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.

The following article, a translation of an essay by Romanian historian David Prodan, summarizes his research concerning three and a half centuries of serfdom in Transylvania, a subject on which he has worked in minute detail for fifty years. The essay presents a global image of the Transylvanian variant of European serfdom, a variant that shows serfdom in its gravest form–that of personal servitude, in which the peasant is bound to both the lord and the soil–and considers how this bondage came about. In this brief introduction, I will place the essay within the context of Academician Prodan's writings and of other work on serfdom in Eastern Europe.

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.

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.

Today, no less than in the days of Lomonosov and Schlozer, the question of the ethnic identity of the early Kievan rulers is a controversial one. The late Adolf Stender-Petersen's criticism of the Normanist school, “that it replaced a real, well-founded historical view of the course of things by an a priori plan, in which things were arranged as well as possible,” also applies—mutatis mutandis, of course—to the historical-sociological method of the contemporary Soviet anti-Normanist school. What is needed in the field are good editions, with detailed, objective commentary, of all the sources known to us. Eventually these may lead to the “comprehensive edition of all the sources from which we can acquire knowledge as regards the Varangian problem” envisaged by Stender-Petersen. The edition of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio by Gyula Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins and the commentary edited by the latter may be cited as an important step toward this goal.

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 mention of “gastronomy and Gogol” may immediately make us think of the good-natured pair in Old-Fashioned Landowners, who, if they were not eating, were sure to be sleeping. Or perhaps what comes to mind is that remarkable five-by-five figure of Peter Petrovich Petukh, whom Gogol appropriately described as a “round watermelon.” And who can forget how Sobakevich ever so quietly and “innocently” alone dispatched that noble sturgeon at the breakfast party given by the chief of police, or how the thoroughly tipsy Khlestakov bragged about the “dream of a soup” that was delivered to him in St. Petersburg from no other gastronomic paradise than Paris itself. Nor can we forget Khlestakov's other soup—the one more like the River Nile (with feathers)—which was so ill-received and yet eaten with such alacrity by the starving braggart. Perhaps only Vladimir Nabokov did not laugh at Puzatyi Paciuk and his ingenious way of transporting varenyky to his mouth without moving an inch—and he first had to dip them into a dish of sour cream that was placed on a low barrel in front of him. And what about that pan of fried eggs that was rushed onto the stage in Meyerhold's production of Gogol's The Marriage, in which one of the suitors for the hand of the merchant's daughter—much to the confusion of the others—is called “Fried Eggs.”

In mid-October, 1878, an outbreak of the plague occurred in the obscure village of Vetlianka on the Volga. Eruptions of various virulent diseases were no rarity in the region of the lower Volga, but this particular calamity made a forsaken village world-famous. It embroiled Russia in a violent diplomatic and press campaign with Germany and Austria; it played a major role in the growth of a legacy of mistrust and suspicion of German motives in Russia; it once again made Russians and foreigners painfully or joyfully aware of the lamentable inadequacies of Russian administration; and, above all, it presented Bismarck with a welcome weapon in his campaign for the conclusion of the Dual Alliance of 1879. A purely domestic event, seemingly devoid of any international significance, thus came to play a major role in the development of the foreign policies of a number of great powers.

This article analyzes the causes and consequences of Islamophobia in the Russian Federation following the story of the Russian ban on the works of a scholar of Islam from Turkey, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878–1960), despite the overall positive reception of his ideas and followers by Russia's Muslims. It positions Russia's existing domestic anti-Muslim prejudices, which evolved in the contexts of the Chechen conflict and the influx of migrant workers from culturally Muslim former Soviet republics to cosmopolitan Russian cities, against the background of the post-9/11 global fear narrative about Muslims. These Islamophobic attitudes in turn informed and justified anti-Muslim policies in Russia, as the Russian state, following broader trends of centralization and illiberalization in the country, abandoned the pluralist policies toward religion of the early post-Soviet years and reverted to the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment in the past two decades.

This article analyzes Soviet Woman, the main publication of the Komitet Sovetskikh Zhenshchin (Committee of Soviet Women), during the 1950s and 1960s. Approaching it as a medium of international outreach, the article illustrates how the magazine reflected official Soviet strategies toward developing countries and propagated “peaceful coexistence.” Specifically, it delineates the ways in which Soviet Woman presented Soviet women (especially those in the “Soviet East”) as models of female emancipation so as to persuade women in the Third World of the potential of socialism to effect social and economic progress, and to sustain national liberation. Assessing also reception among readers of its messages about advancement, international friendship, and solidarity, it concludes that Soviet Woman provided women in decolonizing countries an alternative to a return to traditional modes or a shift to western ones by demonstrating the possibilities that the Soviet system held for realizing gender equality and modernization.

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.

This essay, with a focus on Baku, Azerbaijan, demonstrates that the need to secure and hold energy resources—and the infrastructures that support them—was critical to the formation of the Soviet Union. The Azerbaijani statesman Nariman Narimanov played a pivotal role in the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan by attempting to use Baku's oil to secure prerogatives for the Azerbaijan SSR. In part, Narimanov gained his position by striking a deal with Vladimir Lenin in 1920, an arrangement that I am calling the oil deal. This deal lay the foundations of Soviet power in the south Caucasus. Lenin charged Narimanov with facilitating connections between the industrial stronghold of Baku and the rural countryside of Azerbaijan and Narimanov agreed to do what he could to help supply Soviet Russia with oil. Lenin put Narimanov in charge of the Soviet government of Azerbaijan, with the understanding that he would be granted significant leeway in cultural policies. Understanding the role of the south Caucasus in Soviet history, then, is also understanding how the extraction and use of oil and other natural resources were entangled with more familiar questions of nationalities policy and identity politics.

From the 1960s to 1989, thousands of female Polish workers were sent to Czechoslovak enterprises. I analyze how the Polish women used their stay in the CSSR during the peak period of labor force cooperation to escape the dual burden of production and reproduction. My argument is that the advantageous position enjoyed by skilled male workers in state-socialist regimes could also partly apply to the otherwise vulnerable and marginalized unskilled female and migrant work force. Mutually countervailing policies of the two “cooperating” states, which in fact competed for the same workers, forced Czechoslovakia to relax control over the Poles and allowed the workers to choose relatively freely whether to stay in the host country or return. I conclude that these favorable conditions endowed the female Polish workers with agency and empowered them to flee from their determined roles in paternalist state-socialist society.

This article examines how the production of a dividing line, through violence, the accompanying narratives, and the policing of a physical border from 1991 to 1995, shaped and influenced the lives of ordinary people, all residents of Western Slavonia. How was it possible for people to be divided so abruptly and effectively in a community with a history of multiethnic solidarity? How were these new social divisions produced and reproduced over the course of warfare on a social level? By considering new archival sources, in-depth interviews, and recent scholarly publications, this study argues that such dividing line made the process of ethnicization, or of polarization, possible. Thus, by representing the space where the top-level political cleavages, local-level cleavages, and individuals’ beliefs and momentary choices meet, the wartime dividing line effectively transformed former neighbors into political enemies who were no longer familiar, visible, or accessible on a human level.