1917. A revolution explodes, the most violent in history. Within a few weeks a society rids itself of all its leaders: the monarch and his lawyers, the police and the priests, the landowners and civil servants, the officers and employers. There is no citizen who does not feel free—free to make his own choices and decide his own future. Before long everyone has a plan in his pocket for remaking the country. As the bards of the revolution foretold, a new era in the history of man is beginning.

The essay considers a twofold question: Why, until recently, has our field remained so reluctant to engage with racial epistemology, and what higher form of understanding does “race” offer to students of Eurasia? The answer to the first part of the question is located in the divergence between the “imperial” and “modernity” paradigms in Eurasian studies. With regard to the second part of the question, the essay suggests viewing “race” as one of the languages of self-reflection and modernization in the imperial space. It concludes that the discovery of “race” becomes tantamount to the rediscovery of Eurasia as an imperial space—irregularly hierarchical and heterogeneous, characterized by entangled exceptionalism and a constant renegotiation of differences, as well as the realignment of principles of belonging, subjectivities, and networks of solidarity.

In this article, I analyze the correspondence between state authorities and citizens in the USSR, the GDR, and Romania. As the consumerist turn spread across the eastern bloc, an important focus of the populations' appeals to the authorities concerned the appropriate levels and conditions of consumption. Their letters display growing consumer aspirations, and from the mid-1960s onward a significant number of these petitions expressed the desire to buy a car. However, when state authorities failed to deliver enough cars, they also shaped a new attitude toward consumption. On the one hand, the population asked for automobiles as favors. On the other, a new discourse of entitlement and even “consumer rights” surfaced. Citizens started to expect a certain lifestyle; moreover, they even believed themselves to be entitled to it. As a consequence, their new sense of entitlement diluted the culture of favors and privilege, thereby contributing to the crisis of legitimacy in late socialism.

This article explores some of the principal themes in the intellectual history of early Soviet state violence. I argue that political religions theory, as applied principally to understanding fascism, is especially useful for understanding Leninism and Bolshevik justifications of violence during the civil war. In addition to its principal focus on the relationship between violence and the Bolshevik conception of the sacred, the article examines the significance of Bolshevik punitive discourse more generally and the alternative currents in the approaches to violence and repression. In comparing the approaches of the Chekas and the Soviet Justice Commissariat to repression, it becomes apparent that distinctly more reformatory and more repressive strands of thought coexisted in the early Soviet state. Yet these distinctions were fluid, and the overtly medicalized nature of Bolshevik punitive discourse ensured a certain harmonization of these strands.

In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientific Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants’ rather heterodox conceptions of the afterlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I find that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the afterlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state’s problematic dependency on atheism. The regime’s legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could often prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.

This article explores democracy development efforts in the former Soviet Union as a cultural encounter between the producers and consumers of development assistance. Drawing on literature in both anthropology and development studies, Sean R. Roberts suggests that the divergent worldviews of these different actors in the development process problematizes their interaction, often leading to unintended results. Highlighting a case study of U.S. assistance to Kazakhstan's 2004 parliamentary elections, Roberts also suggests that, although democracy assistance does foster change, this change is both gradual and unpredictable. More generally, Roberts argues that the challenges of democracy development are less related to technical issues than to cultural factors. Furthermore, democracy development efforts in the long term are likely to produce a contested arena in which to negotiate the meaning of “democracy” or acceptable “good governance” in the context of globalization and today's increasingly multipolar geopolitics.

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

The Soviet Paradox of high mechanization and continuing intensive use of hand labor in agriculture has been commented upon many times. For its level of capital intensity, Soviet agriculture is easily the least productive in the world. The purpose of this paper is not to elaborate anew on these well-known oddities or their consequences for the current and prospective (short-run) supply of farm goods in the USSR. The problem here is: Given the collectivist ideology which found expression in the collective-farm and state-farm systems, what will mechanization ultimately do to the farm system? In countries with advanced farm mechanization and effective use of capital, such as the United States, the farm labor force tends to become rather small; a similar development is clearly under way also in western Europe.

On July 11, 1867, an imperial decree established the governor-generalship of Turkestan, inaugurating a significant experiment in Russian administration of Central Asia. On July 14 General Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman (1818-82) was appointed Turkestan’s first governor general. During the next fourteen years he rooted Russian colonial rule so firmly that subsequent incompetent governors could not overturn it. He began Turkestan’s modernization, but his regime aroused intense controversy in Russia. Colleagues eulogized Kaufman as a talented organizer who won the loyalty and respect of both Russians and natives. Numerous critics, led by General M. G. Cherniaev, his successor (1882-84), castigated his administration. Kaufman’s work was misrepresented by Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat. Soviet historians either vilified him as an instrument of tsarist imperialism or relegated him to obscurity.

At the death of the Orthodox Metropolitan Pavel Nenadović in 1768, the educational level of the great majority of his Serbian and Rumanian coreligionists was still very low. In the seventy-year period since the regions in which they lived had again come under Habsburg rule, only feeble and shortlived initiatives had been made to improve their lot. Literacy rates were minuscule, printed matter rare, and schools of any sort so few and so scattered as to make formal education a distinct oddity. This was true even of the Serbs, whose settlements in southern Hungary included a relatively large number of well-off merchants and peasants, and whose statutory position as leaders of the Orthodox minorities was thereby reinforced. Still worse off were the Rumanians, many of whom were just emerging from a pastoral economy and extreme cultural backwardness. Even among the lower Orthodox clergy, the ability to read and write in any language was deemed extraordinary. The literacy problem was complicated by the fact that both Serbs and Rumanians used variants of Church Slavonic instead of their own vernaculars as their literary vehicles.

Within Russian and Soviet studies psychohistory has had few practitioners and a negligible effect, with the notable exception of Robert C. Tucker, an eloquent theorist of Soviet politics and a preeminent biographer of Stalin. His strategy for uncovering the unknown early Stalin has involved borrowing from the methodologies of psychoanalysis with the aim of showing how the pathology of the adult Stalin was rooted in the child. Yet his approach has found few adherents.

Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian. Not particularly introspective, he left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life. Moreover, Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.

The eleven-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of a Byzantine Mission in Moravia (863) revived the interest of Slavic historians and philologists in the history of SS. Cyril and Methodius and served to reopen discussions concerning the significance of their activity in Moravia for the development of the Slavs.

It was widely believed that their mission had a profoundly religious character—the conversion of the Moravian pagans to Christianity. This interpretation is not quite correct. The words which the author of Cyril’s biography lets the Moravian ruler Rastislav address to the Emperor Michael should make us cautious about the real character of the Byzantine mission in Moravia. Rastislav is supposed to have declared that his people had already rejected paganism and were observing Christian rules. Some saw in this declaration an exaggeration and attributed it to Rastislav or to the biographer. Recent archaeological discoveries made in Moravia, however, confirm the correctness of Rastislav’s declaration. Thus far the foundations of sixteen stone churches have been discovered, and at least five of them were erected before the arrival of the Byzantine mission.

Shortly before Lenin's death in early 1924, the Thirteenth Party Conference undertook an ambitious program to recruit thousands of workers into the Communist party. Subsequently known as the Lenin Levy—in memory, ironically, of the party's main adversary of mass worker recruitments—this campaign, which was repeated in 1925 and 1927, marked a key stage in the social and organizational history of the Soviet Communist party, for it brought the party into close contact with the shop floor for the first time since 1917.

Western historians are divided over the significance to be attached to this episode. Many echo the views held by prominent party leftists that worker recruitments were a cosmetic response to the problem of bureaucratism and a convenient means to swamp the party with members obedient to the secretariat.

Although many Western scholars believe that 5 million Soviet peasants died as a result of forced collectivization, this inference is not firmly supported by official prewar census statistics. Official statistics suggest that there may have been as many as 9.2 million excess deaths between 1927 and 1939, a figure more than ample to cover hypothesized collectivization fatalities, but Frank Lorimer has argued that half of this discrepancy may be explained by a 27 percent underestimation of the mortality rate in the census of 1926. The possibility that standard Western estimates substantially exaggerate estimated collectivization fatalities therefore cannot be dismissed, even before allowance is made for victims of the famine of 1933-1934, Gulag forced labor, and the terror.

The plausibility of the hypothesis that collectivization claimed millions of lives is diminished further by Gosplan's estimate of the Soviet population in 1933, 165.7 million, a figure consistent with demographic trends of the late 1920s. Assuming that Gosplan had access to the relevant data when this estimate was made in 1937, it appears to follow that all excess deaths calculated from the census of 1939 occurred after rather than before 1933.

In the decade between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, many of the Russian radical intelligentsia believed that Dostoevskii had anticipated their moral dilemmas. Critics, such as D. S. Merezhkovskii, argued that the experience of that turbulent period confirmed Dostoevskii's discovery about the nature of moral choice: Namely, there existed no single system of beliefs, no coherent ethical code, that could resolve all problems of ends and means and that this was so because, on some of the most fundamental issues of moral choice, the promptings of reason and feeling could not be reconciled. To be internally consistent, any ethical systems (and the religious and political creeds that embodied them) must therefore ignore or deny some of the moral imperatives rooted in man's nature. No system of belief, however compelling, could thus confer immunity from guilt, doubt, or self-contempt.

Over the last twenty years Russia has experienced significant fluctuations in sentiments regarding the prospects and urgency of relocating the Russian capital city. In this article, Vadim Rossman examines the public debates on this topic, which have involved important Russian politicians, intellectuals, and members of various expert communities. In these debates, one can recognize several distinct new visions of society that emerged in the post-Soviet period. This article provides an overview and a critique of these debates and suggests that they should be viewed in the context of nation building, the slow emergence of the nation that was historically suppressed under the weight of the imperial ambitions of Russian statehood. In the background of these debates, the concept of self-identity looms large. National capitals can serve as catalysts for nation building and an instrument of the nation as it constitutes and constructs itself.