Departing from an overview of current mass media discourse on the far right, this article suggests why and how social scientists could contribute to a better understanding of current socio-political changes. In presenting an anthropological perspective, it discusses methodological, conceptual, and ethical challenges to conducting research on and with radical right-wing activists and supporters.

To most Western observers Soviet penal policy means Stalin's labor camps, and what is known about the camps comes from the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In our admiration of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the camps, however, we ought not to accept on faith his version of Soviet penal history. Solzhenitsyn treats Soviet penal practice before 1929 simply as a stage in the development of the camps. He finds the roots of Stalin's camps in Lenin's Russia, and from those roots, he argues, the camps developed steadily and inevitably. To be sure, with hindsight one can plausibly regard the civil war camps as precedent for the later ones and the camps of Solovki during the 1920s as the embryo from which the Stalinist camps grew. But to look only at these developments is to take a selective or partial view of early Soviet penal history, for the civil war period contained the embryo of another penal policy, a progressive policy, which differed radically from that practiced by the Cheka and OGPU. And it was this progressive policy, not the Cheka's approach, which gained the predominant position during the NEP years.

This article will examine how the representation of gender in Soviet art during the second and third Five-Year Plans articulated relationships of domination in Stalinist society. Using female characters to stand for “the people” as a whole, painting and sculpture drew on conventional gender codes and hierarchy to naturalize the subordination of society to the Stalinist state and legitimate the sacrifice of women's needs to those of industrialization. The prevalence of female protagonists was closely connected with the promotion of the Stalin cult: women modeled the ideal attitude of “love, honor, and obedience.” As the triumph of conservative aesthetic hierarchies paralleled the restoration of traditional gender roles, I ask how women artists were to operate in these conditions.

In this article Patrick Patterson offers new perspectives on the critique of Balkanist discourse elaborated recently by Maria Todorova and others. Examining Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian commentary on contemporary southeastern Europe, Patterson concludes that Slovenia's “western” neighbors did not wholeheartedly embrace the campaign by some influential Slovenes to distance their society from other, purportedly “Balkan,” Yugoslavs. Although Balkanism marked the discourse of all three countries, Italian and Austrian opinion often rejected important implications of the Slovenes' exceptionalist rhetoric. Ultimately, the internal dynamics of Austrian and Italian identity and political culture trumped the Balkan - ist logic behind Slovenes' claims to a uniquely “central European” character. Moreover, even in Slovenian sources, Balkanist rhetoric proved less dominant and consistent than the prevailing critique admits. Accordingly, that critique, which treats Balkanism as a rigid, uniform, pervasive, and virtually inescapable “power discourse” of hegemony, should be revised to account for forces that may limit or subvert its power.

In this article Ann Komaromi examines Soviet samizdat based on recendy available materials and fresh critical approaches. Komaromi juxtaposes traditional mythologizing narratives about samizdat and the exposure of such mythology within samizdat and post-samizdat culture. Drawing on recent publications and archival investigations, Komaromi surveys the history of samizdat, its use, reception and resonance. The material form of the samizdat text proves key to understanding samizdat as the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters. That material form, viewed critically through a lens shaped by poststructural concepts, provokes the sense of play between ideal signified and compromised signifier as samizdat's subversive essence. This samizdat text supports both anti-authoritarian playfulness and serious reflection on the threats to the author and the project of culture. Soviet and post-Soviet writers find in the samizdat text an ambivalent marker of their specifically Soviet identity beyond geographical and temporal boundaries of the Soviet empire.

It has been said of so-called old English traditions that on closer scrutiny they usually turn out to date back no further than Queen Victoria. Mutatis mutandis, the same observation can be made about the terminology and concepts of modern Russian history. Closer inves- tigation reveals that in a surprising number of instances they are the product of political polemics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially those involving the Marxists. They are not only neologisms, as historical terms and concepts often are, but neologisms devised for specific political purposes and never subjected by historians to critical appraisal.

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, “Face toward Production.” Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of “rightists” who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

In their Dictatorship over Needs, Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus sought to analyze the nature of domination and subordination in Soviet-type societies in terms of the direct administration of production and distribution by a self-selecting corporate ruling group. This dictatorship, initially justified by the interests of the proletariat and the party's self-assigned role as its vanguard, was perpetuated not merely by coercion but also by various mechanisms of legitimation. Among these was the construction of a self-image of the state as a wise, stern, but also beneficent father. Thus, “everything that a subject may get (consumer goods, a flat, heating, clothes, theatre tickets, etc.) is ‘due to the state'; it is not granted as a right or given in exchange for something else, but provided as an amenity that can be revoked.” It follows that “Soviet subjects ask for favours, their right proper is ius supplicationis.”

This study unfolds the normalizing narrative that is constructed via the Gazifikatsiia Rossii promotional video released by Gazprom. The analysis reveals that the practiced geo-governmentality of gazifikatsiia derives its power from geographical imaginaries of Russia. This bipartite energopower and geo-governmentality receives its essence from the positive and negative materialities of hydrocarbons, the ability to do both “good” and “bad”, which unfolds the way the non-human is embedded in the construction of the social. This construction lumps together the material-nationalistic energy imagination, such as Russia as an energy Superpower, with universal goals such as economic growth and modernization, but also with values such as conservative gender roles. The rationalities and practices of gazifikatsiia geo-governmentality function in and combine several scales: the subject is tied to territories and the nation via gas, the subject is made responsible for the biosecurity of the population, and the global is harnessed in legitimizing the reliance on gas.

For nearly two hundred years the history of the Raskol, the Russian Church schism of the seventeenth century, was a secret one. To be sure, the Old Believers wrote, and in enormous quantities, but they wrote—by hand—secret manuscripts, copied secretly and circulated secretly. And, except for official condemnations of schismatic teachings and the publication of laws directed against the raskol'niki, more or less serious historical investigation started only in the last years of the reign of Emperor Nicholas I and was confined to printed but highly restricted memoranda passed around in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Even the nature and the chronology of early Raskol historiography raise questions about the nature of the schism. Why was the history of the Raskol secret for such a long time? Why were the Old Believers persecuted by the government for so long? Was it all, as the government maintained, because they were ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, fanatical, and disobedient toward the Church?

In this article Chad Bryant examines how Nazi and postwar Czechoslovak officials defined and ascribed nationality in the Bohemian crownlands. Specifically, Bryant looks at how officials struggled to come to terms with so-called amphibians—people who could switch public nationality or whose nationality was unclear. Amphibians challenged officials to define what they meant by “Czech” or “German.” Although the definitions of what made a Czech or a German became increasingly absurd, confused, and contradictory from 1939 to 1946, officials continued to mark individuals as either Czechs or Germans, thus eliminating “amphibianism.” The state had now assumed the sole authority over the ascription of nationality in die Bohemian crownlands. The individual’s right to choose a public nationality—a fundamental aspect of prewar civil society—had been stripped away. The article ends with a glance at other European cases, and a suggestion for future studies of nationality politics in Europe during an era of unprecedented displacement and violence.

This article uses the Soviet state and party archives to describe the workings of a key Soviet economic institution and is designed to serve as a bridge between historical and economic research in the archives. Drawing on the archival records concerning the People’s Commissariats for Heavy and Light Industry, Paul R. Gregory and Andrei Markevich examine how these commissariats interacted with both superiors and subordinates. The principal/agent conflict between vertical orders and "economic rents" from unsanctioned horizontal dealings provide the theoretical framework. Gregory and Markevich explore such disfunctionalities as the tendency to conceal information, to act opportunistically, and to build autarkies as well as the primary measure used to combat these tendencies: splitting the commissariat up.

Just over two centuries ago, on July 21, 1774, at the village of Kuchuk.Kainardji, Russia and Turkey signed a peace treaty which not only marked one of history's great shifts in power relationships, but also became a continuing source of controversy among statesmen and scholars. Most of the terms of the treaty, which ended a six-year war, are clear, easy to summarize, and obvious in their impact. But articles 7 and 14, which dealt with the protection of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire and with an Orthodox church that Russia could build in Istanbul, have been subject to widely varying interpretations. The central question is whether Russia received, under these articles, a right to act as protector of Ottoman Christians. Many historians have contended that the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji did confer such a guardian role on Russia, and some have adopted the opinion that the treaty, especially in this regard, was an example of “Russian skill and Turkish imbecility.“ Other historians have maintained that any such right, under the treaty, was vague. Still others have said it was nonexistent. A reexamination of the historical evidence is long overdue.

This article examines the evolution of socialist internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s through a case study of cultural relations between the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. More broadly, it explores attempts by Soviet and eastern bloc officials to integrate their countries into a cohesive “socialist world” by constructing an extensive network of transnational, cultural, interpersonal, and commercial ties between their citizens. Accounts of Soviet-eastern bloc relations during this period tend to focus on the iconic crises in Poland and Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Yet in the realm of everyday life, the 1950s and 1960s were the apogee of Soviet-eastern European integration. I argue that in the case of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations, the new version of socialist internationalism that developed during these decades was successful in so far as it shaped the lives of ordinary citizens—through participation in friendship societies, pen-pal correspondences, and the consumption of each other's mass media and consumer goods. As these contacts brought the two countries closer, however, they inadvertently highlighted cultural and political discord between them, which ultimately helped undermine the very alliance they were designed to support.

Much criticism of area studies has come from social scientists, some of whom consider area studies to be “soft,” emphasizing description and culture, while social science is “hard,” emphasizing mathematics, rigor, and replicability. Loren Graham, an area studies specialist, and Jean-Michel Kantor, a mathematician, maintain that this contrast is simplistic and undervalues area studies. They show that an area studies approach can help understand, not only society, but mathematics and quantitative approaches themselves. They use an area studies approach to help explain developments in set theory and relativity theory and call for a resurgence of area studies, for both intellectual and political reasons. At the same time, they do not undervalue social science, and celebrate its achievements. As they argue, a sophisticated understanding of social reality will require multiple approaches, including both social science and area studies.

As more than a billion people had done previously, on November 21, 2013, Ukrainian journalist and activist Mustafa Nayem wrote a Facebook post; this post, however, would have a much larger impact on subsequent political developments than most that had preceded it. Frustrated with President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a long-promised association agreement with the European Union, Nayem asked others who shared his frustration to comment on his post. Even more importantly, Nayem wrote that if the post received at least 1000 comments from people willing to join him, they should all go to Independence Square to protest. And indeed they did: starting with just a few thousand people, the protests would swell to be the largest since Ukraine’s independence, particularly after police used force against protesters at the end of November 2013. Eventually, these protests led to the resignation of the government, the exile of the former president, and indirectly to the secession of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country.

In this article Laura Adams examines cultural change in Uzbekistan through the evolution of European-style theater during the twentieth century. The adoption of this theatrical form was part of a broader project of cultural modernization undertaken first by the Jadids and then by the Soviets. It was also an example of a colonial hierarchy of cultures, which deemed European forms to be more advanced than indigenous ones. In spite of a pervasive discourse about the renewal of national culture, however, European-style theater continues to be strongly supported in Uzbekistan today. Adams argues that both modernization and colonialism contributed to an internationalist orientation among Uzbekistan's cultural elites. This orientation makes an investment in indigenous cultural forms less desirable, since they are only intelligible on a local level. European-style theater, however, enhances the value of national culture both by marking its modernity and by communicating national content in an internationally understood and valued medium.

Eric D. Weitz argues that the Soviet Union promoted the development of national institutions and consciousness and explicidy rejected the ideology of race. Yet traces of racial politics crept into Soviet nationalities policies, especially between 1937 and 1953. In the Stalin period particular populations were endowed with immutable traits that every member of the group possessed and that were passed from one generation to the next. Recent scholarship, he suggests, has been resistant to drawing out the racial elements in the Stalinist purges of certain nationalities. Francine Hirsch challenges Weitz’s argument, arguing that the Soviet regime had a developed concept of “race,” but did not practice what contemporaries thought of as “racial politics.” Hirsch argues that while the Nazi regime attempted to enact social change by racial means, the Soviet regime aspired to build socialism dirough die manipulation of mass (national and class) consciousness. She contends that it is imperative to analyze the conceptual categories that both regimes used in order to undertake a true comparative analysis. Weiner proposes that Soviet population politics constandy fluctuated between sociological and biological categorization. Although the Soviets often came close to adapting bioracial principles and practices, at no point did they let human heredity become a defining feature of political schemes. Race in the Soviet world applied mainly to concerns for the health of population groups. Despite the capacity to conduct genocidal campaigns and operate death camps, the Soviets never sought the physical extermination of entire groups nor did they stop celebrating the multiethnicity of tiieir polity. The radicalization of state violence in the postwar era was triggered by die nature and role of the war in the Soviet world, the alleged conduct of those who failed to rise to the occasion, and the endemic unstable and unassimilated borderlands, and not by die genetic makeup of the internal enemies. Alaina Lemon’s contribution suggests that scholars seek racialized concepts by treating discourse as situated practice, rather than by separating discourse from practice. This allows consideration of the ways people use language not only to name categories but also to point to social relationships (such as “race”) with or without explicidy naming them as such. Doing so, however, is admittedly more difficult when die only available evidence of past discursive practices are printed texts or interviews. In conclusion, Weitz responds to these critics.

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in gulag studies: same-sex relations in the camps. In particular, it deals with affective politics of sexuality and class in gulag memoirs and the role of disgust in the formation of sexual and class boundaries. It approaches disgust as existing between the individual and the social, the subjective and the historical, the internal and the external, and traces the ways the gulag memoirs constitute the disgusting, the disgusted, and the boundary between them. At the center of the article are descriptions of same-sex relations in the Kolyma camps of the 1930s-1950s by Evgenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. Based on a critical reading of these and other memoirs, Adi Kuntsman reveals how same-sex relations among the common criminals are constructed by the memoirists as disgusting because they go against gender norms and against class perceptions of sexual morality. Kuntsman shows how these perceptions of the appropriate, embedded within the habitus of the intelligentsia, are transformed in the memoirs into the universal category of humanness, locating the common criminals, and, by association, anyone who engages in same-sex relations, beyond the bounds of humanity.

Most western and all Soviet studies of the Stalinist economy have ignored the role played by the stockpiling of grain in the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s. Thus in his major work on Stalinist agriculture published in 1949, Naum Jasny frankly admitted that data were insufficient to reach a conclusion, merely noting that “stocks from former years probably declined during 1932.” Baykov, Dobb, Volin and Nove said nothing about grain stocks. At the time, western commentators did pay some attention to the possibility that the stockpiling of grain exacerbated the famine. In autumn 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and in spring 1932 British diplomats reported that Karl Radek had told them that, owing to the threat of war in the far east, enough grain had been stored to supply the army for one year.