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.

This article analyzes the interactions of medical experts, minor patients, and parents in a child psychiatric institution that operated in the Soviet city of Perm΄ between 1926 and 1929. Through a micro-history of this institution, the author raises questions about the nature of violence within the realm of psychiatric care, demonstrating the multidimensional flow of power within a particular institutional setting and adding complexity to our understanding of the asylum writ large. At the same time, the article engages the question of violence in Soviet society at the end of the NEP, suggesting that the historical actors involved in the Perm΄ institution used violence as a means to explain the crisis of their time.

This article explores the image of the khalat, or dressing gown, in and around Petr Viazemskii's 1817 poem “Proshchanie s khalatom” (Farewell to My Dressing Gown). As the poem circulated during the period between its creation and printing, its central image—the khalat—became enshrined as a symbol for early nineteenth-century literary culture around and within the Arzamas circle, emphasizing a creative inner life and an informal approach to writing. The poem mediates between friendship, honor, authenticity, and authorship and the formalities, duties, and expectations of society life. The khalat image appears in later poems, correspondence, and occasional writings by Anton Del'vig, Aleksandr Pushkin, and Vasilii Zhukovskii, among others. Tracing the image through its intertextual influences, extratextual impact, and memetic evolution, I examine the way it contributed to the development of an intellectual network through information transfer during the early nineteenth century and beyond.

This article argues that apart from a couple of cases, there were no situations where the Russian imperial government would have supported Lithuanian national culture as a counterbalance against Poles, and more generally, that the policy of “divide and rule” was in principle not applied on the empire's western periphery regarding other non-dominant ethnic groups. A more general reason for not implementing such a policy was related to many officials’ belief that the government should seek integration, acculturation, or even assimilation of non-Russian ethnicities. At the same time, on the Russian mental map, the Northwest Region was understood not just as part of the empire, but as part of Russian national territory. In such a territory, most of the government subscribed to a discourse of nationalism that permitted no means of support for the strengthening of non-Russian nationalisms. Finally, social radicalism of the Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian national movements was another obstacle for tsarist officials to support these “peasant” nationalities.

In this article, I analyze the production of late Soviet propaganda, highlighting the shifts toward greater literary sophistication and the reinvention of revolutionary biography, instituted in order to re-enthuse the population about revolutionary ideals. In the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras, the State Political Publishing House (Politizdat) grappled with a profound crisis of political persuasion and came to realize that collaboration and compromise with literary writers constituted the only solution. The key outcome of this debate over mass political literature was the innovative and unpredictable “;Fiery Revolutionaries” series of biographies, published from 1968 to the end of the Soviet Union. Arguing against the view of the Brezhnev era as a time of political language's standardization, and complicating the binary opposition between Soviet and dissident writers, I argue that it was the sophisticated and nuanced debates and editorial practices within this “;niche” in the post- Stalinist propaganda state that ultimately enabled many of the period’s most talented (and sometimes notorious) writers to contribute sophisticated biographies to the series later in its history.

This article expands our knowledge of nationality policies, center-periphery relations, and Jewish life under late Stalinism, a period which has heretofore been viewed predominantly through the lens of Stalin's terror and marginalization. By focusing on Soviet Moldavia, the article demonstrates that developments in this region followed a different trajectory from those displayed in the center. Local expediencies, derived from the needs of a newly Sovietizing territory with “suspect” locals, encouraged the professional advancement of ethnic Jews to positions of power and prestige previously unmatched in this region. The study explores both the opportunities and limitations faced by Jews in this peripheral region, while placing these phenomena inside the framework of Soviet nationality policies and its accompanying policy toward government professionals. Simultaneously, the article highlights both the legacy of Romanian official antisemitism within this region of postwar Soviet society and the role of the “neo-korenizatsiia” program in displacing Jews within Soviet state structures.

Historians work with sources that are products of specific social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Thus, understanding how and why sources were produced and why they survived is an essential component of historical scholarship. At the same time, many historians often employ some sort of conceptual framework—implicit or explicit, descriptive or normative—in order to translate the sources into a coherent narrative. Modern economic historians are no different. The sources tend to be quantitative and focused on economic phenomena (with many exceptions), but doing economic history well means interrogating the origins, trustworthiness, and usefulness of the data in question. In doing this, modern economic historians are largely unapologetic about employing the tools—especially statistical—and intellectual apparatus of economics to interrogate their sources, much as social, political, or environmental historians draw on ideas and methods from related disciplines in their own inquiries. This is precisely how we make sense of the historical process of economic development.

The Zagreb School of Animation, one of the great achievements of Yugoslav culture, produced hundreds of films from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This paper studies the early development of the Zagreb School and the films that satirized the universal concerns of the post-World War II landscape: industrialization, militarism, environmentalism, nuclear annihilation, and urban alienation, as well as the conforming pressures of commercialization and mass culture. This paper argues that the Zagreb School, which was made up neither of dissidents nor propagandists, breaks many of the stereotypes about artists in the dictatorial states of central and eastern Europe. Its approach to the animation medium is adjacent to the two most important features of Yugoslavia's Third Way experiment: the development of workers’ self-management and a commitment to internationalism. The paper places the Zagreb School in this historical context with a formalist analysis of Boris Kolar's Bumerang (Boomerang, 1962).

This article examines several documentary films made by and about the Russian oil industry in the period from 2003 to 2016, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which they portray intersections between oil and post-Soviet “life.” It divides these films into two major sub-genres: the corporate documentary (2003-present) and the conspiracy documentary (most widespread after about 2012). Corporate documentaries have been instrumental in fashioning new, post-Soviet links between the oil industry and everyday life, especially through “commodity chain” documentaries shown widely on television and in other media. The conspiracy films of the 2010s then extended these commodity chains into the realm of shadowy international cabals and, in some cases, fantastic alien worlds. Together, these sub-genres speak to the cultural imagination of life in Russia as a petrostate, complete with agents and victims, usable pasts and presents, and a variety of energopolitical subject positions that viewers might inhabit and shift among. Although oil documentaries and science fiction generated around the world have long imagined non-hydrocarbon energy futures for humankind, recent Russian oil documentaries in both sub-genres envision a world in which oil and human life will become ever more tightly enmeshed.