Tsar Paul I died at a critical moment in the affairs of Europe. During the last fifteen months of his life he had become estranged from Great Britain and Austria, his erstwhile allies, who were being hard pressed by their French enemy on several fronts. By the beginning of 1801 the tsar's government seemed on the verge of concluding an alliance with Napoleonic France. Russia's “cold war” with Britain heated up as the tsar ordered the confiscation of British merchant vessels in his ports and the incarceration of British seamen. A British fleet under Admirals Parker and Nelson was dispatched to the Baltic to deal with the new threat to British interests. Then, quite suddenly, the tsar was dead.

Soviet interest in Sinkiang is a legacy of Tsarist Russia. Although the new Soviet government formally renounced, in 1917, all claims to the Russian spheres of influence in China, it soon reasserted its interest in Sinkiang, and by the mid-thirties, after the construction of the Turksib Railway, it held a virtual economic monopoly there. Soviet attempts to work out a permanent agreement for the "joint" exploitation of Sinkiang's mineral resources date back to October, 1931, and at various times at least four or five agreements were concluded or proposed by Moscow. None, however, ever became fully operative; most of them were short-lived and were concluded without the knowledge of Nanking.

The article examines the aversive emotion of disgust and its deployment in the visual arts and in the premier Russian modernist novel, Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, which has not been considered in regard to its affective poetics before. Based on recent studies of the emotions in cultural history and theory, it explores the philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of disgust as a response to something viscerally and/or morally repugnant. The emotion, induced by the experience seen or imagined close up, provokes the observer's recoil as defined by cultural norms. As such, disgust is performative in spatial terms. Olga Matich argues that movement away from the loathsome image or idea affords the possibility of making the experience cognitively readable or legible, that disgust creates a space in which the individual negotiates her emotional as well as moral response. Yet she claims that aesthetically—and in certain instances ethically—disgust, which is always about the boundaries of the permissible, is also liberating: it offers society, its artists, and their consumers the opportunity to transgress established norms. Through extensive close readings of Petersburg, Matich shows that Belyi's experimental novel does precisely that, challenging the reader not to avert her readerly gaze from that which is unsettling and to appreciate, even to delight in, his shocking metamorphic image-making. She calls Petersburg a modernist exemplar of baroque aesthetics, characterized by excessive affect and grotesque representation, especially of the corpse, invoking the transience of life and dissolution of form.

In the past, newspaper accounts and many scholarly articles have made dire and sweeping predictions about the imminence of civil war or the collapse of the Yugoslav federal state following the death of President Tito. The substance for these apocalyptic visions generally stems from Yugoslavia's nationality tensions, regional inequalities, and external pressure from both the Eastern and Western blocs. The widely accepted forecast is that the three factors will reinforce each other and exacerbate existing societal cleavages, leading to chaos or strict military rule. But most of the “dismal school” analyses of post-Tito Yugoslavia ignore the profound changes that have occurred in the country since 1945 and assume that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) is unwilling or unable to take steps toward increasing the probability of political stability after Tito's death. In this article I shall critically evaluate the societal changes that have occurred and the LCY's response to them.

Russia Never Renounced its rights and the Soviet Government never gave anyone its authorization to dispose of territories discovered by Russian seamen.” These words were uttered during the 1949 meeting of the All-Union Geographic Society of the USSR by its president, L. S. Berg, a prominent geographer and historian of Russian discoveries in the Pacific. He spoke in connection with the extensive claims to the Antarctic which were voiced at that meeting and which were based on the explorations and discoveries of the Russian Bellingshausen expedition of 1819–1821.

It seems to have become the fashion in the USSR to claim for its own citizens of present and bygone days more and more of the inventions and discoveries of Western civilization. Meant chiefly for home consumption, such claims probably are not very important or dangerous to the non-Soviet world, except as they point toward a systematic building up of a national superiority complex and consequent aggressiveness.

The diplomatic entanglements of Bulgaria and the Great Powers in the period 1894-1914 are well known. Political instability in the Balkans and in Bulgaria itself discouraged extensive and sustained German economic penetration of the region until after 1894. Apart from political difficulties in Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Germany frequently found themselves in competition in Bulgaria. Although bound by the Dual Alliance of 1879 and allegedly pursuing a Drang nach Osten, those two great powers frequently worked at cross-purposes both in policies and practices in Bulgaria.

German economic interests in Bulgaria may be observed by examining (a) banking and financial activity and (b) tariff and trade relations. Industrial development including railroad promotions in Bulgaria assumed relatively less significance. German long-term capital investments in 1914 in the entire Balkan area amounted to about one and three-quarter billion marks, a figure that does not appear outstanding in comparison with German investments elsewhere.

It seems clear that there is a common ideological foundation linking Putin, Le Pen, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Kaczyński, and others, but labeling that ideology has been difficult. Many in the media have called them “populists,” but this term can be misleading and imprecise. This essay focuses on Poland in order to propose a genealogy that transcends conventional divisions between left and right. The phrase “exclusionary egalitarianism” helps us recognize the intertwined commitments to both racism and nationalism on the one hand, and an opposition to inequalities of wealth and status on the other. While the analogy to the radical right of the 1930s is helpful, there is an even closer link to the “national communists” of the 1960s and 1970s.

Julia Kristeva, taking a psychoanalytic approach to the question of exile and exilic identity in Strangers to Ourselves and other works, makes a distinctive contribution to the field of exile studies. She constructs the Balkans as geopolitical analog to the psychoanalytic concept of “archaic mother,” the unconscious source of carnage and violence. She proposes “Oedipal revolt” as a kind of national psychotherapy to connect individual Balkan subjects with their unconscious desire for the maternal space— which will free them to be civilized by internalizing the law of the father. Kristeva even sees this Oedipal reconstruction as a necessary precondition to the establishment of “intimate democracy” in the Balkans. In identifying her “archaic mother” as the Balkan east, however, and in formulating her project of Oedipal revolt, she denigrates the Balkans (in particular, Bulgaria, her country of origin) and discursively elevates France—and “French taste“—to the top of her civilizational hierarchy.

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's book The Beaten Track (1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying about turisty and turizm as components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared “crowds” of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.

This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the “Russian Revolution.” In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of “national-liberation struggle” is too reductionist and teleological. The term “Ukrainian Revolution,” which was widely used by the participants of these events, is better suited for an inclusive analysis of this period that emphasizes the significance of the national factor without ignoring the others. Rather than “nationalizing” the story of the Revolution, such an approach highlights the transnational dimensions of the Ukrainian question.

The Russian Revolution inaugurated a period of unprecedented social agitation in Spain, which shared notable structural similarities with Russia. The instability of this period, often referred to as the trienio bolchevista (three Bolshevik years), paved the way for military dictatorship in 1923, and revealed grave defects in the Spanish political and social edifice (the national question, the land question, the inefficiency and corruption of the state, the militancy of the labor movement), which would re-emerge again with even greater virulence in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution provided a powerful stimulus for these upheavals, and the myth of Bolshevism helped spur both revolution from below and counterrevolution from above. This paper will provide a synopsis of the turbulences of these years and will gauge their ulterior significance, setting them in a transnational context. In particular, the paper will assess the specific impact of the Russian Revolution in Spain.

“The attitude toward the national question always constituted in Czechoslovakia the touchstone for political understanding of the defense of revolutionary positions,” the Czech-German-Jewish historian of communism in Czechoslovakia, Paul Reimann, wrote in 1931. In these few words Reimann expressed the dilemma of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. And to this dilemma my study is also devoted.

The peace treaties concluded after the First World War buried the multinational empire and created in its place a multinational republic. The Communists in Czechoslovakia labored hard to define their stand in relation to the national question. The purpose of this paper is to describe closely the policies of Communists toward Slovakia. We shall argue that confusion, inconsistency, ideological perplexities, and opportunism characterized the party's dealings with problems of nationalism and nationalities in that country.

In addition to examining the ideological and artistic origins of Fedor Dostoevskii's portrayal of the underworld in his short “cemetery story” “Bobok” (1873), Ilya Vinitsky probes the theosophical context of Dostoevskii's “fantastic realism.” Vinitsky considers this story a programmatic “theosophical menippea” that artistically “voices” and “tests” Emanuel Swedenborgs doctrine of posthumous self-exposure of the wicked souls who are no longer restrained by “fear of the law, of the loss of reputation, of honor, and of life” and laugh shamelessly “at honesty and justice.” Vinitsky argues that Dostoevskii was interested in Swedenborg's spiritual psychologism as an epistemological method and contends that Swedenborg's interpretation of devils as former humans, with their “earthly” consciousness, inner sufferings, and memories, perfectly corresponded to Dostoevskii's symbolic anthropology. Vinitsky also proposes that the comic narrator of “Bobok” can be seen as a literary mask of Dostoevskii himself, who employs philosophical irony as a means of conveying a metaphysical message in the age of positivism and disbelief.

The intent of the framers of the Electoral Law of June 3, 1907, was, as Peter A. Stolypin would have it, “constitutionalist,” but it was very nearly the antithesis of “democratic.” In reverting from a broadly representational to a Prussian-style, tax-property, categorical basis, Stolypin sought no fundamental revision of the principles underlying the Electoral Law for the Imperial Duma of November 11, 1905. He was committed to the concept of a constitution providing for representative government, but in accordance with his own predilections he wished to revise the terms of representation in a way that would ensure a preponderance of “trustworthy” elements in the Duma while still permitting most major segments of public opinion to be represented.