Pictures, so the first Bolsheviks believed, speak louder than words. Visual propaganda was essential in their campaign to reach the illiterate and poorly literate masses, to engage them in a new Soviet style of life. By the end of the civil war, every leading member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party valued the political uses of film. As commissar of nationalities, Iosef Stalin recognized its potential; in his simple expression, film was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” Like cinema, the Bolsheviks appeared at the confluence of two worlds, the traditional and the modern. For them, film was the perfect medium by which to critique the old and celebrate the new. Film viewed the world as they did, with one measure of hard realism, another of soft utopianism.

The wave of labor unrest that accompanied Belarusian post-election protests had no precedents in the country's independent history or recent post-Soviet political protest mobilizations. These protests challenge the prevalent trend in the current literature on the post-Soviet working class to stress its weakness in terms of organization, as well as structural and material resources. This article relies on a database of workplace-related protest events (August 10–September 30) and a selection of statements, interviews, and social media discussions among participants of the protests, in order to explain this unexpected activation of the seemingly passive Belarusian working class. The author hypothesizes that it was the vagueness of the Belarusian opposition's ideology and workers’ participation in the broader protest movement that helped them overcome the challenges of suppressed voice, bureaucratic despotism, and atomization. These mobilizing factors, however, limit the further development of autonomous labor organizations and their democratizing impact.

In the late 1950s, the Moscow branch of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf embarked on an ambitious program to build a network of social and residential buildings for deaf people in the city. In this article, I examine the resulting emergence of a defined “deaf space” within the Moscow cityscape, exploring the ways in which this space shaped, and was shaped by, the Soviet deaf community. While such institutional buildings were intended as the ultimate expression of deaf agency, drawing on revolutionary understandings of disability to define the deaf as active Soviet citizens, they also served to frame the deaf as visibly “other,” inviting contradictory and often problematic readings of the deaf community's place within the Soviet body politic. By examining deaf people's engagement with the developing politics of Soviet urban space, I thus explore issues of disability, Sovietness, and the complex intersection of marginality and emancipation in the late Soviet era.

This article explores the prominent role played by visual tropes in Andrei Platonov's Turkmen novella, Dzhan (Soul). While acknowledging Platonov's literary inventiveness, it seeks to identify the equal importance of the gaze as a means of emotional and ideological cognition, thereby arguing that the shift in emphasis in his prose in the mid-1930s entailed not just a move away from explicitly linguistic experimentation but also a greater embrace of visual imagery. With reference to both Dzhan and the author's letters and notebooks, this essay examines how the geographical relocation to Central Asia is accompanied by a heightened engagement with the world through the gaze, which functions principally in terms of gender and national identity. It concludes with a consideration of how the gaze is integral to a theory of Platonov's understanding of language, arguing that the “situatedness” of the individual is predicated on his or her being seen in a visual context by an interlocutor.

This article combines an investigation of legal practice in late tsarist Russia with an analysis of imperial rule. The Judicial Reform of 1864 introduced new legal principles, institutions, and rules of court procedure into the empire. Focusing on legal interaction in the newly established circuit courts in Crimea and Kazan, this article explores the implications of Tatar legal involvement in state courts for both the empire's legal reform process and its policies toward ethnic and religious minorities. It discusses the courts as tools for the integration of these multiethnic regions with the imperial center and shows how legal unification developed in a context of dynamic, and locally specific, plural legal orders. It concludes that minority policies were characterized by the simultaneous pursuit of integration and the promotion of difference. The article draws mainly on court records from Kazan and Simferopol (Crimea), newspaper coverage, and on the reports and memoirs of jurists.

This essay considers the Russian hacking controversy, which has been a prominent theme of the US Presidential election season. Tracking the context and contours of the scandal, I consider some of the anxieties, phobias and cultural logics that animate it (both in Russia and the US) and reflect on the dynamics that drive it.

This article examines Bulgarian cultural relations with India and Mexico in the 1970s to explore the role of cultural diplomacy in the relationship between the Second and the Third Worlds during the Cold War. In 1975, Liudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the Bulgarian leader, became the head of the Committee for Culture; under her patronage, Bulgarian officials organized literally hundreds of exhibitions, concerts, academic conferences, book readings, cultural weeks, and visits that involved the three countries in an intense cultural romance. Even though Bulgaria was known as the “Soviet master satellite,” culture provided a considerable level of independence in Bulgarian dealings with international actors, which often caused Soviet irritation. In the end, by using culture, in addition to political and economic aid, Bulgaria managed to forge its role as an intermediary between the Second World and the Global South, and to project its notions of development on a global scene.

Nikita Khrushchev's proposal to give parents of non-Russian children the choice of whether to send their children to a school with education in their own tongue, or to a Russian school, was first advanced at the end of 1958. It immediately provoked a furious response from leaders of the non-Russian republics of the multi-national Soviet Union, and was an issue contributing to political purges in Azerbaijan and Latvia in 1959. In this article, Jeremy Smith uses documents from archives in four Soviet republics to analyze the responses from the republics. Smith shows that republic leaders were mostly agreed on an alternative solution to the question of language of instruction, and pursued different strategies both to oppose the introduction of the reform and to obstruct its implementation once it was passed. The episode also underlines the uncertainty involved in center-periphery relations in the USSR.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).

Winning elections is so vital for Russian leaders that competing viewpoints on national television news channels have been scotched, together with the channels that broadcast them. This study examines the other side of the screen: how participants in focus groups in four Russian cities process national channels' treatments of an important regional electoral campaign. The study was conducted during the last period in which viewpoint diversity was still available via TV-6. Unlike findings about other news stories, election stories appear to have little connection to viewers' experiences and values and deprive them of using familiar heuristics to make sense of the stories. For the public, the election story is a genre apart, framed by the same confusing template no matter what the office or region. Even TV-6, soon to be shuttered, broadcast its combative message using that template, thus extinguishing any opportunity for identifying genuine diversity and leaving the audience unable to distinguish between state and private channels, something they easily did for other types of stories. Election stories only cue other election stories. It is mainly younger, "post-Soviet" participants who bring an alternative frame to watching: norms, acquired through their education, by which election stories in a democracy ought to be constructed.

I would like to thank the Slavic Review, and its fair-minded editor, Sidney Monas, for allowing me to break the silence on certain taboo themes and respond to critics—civilities practiced mostly in the breach in the societies we study. Due to space limitations, I shall respond fully to Robert Hayden, who raises many issues, apart from the problem of definition, and trust that in the process I may encompass also Matt Oja's thoughtful remarks. Hayden's critique of my article on Yugoslav camp literature is based on two premises, which he fails to prove: that camp literature is not well defined and hence includes a good deal of official writings, or, alternatively, that it lacks internal consistency; and that the very concept of camp literature “misrepresents the political and intellectual currents in the country.” Much of his commentary is an ad hominem argument. Curiously, much of it, even if inadvertently, substantiates my central thesis: Yugoslav prison and camp literature represents a catalyst in the current processes of liberalization, democratization, and humanization in both politics and culture in post-Tito Yugoslavia.

The nature of tsarist policies toward the Moslem population of the Russian empire has long remained a particularly neglected aspect of Russian history. While Russian expansion in Asia has attracted the interest of many scholars, the subsequent development of the Eastern provinces and the Russian Government's attitude toward the conquered national groups have been little examined by both Russian and Western historians. In the present study an investigation is made of pre-Revolutionary Russia's cultural policies in Central Asia and of the Kulturkampf which arose in the early twentieth century between imperial authorities, conservative groups of the Moslem population, and progressive young native elements.

Russian conquest of Central Asia was achieved in a relatively short period of time with but a small number of troops. In 1864, encirclement of the Kazakh frontier was completed when in Čikment the Siberian, or eastern, military line joined its western counterpart, the Orenburg line, preparing the way for Russia's further push toward the south.

When John Hay thus eulogized the economic progress the United States had seen under the leadership of the late President McKinley, the nation was, in fact, a debtor to European capital. Yet the farsighted statesman had interpreted correctly the world financial trend.

Between 1900 and 1914 foreign investments of the United States advanced from an estimated $700,000,000 to well over $1,000,000,-000. By 1920 American commercial investments—those in trading and industrial enterprises—in foreign countries amounted to nearly $4,000,000,000.