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.

The comic figure of the yokel has undergone a resurgence in the past decade, culminating in Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. The yokel, whose predictable humor is based on his aggressive backwardness and persistent malapropisms, draws attention to the “foreignness” with which multiculturalism is uncomfortable, while also highlighting the economic and cultural dislocation of globalization. Cohen builds on the longstanding stereotypes about Jews and Gypsies (Roma), creating a persona who resembles the “vermin” of Nazi propaganda and manages to elicit racist responses from his unwitting audience. Borat functions within a fictional framework of racism and ethnic hostility, bringing to light barely concealed discomforts about border-crossings, cosmopolitanism, and global cultures.

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.

The insurrection on February 27, 1917, totally annihilated the tsarist police system in Petrograd, the most important link tying the citizens to the government, thus throwing the capital into a state of anarchy. Quickly lawlessness crept into the streets, as drunken soldiers looted wine cellars to get even more drunk and criminals released from prisons easily acquired weapons. To the sober-minded, it was apparent that this intolerable disorder had to be stopped as quickly as possible. Yet, for the more committed revolutionaries, the insurrection was not yet finished; even on February 28 machine-gun shots were fired from rooftops and upper-floor windows of tall buildings—actions, people firmly believed, taken by the remnants of Protopopov's police or the counter-revolutionary officers. Whether for the restoration of law and order or for the defense of the revolution, Petrograd urgently needed an organized police force. Indeed, the future course of the revolution to a large extent depended on how the new police force would be organized. If a group which regarded the restoration of law and order as the most urgent task established an efficient police power in the streets, it would mean that the revolutionary process that had been set in motion would be halted. On the other hand, if the revolutionaries succeeded in arming the masses of insurgents for the defense of the revolution, that would surely mean the further intensification of the revolutionary process. An analysis of the formation of the militias in the February Revolution is, therefore, integrally related to the problem of power.

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.

The division of the Slavic nations into catholic and orthodox is the main reason usually given for their mutual distrust and sometimes bitter hatred. Though this is, unfortunately, the general case, there are, nevertheless, exceptions. The Croats, a Catholic nation, have had a great admiration for, and a deep attachment to, the Orthodox Russians since the sixteenth century. What is most surprising is that this unmotivated, decidedly emotional relationship with “mother” (matuška) Russia was furthered by some of the most prominent members of the Catholic clergy: for example, Juraj Križanić, Antun Kanižlić Andrija Kačić Miošić, Franjo Rački, and Josip J. Strossmayer.

I do not intend in this paper to discuss this fascinating trend within the ranks of the Croatian spiritual elite which, while remaining unshaken in its ancestral faith, nevertheless looked toward “the third Rome” and sincerely hoped that one day, under the auspices of the Tsar, all Slavic nations would enjoy freedom and even religious unity.

In 1817, Russian authorities apprehended six Tatar brigands in the port town of Feodosiia in the Crimea. Convicted of murdering seventeen people and of stealing from and desecrating a Christian church, the six were sentenced in April by the local civil and criminal court to punishment by knout–the harshest instrument of corporal punishment used in Russia. The knout consisted of a stiff thong of rawhide fastened by a bronze ring to a braided leather whip of approximately three and a half feet in length; this apparatus was attached to a wooden stick of two and a half feet that the executioner wielded. Following the knouting, the court authorized the executioner to rip out the nostrils and brand the faces of the Tatars, who were then to be dispatched into eternal exile at hard labor in the mines of eastern Siberia. Because the local court deemed these criminals especially dangerous, and because their apprehension and conviction ostensibly reinforced Russian leadership in the province, the court decreed that the knouting of the criminals be carried out in a variety of locations across the province, rather than in a single place.

As a result of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union was left with the largest Jewish population in Europe. Given this large population, the fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused the interest of researchers and drawn attention to the role of Soviet policy in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Some of the reasons for the survival of Jews in Soviet-annexed territories seem obvious. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupiéd by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. This simple and generally sufficient explanation is not the only one which has been offered, however. Some Western scholars have argued that the Soviet government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. Soviet propaganda, particularly that aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust.

In this article, Emily Van Buskirk uses archival manuscripts to peel back layers of Lidiia Ginzburg's palimpsestic Notes of a Blockade Person. She finds in Notes the fragmentary, distanced, and carefully contained traces of Ginzburg's “A Story of Pity and Cruelty,” an intense narrative about guilt and remorse. Relying on Ginzburg's own scholarship, Van Buskirk argues that the author's transformations of experience across multiple texts were inspired by Aleksandr Herzen. Herzen provided a model for developing—out of a family tragedy, personal failure, guilt, and remorse—an elevated memoir that would serve history. Yet Ginzburg's notion of character, her ethics, and her documentary aesthetic were born of a different era and gave rise to different kinds of narratives, written in the third person about a slighdy generalized other, in a single situation. In Ginzburg's attempts to represent the typical Leningrad intellectual's blockade experiences there are tensions (characteristic of documentary literature) between desires for universality and specificity. Self-examination battles against self-exposure, while a commitment to literature of fact withstands an aversion to autobiography.

The Bolsheviks made civil war inevitable by forcing a showdown with the Kerenskii government in October 1917—and concomitantly with the moderate socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks. The resulting conflict accelerated complex processes underway since February that exacerbated social polarization and fostered political and economic localism. Following the local Soviet's siege of the city duma in the provincial capital of Saratov in October, opposition forces began to contest Soviet power, which before long was reduced to Bolshevik and Left SR rule. As a result, the Saratov Soviet spent all of 1918-19 battling a variety of manifestations of discontent with the new political order. The calculus of civil war in the province involved the sustained threat to strategically located Saratov of White armies, which succeeded in striking against and taking the uezd (district) towns of Khvalynsk, Vol'sk, Serdobsk, Tsaritsyn, Balashov, Kuznetsk, and Kamyshin. Opposition from within the province proved every bit as formidable. Anti-Bolshevik forces, inspired by both the socialist and nonsocialist resistance, mobilized uprisings in all of the towns of Saratov province during the civil war; moreover, not a single uezd escaped the throes of peasant violence and resistance before this turbulent chapter in Russian history drew to a close.

Anna Krylova questions whether the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, the standard interpretive approach toward Bolshevik thought in the field of Soviet studies, offers an exhaustive account of Bolshevik discourse. To do that she examines the centrality of V I. Lenin's What Is to BeDone? (1902) in Bolshevik thought and points to the 1905 revolution as the formative event in the Bolshevik conception of the worker. Krylova introduces an overlooked Bolshevik notion of “class instinct” (klassovyiinstinkt, klassovoe chut'ie) and argues that the notion of “class instinct” centrally informed the Bolshevik vision of the worker, structuring her article as a dialogue between scholars of Soviet history and their historical subjects. In the conclusion, she suggests the consequences that such a broadened notion of the Bolshevik conception of proletarian identity—beyond the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm—has for interpretations of Bolshevik and Stalinist culture. In “A Paradigm Lost?” his response to Krylova's essay, Reginald E. Zelnik welcomes Krylova's “class instinct” thesis as a fresh enrichment of and supplement to the spontaneity-consciousness paradigm, but, he argues, if we place this language in its early historical context, we cannot avoid the conclusion that with or without the introduction of “instinct,” Lenin and the Bolsheviks still had to face the same kind of contradictions in their conceptualization of the role of workers in the revolutionary movement. The revolutionary value of particular consciousness or particular instinct still had to be judged in accordance with an external point of reference, the nature of which remained and remains elusive. Igal Halfin, in his response, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” argues that the Bolshevik notion of the self indeed deserves careful scrutiny. Focusing on how the official Soviet language characterized the interaction between workers’ bodies and workers’ souls, Halfin argues that the synthesis of the affective and the cerebral was key to this construction of the New Man in the 1920s and 1930s.

In this article, Sascha L. Goluboff investigates the development of ethnographic knowledge about Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan to provide new ways of understanding who Mountain Jews are and to provoke scholars to reflect critically on empire, ethnicity, and religion in the Caucasus. Following Nicholas B. Dirks's recent call for anthropologists to pay attention to the “textual field that is the pretext to fieldwork,” Goluboff analyzes how the work of the first ethnographers of Mountain Jews—Yehuda Chernyi (1835-1880) and Il'ia Anisimov (1862-1928)—created an image of Mountain Jews as both “savage Asians” and “primordial Jews” and how subsequent scholarship has reinforced this dichotomy as modern “fact.” Goluboff believes that by paying more attention to the intersections among ethnic groups and refraining from making moral judgments, it is possible to open up new ground for creatively researching the relations between Islam and Judaism in the Caucasus.

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

Our view of the cultural situation in late imperial Russia is changing. Long set aside as a distinct period in literary and cultural history, the decades embracing the turn of the twentieth century have customarily been described according to two master narratives. The first has tied developments in cultural life to the political struggle between revolution and reaction, and to the history of Russian revolutionary ideology. The second focuses on the evolution of style, recounting the transformation of realism and the concurrent emergence of decadence and modernism. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to reveal the limits of these paradigms by directing attention to fundamental changes in the institutions of Russian literature. Jeffrey Brooks has shown how the Russian reading public expanded and diversified in the wake of the Great Reforms, thus preparing the way for a broadly based popular literature governed by market forces. As technology improved in the areas of printing, transportation and communications, the potential of this new market was increasingly exploited so that by the turn of the century popular literature had risen from its origins as a virtual cottage enterprise to the status of a major industry.

In 1924, immediately after Lenin died, the Central Committee of his party called upon all who had a shred of writing from his hand to deposit it in the party's archives. The holders hastened to comply. All his letters were ostensibly published in three substantial volumes, supplemented by items in a number of “Miscellany” (Sbornik) volumes, Not one letter to or from Inessa Armand appeared in that flood of Leniniana.

On February 27, 1939, Krupskaia died. Four months after her death, Bolshevik (No. 13, July, 1939) published the first of two letters from Lenin to Inessa on the “woman question.” The letters were not so much an expression of Lenin's views as a comment on Inessa Armand's. Planning in the course of her Bolshevik work with “working women” to write a brochure addressed to them, Inessa had dutifully submitted her outline to Lenin.