Between 1956–68 economic expertise became Poland's key export product in the decolonizing world. India, a broker of social science in the Cold War, became a geopolitical gateway for Polish economists’ spread of developmental thinking that revived heterodox Marxism and peasant studies. In this article, Małgorzata Mazurek investigates epistemic and intellectual effects of Polish – Indian encounters and how they evolved separately from Soviet Third World politics. Mazurek argues that during de-Stalinization and decolonization, failures and obstacles to planning and land reforms came to be seen as a common ground between eastern Europe and South Asia. This shared perception also revived the historical legacy of central and east European social science, which was internationalized in new ways both because, and in spite, of the Cold War.

In a society with virtually all phases of the economy subject to planning an interest in regional economic planning almost inevitably arises. Such an interest has been evident in the USSR since the early 1920s, although not always to the same degree. Out of this interest evolved the notion of the economic complex, broadly conceived as a regional grouping of integrated economic activities. Inasmuch as these complexes were frequently thought of as geographic entities, the expression “territorial-production complex” (territorial'no-proizvodstvennyi kompleks), as well as some essentially synonymous terms, came into use. Interpretations vary somewhat, but, to judge from the frequency of reference to the concept in the professional journals of the geographers, economists, and planners, the idea seems to be a basic one among those concerned with regional planning.

The Army Specialized Training Program brought to the fore numerous problems connected with Russian instruction which, on the basis of the new experience gained, may now be profitably discussed, with some thought of formulating a standard or at least generally applicable procedure. Over the last fourteen years, I have taught beginner's Russian to some twenty-five classes, ranging from the conventional three hours per week schedule to intensive courses with one, two, or three class hours daily for periods of six to twelve weeks and, finally, to the nine months’ Army program with fifteen contact-hours per week. At first glance this might seem like a respectable body of practice on which to generalize. But while the subsequent professional performances of many of our students during this period have been encouraging, I do not wish the present article to be regarded as unduly dogmatic. Looking backward, I think we should have been more ingenious in innovation, and certainly more productive of useful textbooks and other teaching aids. But here, until very recently, lack of time, money, equipment, publisher's interest, and competent assistance may serve in some sense as a valid excuse for defects in performance.

The national heroes of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that emerged in literary culture during the nineteenth century were warrior heroes. In the twentieth century, a series of interpretations and adaptations by leading authors disarmed and desacralized Kalevipoeg, Bearslayer (Lāčplēsis), and King Mindaugas, tempering or rejecting their violent actions and recasting these central allegories of national myth into a nonviolent mold. These heroes are part of the cultural context in which the nonviolent Baltic “Singing Revolution” emerged; they offer an intriguing example of evolving (or devolving) aggressive drives and the civilizing process in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national cultures.

Historians have had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the debacle wrought by Operation Barbarossa. How could the Red Army, a large and heavily equipped force, be so thoroughly decimated by the Wehrmacht, especially when evidence of the impending attack was plentiful? Most commonly, explanations have focused on the unexpectedly rapid success of the Blitzkrieg in western Europe, the impact of the Great Purges on the Soviet officer corps, the problems of reequipping the Red Army with modern weaponry and protecting newly expanded borders, the lack of adequate training for the rapidly growing Soviet armed forces, the confusing nature of available intelligence, and, most of all, the nearly fatal self-delusion of Iosif Stalin, which prevented the implementation of proper defensive measures. Although Stalin certainly realized that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was no more than a temporary truce and that a German attack was ultimately inevitable, he deluded himself that Adolf Hitler could be appeased until Soviet forces had grown strong enough to meet the Nazi assault. Soviet shipments of petroleum products, various raw materials, and foodstuffs were critically important to the German war machine and, thus, the key element in Stalin's strategy of appeasing Hitler.

In 1889 the head of the Railway Department of the Russian Ministry of Finance published a brochure entitled Concerning Nationalism: National Economy and Friedrich List, which is a brief exposition of List's book on The National System of Political Economy. The same man, who had arrived at his position the hard way, had written on economic subjects before. In 1883 he had published a technical volume on the structure of railway tariffs, in which he liberally included his comments on current economic theory and a special recommendation for a Russian type of socialism sponsored by the Orthodox Church.

All economic systems have ways in which they determine how much their total trade with the world will be, what commodities will make up that total, and the destinations and sources of those commodities (the geographic composition of exports and imports). In Western economies, which rely heavily on markets, the values of these variables summarize the outcome of a myriad of private decisions, with some influence of governments primarily through tariffs and quotas. In Eastern economies, which rely heavily on central planning, the government itself through its planners directly determines the value of those same variables.

The concept of Most-Favored Nation (MFN) treatment evolved as a mechanism by which governments in market economies could agree mutually to limit interference in private decisions on trade, with the expected consequence being an increase in trade and welfare. When two market economy governments agree to accord MFN treatment to each other's commodities, it means (in its simplest form) that tariffs applied in each country to commodities imported from the other country shall be no higher than the lowest tariffs charged on imports of those commodities from any destination.

The 1 December 1934 murder of Soviet Communist Party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov has long been considered a pivotal event in Soviet history, not least of all because of the attention it received in the USSR. But although there is much controversy over Stalin’s role in the assassination, and on the connection between Kirov’s death and the Soviet terror of the 1930s, most observers concur that once Kirov was dead, the government attempted to orchestrate public opinion of his death as a calamity with broad implications. For days after the slaying, the Soviet leadership devoted hours of radio time and pages of newsprint to mourning the loss of the 48-year-old Politburo member, Central Committee secretary, and Leningrad regional and city party leader and to denouncing those allegedly behind the murder. In turn, local party functionaries organized meetings of workers, peasants, students, and housewives to collectively mourn “Mironych” and to reflect upon his life and work, while also exhorting citizens to make donations of cash or labor in his memory. The authorities lauded Kirov as the “truest son and outstanding leader” (deiatel’) of the party; headlines proclaimed “Kirov can never be torn from our hearts” and “Until the end of our days we will remember your life and struggle, Comrade Kirov!“

Organized by a Moscow learned society, the Polytechnical Exposition of 1872 helped mobilize resources for popularizing science that connected tsarist officialdom, the Moscow municipal government and business community, university scientists, and other private associations. Although the relationship between the autocratic government and society is often portrayed in terms of conflict, partnership was more typically the rule, especially in the effort to build a native science infrastructure. The grand exhibitions of science and industry of the nineteenth century were sites of modernity that displayed visions of progress, created a public culture, and fashioned national identity. Moscow's Polytechnical Exposition juxtaposed the modern and the foreign with the traditional and the Russian in order to demonstrate that Russia could have modern science and technology without abandoning its traditional culture. Paradoxically, to assert its place in European civilization in an age of nationalism and imperialism, Russia had to assert its Russianness—its cultural distinctiveness, patriotism, and imperial pride. With its emphasis on change and progress, as well as on traditional Russian culture, the exposition fostered a Russian public aware of its place in a changing world, of its place in history, of its identity as a nation.

In the north Caucasus, collective dance has long been an expression of communal identity and a forum for political dissent. In this article Sufian Zhemukhov and Charles King examine the emergence and transformation of a communal dance form known as adyge jegu (roughly, “Circassian festival“) in the Russian republics of Adygeia, Karachaevo-Cherkesia, and Kabardino-Balkaria. They chart the history of the adyge jegu after 2005, elucidate debates over the meaning of authenticity in contemporary Circassian nationalism, and provide a detailed archaeology of the specific decisions that enabled this cultural artifact to get constructed in one way but not another. While attention typically focuses on elite-driven narratives of border security and terrorism, the adyge jegu highlights grassroots debates over the meaning of right behavior, the boundaries of communal identity, and alternatives to Russianness in either its russkii or rossiiskii varieties.

Students of the Soviet political system have frequently noted the high turnover rates and the short terms of office of middle and lower ranking Soviet party and governmental officials. Soviet leaders have striven to combat the formation of informal structures within the party and governmental bureaucracies which, if allowed to go unchecked, could erode the control of the central political leadership.

“Lyric dialogism” is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, “Slovo v romane” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently “monologic,” as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel. He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century. On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry.

This article examines variegated depictions of Europe and the west produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev, an Old Bolshevik cultural official, writer, and diplomat. Arosev traveled and worked in many parts of Europe in the prewar emigration, in the 1920s and early 1930s as Soviet ambassador to Prague and other European capitals, and during the years of the Popular Front as head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The discussion refracts a much asked question—what new sources say about attitudes toward the Soviet system—through a new prism, depictions of the outside world. Although Arosev's personal diary and unpublished reports on cultural diplomacy with European fellow-travelers suggest an often startling degree of admiration and affinity for the west, higher levels of hostility are expressed in his literary output, mass-produced pamphlets, and especially his letters to Iosif Stalin. Interpreting these disjunctures, David-Fox argues that Arosev took advantage of tensions within Soviet ideology to craft depictions of Europe for different audiences. Until his execution in 1938, it was not impossible for Arosev to be both a Stalinist and a westernizer, but the combination was perilous, painful, and difficult to sustain.

What does a postcommunist regime do with its bureaucratic inheritance? Without a replacement bureaucracy at hand, the political leadership in Russia had no choice but to govern through state employees whose values and patterns of behavior were instilled in the Soviet era. Given this reality, one might have expected Russian reformers—and their overseas supporters— to have developed an aggressive and comprehensive policy on retraining officials of state. But instead of a coordinated effort to educate new and existing personnel in a spirit of public, rather than state, service, one finds only a gradual and haphazard reform of bureaucratic training. In this article, Eugene Huskey argues that the driving force behind such training has been the market in higher and continuing education and not a conscious and consistent policy emanating from the presidency or other central institutions of state. The major player in that market is the system of state service academies, which inherited many of their faculty and facilities from the old Higher Party Schools of the communist era. But the market, taken together with the fragmentation of state power, has consistently undermined attempts by the academies to serve as the sole purveyors of training to the bureaucracy. What is as yet unclear is whether the marketization of bureaucratic education and re-education, which discourages the emergence of a coherent national approach to remaking the bureaucracy, is facilitating or impeding the modernization and liberalization of Russian officialdom.

Ukrainian peasant women of the postemancipation Russian Empire, like their Russian counterparts, faced an oppressive patriarchal system in both family and village. Over the ages peasants strictly delineated tasks and functions according to gender and age in order to meet the demands of a predominantly agricultural economy. The precariousness of subsistence agriculture and the peasantry's burdensome obligations to family, community, and state reinforced inflexible and oppressive power relations in the village. Ukrainian peasants feared that any departure from the subordination of woman to man, child to parent, young to old, and weak to strong would threaten the existence of their society and culture.

Since the sixth century, the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodoxy has been Constantinople's Hagia Sophia Cathedral and, since the eleventh century, that of Russian Orthodoxy in two cathedrals dedicated to that same Holy Wisdom. Yet few Orthodox believers would recognize any icon of Sophia.

Vladimir Solov'ev, in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898), describes three visions of Sophia—each a somewhat indistinct image of feminine beauty, suffused in a “golden azure” light. Possibly, Solov′ev's perception of Sophia originated in an icon he saw as a child (his first vision having occurred when he was nine); the Orthodox church, however, found his almost fanatical obsession with the divine femininity of Sophia to be highly objectionable. In particular, the Sophiology based on Solov′ev's writings, and advanced after his death first by Pavel Florenskii and then by Sergei Bulgakov, was attacked by the church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bulgakov's idea of Sophia was seen by the church as “involving a fourth feminine hypostasis in the Holy Trinity” who acted as a “gnostic intermediary between God and the world”; it was condemned as heretical. The church's unyielding position in this controversy was (and is) that only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true Sophia—the Divine Wisdom of God—in accordance with 1 Cor. 1:23-31: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”

The Bolsheviks created a new system for the production and distribution of the printed word to replace the prerevolutionary print media. This innovation was in many respects the most remarkable of the early revolutionary years, since it led to the radical dichotomy between public and private codes of behavior that has plagued Soviet society ever since.

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.