In April 1965, an illegal demonstration brought an estimated twenty thousand people to the streets of Yerevan to call for the official recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the return of “Armenian lands.” While this event is traditionally seen as “dissident” and “anti-Soviet,” in this article I draw attention to the demonstration's particularly Soviet character, as it followed rules and practices central to Soviet rituals and the official revolutionary narrative. Party officials and petitioners expressed similar views on past national suffering and its implications for the Soviet community and the communist future, all of which were in turn to be affirmed by the construction of the first genocide memorial ever built on Soviet soil. These local reinterpretations of the Soviet project do not just point to developments that help explain the Soviet system's longevity. They are also a reminder that the constant reimagining of communities not only pertains to the “nation” but also concerns and often intermingles with the reimagination of other communities, such as the Soviet one.

So far in the twenty-first century, triumphalism has dominated Russian culture. As manifest in popularized history and film, this wave has often been described by recourse to interpretive paradigms derived from a neo-Soviet or neo-socialist realist orientation, particularly when the subject is war. While understandable, this interpretive practice cannot account for salient productions that upstage Soviet conventions by reconfiguring the Russian historical experience along a narrative trajectory anchored by two scenarios diat constitute the alpha and omega of national achievement and pride: Aleksandr Nevskii and the Time of Troubles. Tapping into deep structures of myth, contemporary reproductions of these two tie their significance explicitly to the post-Soviet period. Supported by the state and church, their increasing traction in war narratives facilitates a new discourse of nationalism that supersedes Soviet precedent, reconfigures traditional domains of triumphalism, and sets a standard for future constructions of Russian history that eclipses key problems of the real or imagined past.

The report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in România, issued in December 2006, is the most serious attempt to understand România'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 Românians learn, at last, how to own it.

The American and British periodical publications have devoted considerable attention to reporting the contents of Eugene S. Varga's Changes in the Economy of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War and to the discussion and criticism in the Soviet Union centering on this work. The time is ripe for a more full account of this important development on what in Soviet terminology is called the “theoretical front” than brief journalistic treatments have been able to provide. The basic materials both for ideological and for political interpretation are now available. Further developments may, of course, occur, particularly in the sphere of administrative measures applied by the Party authorities to economists who hold erroneous and harmful views.

Russian peasant farming techniques in the last decades of the nineteenth century are generally considered to have been technologically backward. What student of Russian history has not read about the dire effects of the three field system of agriculture, the lack of fertilizer, and the inadequate wooden plow used predominantly by Russian peasants? The low productivity of the peasant is traditionally attributed to these backward methods, which in turn are seen as contributors to the exhaustion of the land and consequently the impoverishment of the Russian peasantry. As the land became exhausted, peasants could not maintain their standard of living or meet an increasing tax burden. Technological backwardness and soil exhaustion are thus important indexes for the “crisis hypothesis,” which states that the economic well-being of the Russian peasantry was deteriorating as the nineteenth century came to a close. An investigation into the causes of the crop failure of 1891 and the quality of the Russian harvest after the crop failure and famine of 1891-92, however, clearly suggests that: (1) soil moisture was the critical determinant of harvest quality; (2) peasant methods were riot unambiguously “backward,” given the climate and soil conditions in much of the black earth district and the grainlands in general, and may even have been appropriate; and (3) Russian farmland was not becoming exhausted, particularly in the so-called hunger provinces of the central black earth district. Quite simply, the vicissitudes of weather determined the harvest in tsarist Russia.

The period 1917-21 in Russia found the fledgling Bolshevik government engaged in desperate military struggles with imperial Germany, with several White Russian armies assisted in varying degrees by foreign troops and supplies, with national movements for independence, and with a newly restored Poland. Yet despite an ever-present military threat to the very existence of the new government, many Bolshevik leaders remained constantly aware that theirs was a revolutionary regime, with the goal of achieving a radical trans? formation of the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions they had inherited. Consequently this same period witnessed, in addition to the crucial military conflicts, several experimental efforts to achieve thoroughgoing institutional change.

Higher education was one such target of reform, and this paper will describe succeeding attempts undertaken during 1917-21 to implement three radically different blueprints for reform of the higher educational system.

In this article, Sona Hoisington focuses on the evolution of the project for the Palace of Soviets and its metamorphoses during the four stages of the competition (1931-33) and after. Rather than interpreting the project as the repudiation of modernist architecture, as many scholars have done, Hoisington argues that the design evolved from the modern and functional to the eclectic and monumental. Drawing on archival materials, she demonstrates that this change came about gradually and in a contradictory fashion. Hoisington shows how the Palace of Soviets acquired mythic significance, becoming a symbol of Soviet might and determination to overtake America and a temple to the revolution and its deity, Vladimir Lenin. In conclusion, she argues that the evolution of the Palace of Soviets encapsulates the changing models in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and the other successor states lost much of their collective strategic significance for the international community. Russia's role as a new member of the nuclear club is potentially destabilizing but does not present the overriding nuclear threat once posed by the USSR. Although Russia is attempting to reestablish its traditional roles in Eurasia, the Balkans and eastern Europe, its political importance has generally decreased commensurate with the collapse of the Soviet military machine; Russia is important economically only insofar as it is a powerful magnet for western aid and investment. While this perception of gradual marginalization, apparently shared by western diplomats, academics and journalists, may be largely accurate, it is incomplete. It overlooks Russia's potential role as a source of natural resources.

In this essay Galina Yankovskaya explores the economic aspects of Soviet artistic life, which were often as important as political factors or censorship in determining the formal features and content of art production. Yankovskaya considers a complex of multisided trends: Russian artists' egalitarian imagination, the expectations of a new art audience, and the authorities' intentions. Exploring the confusing history of art institutions (mostly Vsekokhudozhnik, but also the Union of Artists and the Artistic Fund) within the everyday routines of the Soviet planned economy enables Yankovskaya to examine the clash of economic, ideological, and political motives in Stalinist culture and to look at how artists escaped from official ideology or exploited it for their own goals of appearing “busy.” Certain specific practices from this system of art production and distribution, such as the state's financial support as well as regulation of the art market, copyright law, and the mass production of handmade copies, survived into the post-Stalinist period.

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic “empire of knowledge.” It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.

The main argument presented in this essay is that the politics of Ataka, the most successful and influential populist party in Bulgaria, should be construed as a form of left-wing radicalism. Originally a nationalist formation, over the last decade Ataka has evolved into a broader social movement that blames free markets, neoliberalism, and US led neocolonialism for the country's misfortunes. Today its activists routinely assault liberal democracy as a political system unable to cope with the evils of capitalism, and seek to marginalize political actors and social constituencies identified as pro-western.

Preliminary results from the 1979 Soviet census reveal that non-Slavic minorities make up over a quarter of the populace. Ethnic diversity has been and will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, an important consideration in Soviet policy making. Analysis of nationality trends is thus a key aspect of Western study of Soviet domestic politics. Assessment of Soviet labor force prospects, for example, depends in part on the occupational skills, Russian fluency, and geographical mobility of the Soviets of Muslim heritage in the fast-growing southern tier of the USSR. Soviet military capabilities will be increasingly affected by a rising proportion of Muslims of draft age. In addition, long-term population projections hinge on an evaluation of how rapidly these same groups will exhibit the low fertility associated with demographic modernization.

In March 1922 (in the very heat of the campaign to confiscate Church valuables), L.D. Trotskii sent a memorandum to the Politburo, arguing that the “proletarian revolution had finally reached the Church.” Indeed it had: over the next few years the Russian Orthodox Church would undergo tremendous convulsions and intense internal conflict. In May 1922, amidst a violent confrontation with the bolshevik state over the seizure of Church valuables, a small group of radical priests took control of the Church and engineered a temporary but controversial withdrawal of Patriarch Tikhon from active leadership. Their aim was not only to end the conflict with Soviet authorities (by recognizing its legitimacy and endorsing its confiscation of church valuables), but also to implement fundamental reforms in Russian Orthodoxy.

The return of the first wave émigrés' cultural legacy at a critical juncture of postcommunist transformation in 1990s Russia presents a case study of a dialogue between the diaspora and the homeland. The belated encounter of shared national traditions reveals a history of competing cultural monopolies, incongruous resemblances, and matching nostalgias. Contemporary diaspora and postcolonial studies in the west have addressed such key issues as diaspora's self-definition in relation to the homeland, its strategies of resistance and accommodation, and transnational networks. The first part of the article presents a brief survey of Russia Abroad, its internal discourse concerning its legacy and the dream of return after losif Stalin's death. The second part considers the emerging field of diaspora studies in Russia, focusing on the dynamics of its reception, appropriation, and domestication. The range of partisan responses to the émigré legacy is considered a touchstone for the current debates concerning Russian national and cultural identity.

Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union developed sophisticated and diversified criminological research. Well-trained lawyers, doctors, and social scientists obtained access to criminal statistics, research facilities, and funding and were unhampered by ideological limitations. The varieties of descriptive, statistical, and experimental research on crime conducted in criminological institutes by government agencies and independent researchers throughout the Soviet Union did much to advance criminologists’ understanding of the personality of the offender and the relationship between crime and social change.

Very close ties exist between Soviet belles-lettres and the official “line” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The organizations of Soviet writers are important connecting links between individual authors and Party authorities; before a literary work is submitted for final approval to the Glavlit, the official Government censorship, it is frequently discussed by the relevant committee of the Union of Soviet Writers.

The propaganda value attached to literature by the Soviet leaders was once eloquently expressed by Karl Radek, who said that although the pen cannot replace the rifle, it can mobilize and multiply these rifles. Perhaps some such sentiment, rather than aesthetic insight, was behind the statement generally attributed to Stalin, in which a writer is called “an engineer of the human soul.”

According to scholars of resource dependency, foreign funding can weaken rather than strengthen civil society abroad, ultimately impeding its effectiveness. Yet the spate of recent “democratic revolutions” in semiauthoritarian, postcommunist states suggests that pumping foreign money into the nongovernmental sphere can be an effective strategy. In this paper Brian Grodsky argues that a critical factor in assessing the likelihood that a given organizational movement will succumb to the ills of resource dependency is the type of politicization within that movement. Those organizations composed of members primarily motivated by ideology are logically less likely to succumb to resource dependency than those organizations dominated by political aspirants intent on converting democratization into their own political power. Two case studies, communist-era Poland and contemporary Uzbekistan, provide support for this theory.

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz's analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism's norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

A new approach to the study of national character is being developed out of principles and research methods drawn from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This approach differs from its predecessors in that it seeks the key to an understanding of cultural and historical processes in the influences of early childhood upbringing upon the formation of adult personality. The work of Geoffrey Gorer illustrates, although in an extreme form, the principal lines of thought of this school. Thus, he has tried to explain some of the main features of American culture and history in terms of the child's rejection of the father. From severe toilet training he derives major clues to Japanese culture and history.