to Yugoslavia. It approaches the Cold War world as characterized by the transfer of ideas and practices, not just the clash of civilizations.

Sexual exchanges between men in modernizing Russia can be a window on the comparatively unexplored problem of Russian masculinities. Traditional forms of mutual male intimacy occurred within the patriarchal structures of gentry and merchant households, workshops and bathhouses. Arteli of peasant bathhouse attendants engaged in “sodomy” with clients, observing customary work practices (zemliachestvo, krugovaia poruka). By the 1890s an urban sexual marketplace characterized Russia's male homosexual subculture. Sexually knowing youths and men systematically offered sex for cash to “pederasts”, or tetki, who were perceived as predominantly attracted to men. After 1917, Bolsheviks evaluated same-sex love not through a single prism but by class and national contexts. Russia's male homosexual subculture was mistrusted in part because it was a clandestine sexual market, creating suspicious dependency relationships and threatening the “purity” of “innocent” young men.