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.

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.

In December 1851, Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev, one of Russia's foremost specialists on the history and languages of Central Asia and the Near East, set off from St. Petersburg to build a new career as an administrator in the turbulent borderlands around the city of Orenburg. Grigor'ev's reasons for leaving Petersburg were both professional and personal. Unable to find an acceptable position in either the educational system or the state bureaucracy, Grigor'ev, formerly a professor at the Richelieu Lycee in Odessa, had subsisted for several years as assistant editor of the journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by 1851, with little prospect for advancement, he was willing to look further afield for employment. Grigor'ev's biographer also alludes to personal problems—a painful conflict with a close friend that made his presence in St. Petersburg unpleasant if not unbearable.

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.

Infamously, the 1991 Bulgarian Constitution contains a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” In the early 1990s, the neo-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party invoked this provision when it asked the country's Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional the political party of the beleaguered Turkish minority. In this article, Venelin I. Ganev analyzes the conflicting arguments presented in the course of the constitutional trial that ensued and shows how the justices’ anxieties about the possible effects of politicized ethnicity were interwoven into broader debates about the scope of the constitutional normative shift that marked the end of the communist era, about the relevance of historical memory to constitutional reasoning, and about the nature of democratic politics in a multiethnic society. Ganev also argues that the constitutional interpretation articulated by the Court has become an essential component of Bulgaria's emerging political order. More broadly, he illuminates the complexity of some of the major issues that frame the study of ethnopolitics in postcommunist eastern Europe: the varied dimensions of the “politics of remembrance“; the ambiguities of transitional justice; the dilemmas inherent in the construction of a rights-centered legality; and the challenges involved in establishing a forward-looking, pluralist system of governance.

In this article Ann Komaromi proposes a new critical look at the history of Soviet dissidence by way of samizdat and the idea of a private-public sphere. Samizdat is defined in a less familiar way, as a particular mode of existence of the text, rather than in terms of political opposition or a social agenda. This allows for a broader view of dissidence that includes familiar phenomena like the civil rights or democratic movement, along with relatively little known national, cultural, musical, artistic, poetic, and philosophical groups. The multiple perspectives of Soviet dissidence correspond to a decentered view of a mixed private-public sphere that resembles Nancy Fraser's modification of Jürgen Habermas's classic public sphere. This model of a private-public sphere provokes new questions about unofficial institutions and structures, the dialectic between private and public impulses in Soviet samizdat, and the relationship of dissidents to foreign individuals and organizations. The empirical basis for this analysis is a survey of Soviet samizdat periodicals from 1956 to 1986.

In recent years, there has been a minor explosion of interest in Aleksandr Bogdanov and other radical Russian intellectuals of pre-Stalinist days. After being in limbo for half a century, their ideas seem almost fresh and vibrant: Set against subsequent Soviet history, their aborted visions of a socialist future seem to give a sense of what might have been. And who knows—in the Gorbachev period, as the Soviet Union sorts out its problems and policies, some of their ideas might enjoy a new lease on life. For these and other reasons, they have recently attracted special interest.

Of course, in Bogdanov's case, there is much to be interested in. Born Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii in 1873, Bogdanov trained as a physician in Moscow and Khar'kov, worked briefly as a psychiatrist, and published widely on philosophy, politics, social theory, social psychology, economics, and culture.

Boris El'tsin's abrupt departure from the presidency on New Year's Eve 1999 began a new phase in Russia's postcommunist political development. With the presidency no longer occupied by the author of the constitution, the question arises whether his successor will consider himself more bound by the constitutional arrangements in place since 1993, or less. Rather than to speculate on Vladimir Putin's political personality, this paper will instead examine the record of president-parliament relations since 1993 for indications concerning whether Russia's institutions have begun to settle into those of a consolidated constitutional democracy.

This paper is programmatic: it defines the concept of “phantom borders” and describes its heuristic potential. The proposed approach positions itself between structuralist methodologies that postulate stable social and cultural regional structures and deconstructive viewpoints that reject the former, while focusing on the discursive dimension of regions. The paper takes this tension as its point of departure. Viewed from a situational perspective, phantom borders are neither to be understood as immutable structures nor as purely discursive constructions, but rather as an outcome of the interaction between three interwoven levels, which are simultaneously: 1) imagined in mental maps and discourses, 2) experienced and perceived by the respective actors, and 3) shaped by everyday practices and continuously updated and implemented. Phantom borders are context sensitive. We argue that the topic of phantom borders is not only relevant for research on eastern Europe, but also for research in “new area studies” in general.

In this article, Peter Holquist traces both the institutional culture and personnel of one key late-imperial era agency, the Resettlement Administration, based within the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture. Holquist examines the technocratic ethos of a close-knit set of officials within the Resettlement Administration's central office, a group who from 1906 to 1917 oversaw plans to develop the empire's peripheries as well as incorporate territories annexed during World War I. Crucial to all their plans was a commitment to the rational and scientific administration of the empire's people and resources under the aegis of the central state. This ethos informed policies during the last decade of the old regime and throughout World War I, and both this ethos and this cohort of officials influenced the state policy of Red and White governments during the civil war and laid the foundation for the Soviet state's colonization programs in the early 1920s.

A cholera epidemic that swept through Central Asia on its way to Russia and Europe in 1892 transformed visions and practices of empire in Tashkent, the capital of the Russian province of Turkestan. Jeff Sahadeo argues that the epidemic revealed interdependencies between Russian colonizers and the predominandy Muslim local population, even as it produced ethnic violence. Tsarist officials and Russian settlers ruthlessly suppressed a June 1892 protest against anticholera measures that violated principles of local culture, based on Islam. Central Asian and Russian elites sought accommodation to prevent further violence; poor Russians, meanwhile, received censure for their own opposition to anticholera regulations and violence during the riot. Hopes that anticholera measures based on new advances in medicine pioneered by Robert Koch would display the superiority of European “civilization” evaporated. Tsarist administrators and Russian elites saw in the behavior of Central Asians and poor Russians proof of their inherent backwardness. The city remained under emergency statute until 1917, with administrators convinced of the danger of a revolutionary coalition across ethnic lines.

The essential idea of landscape, that a section of terrain can be appreciated as a visual or aesthetic object, is largely a phenomenon of modern history, tied to processes such as urbanization and the development of tourism. Although the appreciation of landscape in Russia was influenced by European aesthetics, Russia developed a unique approach to its own natural environment, and the Volga River played an important role in that process. When steamship tourism appeared on the Volga in the late nineteenth century, the river became a crucial location for the articulation of a new, scenic aesthetic. But this aesthetic competed with earlier views of Russian landscape, which held that the simple and unspectacular character of the native countryside contrasted favorably with the overly picturesque and inauthentic landscapes of western Europe. Images of the Volga that emerged in guidebooks, travelogues, and visual media took shape in attempts to negotiate between the touristic impulse to appreciate beautiful scenery and more established conceptions of Russian nature as appealing precisely in its lack of picturesqueness.

This article uses life history interview data collected during a project on languages and peace support operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina to consider, as an occupational group, people from former Yugoslavia who were employed as interpreters by foreign military forces. In exploring their opportunities for temporary prosperity and the sources of precarity that were associated with this distinctive form of work, Catherine Baker discusses the socioeconomic transformation of Bosnia-Herzegovina both in light of literature on postsocialist labor and in light of a global “development-security nexus” that may be observed during and after contemporary conflicts. Neither lens is sufficient for understanding the full extent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Baker concludes by making the case for researchers of all postsocialist societies in central and eastern Europe, not just the societies that have direcdy experienced armed conflict, to take account of the global context of security, development, humanitarianism, and intervention.

After the 2008 war with Russia, many internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Republic of Georgia complained that they had nothing, despite the fact that international donors gave more than $450 million in humanitarian aid. What was nothing? How was it related to forced migration? Why did humanitarianism continually focus the IDPs' attention on what they had lost rather than the help they had been given? In this article, I use the work of existentialist philosopher Alain Badiou to argue that humanitarianism creates four forms of absence: anti-artifacts, black holes, imaginary numbers, and absolute zero. These forms of nothingness force displaced people into having nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing, which in turn prevents them from reassembling the fragments of their previous lives into meaningful forms of existence in the present.

On 23 April 1873, the peasant Kuz'ma Rudchenko was found near the village of Brusovka. His head was completely crushed, his hands had been chopped off, and the plank that had been used to beat him had been thrust through his anus, piercing the full length of his body and extruding from his gaping mouth. In 1881, in the village of Mukhovitsie, Kiev province, peasants apprehended a thief and sliced the tendons in his right leg and left hand. In the same year and province, in the village of Iazvinkie, the peasants carved a special toothed stake, so that it resembled a series of arrowheads on one shaft. They then shoved it up the rectum of a suspected thief, with the arrows positioned so that he could not remove it.

Through a detailed examination of institutional discourses in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article demonstrates that formal political institutions may play a more layered role than is allowed by existing theories of nationalist and ethnic conflict. Competing institutional preferences of Bosniak, Serb, and Croat elites are not simply instruments for the achievement of collective or individual goals. They are symbolically salient expressions of collective identity as well. For Bosniak elites, the stated preference for a non-ethnicized territorial framework and majoritarian central government suggest the vision of a multiethnic, but not institutionally multinational, Bosnian political community. Their Serb and Croat counterparts, by contrast, insist on the continued “ethnicization” of the territorial architecture and the central government apparatus. These preferences express an understanding of Bosnia as a state of three discrete political communities. Any attempts at comprehensive institutional reform must thus reckon with the opposing and deeply embedded visions of institutions-as-symbols. The theoretical implications of this work go well beyond the Bosnian case.