In this article, Sheila Fitzpatrick investigates the phenomenon of Soviet conmanship in the Stalin period through the medium of conman stories, both real (as reported in newspapers and archives) and fictional. While attention is paid to the distinctive characteristics of conman stories as a discursive genre, die main emphasis is on the social. The article explores the sources and processes of the Soviet confidence trick, as well as showing how conmen and their exploits illuminate social, bureaucratic, and cultural practices. In the comparison of prewar and postwar periods, the “Jewishing” of the conman in postwar representation is discussed and related to the broader phenomenon of officially encouraged anti-Semitism in the late Stalin period.

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.

Some years ago, Robert V. Daniels, in his analysis of the Communist theory of state, concluded that, according to Marxist theory, the oppressive function of the state is a secondary consideration and only explains the origin of the state, but not its continued existence; that although the state originates only in class struggle, in order to ensure its continued existence, the state creates order, modifies the class struggle, and serves the common interests of society; that when the class struggle is terminated by the proletarian revolution, the state as such does not wither away, but only its oppressive functions so wither.

The origins of modern Moscow can be traced to the early nineteenth century, when smokestacks began to supplement church cupolas on the city's skyline and the forsaken palaces of boyars were being converted into factories or homes of wealthy merchants. Pushkin observed this process with a mixture of romantic nostalgia and patriotic optimism as early as 1834. The old Orthodox and national shrine of Russia was starting its evolution as a major industrial center of the Empire. Along with this, however, came a later chapter of Russian religious history. Moscow during this same period also became a center of the Old Believers; Raskolniki, scattered for over a century on the frontiers of Russia, began to flock back to the ancient capital.

Having crushed the Solidarity movement’s unprecedented attempt to pluralize postwar Polish society, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) ordered a special commission of the party’s Central Committee to study the causes of the political crises that have repeatedly convulsed Poland during forty years of Communist rule and have resulted in the downfall of successive first secretaries and their principal associates. After several months of labor, the commission declared that one of the main causes was that the authorities ignored popular opinion and discouraged local initiatives for independent action and reforms. To show that it had learned its lesson, the PZPR adopted “socialist pluralism” as one of the principal points of its program for “normalization” and “renewal” soon after martial law was lifted in 1982.

This article explores narratives surrounding child soldiers in Poland, with a particular focus on the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. My discussion examines a variety of contexts in which this figure appears, such as urban spaces, press debates, popular literature, and educational games, and unpacks the taboos associated with cultural constructions of childhood. The article points to the complex interaction between the enduring narratives of resistance and the struggle for independence which characterize Poland and the international humanitarian discourse on the use of children in war which goes beyond the local context. More generally, I show that the representations of Warsaw's young insurgents speak less of the children and their rights and more of contemporary notions of Polish national identity, the nation's wished-for or projected development, and collective hopes and fears in the wake of its accession to the European Union.

This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.

In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.

It has long been accepted by historians that the conjuncture of grain crises of 1927-1929 marked a turning point during which the Soviet Union descended into the tumult of Stalin’s “revolution from above.“ There is, however, no agreement as to what caused this outcome. Was the country pushed down this road as a deliberate act of policy by Stalin to enhance his dictatorial power? Did bolshevik ideology, which favored rapid industrialization and bureaucratic centralized state control, predetermine the end result? Did the sequence of events in this period generate an uncontrollable dynamic of crises and conflict between strengthening state power and societal, particularly peasant, resistance? To reach a more definitive answer to these fundamental questions I have undertaken a case study of a pivotal policy development of this period, one which bridged the crucial transition from NEP to “dekulakization”: the so-called “Ural-Siberian method” or “social influence” method of grain collection.

When the Communist Party took power in Rumania in 1944, it inherited a poor, agrarian society. In 1950, before the advent of planning, three-fourths of Rumania's labor force was still in agriculture; only 12 percent of the labor force was in the industrial sector. Per capita income for the country as a whole was the equivalent of thirty dollars and in agriculture it was close to twenty dollars. The new regime did not have to search very far for a general development model. It adopted the Soviet strategy of rapid economic growth through the priority development of heavy industry. Women have played a key role in this process; indeed, it may be argued that they form the linchpin of Rumanian growth strategy.

In 1928-29 the drive for rapid industrialization exacerbated economic hardships in the Soviet Union and forced the adoption of food rationing in the major cities.1 Social discontent and social tensions grew more acute. Workers pressed for a tougher line against the educated and privileged classes, and the Stalin leadership responded by promoting a "proletarianization" of the party, government, and educational institutions. In this way the leadership hoped to win working-class support for the revolutionary path on which it was preparing to embark. But the economic hardships provoked by the industrialization drive caused the Stalin leadership to doubt whether it could indeed rely on uniform support. It feared that certain strata of the proletariat would resist the accelerated drive for industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

In the last decade, state building and the problems of establishing state authority in the provinces in 1917 have begun to attract historians’ attention. Several works by Russian authors treat state building under the Provisional Government, with emphasis upon organizational activities “at the center.” Daniel T. Orlovsky and Howard J. White (with greater analytical rigor than their Russian counterparts) have studied the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the provinces. But none of these works has offered a sustained discussion of the revolution in a single city or province. Local studies have concentrated on popular institutions (for example, unions, Red Guards, and the Soviets) and the process of social polarization but have paid litde attention to the state. My aim is to bridge the gap between institutional studies and local studies by looking at local government and the contested nature of state authority in Smolensk from March to June 1917, tracing especially the conflict between class-based politics and state interests.

According to the evidence found in historical records, the first influences of the Byzantine Christian mission had reached the Magyars prior to the conquest of present Hungary while they were still on the shores of the Black Sea. As I have proved in detail in an earlier treatise, we must surmise that, when they took possession of their present land, the Magyar people had brought with them a knowledge of Christianity.

However, the Byzantine mission was not the sole factor in preparing the Magyars for their acceptance of the new faith. This acceptance was influenced also by the earlier Christian traditions of the new land which ultimately became their country. From Roman times (ancient Christian relics of which are being excavated in increasing numbers) to the appearance of the Magyars, Christianity had existed without interruption in Hungarian territory.

Since 1989, the question of public values has been one of the most critical and the most controversial in the study of postcommunist politics. While there seems to be a consensus that people should accept democratic and market-based norms, there is little agreement on how much they actually do so—or on how much they need to, if markets and democracy are to survive.

One of the critically important trends in the government and politics of the East European Communist states in recent years has been the quite steady and rapid development in Yugoslavia of some striking forms of pluralization and institutionalization of power, and of some concomitant fairly well enforced legal restrictions on power. The development is often called by the Yugoslavs their movement toward “constitutionalism and legality.” However, though Titoism has been much studied, this particular movement, one of the most far-reaching and fundamental of all of the Titoist innovations, has received little explicit examination in Western scholarship, even in such a colorful manifestation as the exercise by the new constitutional courts of the power of judicial review over major legislation approved by the party. This article deals with the nature and dynamics of the movement and with some implications it may have.

Among the approaches one might adopt in studying church-state interaction is one that endeavors to treat both church and state as active subjects and which tries to be sensitive to factional divisions within both. This approach makes it clear that just as a regime may have a religious policy, the churches may also have policies toward the regime, and that the resulting relationship reflects the interplay of both policies. If there are factions in both state and church, the policies of both will be the subject and the product of continuing debate and struggle among the factions.

Sensitivity to factionalism is not a black-and-white issue but a matter of degree. Nevertheless, Western writings on church-state relations under communism may be grouped into four general categories. In the first category are works treating both church and state as unified (nonfactionalized) entities—either explicitly (by denying factionalism) or implicitly (by ignoring it as analytically unimportant).

Over twenty years ago Merle Fainsod warned against underestimating the “fluid play of bureaucratic politics” in the Stalinist political system. However, scholars have generally regarded the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) of the VKP(b) as immune to this process during Stalin’s reign as general secretary. They have assumed either that Stalin did not permit conflict between the directors of the various bureaucratic divisions in the Secretariat or that such conflict could simply not develop in the leading organ of the party’s apparat.

In the early 1990s social scientists began to refer to migrants who retained familial and economic ties with their country of origin as transnational. The term eventually gained currency among historians who had found multiple examples of such ties in earlier decades and centuries. Although migrants traveling among former Soviet republics came to be understood as transnational, Soviet-era migrants never have been so characterized. We contend that this is due to a double blindness: that of migration scholars to the Soviet Union as a “state of nations,” and that of historians of the Soviet period to migration as a complicating element in the construction of nationality. By emphasizing the transnational dimension of “internal” Soviet migration, we seek to sharpen awareness of how nationality worked in the Soviet context, particularly in its last decades. We thus posit the maintenance of economic, familial and other affective ties across Soviet national boundaries as the Soviet version of transnationalism—transnationalism in one country. We also suggest the ways that despite its well-deserved reputation for limiting international migration and otherwise restricting its citizenry, the Soviet state facilitated transnationalism within its borders.

Supported by new archival material, this article delves deeply into one landmark criminal case to explore key aspects of the social, economic, and cultural history of illegal production and markets in the Soviet 1950s–60s. The goal of the article (and the larger project from which it draws) is to use archival research to shed light on major themes in Soviet history. It touches on three important and promising fields: everyday life under late Soviet socialism; the vibrant history of crime and law in this period; and the history of entrepreneurial activities within the hyper-centralized state-planned economy, focusing on the dynamics of the shadow economy. The so-called Kyrgyz Affair, a famous and expansive shadow economy operation centered in clothing factories in Frunze (Bishkek), Kyrgyz Republic, is at the center of the article. I argue that the scope, sophistication, ambition, and success of this and similar operations helps us understand a significant reason why Nikita Khrushchev decided to introduce the death penalty for aggravated cases of theft of state property and bribery in 1961–62. Associated with and fully permeating the shadow economy, one sees many varieties of practices, attitudes, informal institutions and agreements, and relationships.