“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”

The 1999 Ukrainian presidential election took place during a period of extreme political turmoil. The excitement of democracy had waned, the economy spiraled ever downward, and charges of corruption among the administration seemed the harbinger of communist victory. Nevertheless, Ukrainian voters returned Leonid Kuchma to the helm. Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller, and Gwyn Erb investigate this curious result, using a model that combines economic evaluations, the candidates’ personalities, and ideology. Relatively well-developed partisanship is present in Ukraine and was a major influence on voters’ choice. Surprisingly, economic evaluations had little impact on the Ukrainian vote. Instead, party identification, ideology, and leadership trait assessments led Ukrainians to vote for the “democrat.”

Relations between the center and regions in Russia, being always in the limelight of attention in political science literature, remain a battlefield of different scholarly interpretations. Several narratives shape the current debate on Russian subnational regionalism or, in very legalistic terms, “federalism.” One is bent on applying to Russia such normatively-loaded concepts as multilevel and networked governance, meta-governance, indigenous governance, civil society participation, and others with strong liberal and institutional pedigrees. In this vein, Russia might be referred to—for example, along with Germany and France—as a “post-imperial democracy,” with an implicit anticipation of the prefix “post-” to signify Moscow's commitment to a democratic, rather than imperial, future. Seen from this perspective, with all its specificity Russia still conforms to basic standards of democratic rule and therefore can be approached, described, and analyzed in the language applicable to the liberal west, where institutions mitigate controversies over interests and create consensus over rules of the game.

In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the “taming of the arts.” Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the “revisionist” generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham suggested that the middle-class values apparent in the literature of mature Stalinism might reflect a “Big Deal” between the bureaucracy and the cultural tastes of the new Soviet “middle class,” while Sheila Fitzpatrick maintained that even in the heyday of Stalinism, some prominent intellectuals held positions of “cultural authority,” enabling them to influence the course of cultural life.

Social historians have argued for three decades that the Russian Revolution was preeminently a workers’ revolution. Leopold Haimson was the first to propose, in an influential 1964 article, that workers themselves, and not, as the prevailing wisdom then held, Lenin and the Bolshevik party, prepared the way for the October Revolution. In this article, however, I will argue that in some instances ideological institutions had shaped the workers’ expectations.

The St. Petersburg Passage—a shopping arcade and recreation complex, comprising restaurants, exhibitions, amateur theater, and the Literary Fund—was a remarkable center of public life in imperial Russia. Contemporary journalists wrote incessantly about the Passage, celebrating the various forms of popular entertainment that it offered. In his strange unfinished story “The Crocodile,” which also takes place in the Russian arcade, Fedor Dostoevskii parodies this trivial discourse of the daily press. Urban spectacles and their refraction in the mass-circulation media are the main targets of his caricature of westernized popular culture in Russia. The writer's response to Russian modernity, as it was taking shape in the age of the Great Reforms, is expressly negative. Dostoevskii believed that in a decade defined by the rise of civic consciousness, the Russian press should address vital social concerns at home instead of celebrating ephemeral cultural imports, such as the arcade and the newspaper feuilleton.

Stephen Kotkin is surely right that Russia cannot be understood fully through the lens of its elections and that it is conceptually risky for political scientists to treat U.S. democracy as its analytical point of departure. He also makes a good point that governance, institutional quality, and actual state performance need to be studied along with civil society and political parties.

Fortunately, today's field of political science offers a wide range of works that agree. Without producing a long bibliography, we might mention Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's and Daniel Treisman's recent books on center-periphery relations and governance; Maria Popova's and Peter H. Solomon's research into the Russian judiciary; Lucan Way's study of the institutional underpinnings of authoritarianism; and lively debates on the state's management of the economy and its ability to provide social services.

S. S. Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 to 1849, is usually described as a reactionary. The reason for that judgment is clear. Many of the steps Uvarov took as minister seemed designed to block the realization of the liberal goals set by the reformers who assisted Alexander I in founding the modern Russian educational system in 1801-4. One important aspect of that liberal, modern, system was its “all-class” character. An educational system which admitted students of all classes was perceived by “reactionaries“ as a threat to the established order, despite the relatively small numbers of people involved. Thus, “Uvarov was disturbed by the trickle of students from lower classes who were finding their way into the universities. As in secondary schools, the admission of such students was hindered by legalistic formalities and an increase in tuition fees.“

Based on a comparison of the prison experiences of Ekaterina Breshko- Breshkovskaia, member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, revolutionary and Hindu fundamentalist, I ask two central questions: How did Breshkovskaia's story about exile and punishment help establish the tsarist genealogy of the gulag in the western consciousness, while the suffering of political prisoners in British India, as exemplified by Savarkar, were completely occluded? How and why did the specificity of incarceration in the Russian empire eclipse systems of punishment designed by other European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In this article, I argue that the penumbra of modernity was darkened not only by the savagery of the Holocaust and the gulag but also by the brutal violence of western imperialism. Placing the Russian prison and exile system in comparative global perspective opens up new avenues of research in a field that has relied excessively on the intellectual binaries of a repressive Russia and a liberal western Europe.

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

The interwar period in Poland between 1919 and 1939 was punctuated by three significant crises in ethnic relations: the presidential succession of 1922, the Pilsudski coup of 1926, and the “pacification” of the Ukraine in 1930. This article is an attempt to sketch certain aspects of these crises based primarily on records of parliamentary debates. Within the walls of Parliament ethnic conflicts were aired and articulated openly. Here the claimants spoke to and with one another, rather than solely to their own particular clienteles.

The number of non-Polish inhabitants within the frontiers of post-Versailles Poland has been variously estimated at between 30 and 45 percent of the total population, depending on the source, time, and method of classification used in the estimate.

Less than a year before his recent death, the distinguished émigré poet-critic Georgii Adamovich published one of his last essays in the New York Novyi Zhurnal. One section of it was particularly striking. Here was the “dean” of Russian émigré criticism and the author of hundreds of critiques and articles over the past fifty years questioning the purpose of literary criticism and whether there was a need for it at all: “In criticism … what is amazing is that behind all the innumerable articles and pieces of research, even the most penetrating of them, one never discerns the least perplexity about why, in fact, the article was written… Do Tolstoy, Dickens, and the others really require explanation and commentary ? Wasn’t Tolstoy right …that ‘criticism is when the foolish write about the wise’ ?”

In Newspapers and in magazines, as well as in books (including The Encyclopaedia Britannica and The American Year Book) these two spellings are encountered, and a divergence of opinion exists as to which of the two is more correct or more desirable. The following explanatory remarks may be useful, as an unpretentious voice from the past, to those who will be in charge of bringing about a satisfactory solution of Central European problems. These remarks are not prompted, in the slightest degree, by the spirit of antagonism or animosity; on the contrary, they are intended as a contribution toward the removal of controversies, from a wider and more exact perspective, based on personal travels and experiences in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia, including the period September 10–25, 1938.

Accounts of the Russian peasant movement of 1905-1907 have conventionally stressed its violent and spontaneous character. At least in the core provinces of the Central Agricultural Region, Volga, and parts of the Ukraine, where economic relations between peasants and gentry estates were highly exploitative, land hunger pressing, and the repartitional commune still viable, arson and destruction of estates were the most dramatic forms of agrarian activism. Peasant insurrection would crest in the weeks following promulgation of the tsar's October Manifesto, in some cases as the result of willful misinterpretation of that document, more often as a reaction to news of revolutionary occurrences in the cities and confusion among local authorities.

One hundred years ago, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii delivered the principal address to the Moscow Theological Academy. With his first tortuously long sentence the historian created an imaginary continuum, transcending time, between his audience and the saint. His words bear repeating:

The mute scene at the end of Nikolai GogoFs comedy The Inspector General has been described as apocalyptic, metapoetic, and pictorial. It begins when the gendarme announces the arrival of the real inspector general to the town’s corrupt officials: their horrified expressions create a protracted, silent tableau, and the audience (having been told in the play’s epigraph and the mayor’s aside that they are looking at their own “crooked mugs”) is left to stare back at the players for ninety seconds. Gogol' expected this scene to be a transformative moment for all of Russia. But exactly how he meant for the tableau to set up a moral-aesthetic event has never been adequately explained.

As some critics have noted, for Gogol' images of viewers looking at paintings are a means of commenting on the potential power of art over the human soul.

Russia is embarking upon a new path of historical development. Today, as the country gradually liberates itself from the vestiges of a nondemocratic society, it seems especially propitious to trace the subordination in the 1920s and 1930s of Russia's most important social institutions to a nascent totalitarian regime. The Russian Orthodox Church belongs on the list of such institutions. During its long history it frequently exerted a stabilizing, consolidating effect on the nation, especially during times of national crisis; even during the civil war it maintained a neutral position.