This article examines debates, scholarly studies, and literary representations of the phenomenon of racism in socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs’ relationship to whiteness in the 1960s and 70s. I argue that the persistent activism of black African students helped provoke official, scholarly, and public discussions about the thorny question of racism in Yugoslav society during this time. The salience of black students’ accusations eventually made something that was taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s—namely, entertaining the prospect that anti-black racial prejudice existed in non-aligned, socialist, and anti-racist Yugoslavia—into an active subject of debate by the end of the decade. Importantly, the relative candidness with which academic studies and popular literature addressed racism indicates a reflexivity about “racial” questions on the part of socialist Yugoslav society, something that scholarship has largely neglected in favor of focusing on the suppression or elision of race and the inadequacy of state socialist responses to the problem of domestic expressions of prejudice.

A vast array of research institutes and cultural organizations began to study the viewer of Soviet cinema and theatre in the years following the October Revolution. These investigations called on the techniques of sociology, psychology, and physiology to make Soviet cultural production more “efficient” and “rational.” Belying the conventional assumption that the cultural revolution of 1928–1932 brought empirical research in aesthetics to an abrupt end, this paper traces the continuation and redefinition of studies of the viewer in the Soviet Union after the “Great Break.” My analysis of the work of the “Scientific Research Sector” at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) between 1933 and 1936 outlines how Stalin-era researchers shifted their gaze from viewers’ tastes and attitudes to questions of perceptual management and effectiveness. Exploring the VGIK researchers’ attempts to determine the “laws” of aesthetic perception and optimize intelligibility, the article brings to light the developments in scientific knowledge underwriting Soviet culture's transition to a form “accessible to the millions.”

In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of "Neschastnaia," the story that he had just finished writing, as "moia posledniaia dochka."' Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter.

Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. "Neschastnaia" is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in which Turgenev himself takes part. This second story concerns the legitimacy of Turgenev himself as much as that of his heroine; it touches on the genesis of Turgenev's own art and his relationship to women writers of the 184Qs. It is a story suggested by the thematics of paternity and legitimacy and also by the very structure of Turgenev's narrative.

The final stage of Muscovy's subordination to the Tatars is a murky topic in Russian history. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Golden Horde fragmented and new political entities emerged: the Great Horde, the Nogai Horde, the Khanates of the Crimea, Kazan', and Astrakhan'. The Great Horde claimed the same supremacy as the Golden Horde, and the khans of the Great Horde demanded the tribute and the submission which Muscovy formerly had given the khan of the Golden Horde. As the power of the Great Horde in turn weakened, Muscovy was able to emerge from its submission to the Tatars and function as an independent state.

A country’s multinational diversity does not by itself predict the way this diversity will be reflected in the party system. The pattern of party politics also depends on the context: electoral and institutional rules, differential political assets, and different incentives to cooperate or dissent. To demonstrate variations in the dynamics of ethnic politics, this article examines the divergent ways in which Slovak political parties were organized within the larger political system in two periods—the interwar unitary Czechoslovak state and the postcommunist federal state. Differences in political resources and institutional setting help explain why interwar Slovakia had a hybrid party system composed of both statewide and ethnoregional parties, while the postcommunist state saw the emergence of two entirely separate party systems in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In turn, differing patterns of party politics in these two cases had different consequences for the management of ethnonational conflict in the state.

Like their zemstvo counterparts, the municipal dumas played a major role in determining the quality of life in tsarist Russia from the Great Reforms until the Revolution in 1917. During this period of rapid urban growth, the dumas had the authority to regulate housing conditions. They bore major responsibility for ensuring an appropriate level of public health and sanitation, welfare and social services and for developing public education, transportation, parks, and recreational facilities.

The restrictive municipal “counter reform” of 1892 destroyed some of the promise of urban self-government, however, and with few exceptions, city government entered the twentieth century with a reputation for apathy, indolence, and indifference to all but the narrow concerns of the tiny propertied elite to whom local affairs had been entrusted. Perhaps Den', a leftist paper, was too harsh when it characterized the record of a St. Petersburg duma as one of “criminal indifference and cynical unconcern.” But recently historians have taken a similar, if less biting view:

If Old Russian literature had a typical hero, he was a superman. Whatever the field of his activity, he was able to surmount all obstacles with ease. Either he was described as predestined to success, or as so strong that his success was inevitable. This was as true of religious ascetics and martyrs, whose death was only a sign of their final triumph, as it was of princes or military leaders.

Examples of literary heroes who were not so victorious are rare, almost nonexistent until the seventeenth century. One thinks, however, of the hero of the Igor Tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve), or of the heroes of the chronicle tales which depict Russian resistance to the Tartar invaders. But, though defeated, these historical figures are still characterized as heroes in the grand style, unusual men whose tragic fate is in strange contrast to their superior strength.

In his article “Kaufman of Turkestan: An Assessment of His Administration, 1867-1881” in the Slavic Review (June 1967, pages 265-85) Professor David Mac- Kenzie appears to have been unduly sensitive to any critical contemporary comment concerning General Kaufman. In his protective zeal he has sought to undermine the reputation of Eugene Schuyler, one of the most capable American diplomats of that period, whose diplomatic and literary careers were distinguished by perceptive and candid reporting.

Nothing in Eugene Schuyler's writings justifies the generous use of depreciatory language in Professor MacKenzie's article. To claim that Schuyler was “unfair or malicious,” “misrepresented” Kaufman's work, and presented a “distorted picture“ of his regime is unwarranted by the record.

How did the reading material enjoyed by Nicholas I differ from that of one of his stokers? This article focuses on the novels enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers at the court of Nicholas I, from the tsar himself and the members of the imperial family to their servants, shedding new light on certain mechanisms of court culture. Based on archival sources such as the loan registers and the correspondence of the tsar's and the palace staff's libraries, this paper shows how, despite social and cultural differences, these two communities of readers actually often ended up reading the same authors and novels. What distinguished them was less their consumption of different texts than the way in which they read and interpreted the same books and, more generally, the different purpose that they attributed to reading. Based on their position at court and what they experienced in the Winter Palace—a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etiquette, or a place where servants could find otherwise unobtainable books—reading novels could constitute either a form of social control, escapism, or a school of good taste and proper behavior.

Americans have paid relatively little attention to the history of higher education in the United States, and Russian specialists have neglected the history of their own field, even though our foundations strongly affect our qualities as scholarteachers and the circumstances in which we work. One of the most important founding fathers of Russian studies in the United States was Archibald Cary Coolidge, a member of the Department of History at Harvard University from 1893 until his death in 1928, who launched teaching and research concerning Russia and Eastern Europe at Harvard and in many other colleges and universities through those whom he helped train.

Count M. M. Speranskij, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant statesmen tsarist Russia has ever produced, wrote in the Introduction to the Code of Laws of 1809, that the “Russian constitution will owe its existence not to the excitement of passions and the exigency of circumstances, but to the blessed inspiration of the Supreme Power…”. He was wrong. The “blessed” Supreme Power granted reforms to the Russian people only reluctantly and, with few exceptions, always under pressure of revolutionary impact.

Tolstoy the man, whose awe-inspiring personality haunts us still, poses an enormous obstacle to those who wish to write about his work. One frequently encounters interpretations of the novels, plays, and short stories based on Tolstoy's aims in creating them and on what his consciously held values were or are believed to have been. Unfortunately for anyone who attempts this kind of evaluation, Tolstoy, one of the most complex and baffling men who ever lived, is notorious for his self-contradictions. Although we have some good biographies, Tolstoy deserves the attention of a scholar—probably not a literary critic—with a sophisticated view of human personality and the relationship between the individual and society, who will write an analytical account of his problems comparable to Erik Erikson's widely admired Young Man Luther.

Vodka was big business in nineteenth century Russia, was it is in the Soviet Union today. In the 1850s, the total turnover of the trade was at least 200 million rubles, or more than 20 percent of the value of all internal trade. In 1859, the government's share of this huge turnover exceeded 120 million rubles, which accounted for more than 40 percent of all ordinary revenues. As Nikolai Ogarev pointed out, this huge sum was enough to cover most of the peacetime expenses of the army on which Russia's status as a great power depended. Figures for 1859 were certainly unusual; nevertheless, liquor revenues averaged 32 percent of ordinary revenues throughout the period from 1805 to 1862. Vodka was the single most important source of government revenues in this period, and the government had, therefore, a huge stake in the success and expansion of the trade.