Focusing on the funerals of two populist political prisoners, this article examines how Petersburg's radical youth expropriated an allegedly unchanging, sacred ritual to extend the parameters of public discussion and social critique in late imperial Russia. Drawing on their experiences of Russia's religious and revolutionary past, the youth who accompanied their peers to the grave used the special, “sacred” time and space effected by the performance of customary burial rituals to offer their fellow citizens revolutionary alternatives to the existing regime.

There were no guarantees in the Russian absolute monarchy against arbitrary arrest, arbitrary search, or violation of the secrecy of mail (three main aspects of personal inviolability) before the reform of the judiciary in 1864. As there was no separation between the administrative and the judicial powers, no difference existed between an arrest or search decided upon as a judicial measure and an arrest or search ordered by the police, whether to prosecute an already committed offense or to prevent a violation of law and order. The statutes of 1864 organized justice as an independent power, and to assure this independence they established guarantees of due process of law.

Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.

At the height of World War II, General Wfadyslaw Sikorski visited Dr. Edvard Beneš at his London residence. The Polish prime minister warned the Czechoslovak president that if the Red Army were to occupy central Europe it would impose communist governments there. Beneš conceded that this was so but he added that there was nothing they could do about it. Sikorski continued pressing Beneš: "Why are you so friendly with the Soviets?" he demanded. He then invited the president to harmonize his foreign policy with that of the democracies. Beneš replied that he was unable to share Sikorski's confidence in the west for the simple reason that he had experienced the horror of Munich. "What partitions of Poland mean for the Poles, that is what Munich is for us," said Beneš forcefully.

Scholarly debate in the West, and to a large extent also in the Soviet Union, concerning the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Russian monk losif (né Sanin) Volotsky (Joseph Volotsky), 1439-1515, has generally centered on his political ideas and the interpretation of his Prosvetitel' (Enlightener, or Illuminator) . The monastic side of his activities is often played down or neglected, even though the most important aspect of his daily life for fifty-five years was his serious pursuit of the monastic and (for thirty-eight years) abbatial vocation. In the provincial Volokolamsk Monastery, which he founded, he not only entered into ecclesiastical politics and composed the didactic apologetics and inquisitional invectives that comprise his sixteen-discourse (originally eleven) Enlightener but also wrote two monastic Rules, which are very important sources for his life and for the religious and intellectual history of his time.

It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.

At noon on Saturday, October 26, 1918, as World War I drew to its agonizing close, the courtyard behind stately Independence Hall in Philadelphia witnessed one of the dramatic episodes of its long and colorful history. From a platform Professor Thomas G. Masaryk, soon to be President-designate of Czechoslovakia, read out a "Declaration of Common Aims" of the newly created Mid- European Union. Flanking the venerable philosopher-statesman from Prague were representatives of European nationalities who had just signed the "Declaration," eminent citizens of Philadelphia, and delegates of American patriotic societies and political parties.

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.

On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

During the Crimean War, Crimean Tatars were charged en masse with collaborating with the Allies. At the war's conclusion, nearly 200,000 Tatars left the peninsula to relocate in the Ottoman empire. Mara Kozelsky contributes to an understanding of this critical episode in the Crimean War by examining secret surveillance documents, a collection that records complex state attitudes toward Tatars from the Allied landing on the Crimean coast to the Treaty of Paris. These documents reveal that intelligence operations provided no evidence of a collective Tatar guilt and instead testified to the diversity of pressures on state policies toward subject populations on the front lines of battie. Shifting wartime conditions, religious tensions, and repeated crises at the front highlighted unresolved debates about religion and loyalty to the state. Some officials recommended deporting the Tatars, others encouraged their migration, and still others advocated on the Tatars’ behalf.

In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs, increasing numbers of peasants left their native villages for cities and industrial centers, in response to a growing need for cash and declining opportunities to earn it at home. At least until World War I, the vast majority of these migrants were men; women were the more stable element in the village. In the words of one student of peasant life, women “cling to the family and the land, and need particularly unfavorable circumstances to compel them to move somewhere else.“ Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close the economic circumstances that prompted peasant men to leave villages increasingly caused women to leave as well. Like their husbands, fathers and brothers, migrant women often chose urban destinations. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 650 peasant women per 1,000 peasant men in Moscow, and 368 migrant peasant women for every 1,000 migrant peasant men in St. Petersburg; by 1910, the proportion in St. Petersburg had increased to 480 per 1,000.

What were the meanings of blackness in the Soviet Union? Marxist ideology offered no clear guidance for conceptualizing blackness, and the Russian Empire provided few historical references. But discrimination against people racialized as black was a major problem of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was unable to ignore. As Soviet institutions and black people from different parts of the African continent and diaspora cultivated political and cultural connections, those connections entailed collisions among multiple ways of conceptualizing difference. Blackness could not easily be translated into Soviet taxonomies, but, propelled by a series of conjunctures in global politics, people never stopped looking for linkages and analogies. Two primary challenges, recurring in different forms over several eras, were: How was the Soviet Union to conceptualize the relationship between the African continent and the diaspora? And how should it relate racial dynamics elsewhere to domestic conditions within its own borders? Drawing on two scholars’ original fieldwork and recent scholarship in an emerging field, this article proposes a novel, interactive approach to the historical construction of blackness and Africanness in the USSR.

In this article, Muireann Maguire examines the cultural construction of the trope of the engineer-inventor in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the changing representation of this archetype in three science fiction novels by Aleksei Tolstoi: Aelita (1922-23), Soiuzpiati (The Gang of Five, 1925), and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (Engineer Garin's Death Ray, 1925-26). Tolstoi's fiction portrays engineers as misguided and self-centred at best and as amoral, megalomaniacal, and irredeemably un-Soviet at worst. This increasingly negative portrayal of the engineers in these novels, and in their later redactions and cinema versions, helped to prepare the way for the alienation of engineer and technical specialist within Soviet society, providing cultural justification for Iosif Stalin's show trials and purges of both categories in the 1930s. Tolstoi's alienation of the engineer-inventor, the traditional hero of early Soviet nauchnaia fantastika (science fiction), prefigured the occlusion of science fiction as a mainstream literary genre. As a trained engineer, former aristocrat, and returned émigré whose own status in Soviet Russia was deeply compromised, Tolstoi's literary demonization of engineers effectively purchased his own acceptance within the Stalinist literary hierarchy.

Rudolf Slánský's arrest in November 1951 by Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovak secret police, his Kafkaesque trial a year later, and his execution caused a sensation during the early years of the Cold War. For a full week, the trial could be followed live on the radio in Prague. The transcript of the proceedings was published and widely distributed. Yet the affair remained a mystery. Slánský, until recently the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and thirteen of his colleagues, all of them lifelong party members, confessed to crimes of high treason against the Prague government, espionage on behalf of the west, and sabotage of the socialist economy. In tired, monotonous voices, they described their lives as being motivated by their hatred of the CPC and loyalty to such sponsors as the Gestapo, Zionism, western intelligence services, and international capital. In their final speeches, all the defendants demanded that the court impose upon them the death penalty. The judge disappointed only three—they received life sentences. Slánský and ten others were executed in December 1952.

In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, the Kara-Kum desert of Turkmenistan–the setting of Andrei Platonov's novella Dzhan–represented an environmental challenge to Soviet technological utopianism, just as its nomadic inhabitants challenged Stalinist narratives of political development. In this article, I offer new contexts for reading Dzhan, locating it within Russian and Soviet discourses of natural and national development and within the context of Platonov's second profession as a meliorator (land reclamation engineer). I argue that Dzhan offers a vision of vernacular socialism, first, in its attention to the specific ecology of the desert and its inhabitants, and second, in its resistance to two totalizing Soviet master narratives forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot.

In this article Edyta Bojanowska explores the circumstances surrounding the publication, in 1863 in the Dostoevskii brothers' journal Vremia, of a pro-Polish article by Nikolai Strakhov that led to the journal's closing. Bojanowska argues against accepting Strakhov's and Fedor Dostoevskii's retroactive explanations that the article was misunderstood. She analyzes Strakhov's article and the entire issue of Vremia in which it appeared and finds a consistent message in both: that Russia should withdraw from Poland, where imperial success would be either unlikely or too costly, shift its attention from imperial expansion to a domestic agenda, and restructure the empire into one based on the constituent populations' consent. Given Dostoevskii's endorsement of Strakhov's article and his hands-on editorial work on Vremia, this affair suggests a tolerant and pragmatic phase in Dostoevskii's imperial ideology that contrasts with the militant imperialistic punditry of his later period.