At the turn of the twentieth century most Polish political activists dreamed of recreating the Polish state, although they disagreed about where the new Poland should be located and whom it should include. In the years before 1905 the National Democratic movement—the “Endecja,” as it was commonly called—envisioned an expansive Poland stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the Dnieper to the Oder. How could a movement which came to be known for its pragmatism and tactical flexibility espouse such an unrealistic, if not absurd, ambition? How could nationalists who insisted upon cultural unity desire a nation which would include millions who neither spoke the Polish language nor considered themselves to be Poles? This article will argue that these questions can be illuminated by examining the Endecja's definition of that enigmatic Polish term, naród (nation).

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?

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.

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.

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

The report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, issued in December 2006, is the most serious attempt to understand Romania's communist experience ever produced. Coordinated by the American political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, the report covers virtually every aspect of communism as a lived system, from the installation of Communist Party officials during the postwar occupation, through the instruments of coercion, to the fate of religious institutions, the economy, national minorities, and education. The release of the report also contributed to a major political crisis, during which the parliament attempted to unseat the president, Traian Basescu, who had lauded the report and officially condemned communism as an illegitimate system. The question now is whether the commission's report will be used as yet another opportunity to reject history or as a way of helping Romanians learn, at last, how to own it.

Commentators on the imperial Russian polity have regarded the Security Law of 14 August 1881, which invested administrative officials with broad discretionary powers, as the keystone of the developing Russian police state, the virtual cause of the 1905 revolution, even “Russia's de facto constitution.” In truth, it merely codified and, in many respects, actually limited the powers granted by emergency measures adopted in the late 1870s, at the height of the terrorist campaign to murder Alexander II. The Judicial and Zemstvo Reforms of 1864 had marked the beginning of the development of the rule of law and a respect for civil rights in Russia, and the emergency legislation adopted between 1866 and 1881 was an only partially successful attempt by administrative Russia to return to traditional patterns of arbitrariness, or proizvol. Late imperial Russia's emergency legislation, in other words, was not a turning point on the path toward a modern “police state“ but a sign of that country's uneasy transition from an absolutist to a constitutional order.

More than two dozen Soviet astronomers were arrested between March 1936 and July 1937. Few astronomers or historians are aware of the extent to which Soviet astronomy was devastated. This article investigates the situation in astronomy during these two years. It begins with a brief discussion of Soviet astronomy between 1917 and 1935 and continues with a detailed examination of the events that served as the catalyst for the purge, the arrests themselves, and a discussion of what is known about the fates of the victims.

In the mid-1930s the Soviet Union had approximately two hundred professional astronomers and sixteen astronomical observatories, most of which were associated with universities and had staffs of only two or three people. The most important and best equipped astronomical institution was the Central Astronomical Observatory of the USSR at Pulkovo, just outside Leningrad, with its branch observatories at Nikolaev and Simeis in the Ukraine. In 1935 thirty-three astronomers worked at Pulkovo.

Lenin's crucial role in formulating and laying the foundations of Soviet nationality policy is acknowledged by all. His nationality program—whether one views it as opportunist and pseudo-Marxist or as “the outstanding contribution to the treasure trove of creative Marxism”—is considered to be his most original and perhaps most successful policy. Lenin's lasting impact on the nationalities themselves is attested by the fact that national dissidents in the Soviet Union often call for a return to “Leninist” policy. One dissident writes, “It is difficult to find today anything more useful, noble and imperative than the restoration of Lenin's nationalities policy.”

According to most biographers, Lenin became involved with the nationality question only on the eve of World War I while living in exile in the multinational Austrian Empire. It was there that he recognized nationalism as a powerful force and began to devise a program that would harness it for the revolution. Opposing both the cultural autonomy scheme of the Austrian Marxists and the total scorn of nationalism by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, in debates with fellow Marxists, formulated his own program.

Systemic transition in the former USSR is an inherently spatial process. In the most general sense, marketization, privatization, and internationalization involve a reordering of the political space and the restructuring of the economic and social landscapes of the former Soviet Union (FSU). In a number of more specific ways, geography also provides a structure within which individuals and institutions operate, and it provides a series of opportunities and constraints. Geographers, then, should be able to make an important contribution to debates concerning systemic change in the FSU.

In 1991, Leningrad television broadcast a program that has since become infamous. The program's guest, Sergei Kurekhin, claiming to be a political figure and scientist, conducted an elaborate hoax that he presented as a serious historical exploration into the origins of the Bolshevik revolution. Using visual, textual, and scientific evidence, Kurekhin argued that the revolution was led by people who had been consuming hallucinogenic mushrooms. As a result, their personalities were being replaced by mushroom personalities, and their leader, Vladimir Lenin, was simply a mushroom. This fact, according to Kurekhin, shed new light on many enigmas of Soviet history. Millions of viewers were at a loss: were they witnessing a serious program, a daring prank, a case of unprecedented lunacy? In this article, Alexei Yurchak analyzes that remarkable comedic performance, its social and political effects then and now, and what it may contribute to our understanding of the relationship between politics and irony.

This new reading of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog challenges the two lines of thought that dominate existing interpretations. Cold Warinspired critics saw in the banned novella an anti-Soviet political allegory and ignored its astute treatment of Soviet debates on biosocial issues. Most other critics have cast Preobrazhenskii as a mad scientist in the Frankenstein tradition, unleashing forces he himself cannot control. Putting aside false antitheses, Bulgakov's novella emerges as a fictional exploration of ideas in eugenics, hormone replacement therapy, and the nature-nurture debate that had real urgency for early Soviet geneticists struggling for ideological support, and for Bolshevik policymakers trying to create a “New Soviet Man.” In this article, Yvonne Howell describes the competing scientific paradigms that provide a backdrop to Bulgakov's work and shows how attitudes from across the “nature-nurture” spectrum appear and interact in Heart of a Dog through the voices of its principal characters.

Eurasianism, the theory that Russia was neither Europe nor Asia but a world unto itself, Eurasia, runs through much, if not all, of George Vernadsky's enormous scholarly output. Eurasianism was the fuel of his impressive productivity, the central, unifying theme of his varied investigations of Russian, Byzantine, and Inner Asian history. Despite the high esteem in which Vernadsky came to be held, there have been few examinations of his contributions to historical knowledge. Yet Vernadsky's career and his scholarship have much to tell us of the fate of the Imperial Russian historiographic tradition in the twentieth century.

Vernadsky is most often associated with the theme of the significance of the Mongols in Russian history. Vernadsky's observations on this topic over the course of his nearly sixty-year career provide an excellent medium for understanding the ambiguities of his adherence to Eurasianism and for tracing the evolution of his Eurasianism in response to the different political and cultural environments in which he worked. As we shall see, the assumption of his eulogists that Vernadsky's Eurasianism was static is too simplistic, while the equally facile conclusion that Vernadsky gradually tempered the extremist elements of Eurasianism is too imprecise to be satisfactory. Indeed, the development of Vernadsky's historical concepts is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated.

Recent scholarship on the purges and Great Terror has contributed immensely to our understanding of the Stalinist political system that emerged in the mid-1980s. Research by J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn, among others, has challenged the totalitarian perspective that views the Terror as part of a grand scheme designed by Stalin to silence his opponents in the Party and government, establish his personal dictatorship and coerce society into unquestioning submission.1 Instead, these historians emphasize the limits of power and control wielded by the national leadership which found itself at times frustrated in its efforts to impose its will on both society and regional party organizations. They conclude that the "cleansing" of the Party and government was the partial product of a conflict between national and subnational officials, with initiative from below sometimes playing as important a role as central directives in fueling the purges.

Discussions of Catherine II as an “enlightened despot” usually emphasize her attempts to reform the social and political bases of the Russian Empire and to gain the active support of the nobility and gentry in governmental activity. Catherine denned enlightened government as wellordered government, achieving its policy and programs through bureaucratic and political means rather than with the sheer force that many of her predecessors had used.

The term “Russification” is seldom used with reference to the period of Catherine II, even though it was in her reign that the Cossack Sech was abolished, the special privileges granted by Peter I to the Baltic provinces abrogated, and the first successful assimilation of Russia’s Muslim subjects into the Russian state accomplished.

“Patterns” is a term infrequently used in our historical writing; many historians associate it with certain more modern sciences. I have chosen it here in order to stress the need for a somewhat more highly elaborated methodology in the study of the matters discussed below. We are so far from adequate understanding of many of these subjects that we cannot be squeamish about borrowing any applicable method from the faster-moving sciences—whether these devices are to be called “matrices,” “models,” or “patterns” will be a matter of taste. I have, for present purposes, chosen the last, for what I should like to do is to suggest a comparative approach to the history of Muscovite-Tatar relations based upon systems, or patterns, of phenomena so arranged that the logic of the arrangment provides information concerning phenomena about which there is no direct evidence.

In 1917, Ukrainian nationalists took advantage of the deterioration of central authority in the Russian Empire to make a bid for Ukrainian self-determination. The struggle for Ukrainian statehood continued under three successive national governments until 1920.The first year of the revolution, however, is crucial to understanding the evolution of the national movement in the Ukraine. In 1917, the Ukraine was as free of Russian interference and military occupation as it would be during the era of revolution and civil war. Ukrainian institutions and parties developed in freedom, democratic elections exposed the Ukrainian masses to nationalist agitation and measured their response, and the Russian government was forced to deal with the Ukraine as a distinct political entity.

In this article, I analyze changes in the Czechoslovak-Vietnamese labor exchange program between 1967 and 1989, specifically Czechoslovak state policies toward pregnant Vietnamese workers. In the program, the Czechoslovak state's commitment to being a welfare provider was confronted with its commitment to socialist internationalism. The policies toward pregnant Vietnamese workers constituted a part of the process through which the Czechoslovak state was redefining the limits of care it saw itself obligated to provide. The conflict between the two states over the appropriate treatment of pregnant Vietnamese workers was also an outgrowth of a more general feature of Czechoslovak state socialism: the tension between the pressure to increase (or at least maintain) productivity and the pressure to increase fertility. The gradual transformation of the program into a more decentralized and market exchange-like form shaped the nature of the conflict, the attempts to resolve it, and the limited efficacy of the solutions.

This article presents post-Habsburg central and eastern Europe as the flagship campus of the new international order of 1919. It shows how the international project of imperial liquidation, and the predicament of the successor states, produced a wide range of new international schemes, techniques, and frameworks—spanning the economy, crime, humanitarianism, and rights—that significantly shaped the global governance of today. Where historians customarily trace the implications of imperial collapse for the region's nationalization, I focus instead on internationalization. I isolate three different “border effects” in which the boundaries of sovereignty were reworked or challenged. International authority and jurisdiction grew and thrived on the sorts of qualified sovereignty that emerged in empire's wake.