In this article, Francesca Stella examines the notion of Moscow as a global city through the prism of cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism by exploring articulations of queer space in the Russian capital. Two types of queer space are explored: the “scene,” understood as a loose cluster of commercial venues and community organizations catering to an LGBT clientele, and Moscow Pride, a temporary but also highly visible and politicized appropriation of urban space by the LGBT community. The analysis of Moscow Pride as a putative cosmopolitan object is framed within a broader sociopolitical context characterized by the rise of authoritarian, sexually conservative, and anti-western nationalist discourses. Stella provides insights into the contextual ability of political strategies based on visibility, recognition, and the support of transnational solidarity networks to pursue cosmopolitan values of openness and respect toward sexual diversity, highlighting a crucial tension between global/local and universal/particular in current debates on cosmopolitanism.

One of the most important and most generally espoused interpretations in Russian history is the existence of a crisis in Russian agriculture toward the close of the nineteenth century. A discussion of this crisis or agrarian problem is found in contemporary, in Soviet, and in the Western scholarly works. Statements such as “the economic condition of the peasantry kept deteriorating,” or “famine conditions, epidemics, increased mortality, decrease in the number of livestock, … this is the spectacle of the growing destitution of a faminestricken Russian village,” are commonplace. In fact, “to numerous observers of Russian rural conditions, the growing destitution of the village seemed so evident that it required no special demonstration.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the indexes used to support the crisis interpretation, and to show that this interpretation is not only arguable, but probably fallacious.

Through an ethnographic analysis of public and “everyday” discourses in the Muslim-majority area of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article shows how gender is frequently constitutive of orientalist and balkanist representations. Both orientalism and balkanism have recently undergone a shift, precisely in the ways in which they are gendered. Women have become more visible symbols of Balkan backwardness while orientalist depictions have moved from emphasizing erotic sexuality to a focus on heavily veiled and controlled women, symbolizing the political threat of the east/Islam. In examining the everyday workings of such discourses in a community straddling the imagined boundaries of east and west, Elissa Helms shows a range of competing (re) configurations of east/west and related dichotomies, which are reconfigured precisely through notions of gender. While some of these (re)articulations seem to challenge dominant orientalist and balkanist frameworks, Helms argues that they ultimately reproduce (gendered) notions of opposing east and west civilizations.

Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the “thoroughly democratic” elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death.

Politics in postcommunist societies is in large measure a politics of identity. Central to it seem to be two mutually reinforcing moments through which national communities recreate themselves. One involves the "positive" expression of nation and concerns the recovery of those identity markers—symbols, rituals, anthems, history, literature and so forth—that had been suspended and suppressed during the communist epoch. The other moment is "negative." It appears in the act of purging the nation of like markers associated with the period of communist rule that are now openly regarded as alien. The multitude of images projected from the countries of east Europe and the former USSR at the moment of communism's collapse capture these two moments in concentrated fashion. In the crowds chanting national slogans and waving the national flag, while chiseling communist emblems from the facades of public buildings and toppling statues erected to some member of the communist pantheon, we observe a distilled version of this duplex signification: "We are not communist/communism is not us."

In this paper Robert J. Brym and Vladimir Gimpelson analyze changes in the size and social composition of the Russian state bureaucracy in the 1990s based on official data. Although the Russian state bureaucracy grew somewhat at the regional level in the 1990s, it actually shrank at the federal level. Comparing the Russian state bureaucracy to the Weberian ideal type of bureaucratic efficiency, the authors also demonstrate the existence of strong gender and age segregation, with women and young people concentrated at lower levels and men and older people concentrated at higher levels. Furthermore, because many public officials were formally educated in the pre-perestroika era, they are poorly adapted to the needs of a modern state. Finally, circulation of new personnel through the bureaucracy, or bureaucratic “renewal,” is slow and occurs mainly at low-status levels. Circulation of personnel at high-status levels is practically nonexistent. Consequentiy, young recruits have little incentive to remain in state service and older officials confront little competition from either below or outside the state bureaucracy. Much of the inefficiency of the Russian state bureaucracy stems from these realities.

Jelena Subotić explores how the states of the Balkans construct their “autobiographies“—stories about themselves—and how these stories influence their contemporary political choices. By understanding where states’ narratives about themselves—stories of their past, their historical purpose, their role in the international system—come from, we can more fully explain contemporary state behavior that to outsiders may seem irrational, self-defeating, or simply, inexplicable. Subotić specifically addresses ways in which states of the western Balkans have built their state narratives around the issue of human rights. She explores, first, how a particular narrative of state and national identity produced—or made locally comprehensible—massive human rights abuses. She then analyzes why contemporary identity narratives make postconflict human rights policies very difficult to institutionalize. The article focuses specifically on the human rights discourse, practices, and debates in Serbia and Croatia.

Since the collapse of socialist regimes in 1989 few subjects in eastern Europe have attracted as much attention as nationalism. Detailed academic studies have been carried out from many disciplinary perspectives, by scholars native to the region as well as many from outside it. This is also a field in which governmental and nongovernmental organizations have undertaken numerous policy-oriented initiatives. Eastern European developments have figured prominently in global discussions of "ethnicity" and "identity politics," while a few scholars have used materials from this region to articulate more general frameworks of comparative analysis.

Through the prism of Gavriil Derzhavin's 1797 poem “Razvaliny” (Ruins), Luba Golburt explores two concurrent developments in Russian cultural history: the fragmentation of Catherine the Great's overwhelming legacy after her death in 1796 and the contemporaneous weakening of the classicist genre system, which gave rise to such hybrid genres as the historical elegy. In its temporal polyvalence, the historical elegy bears great resemblance to the ruin, a semi-preserved historical artifact, which in the late Enlightenment/early Romantic period becomes the central image for experiencing history. Derzhavin's poem appropriately enacts historical recollection in a place overpopulated by ruins and pregnant with memories of recent history, Tsarskoe Selo. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the essay tracks the emergence of this summer estate as the central locus memorii in Russian poetry and disentangles the intertwining threads of textual and pictorial representation in Derzhavin's work.

Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.

In this article, Kristin Roth-Ey explores the complex and often convoluted reception of television technology in the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s. Television held out the potential to fulfill the long-standing dream of a universal Soviet culture—propaganda, art, and science delivered directly to every home—and it offered a compelling symbol of a modern Soviet “way of life” in a Cold War context as well. Soviet consumers and technological enthusiasts embraced the new medium with gusto and played an important role in its promotion. As Roth-Ey elucidates, however, the nature of television production and consumption—and, in particular, the Soviets’ decision to promote a home-based broadcasting system—put television in implicit conflict with important Soviet traditions, ideals, and, at times, interest groups. The development of the mature form of centralized Soviet television symbolized by Moscow's Ostankino complex is the story of how political and cultural elites, consumers, and the Soviet system in an abstract sense struggled to make a “home” for television technology in the USSR.

In this article, Anne E. Gorsuch explores the nature and meaning of tourism in the difficult and hungry years of late Stalinism. In this period of Cold War anxiety, tourism was seen as a means of reinforcing Soviet identity. Moscow was a particular focus of Soviet patriotic education, but tourism also contributed to the construction of Soviet identity on the larger collective level of the Soviet Union. Tourism was also offered as part of the cultured "good life" due loyal Soviet citizens. In every case, tourists were reminded that it was only within the borders of the socialist homeland that Soviet citizens could let down their guard and be confident of a warm welcome.

In this review essay, Jody LaPorte and Danielle N. Lussier examine the “legacies” paradigm dominating postcommunist scholarship in the social sciences. The legacies paradigm has produced a growing list of factors that qualify as historical antecedents to contemporary outcomes without establishing a set of shared standards to guide comparative analysis. Scholars have paid less attention to developing a conceptual definition of legacy, thereby limiting our ability to evaluate the importance of historical factors versus more proximate causes. This critique presents a thoughtful analysis of the communist legacy, develops a typology that can be used to categorize legacy variables for meaningful comparison, and brings the concept into discussion with the broader literature on historical institutions and path dependency. By suggesting tools to aid comparative study, LaPorte and Lussier’s goal is to stimulate both conceptual and empirical analysis in evaluating the effect of communism on contemporary outcomes.

As far as the Russian state and most educated Russians were concerned, assimilation in the eastern borderlands of the Russian empire in the late imperial period was supposed to be a one-way street. “Backward” eastern peoples were generally supposed to become more like Russians, while Russians, for their part, were expected to change others while themselves maintaining their language, customs, religion, and overall Russianness. In reality, of course, things were rarely so straightforward. In the mixed settlement worlds of the borderlands, both Russians and non-Russians influenced one another in multiple ways, and Russian influences were not always strongest. In fact, in certain cases, contrary to official and elite expectations, it was not so much the Russians who “Russianized” the “natives” as the “natives” who “nativized” the Russians. By the late imperial period, “nativized” Russians of one kind or another could be found throughout the imperial east. In the northern Caucasus, for example, whole Russian villages looked and lived like gortsy; in the Volga-Ural region, other Russian peasants performed “pagan” sacrifices like Voguls and Maris; on the Kazakh steppe, still others had converted to Islam; and on just about every frontier one came across supposedly “Russian” cossacks who lived according to native ways and preferred to speak native languages.

The revolutions of 1989 in central and east Europe raise crucial questions for the social sciences. Is it possible to build democracy and capitalism simultaneously in societies that have no real history of either system? Will democracy really take root and flourish in societies without an existing market economy? Or will the monumental task of creating a market economy strain these new democratic governments to the limit and ultimately lead to an authoritarian backlash? Since the transition to democracy from socialism is unprecedented, history can offer little useful data from which to derive well founded predictions.

Much of the analysis of the results of republican and local elections held in the USSR in 1989-1990 understandably focused on the dramatic victories of candidates and groups committed to a radical reform of the old system. Anti-communist majorities were elected to the parliaments of several republics. The city governments of Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk fell under the control of activists associated with the self-styled “democratic bloc” and, in summer 1990, Boris Yeltsin was elected to chair the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Conversely, local party officials suffered embarrassing defeats in the face of competition from popular fronts united under the banner of Democratic Russia. That the Party itself was in disarray over how to respond to these challenges was reflected in the open split between rival platforms at the 28th party Congress in July 1990. Taken together, these events could easily convey the impression that old party elites “lost” the local elections of 1990 and that they lost because they failed to adapt to the new rules of democratic politics.

Explanations of the success of Soviet rapid industrialization during the 1930s, whether put forward by Western or Soviet scholars, have generally presupposed the “extraction” of a substantial net contribution from the agricultural sector. According to this view the rapid pace of industrialization, especially during the early years of the campaign, demanded an agricultural contribution well in excess of what might have been obtained by relying on the voluntary acquiescence of the peasantry. Forced mass collectivization, by replacing private (peasant) discretion over the amount, composition, and marketed share of agricultural output with centralized administrative coercion, has been supposed to have ensured the necessary increased flow of agricultural products to industry and urban centers and to have severed the potentially constraining link between the pace of industrialization and peasant willingness to expand output and particularly, marketings in the face of increasingly adverse terms of exchange.

Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “man-made” or “artificial.” The Stalinist leadership is presented as having imposed harsh procurement quotas on Ukraine and regions inhabited by other groups, such as Kuban’ Cossacks and Volga Germans, in order to suppress nationalism and to overcome opposition to collectivization. Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population. Robert Conquest, for example, has referred to a Soviet study of drought to show that conditions were far better in 1932 than they were in 1936, a “non-famine year.” James Mace, the main author of a U.S. Congress investigation of the Ukraine famine, cites “post-Stalinist” statistics to show that this harvest was larger than those of 1931 or 1934 and refers to later Soviet historiography describing 1931 as a worse year than 1932 because of drought. On this basis he argues that the 1932 harvest would not have produced mass starvation.

Lenin's views on law, like so many other aspects of his intellectual life, appear in scholarly and political literature primarily as weapons—a striking quotation from State and Revolution here, an insistent instruction to the commissar of justice there—arms wielded in the service of particular aims and, often, interpretations of the Soviet project. A collection of these citations would yield a most disparate arsenal—jabs, slings, barbs and bombs, and sometimes the most precise button-pressings (especially when Lenin was head of state)—an arsenal drawn, it would seem, from different wars and different epochs of combat technology. It might also seem from such a survey that, where law was concerned, Lenin's various missiles were hurled at each other.