Using survey data from 900 rural households, this article assesses the degree to which Soviet-era workplace inequality between rural males and females has been remediated by the introduction of democratic and market reforms. The overall effects of reform institutions are mixed. Concerning male-female workplace inequality, three continuities were found with the Soviet period. First, rural males have larger total incomes than do rural females. Second, equal pay for equal work does not exist: females holding similar positions to males earned less in all categories of employment. In addition, males continue to dominate numerically the ranks of farm managers and leaders. Third, managers and leaders of both sexes are the most entrepreneurial, measured by income from private business. Male managers, however, have over three times the income from private business as do female managers. Concerning intragender inequality, it was found that females with advanced education and specialized knowledge or skills have significantly higher incomes than women with lower skill sets.

In the summer of 1994, political parties in Poland debated yet again the content and form of Poland’s first new constitution since the end of Communist Party rule. These arguments continued a process that had begun in 1989 and would continue until the ratification of a final document in May 1997. During the 1994 debate, each party offered its own version of a constitution, which was closely tied to its particular vision of the ideal new Polish republic. One of these groups was NSZZ Solidarity, the trade union successor to the social movement that had dominated opposition politics in the 1980s. In Solidarity’s version of the constitution, the state’s legitimacy was based on a community of Poles unified by a shared Catholic tradition. Political commentators who supported Solidarity’s constitution described it as follows: “Under the NSZZ Solidarity and presidential drafts [of the constitution] the Republic is the commonweal of the citizens.

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov's first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state's firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen“ nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

In this article, Robert Weinberg explores the visual representation of Judaism and observant Jews in the Soviet journal Bezbozhnik u stanka (The atheist at the workbench), which appeared in the 1920s. In their efforts to promote atheism and undermine organized religion, the artists responsible for the images in this journal singled out the Jewish god to be depicted with inhuman, bestial, and bizarre features such as a single eye and a nose made out of a fist. This portrayal of Judaism and religious Jews drew upon the pervasive antisemitic tropes and motifs in Russian culture and society and served to demonize Judaism and its adherents.

Traveling in Yugoslavia one is struck by the great contrasts and variety of its cultural and physical landscape. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in agriculture and in the rural life and economy. The importance of agriculture and the peasantry in the total economy can easily be seen since roughly 56 per cent of the population derives its sole or principal income from agricultural production, and agriculture contributes close to 30 per cent of the country's national income. Before 1945 Yugoslavia was predominantly a land of peasant subsistence farming, using primitive methods of production.

The unification of private law with the corrolary task of codifying it into a single code has proved to be everywhere a long, complicated and very difficult task. Two recent well-known examples are the unification of German law into the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch which lasted from 1874 until 1896; and of Swiss law extending over the period from 1874 to the codes of 1907 and 1911. The analogous work performed a century earlier in Austria extended from 1753 until 1811. The unification of French civil law lasted, in spite of revolutionary zeal, virtually from 1789 until 1804.

Russian Fourierism of the 1840's was rooted in soil prepared for it by Russia's nineteenth-century bureaucratic renascence. It was the latter which, having arisen partly as a reaction to the Decembrist Revolution of 1825, brought with it a new relationship of the intellectuals to the state. Russian Fourierists can be understood, therefore, only in relation to other groups of intellectuals and the situation created by the Decembrist Revolution. The Decembrist Revolution marks the end of the political domination of the land- and serfholding nobility, the dvorjanstvo.

Ever since the accident that destroyed unit 4 of the Chernobyl’ Nuclear Power Plant on April 26,1986, became public knowledge, the Soviet government's response to this catastrophe has been the subject of bewilderment and withering criticism. The exact sequence of events that unfolded in the days following the disaster and the forces that shaped it have, however, remained obscure. While the USSR's civil defense organization urged prompt and decisive measures to inform the population of the accident and move people out of harm's way, other Soviet institutions, such as the Communist Party and the KGB, feared the accident's threat to their legitimacy more than its implications for public health. Drawing on declassified archival documents from Ukrainian archives and memoir literature, I explore the political and institutional logic that prevented the USSR from acting appropriately to protect citizens from the consequences of the nuclear accident.

The paper investigates past and current research on the executions at Kurapaty, in the northern suburbs of Minsk, Belarus, in 1937–41, covering the period from the discovery of mass graves in the 1970s to the establishment of an official monument in late 2018. It deals with several issues: archaeological excavations of the site in the 1980s and 1990s; the numbers, ethnic origin, and identities of the victims; the continuing debates between the authorities, scholars, and the nationalist opposition; the protection of the site from various incursions; and the role of Kurapaty as an alternative national symbol to the Great Patriotic War victory. It also looks at Kurapaty victims in the context of the Stalin Purges in the USSR as a whole. The authors conclude that while the number of deaths and the scale of repressions did not differ significantly from the Soviet average, the impact on the modern state has been largely concealed because of the politicization of the event, and the tardiness and unwillingness of the post-independence government to peruse the harsher aspects of the Stalin era.

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

In both the west and the Soviet Union the reputation of the late lurii Trifonov has come to rest principally on the candor with which his works, particularly those of his Moscow cycle, examine ethical themes. To non-Soviet scholars Trifonov offers the appealing biography of a writer who, having begun his career with a Stalinist novel (Studenty, 1950), nonetheless welcomed the Thaw (Utolenie zhazhdy, 1963) and then evolved into a chronicler of the moral decline into which Soviet society was sliding under Leonid Brezhnev.

This study is an assessment of the theories and practices of teaching Russian to the local (indigenous) Turkic and Iranian speaking peoples of Soviet Central Asia. More specifically, it is a description of the processes by which the programs of teaching Russian as a second language (TRSL) are implemented in the classrooms of Central Asia. An investigation of methodologies in TRSL, qualifications of teachers, and some of the characteristics of the target group— the young Central Asians—sheds light on the factors accelerating or inhibiting the acquisition of Russian as a second language in this part of the USSR.

Lithuania’s 2000 parliamentary elections were the first in the post-Soviet era to fail to produce a majority government. Further, neither the Homeland Union nor the Democratic Labor Party entered into the ruling coalition. In this article, Terry D. Clark and Nerijus Prekevičius explore two different ways of explaining why this occurred. To answer the broader question, the first approach focuses on the particular events that occurred in the run-up to the elections. To consider why particular parties fared better or worse than expected, the second approach evaluates a set of rational choice approaches, including spatial analysis. Neither approach is preferable to the other; instead, they are complementary, each helping to resolve certain questions that are appropriate to the particular approach. To conclude, they consider the implications of their findings for the consolidation of Lithuania’s party system.

The policy of “using non-communist hands in the building of communism,” almost as old as the Soviet government itself, came to an end at the outset of the First Five-Year Plan. In the early 1920s the Communist Party had come to accept the realities of a socialist regime confined to an underdeveloped country. Consequently, during the years of the New Economic Policy (1921- 28), the party sought to guide numerous institutions in which its members and supporters were a minority. To this end, the Communist Party created a network of scholarly institutions staffed by Marxist scholars which paralleled the traditional institutions staffed and led primarily by non-Marxist scholars. The purpose of this essay is to recount some of the conflicts between Marxist and non-Marxist historians and to make some suggestions about connections between these conflicts and ongoing political changes.

Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) is considered by most critics—even by those who condemn his subsequent politics, judging them a mixture of vacuous pronouncements and ineffectual gestures—a genuine liberal statement. Literary critics who do not go so far as to claim that the work contributed directly to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861—a view Turgenev himself occasionally espoused—at least assert that Notes of a Hunter is as biting and affecting a criticism of serfdom as literature could level at the time. There is, I believe, a serious objection to this position. I am not referring to the argument that a cycle of twenty-two sketches mainly about a man out hunting with his dog can hardly have much to do with politics; there are so many references to social injustice that even the narrator's most seemingly mundane observations, such as his disquisitions on various hunting techniques, must be read as willful efforts to distract himself from the corruption of Russian life.

The gestation period of Marxism in Bulgaria before a Marxist party came into existence in 1891 is one of the least studied periods in the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, where most of the work on BCP historiography has been done, attention has primarily, and understandably, gone to the activities of Dimitŭr Blagoev, the so-called father of Bulgarian Marxism, whose early career as propagandist and organizer of the new movement included a notable effort while he was a student at the University of St. Petersburg to form the first Marxist group in Russia. The story of the penetration and dissemination of Marxism in Bulgaria, however, is by no means exhausted with accounts of Blagoev's life to 1891. Yet, Bulgarian Marxist historians have done little to date to reconstruct this story in monographic investigations of the kind they have produced for other phases of their party's history. Of the general accounts they have produced, the best one, relatively speaking, is in the latest Istorita na Bŭlgarskata Komunisttcheska Partiia, which devotes fifteen pages (out of 699) to Blagoev's early activities and the party's prehistory, including the founding congress of 1891.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state turned out to be pretty adept at authoritarianism, and the voters have appreciated it. That, at any rate, is the broad upshot of these three articles.

Following what has seemed the dominant tendency in the Anglophone political science literature on contemporary Russia, Henry E. Hale and Timothy J. Colton examine not governance but elections. The two scholars confirm “arguments that Putin draws a great deal of vote-winning power from how people view his performance and that the economy is a large part of this.” Readers may have believed this before encountering this article (I did), but Hale and Colton demonstrate the point marshaling evidence.

The Baltic countries, which were absorbed by the Russian Empire between 1721 and 1795 (Estonia and Livonia in 1721, Latgale in 1772, Lithuania in 1793 and 1795, and Courland in 1795), have played a significant role in Russian economic life, and have been regarded as an important, if not a vital Russian outlet to the Baltic Sea. Before the First World War 20.6 per cent of all Russian imports and 28 per cent of all Russian exports passed through the Latvian territory alone. This was not only because Latvia is situated on the most direct trade routes between Russia and Western Europe but also because of her excellent harbors—Riga, Liepaja (Libau), and Ventspils (Windau). Three of Russia's principal railroad lines converged on these ports. In 1912 the port of St. Petersburg handled 2,500,000 tons of shipping.