Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin has long been regarded as both a leader and archetype of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism. It is not clear, however, what “liberal” and “liberalism” mean with reference to nineteenth-century Russia. Russian liberals of the early twentieth century, seeking to create a tradition for their movement, put the most diverse figures from the past in the liberal pantheon. Soviet historians, with somewhat more justice but the same kind of zeal, have sharply demarcated mid-century radicals, with, whom they sympathize, from the liberals. American historians of Russia tend to characterize as “liberal” almost anyone who tried to achieve social and political improvements by nonrevolutionary means. And almost all historians have resorted to the tautology whereby “liberalism” denotes the activities and doctrines of those public figures whom we know to be “liberals.”

This essay provides a critical decolonial intervention into the prevalent state of racial exceptionalism in mainstream sociological research on contemporary Russia. Following critical race theory's understanding of race as relationally constituted and rooted in discourses of Europeanness, modernity, and civilization, the essay shows that race is highly prevalent but unacknowledged in sociological studies of Russia. It is argued that dismissing race as analytically irrelevant in Russia seriously limits the sociological ability to explain social inequalities, engage with current global challenges and inadvertently gives racism new legitimacy. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial critiques of sociology as a form of knowledge production, the essay points towards some ways of decolonizing sociological research concerning the inequalities associated with race and ethnicity in Russia and overcoming racial exceptionalism.

An acutely significant episode in the history of Soviet Russia, rendered no less important by the perspective of recent events, is the development of the organizational machinery of the Communist Party in the years immediately following the civil war. It was this period which witnessed the true realization of Lenin's prerevolutionary ideal of the monolithic party, despite the paradox that the model of conspiratorial discipline was designed for the accomplishment of the revolution, not the organization of the post-revolutionary society.

The USSR has entered a new, qualitatively higher stage in constructing a Communist society—“mature” or “developed” socialism. Theorists envision progressively higher developments to occur in this stage and commonly regard the scientific technological revolution as one of its defining traits. Reflecting objective changes that have occurred in society’s production forces, the scientific-technological revolution poses an unprecedented challenge to political leaders: they must now “integrate complexity and manage change through advances in organization and technology.“ This challenge cannot be successfully met without the support and active participation of specialists in administrative policy. While theorists and politicians alike remain convinced that only socialism provides the optimal framework for organizing societal development, they begrudgingly acknowledge that the reputed advantages of the Socialist economy—national planning, public property, class solidarity—do not manifest themselves automatically, but must be brought to life through the creative application of scientific knowledge and organizational skill.

Throughout the nineteenth century a major international issue facing the Great Powers of Europe was the volatile “Eastern Question.” As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, the question of the future disposition of its extensive territories (some 238,000 square miles in Europe alone in 1800) provoked an intense and prolonged rivalry among those European states with vested political and economic interests in the Near East. With its military power in decline and its frontiers menaced by powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the nineteenth century despite its imposing imperial edifice.

Drawing on the experience of Russian-speaking queer migrants in Berlin, the article furthers our understanding of queer migration by analyzing the motivations and integration strategies of LGBQ migrants, as well as their attempts to maintain and perform both their sexual and national identities in the post-migration context. The risk that they could be doubly marginalized—as ethnic minorities within the host society and sexual minorities in the established diasporic community—led to the establishment of Quarteera, a forum for Russian-speaking queers to perform and maintain both their sexual and ethno-cultural identities and give and receive social and psychological support, as well as a channel for expressing feelings of solidarity towards other Russian-speaking queers in the post-Soviet homeland. A further contribution of the article is thus highlighting the benefit of “queer diaspora” as a heuristic device to think about identity, belonging, and solidarity among sexual minorities in the context of dispersal and transnational networks.

This paper critically examines the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that despite the Soviet legacy of rather strong institutionalization and discursive presentation of nationality, the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of ethnic distinctiveness and virtually abandoned the use of ethnic categories in official discourse. While several smaller minorities retained some institutional backing and discursive presence, the once very large group of ethnic Russians ceased to be publicly presented and popularly perceived as clearly distinct from the bulk of Ukrainians. At the same time, Ukrainian citizens differ greatly in their ethnocultural practices and ethnolinguistic identifications, hence Ukraine certainly remains ethnoculturally diverse, and this seems to be a more appropriate designation than “multiethnic.”

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, almost three decades after consensual sodomy was declared a crime in the USSR, voices began to speak out in favor of its decriminalization. This article traces the history of the ensuing debate on this issue, conducted between Soviet criminologists and legal academics in the period from 1965–75. Through a close reading of the related texts, I explore the evolution of the different positions put forward. These fall into two camps: on the one hand, legal scholars who, together with their graduate students, made the case for decriminalization, and on the other, criminologists affiliated with the Interior Ministry, who opposed their views. The article provides the first detailed historical account of this extraordinary discussion and contributes to expanding our scant knowledge on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet Union.

Perhaps the most mysterious and elusive figure in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is Afranius, a man who has been in Judea for fifteen years working in the Roman imperial service as chief of the procurator of Judea's secret police. He is present in all four Judean chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26) as one of the myriad connecting links, though we really do not know who he is for certain until near the end of the third of these chapters, “How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth.” We first meet him in chapter 2 (which is related by Woland and entitled “Pontius Pilate”) simply as “some man” (kakoi-to chelovek), face half-covered by a hood, in a darkened room in the palace of Herod the Great, having a brief whispered conversation with Pilate, who has just finished his fateful talk with Caiaphas (E, p. 39; R, pp. 50-51). Fourteen chapters later, in the chapter dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyi and entitled “The Execution” (chapter 16), we meet him for the second time, now bringing up the rear of the convoy escorting the prisoners to Golgotha and identified only as “that same hooded man with whom Pilate had briefly conferred in a darkened room of the palace” (E, p. 170; R, p. 218). “The hooded man” attends the entire execution sitting in calm immobility on a three-legged stool, “occasionally out of boredom poking the sand with a stick” (E, p. 172; R, p. 220). When the Tribune of the Cohort arrives, presumably bearing Pilate's orders to terminate the execution, he (the Tribune) speaks first to Krysoboi (Muribellum), who goes to pass on the orders to the executioners, and then to “the man on the three-legged stool,” according to whose gestures the executioners arouse Yeshua from his stupor, offer him a drink which he avidly accepts, and then kill him by piercing him “gently” (tikhon'ko) through his heart with a spear.

Between 1987 and 1990, simultaneous with "glasnost' and perestroika" and the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin's crimes, execution sites were discovered, particularly in the European regions of the former USSR. One such discovery at Kuropaty (formerly Brod) about twelve kilometers north of Minsk, elicited widespread publicity, and was a serious embarrassment to the communist authorities.

In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:

Like other multinational states in Europe, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire found itself confronted, indeed threatened, by the growing strength of non-Russian national movements. Unlike other contemporary national “awakenings,” however, the Polish question in the Russian Empire had roots extending beyond the eighteenth century and posed, at least in the minds of Russian administrators, a serious and persistent threat to Russian national interests in the empire’s vulnerable western borderlands. From the 1830s an anti-Polish policy had been pursued in these areas, but only after the 1863 uprising did the Russian imperial state dedicate itself to a policy of radical elimination of Polish influence in the so-called “western provinces,” a fusion (sliianie) of these territories with the Russian interior in terms of administration, economy, culture and nationality.

This article explores how culture in the USSR became “Soviet.” Malte Rolf describes how different fields of communication and cultural production generated criteria that could be used to attach the label “Soviet” to all features of culture. Sovietizing culture was a work in progress, and various institutions, agencies, and experts actively participated in defining an adequate “Soviet style.” Focusing on this interplay of agencies and taking mass festivals as an example, Rolf portrays the dynamics of a growing selfreferentiality within Soviet culture in the 1930s in such cultural spheres as architecture, city planning, and mass celebrations. Under Stalinism, canonized “Soviet” standards also set the agenda for everyday communications. By reproducing an officially privileged agenda, participants in these daily communications encouraged a cultural inner Sovietization during the prewar decade. This article explores how and why the cultural canon of a closed system of “Soviet” references made its way so smoothly into die microstructures of society.

The demographic development of the serf population in imperial Russia, particularly its rate of natural growth during the thirty years preceding the emancipation in 1861, has been the subject of considerable controversy. On the basis of data from the tax censuses (revizii), abolitionists sontended that the serf population was dying out, implying that the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Many Soviet historians and demographers have subsequently advanced this view, seeing a demographic crisis as one dimension of the collapse of the feudal serf system. A Western scholar, Professor Daniel Field, has recently lent his support to this interpretation. But was serfdom so socially oppressive or economically stifling as to affect natural population growth adversely? Other contemporary statisticians and later historians—either less opposed to serfdom or more skeptical about the accuracy of population data—have avoided the issue.

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

Odessa has played a significant role in Russian and Yiddish folklore and popular culture. Although the city has changed with the times, the Odessa variant of the Russian language and the Russian and Yiddish songs created in and about Odessa are the lasting product of a unique brand of multiculturalism. The Russian of Odessa shows die influence of Yiddish and Ukrainian in grammar, lexicon, and phraseology, and Odessa folk humor reflects Jewish sensibilities. Odessa Yiddish is permeated with Russianisms. The repertoire of Russian and Yiddish songs about Odessa reveals the mixed character of die respective languages. The songs portray a unique city: one tfiat is more impressive than Vienna or Paris; one that embodies progress and the carefree life but is also dangerous. These songs deal with various aspects of the Jewish experience but also with the life of the underworld, employing the stylistic conventions of the so-called blatnaia pesnia.