The leading role of the state in nineteenth-century Russian industrialization is one of the most widely accepted notions in economic history. Thus state-sponsored industrialization, deeply rooted in the strength of the despotic state and the subservience of an undifferentiated peasantry and an insignificant middle class, began in earnest in the era of the Great Reforms, after the Crimean War had shocked the government out of its economic lethargy under Nicholas I and Finance Minister Kankrin. It continued unevenly thereafter until it crested in the burst of state-led growth in the 1890s. The “statist interpretation” of prerevolutionary Russian industrial development has been most notably expounded by Alexander Gerschenkron in a series of influential essays and by Theodore Von Laue in his biography of Sergei Witte. It thoroughly dominates non-Soviet scholarship and serves as the point of departure for almost all general investigations.

Before Angelina Jolie's 2011 film In the Land of Blood and Honey, about the rape of women in the Bosnian war, was filmed, a group of Bosnian women war rape survivors persuaded local government officials to revoke Jolie's onlocation filming permit. The survivors’ objections were based on a rumor, subsequently refuted, that the plot was a love story between a Bosnian Muslim woman and her Serb rapist. This paper analyzes these objections, their subsequent permutations, and the film itself in light of the relationships between gender and sexuality, nationalist ideologies, and the logics of war. I contextualize the objections raised and argue that the film ultimately fails to challenge conventional patriarchal and nationalist assumptions about wartime rape, sex, and gender roles in war, despite its seemingly provocative focus on violence against women in war. Ultimately, as I show, the film reinforces clear-cut ethnonational narratives of victims and perpetrators while leaving the gendered logics of sex and power unexamined.

This article analyzes how Moscow has extended its rule over Chechnia since the beginning of this century. Within the larger understanding of this rule as imperial in form, the current distinct contractual relationship between the Russian center and Chechnia is substantiated as one based on kinship. I argue that the Putin-Kadyrov relationship is a generic case of patronage but highlight the local imprint that such relations acquire by tracing how Chechen kinship practices inform this case.

Russian folk wisdom regarded the daughter-in-law, the snokha (a word that also meant sister-in-law), as a source of family friction. Unable to coexist in the cramped quarters of the peasant hut, or izba, where a mother-in-law ruled over the stove and a father-in-law kept watch on the family purse, the daughter-inlaw supposedly made evident her discontent. A host of proverbs and folk sayings attest to the idea of the snokha as troublemaker: the saying that the daughter-in-law “likes the family hands but resents the family pot” summed up this resentment. According to this view, the daughter-in-law took but did not give.

Twentieth-century historians, influenced perhaps by Soviet interpretations as well as by literary impressions, see the peasant daughter-in-law in the prerevolutionary era not as a source of friction but rather as a helpless victim of family hostility: a husband's beatings, a mother-in-law's tyranny, a father-in-law's sexual harassment.

To begin, three encounters, and then some ruminations about two deaths, the veiling of identity and the expression of kinship. The encounters are from the diary Isaac Babel' kept during his service with Budenny's First Cavalry Army in the Polish campaign of 1920; the deaths are those that frame the work of fiction he drew from this experience, Red Cavalry. That book begins and ends with the narrator contemplating a corpse–in each instance, the body of a Jewish man whose passing leads the narrator to confront the meanings of kinship and loss. In the first case, he witnesses bereavement; in the second, he experiences it. On one important level, the narrator's trajectory in Red Cavalry is captured in the contrast between his links to the first death and to the last. Reading the story cycle against the background of the diary, one can see this feature of the cycle's design in terms of the central dilemma for Babel' (bearing papers in the name of Kirill Vasilievich Liutov, the name he bequeathes to his narrator) in his dealings with the civilians of the heavily Jewish towns through which his division passed: whether or not to reveal that he was himself a Jew.

In this article, Mark Bassin explores Lev Gumilev's theory of ethnicity. Developing his ideas in the context of post-Stalinist debates about the relationship of society to the natural world, Gumilev maintained that the etnos was a wholly natural, quasi-biological entity. Although this naturalism involved an important genetic dimension, Gumilev denied that ethnicity was determined by race and emphasized instead its ecological quality as an organic part of biogeocenoses or natural-landscape ecosystems. Although he remained marginalized in his day by the Soviet ethnographic establishment, his essentialist perspective is powerfully appealing for post-Soviet audiences, who find his “ecology of ethnicity” singularly useful for the purposes of ethnopolitical discourse.

Kathryn Hendley argues that easy access to the civil courts in Russia is a deliberate policy choice aimed at countering the popular image of courts as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent that is propagated by the media. Judicial officials present judges as heroically struggling to cope with the deluge of cases in a timely fashion. Relying on field work and analysis of caseload data, Hendley shows that the burden on trial-level Russian judges has been exaggerated for effect. She documents the procedural mechanisms available to facilitate rapid turnaround of simple cases. She argues that the flood of cases could easily be stanched by increasing filing fees, but that judicial officials cling to the open door policy as a way of proving the value of the courts. Rather than discouraging the demand for courts, they prefer to tinker with the supply side of the equation.

Based on interviews with twenty-one women and fifteen men who expressed homosexual desires during the late Soviet period, this article seeks to shed light upon Soviet homosexual subjectivities in the Russian SFSR. As a result of the drive to “close off the entire topic of gay subjectivity to respectable inquiry, so as to prevent gayness from ever again being understood as a sickness,” queer studies has for a long time been “silent” on this topic (David Halperin). My objective here is to take into account both the effects produced by Soviet medical and penal discourse on the subjectification of individuals who experience homosexual desire and the room to maneuver open to individuals for constructing the subject of their sexuality from their experience. I suggest that men and women were able to construct homosexual subjectivities that cannot be reduced to binary stigmatization as either sickness or criminality. In reality, men and women rendered themselves the subjects of their homosexuality in confrontation simultaneously and non-exclusively with both the pathologizing and criminalizing definitions of homosexuality.

In the 1950s, films like Sergei Yutkevich's Velikii voin Albanii Skanderbeg symbolized Albanian-Soviet friendship, which was said to be undying. The Soviets brought their reels and their famous actors to this corner of the Mediterranean, and they also designed the country's first film agency, baptized “New Albania.” By the early 1960s, however, the friendship was dead. Albania's communist regime sided with Mao's China during the dramatic Sino-Soviet schism. From instruments of friendship, films turned into weapons in a global battle over the soul of socialism. Unexpectedly, Albanian war films assumed revolutionary meaning—far away from the Balkans—during China's Cultural Revolution. Recapturing these zigzags, this article shows how globalized socialism interacted with national imperatives. Bringing about exchange on a cross-continental scale, socialism encouraged constant mental mapping, and it also produced competing temporal frameworks. Going beyond nationalized histories of cinema, the article draws on archival sources from three countries, including previously classified Albanian materials.

Ivan IV was the head of a theocratic state and an ardent participant in the spiritual culture of his church. He nevertheless seems to have deliberately flaunted the religious standards which were the basis of his legitimacy, especially during the Oprichnina (1564-1572). He reveled in blasphemy and his cruelties often manifested the ironic twist of what is termed "glumlenie": he denigrated his victims, ostentatiously violating their status by immersing them in inverted worlds of carnival. Although scholars have explored Ivan's motivations, no one has adequately explained the contradiction between his affirmation of his official status as model Christian and his blasphemous and immoral behavior.

This article examines how a discourse on international image animated Macedonian politics following the country's 2001 conflict and how it reflected a broader cultural politics of European Union expansion. Contrasting with the continual deferral of recognition that characterized European integration in Macedonia, the Macedonian discourse on image (imidž) anchored a social imaginary where a national project of marketing could facilitate Macedonia's accession into the European Union and concretize its belonging to "Europe." The analysis developed here centers on the ambivalences in this discourse and the practices it authorized. By incorporating both orientalist distinctions and key concepts from the European Union's own process of integration, the discourse of imidž supported the neoliberal reform associated with Macedonia's postconflict restructuring and European integration. But the discourse on imidž also provided Macedonian political actors with an idiom in which to imagine, respond to, and capitalize on the larger political forces engendered by discursive constructs of Europe and the international community.

A number of studies of income distribution have suggested that income inequality in the United States showed some tendency to decline during the 1930's and the war years. Although the extent and timing of the decline may be in dispute among specialists in this area, and some recent studies suggest that no significant changes in income shares have occurred since 1944, the American Income Revolution has nonetheless been widely accepted and acclaimed. All the more reason, it would seem, that studies of changes in income inequality in Soviet Russia should prove of great interest. If income inequality has been reduced in the world's major capitalist economy, what has been happening to income distribution in the Soviet Union?

Western discussion of Soviet nationality issues frequently centers on large national groups and their varying potential for dissent. The fate of smaller groups, particularly those within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, is less often explored and is sometimes obscured by assumptions of forced acculturation. Rather than viewing the dominant Soviet Russian culture as a shark eating small fish cultures like the Siberian Khanty, it is more appropriate to decipher a range of acculturation options and experiences. Sharks can get indigestion, and all the economic and political changes introduced in small Siberian societies do not eliminate questions of ethnicity. Sometimes they exacerbate them.

This article focuses on the cultural survival and ethnic consciousness of the Khanty, a Ugrian speaking group who live predominantly in the Northern Ob River area of sub-arctic Siberia and who numbered 20,934 in 1979. They are traditionally hunters, fishers, and semi-nomadic reindeer breeders whose locale and trade over centuries have led them into contact with several ethnic groups, including the Russians. Within the Soviet political framework, the Ob-Ugrian Khanty and Mansi share an Autonomous District (Okrug). This places them midway between Siberian groups without a formal administrative unit based on nationality (for example, some Amur River peoples) and the two largest Siberian groups, the Buriat and the Yakut, each numbering over 325,000, with their own Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs) within the RSFSR.

To understand Stalin as a political thinker, we must see him as a man whose thinking was strongly influenced by perceived parallels between present and past. Unlike other Bolsheviks, he found a parallel between Russia’s internal situation in relatively tranquil 1925 and on the eve of the October upheaval of 1917. He thrice stated in party forums during 1925 that the present international situation resembled the prelude of the World War’s outbreak in 1914. And having come to think in Russian historical terms, he discerned a parallel between Muscovite Russia’s situation in earlier centuries and Soviet Russia’s now. In a party speech of 1928, for example, he found a cue for present policy in Peter the Great’s attempted revolutionary leap out of Russian backwardness; and in the often quoted speech to managers in 1931 he spoke of the beatings that Russia had suffered in history as punishment for her backwardness and declared that Soviet survival now depended on conquering that backwardness in ten years.

Sacha Baron Cohen maps a cultural background for his “Borat” character by creating a hyperreal Kazakhstan that is based, nonetheless, on gradations of a “real,” yet Orientalized, eastern Europe and Balkan region. Having no cultural connections to its actual Central Asian namesake, “Borat's Kazakhstan” is a Baudrillardian simulacrum because, for a western filmgoer, it essentially replaces the original. Scratching beneath the surface, however, we see that Baron Cohen composes his clown-journalist using exotic, yet familiar, “realities” from the “Other” in Europe's backyard. Using Edward Said's Orientalism (along with Milica Bakić-Hayden's and Maria Todorova's modifications of the idea), Dickie Wallace describes how this discursive bricolage of eastern European and Balkan music, language, folkloristic rituals, and archetypes, as well as continual tabu violations and commonsensical acceptance of violence, gives the character the sharp parodic elements that have had western audiences laughing even while wincing as they recognize themselves in this “Other.“

During the last three decades of the tsarist regime the business tax system became the experimental vanguard of the entire tax structure. Thirty-one years before a general income tax on all estates (sosloviia) was confirmed in April 1916, Russia's first permanent income taxes on business were imposed in January 1885.

In recent decades, the rediscovery of historical ethnography in western historiography has produced an extensive literature on "popular Christianity" in many European societies. Until recently, however, this historiographical current has exercised very limited influence on historical study in the former Soviet Union. In one sense, Russian historians had no need for such influence; the populist tradition in Russian historiography and its continuation in marxist-leninist attire meant that the study of popular attitudes and beliefs was hardly the novelty it was in other countries in recent decades.

The significance of the reign of Alexander III as a turning point in the history of Russian Jewry is beyond dispute. This reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in the Jews’ economic, social, and political condition. Jewish hopes for emancipation from the prevailing discriminatory legislation were dashed. Instead of emancipation, the Jews were presented with new restrictions, on their residence rights, educational opportunities, economic and professional pursuits, and participation in the institutions of local government. Faced with starvation, many thousands of Jews chose to leave the Russian Empire. Others chose to convert to Christianity in order to throw off the yoke of persecution. Moving in the opposite direction, many Jewish intellectuals who had previously believed in the beneficial results to be achieved by assimilation began to question this assumption. Some began to turn to Zionism. Others turned to active Jewish self-defense.