Stalin must have known better. A non-Russian and the author of Marxism and the National Question, he was surely aware that his slogan of “socialism in one country“ obscured the USSR's profoundly multinational character. To the degree that he really built socialism, Stalin clearly did so not in one country but in many simultaneously. Indeed, not only did the Soviet republics lend one another what Soviet propagandists like to call disinterested proletarian assistance, but some, such as Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, and the countries of Central Asia, may have served as the involuntary base for the “primitive accumulation of capital” as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Conversations with recent immigrants from the Soviet Union' often revolve around the theme of druzhba. In Israel and America alike, Russian-Jewish newcomers wistfully and passionately describe their old circles of friends as involved in absorbing conversations about literature, cinema, and news from abroad. As they reminisce, Soviet Jewish immigrants break into smiles and relate the political jokes and critical anecdotes they heard and told in these circles. They tell too of friends pooling scarce resources to help each other purchase a car, an apartment or summer home, a once-in-a-lifetime find on the black market, or, simply, food. Happily they remember birthday and New Year's parties that just seemed to have happened; they describe festive singing and dancing in joyful gatherings that were never formal or prearranged.

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.

Prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons has long been a theme of the Soviet! Union's declaratory arms control policy. It has also found concrete expression in Moscow's endorsement of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America of 1967 (Treaty of Tlatelolco), the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, and, since 1958, in the stringent nuclear export policy of the Soviet Union. Although much of Moscow's nonproliferation rhetoric and elements of its nonproliferation behavior can be explained in terms of narrow self-interest (namely, prevention of access to nuclear weapons by traditional adversaries), the range and consistency of its nonproliferation efforts, as well as certain specific actions, indicate that the Soviet leadership appreciates the dangers posed by the diffusion of nuclear weapons.

In early December 1994 in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs, a new category appeared in the Page of Records–a sophisticated guide to the “best” places and services in Budapest: “The Most Unsighdy Square in Europe.” This award went to Budapest's Moszhva tér (Moscow Square). No other contender for this title has yet been found. On the last pages of his monograph on the current architectural transformation of Budapest, art and media critic Péter György reveals in parentheses how the book was inspired by the sight of this area: “I have been crossing the square every day for ten years, and in the last couple of years I would stop ever more frequendy–unable to move on–and fixedly stare at the decay.”

Public opinion polls show that between 1988 and 1991 some three percent of adult Russians donated money to various political movements, four percent took part in strikes and just over six percent participated in mass rallies and demonstrations. Fewer than one percent of Russians j o i n ed new political parties, still nascent organizations that attract elites, not masses. At the same time, membership in the Communist Party dropped from ten percent to four percent of the adult population of Russia.

The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml´ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.

This article analyzes the Serbian fake news site Njuz.net, exploring the dynamics of its production, consumption, and appropriation in Serbian postsocialist, pre-EU-accession society. The increasing presence and importance of parodic media genres and the embrace of satire as a viable way to interpret and deal with social and political reality are explained in terms of both Serbia's historical trajectory and its media landscape as well as the global neo-liberal condition. Njuz.net's parody sheds critical light on various political, public, and social subjects simultaneously. Its satire communicates with multiple audiences and enables identification and detachment on several levels, a fact that makes the effects of this parody difficult to judge. The dilemmas that its writers face regarding their social activism are, I argue, a symptom of wider social anxieties and structural adversities caused by the difficulty of clearly identifying and detaching from “the enemy.” Because of how labor, consumption, and everyday practices are organized, we all inevitably contribute to the maintenance of that enemy's well-being. Seen in this light, parody is not only a form of social criticism but also a self-reflective practice.

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the “simple Soviet man” serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology.

The legacy of ancient writers to western culture since the Renaissance has long been acknowledged as a cornerstone of contemporary humanism. Yet within the vast territory of studies of the classical tradition there remains a large piece of uncharted terrain, and that is Russia, the significance of whose participation in the reception of antiquity has been largely excluded from investigation by foreign scholars and has only recently energized Russian scholars, particularly in the field of medieval studies.

It is widely accepted that Russia's failure in the Great War derived from the fact that its peasants were not “citizens.” Peasants remained isolated and particularistic, in part because Russia's elites had failed to integrate them politically or culturally into anything resembling a “nation.” When Russian peasants dreamed, it was not as members of an “imagined community” but as peasants, with their own agenda of land and local power and in their own language and cultural codes. As a result, Russia did not represent a “nation at arms,” and most peasants lacked deep commitment to or understanding of their country's war effort.