This article investigates the impact conceptions of national identity have on mass support for political and economic reform in Ukraine. After laying out the theoretical linkage between national identity and models of political and economic development, it uses a 2001 mass public opinion survey to assess the influence of two competing versions of national identity—Eastern Slavic and Ethnic Ukrainian—on reformist attitudes in Ukraine. Bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis demonstrate that an Ethnic Ukrainian national identity is associated with pro-democratic and pro-market orientations, while the Eastern Slavic national identity is associated with antidemocratic and antimarket orientations. Furthermore, the apparent effect of national identity is stronger than that of other factors that scholars have typically argued promote backing for democracy and capitalism in the postcommunist region, including education, age, urban residence, and economic well-being.

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.

Isaac Babel'’s two stories depicting the 1930 collectivization campaign must be placed beside his other story cycles in any effort to understand the writer and his time. The resistance to authority displayed in “Kolyvushka” and the reconciliation reached for in “Gapa Guzvha” have in common an important and hitherto unnoted feature: the implicit adaptation of Orthodox religious ritual to new functions. In both stories the climactic encounter with officialdom shows how vestiges of religious ritual become improvised rites of transition, religious in form but political in content. Placing Babel”s stories in the context of the surrounding cultural and political discourse (including Iosif Stalin's “Dizzy with Success article, but focusing on the pages of Novyi mir, where one of the stories appeared), this article explores links between Babef”s dark depiction of the countryside in crisis and contemporary treatments of collectivization, religion, and literary engagement.

Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the literary journal Novyi mir in November 1962 and provoked excited debate across the Soviet press in subsequent months. In this article, Miriam Dobson uses unpublished letters to the editor to examine readers' responses to this work of literature and as a means to explore attitudes towards the process of de-Stalinization more broadly. While many historians have tended to see the Nikita Khrushchev period as a battleground between liberals and conservatives, these letters suggest a rather more complex dialogue over the legacies of Stalinism. They show that even those readers who embraced the de-Stalinizing rhetoric of the Twenty-Second Party Congress found Solzhenitsyn's text highly disturbing. Distressed by the appearance of camp slang and "vulgar" language within a literary work, readers took the opportunity to express their concerns over the large numbers of criminals released from the gulag, rising crime levels, and the perceived threat they presented to "respectable" Soviet culture.

Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

Critiquing prevalent secular explanations for the cossack-led uprising called Koliivshchyna that erupted in the Ukrainian borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1768, this article identifies religion as the root cause of the uprising. Traditional nationalist and socioeconomic arguments explain Ukrainian violence against Poles and Jews, but do not account for Ukrainian violence against Ukrainians, which set this uprising apart from previous cossack-led disturbances. Increasing conflict between Uniate and Orthodox parishes along the newly reinforced Polish- Russian border on the Dnepr River at the time of Catherine II set the stage for the uprising. As Uniate religious practices had become more Latinized while Orthodoxy in this region drew ever closer into dependence on the Russian Orthodox Church, confessional tensions also reflected opposing Polish or Russian political allegiances. This article reaches beyond the context of Ukrainian national history to bring this event into current discourse on borderland regions and on overlapping political and religious identity.

Founded in 1765, the St. Petersburg Free Economic Society was one of imperial Russia's first and most prestigious public associations. Historians have long recognized the society's significance for the empire's agrarian history, but only recently have scholars begun to pay attention to its contributions to Russian public culture. Focusing on the society's daily activities and public practices under Catherine II, this article argues that the organization's dependence on royal and elite protection transformed it into a patronage network that mirrored the hierarchies found in state service. Despite its egalitarian rhetoric, courtiers such as Fedor Angal't wielded the greatest influence by virtue of their elite status while rank-and-file members like Andrei Nartov assumed responsibility for the organization's dayto- day operations. The lived experience of the society underscores the persistence of traditional power relationships in the empire's nascent public culture and illuminates the survival tactics devised by the first generation of Russia's educated public.

The construction of a cable car in 1935 by Minister Aleksander Bobkowski halted the proclamation of a Polish National Park in the Tatra Mountains near Zakopane. A press and letter-writing campaign organized by Polish environmentalists, headed by Professor Wladyslaw Szafer and the Tatra Society, subsequently convinced the government to create a park. This debate also concerned the architectural aesthetics of the cable car buildings. The episode sheds light on the development of environmentalism in Poland during the partition era and in interwar Poland, as well as related discussions on the role of technology in modern life and aesthetics. Overall, the episode reveals the existence of two competing views of modern society.

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.

A fictional account of the life and death of Sergei Kirov, Fridrikh Ermler’s two-part film The Great Citizen (1937 and 1939) appears unusual due to its lack of action and its fetishization of the spoken word. As an instance of what Ermler called “conversational cinema,” the film defines the outer limit of verbosity and immobility in socialist realist film. The movie’s hero Shakhov mediates between Stalin and the Soviet masses; as a result, the conflict between Shakhov and the Trotskyist opposition represents a struggle between authentic and corrupt linguistic mediation in the film. By appropriating the myth of the Russian writer's martyrdom, The Great Citizen depicts Shakhov’s demise, not merely as the result of a Trotskyist conspiracy, but more importantly as the necessary guarantor of the truth of Shakhov’s words. Ermler's film reconfigures the writer’s role in Russian society by inverting the hierarchy of the written and the spoken word, thus subjugating the myth of the martyred writer to the aesthetic and ideological goals of socialist realism. The Great Citizen demonstrates the importance of Kirov's martyrdom within Stalinist mythology and figures as a paradigmatic work of socialist realist film.

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.

This article focuses on the discourse of backwardness as an aspect of what has been recognized as the dominant trope in east European historiography undl the end of the twentieth century, namely nationalism. Through a survey of east European historiographies, it demonstrates how different notions of temporality are employed. Eastern Europe as a whole and the particular problem of east European nationalism have been constituted as historical objects of study very much on the pattern of anthropological objects, through structural models of “timeless” theory and method and bracketing out time as a dimension of intercultural study. The article proposes a way to circumvent the trap of origins, which carries backwardness as its corollary, by introducing the idea of relative synchronicity within a longue durée framework. This allows the description of a period in terms of linear consecutive developments but also as a dialogical process without overlooking important aspects of short-term historical analysis involving sequential development, transmission, and diffusion.

In May-June 1954, prisoners in the Kengir division of the Steplag special camp staged one of the longest and largest uprisings in gulag history. Steven A. Barnes considers the role played by the west Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists and Red Army veterans who comprised the Kengir pris oner population in an uprising strangely marked by moderate, even pro- Soviet, demands. Through a careful study of the propaganda war between prisoners and authorities and a consideration of the uprising's nominal leader, Red Army veteran Kapiton Kuznetsov, Barnes explores the possibilities and limits of resistance under Soviet rule and examines the gulag in its twilight as seen by both leadership and inmates.

This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Semenov's work. While the Soviet debate on the Asiatic mode of production has been read as Aesopian criticism of the USSR, it may more fruitfully be seen as an argument against a strict five-stage scheme of historical evolution that opened up new possibilities of concrete empirical analysis and a new theoretical role for ethnography as the science of noncapitalist societies. Grinev's use of politarism in the 1990s shows the lasting explanatory value of the concept as well as the need to understand the origins of Soviet intellectual traditions in order to critically engage with them.