For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.

Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

National women's organizations were a ubiquitous feature of all of the eastern European communist nations. Although the specificities of these organizations varied from country to country, they were all state-run mass organizations variously charged with mobilizing domestic women and representing their nations at international forums concerning women's rights. In the west, these state women's organizations were treated with suspicion; they were often viewed as tools of authoritarian control, mobilizing women to fulfill party goals. It is rarely considered that eastern bloc women may have used their privileged relationship with the Communist Party to promote policies that actually helped women, or that they could push back at male patriarchal elites by appealing to higher communist principles regarding the woman question. This article is a case study of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement. It demonstrates that this organization, despite its entanglement with the state bureaucracy, was relatively successful in pressuring the Bulgarian Politburo into expanding rights and entitlements to women between 1968 and 1990.

The article analyzes how the nationalist segment of the Russian public has engaged in attempts to interpret and evaluate the Crimean annexation and the war in Donbass. The Crimean annexation was justifi ed in the Kremlin by a novel use of nationalist rhetoric. Initially, this rhetoric paid off particularly well—boosting Putin’s popularity ratings and endearing him to virtually all Russian nationalists. He could present himself as the foremost defender both of ethnic Russians abroad and of Russia’s state interests, stealing the thunder from Russian ethnonationalists and the state-centered nationalists alike. However, in spite of the initial euphoria, the war in Eastern Ukraine has antagonized the nationalist segment of the Russian public which had been won over by the Kremlin only months earlier. Russian TV footage of burned houses in East Ukrainian towns and hamlets prompted questions about why Putin was not doing more to defend them.

Sir George Buchanan, Great Britain's ambassador to Russia during World War I, published his widely read memoirs in 1923. In those pages, he provided an influential account of the response of the Russian people to Germany's declaration of war:

The First Congress of the Peoples of the East was held in. the city of Baku from September 1 to 8, 1920. It has tended, on the whole, to attract attention rather more because of the colorful Oriental pageantry which surrounded it than because of the importance of its debates and resolutions. The first account to become available in the West, for instance, was that of H. G. Wells, who had been in Russia when the Congress was taking place. He reported that Zinoviev and his associates had "held a congress at Baku, at which they gathered together a quite wonderful accumulation of white, black, brown, and yellow people, Asiatic costumes and astonishing weapons.

During World War II, images of mothers constituted one of the most striking—and lasting—additions to Soviet propaganda. The appearance of “Mother Russia” has been understood as a manifestation of the Soviet state's wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its embrace of nationalism. Yet “Mother Russia” (rodina-mat', more literally, the “motherland mother“) was an ambiguous national figure. The word rodina, from the verb rodit', to give birth, can mean birthplace both in the narrow sense of hometown and in the broad sense of “motherland,” and it suggests the centrality of the private and the local in wartime conceptions of public duty. Mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between home and nation, between love for the family and devotion to the state. From this point of view, the new prominence of mothers in wartime propaganda can be understood as part of what Jeffrey Brooks has identified as the “counter-narrative” of individual initiative and private motives, as opposed to party discipline, that dominated the centrally controlled press's coverage of the first years of the war.

From the 1860s to 1917, direct taxation provides a window onto the paradoxes of reform in late imperial Russia. The new systems of assessment that culminated in the income tax of 1916 aimed to individualize government in a regime still ordered by legal estate and collective identity; to recognize the autonomy of the individual while disassembling and reintegrating the person by way of comprehensive assessment; and to promote a sense of citizenship, participation, and individual responsibility while still defending autocracy. Yanni Kotsonis suggests that these tensions were borrowed, along with the new techniques of taxation and of government, from European and transatlantic practice, but Kotsonis also locates the distinctiveness of the Russian case in the historical context and the set of ideological premises into which the practices were introduced.

The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

The article examines the controversial book AZ i IA (1975) by the Russian-language Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov. Ostensibly a study of the Russian medieval classic The Song of Igor's Campaign, the book was quickly understood to be a pointed commentary on the history of Russo-Turkic relations and a vindication of the Central Asian nomads, who were seen as oppressed by imperial domination in the field of knowledge no less than in politics. While Soviet critics noted the tension between the book's scholarly premises and its ideological claims, they chose to ignore the deeper implications of AZ I IA as a hybrid genre that conflates the devices of poetry with the scholarly methods of historiography and linguistics. While earlier critics chose to hail or dismiss Suleimenov's ideas on the basis of their scientific accuracy, this article interprets his poetics and ideology as characteristic of a “Eurasianist” tradition in Soviet letters, represented in this case by the linguist N. Ia. Marr and the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, both of whom can be said to anticipate essential aspects of Suleimenov's linguistic vision and epistemological orientation.

In Any Multinational State the language and content of elementary and secondary education are liable to become controversial political issues. The dedicated nationalist will be concerned about safeguarding the purity of his people's heritage. On the other hand, many parents want their children to achieve responsible positions that call for higher education. Equal access to universities and technical institutes by students of all nationalities then becomes the touchstone of equitable educational policy. This essay seeks to evaluate briefly Soviet educational policy toward the non-Russian peoples that together make up nearly one half of the total population of the USSR (454 percent in 1959).

The problem of educating constituent peoples and ethnic, cultural, or racial minorities equitably is, of course, not limited to the Soviet Union. The classic example of a genuinely multilingual state, with four official languages, is Switzerland. But even in that country, higher education is available only in French and German. Nonetheless, despite their linguistic differences the Swiss remain exceptionally attached to their little country, which was founded in 1291. Not so united is Belgium, a creation of the nineteenth century. In February 1968, for the first time in that country's history, the long-smoldering language dispute brought down a government: the division of the country into Wallonia and Flanders, with a theoretically bilingual Brussels enclave, has not worked out smoothly, nor has the division of Louvain University into French- and Dutch-speaking sections.

Since 1991, the Eurasian republic of Kazakhstan has endeavored to build a recognizable and credible national brand as a resource-rich, multicultural, and stable outpost in an otherwise troubled region of the globe. It is therefore not surprising that Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of die fictitious Kazakhstani reporter “Borat Sagdiyev,” touched a raw nerve with his parody of the country and its people as bigoted and backward. While the Borat satire is both grotesque and spurious, the success of the motion picture Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has provided Kazakhstan with a precipitous increase in its global profile. Using the analytical tool of “nation branding,“ Robert A. Saunders discusses the challenges and opportunities the Borat film presented to the government of Kazakhstan. After some false starts, Kazakhstan has entered into a querulous but symbiotic relationship with Borat's creator to promote its own efforts to build a brand state and hone its national image in the west.

A recent collection of Soviet song texts differs from its many predecessors in one interesting respect. It contains Pavel German’s “Pesnia o kirpichnom zavode,“ better known as “Kirpichiki,” one of the most popular songs of the late 1920s, and a song that for decades symbolized the survival of petit-bourgeois tastes and poshlosf after the Revolution. This quiet rehabilitation can serve as the occasion to examine an aspect of Soviet cultural history that is rarely discussed outside the USSR, namely, the beginnings of Soviet popular music.

Several young Russian and Ukrainian writers responded to the era of Great Reforms by taking up a new enterprise: literary ethnography. Their ethnographic expeditions and reports of 1856 to 1862 manifested new political, cultural and social scientific movements within the empire. They not only investigated obstacles to forging a diverse, multinational population into a common empire, they also called the attention of educated Russians and the Russian state to cultural legacies of the countryside. Some were deemed worthy of preservation; others seemed inconsistent with modern ways. They sought a new socio-political path for the public. In these ways they began to link the various peoples in the empire, the imperial state and educated Russia at a time of social and political disclocation.

Almost every country in Eurasia and Africa has been labeled a "cross-roads" at one time or another. In the Balkans, every country on the Via Egnatia and the Via Militaris was a crossroads simply by virtue of being on the route. In fact, when applied metaphorically, a crossroads need only involve two directions rather than the literal four, and the metaphor often invokes problematic dichotomies—for example, Christian/Muslim, east/west, center/periphery, tradition/modernity—rather than enlight-ening complexities. Still, as crossroads go, the territory of the Republic of Macedonia has seen quite a bit of traffic over the millennia, and the presence of seven different language groups with eight centuries or more residence—Slavic, Romance, Albanian, Hellenic, Indie, Armenian, and Turkic—gives it the same linguistic complexity as Greece, although the latter country pays considerably less attention to its multilingual and multi-ethnic heritage. The illustration on the cover of this issue, with signs in two alphabets and four languages (Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and English), taken in a busy commercial district in the capital, Skopje, is intended both to illustrate the everyday nature of this complexity in Mace-donia and to acknowledge the global processes of which Macedonia is now a specific part.

Using new evidence from forty-seven formal in-depth interviews conducted with Russian citizens in 1998 and 2000, this article dissects Russian popular attitudes toward democracy. Rather than asking the usual question—are Russians democratic enough for their new institutions—Carnaghan examines what Russians find troubling or difficult about their new political institutions and what they would change. Listening to Russian voices makes it clear that much of what looks like flawed support for some aspects of democracy, particularly the operation of legislative institutions and the role of law in organizing society, can be better understood as a fairly nuanced critique of the flawed operation of those institutions. Carnaghan's respondents like democracy in the abstract better than they like the version they have at home. Yet their disillusionment regarding the ability of ordinary citizens to influence officials also means that they are unwilling to work very hard to improve those institutions or to deepen the democracy they have.

Stephen F. Cohen presents a critical analysis of the prevailing view that Mikhail Gorbachev's six-year attempt to transform the Soviet Union along democratic and market lines proved that the system was, as most specialists had always believed, unreformable. Ideological, conceptual, and historical assumptions underlying the nonreformability thesis are reexamined and found wanting, as are the ways in which generalizations about “the system” and “reform” are usually formulated. Cohen then asks how each of the system's basic components—the official ideology, the Communist Party and its dictatorship, the nationwide network of Soviets, the monopolistic state economy, and the union of republics—actually responded to Gorbachev's policies. Citing developments from 1985 to 1991, Cohen argues that all of those components, and thus the system itself, turned out to be remarkably reformable. If so, he concludes, most explanations of the end of the Soviet Union, which rely in one way or another on the unreformability thesis, are also open to serious question.

Five distinguished scholars respond to Cohen's article.

What happens when the modern world intrudes upon an isolated mountain region, particularly one that is a borderland par excellence? Patrice Dabrowski examines the moment of “discovery” of the most remote corner of Habsburg Galicia, the Carpathian Mountain region known as the Eastern Beskids and identified with its rugged yet artistically talented highland inhabitants, the Hutsuls. The discovery was facilitated by an ethnographic exhibition in Kołomyja, organized by the Czarnohora branch of the Tatra Society (Towarzystwo Tatrzańskie), which gained renown thanks to the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph at its opening in September 1880. The transformation of the region from terra incognita into a tourist destination for Poles, Ukrainians, and others has local, regional, national, and international dimensions and sheds light on interethnic relations within multiethic Galicia and beyond. This article represents a historiographical meeting point of studies of nations and nationalism, environmental history, and the study of tourism.

The Russian empire provided Islam a sheltered but precarious place within its borders. Sporadic efforts at forced conversion to Orthodoxy ended in 1773 with Catherine II's edict of religious tolerance, which officially acknowledged the existence of the Muslim community and allowed the free practice of its essential religious rites. Among these, pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) was one of the most sacred. But distrust of Islam and fear of Muslim revolt, fed by an almost paranoid apprehension of pan-Islamic solidarity, were deeply embedded in tsarist policies and attitudes toward pious Muslims.

This article analyzes the development of Soviet scientific future studies after World War II, arguing that the field's theory and methods undermined the certainty of the communist future and laid the foundations for a new Soviet governmentality that acknowledged the intrinsic uncertainty of future development. The emphasis on uncertainty—but also the need for more data that could freely circulate between different branches of government and hence more transparency (glasnost')—called for radical revisions to Soviet notions of effective governance. Whereas some used future studies to criticize the actual practices of Soviet economic planning, others used this new type of expertise to extend personal influence and accumulate organizational power. Both cases, however, made it clear that Soviet governance had to accommodate the shift toward new constellations of power/knowledge in which scientific experts would play an ever-increasing role in shaping policy with regard to a fundamentally uncertain future.