In this article Edyta Bojanowska explores the circumstances surrounding the publication, in 1863 in the Dostoevskii brothers' journal Vremia, of a pro-Polish article by Nikolai Strakhov that led to the journal's closing. Bojanowska argues against accepting Strakhov's and Fedor Dostoevskii's retroactive explanations that the article was misunderstood. She analyzes Strakhov's article and the entire issue of Vremia in which it appeared and finds a consistent message in both: that Russia should withdraw from Poland, where imperial success would be either unlikely or too costly, shift its attention from imperial expansion to a domestic agenda, and restructure the empire into one based on the constituent populations' consent. Given Dostoevskii's endorsement of Strakhov's article and his hands-on editorial work on Vremia, this affair suggests a tolerant and pragmatic phase in Dostoevskii's imperial ideology that contrasts with the militant imperialistic punditry of his later period.

Polish modern art was collected by leading figures within America's cultural vanguard. Most prized the art's stylistic innovation; they were likely unaware of the ideological charge that animated modernism's makers. By the end of the 1930s, numerous exhibitions of Polish art had been mounted in the United States; however, few concentrated on strikingly innovative works, preferring instead traditional themes, genres, and styles. Nonetheless, Poland's modernist efforts garnered popular success at the New York World's Fair of 1939. The modern art from other central and eastern European nations was actively promoted by its makers, who had immigrated to the United States. Poland's modern art did not benefit from a similar presence, its modernists having mostly elected to remain in their native land. The paucity of Polish artists in 1930s America compromised their chance to exercise an influential role just as the United States was consolidating an international canon of modern art.

In this article Andreas Schönle explores the treatment of ruins in the Romantic period, in particular the propensity toward holistic reconstruction, rather than preservation of architectural heritage. He argues that the Romantic disregard of extant heritage harks back to the Sentimentalist infatuation with the fleetingness of life and dramatization of loss, that this melancholy feeling stoked a sense of national victimization, and that it legitimated an imaginary reinvention of the past and the constructedness of collective memory. The Church of the Tithe in Kiev serves as a case study illustrating that the Romantic commitment to totality has resulted in the significant destruction of architecture. Depictions of its ruins in travel accounts and in the writings of Vadim Passek and Andrei Murav'ev evidence a marked desire to exacerbate the sense of loss rather than to describe and valorize the remains. This disregard of heritage reprises the Sentimentalist infatuation with melancholy prominently deployed by Nikolai Karamzin. A comparison with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in England indicates that in Russia the invention of a national style of architecture required a much more radical imposition upon the historical landscape.

The Czech Group of Fine Artists published their journal, Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly, 1911-1914) to justify their abstraction and their interest in French cubism in response to criticism that denigrated their work as incomprehensible and foreign. In this article, Naomi Hume argues that the Group's strategy was fundamentally at odds with how avantgardes have been understood to operate in scholarship on modernism. Rather than asserting a break with the past, the Group applied new Viennese art historical approaches—particularly those of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, and Vincenc Kramář—to draw parallels between their work and prior art objects that departed from mimesis. They equated their radical style with what Riegl called anachronisms in art's development, moments when an independent will to form emerges from the mainstream. By bringing French cubist ideas into dialogue with the inherent spirituality of their own national tradition, the Group saw themselves as reinvigorating Czech art.

This article demonstrates that it was the public sphere shaped by the Kazan city duma and the local press, rather than the tsarist state alone, that strengthened Muslim identity among the urban Tatars. Norihiro Naganawa argues that the invocation of the empire's ruling principle of religious tolerance split the duma along confessional lines and undermined its arbitrating role. He also examines the political discussions among the local Tatar intellectuals over the timing and meaning of Islamic holidays. While the Spiritual Assembly, the long-standing hub of Muslim-state interaction, provided leverage for the mullahs in their efforts to maintain a secure domain for religion, this security dissipated as it became entangled in the competition for authority among increasingly numerous actors speaking for Islam and nation. Naganawa also suggests that late imperial Russia was confronted by the profound theoretical challenge of religious pluralism, to which not tsarism, nor liberal democracy, nor secularism had or have easy answers.

By interrogating Putin-era civil society projects, this article tracks the aftermath of international development aid in post-Soviet Russian socialist space. State-run organizations such as the pro-Kremlin youth organization Nashi (Ours) are commonly read as evidence of an antidemocratic backlash and as confirmation of Russia's resurgent authoritarianism. Contributing to recent scholarship in the anthropology of postsocialism, Julie Hemment seeks here to account for Nashi by locating it in the context of twenty years of international democracy promotion, global processes of neoliberal governance, and the disenchantments they gave rise to. Drawing on a collaborative ethnographic research project involving scholars and students in the provincial city Tver', Hemment reveals Nashi's curiously hybrid nature: At the same time as it advances a trenchant critique of 1990s-era interventions and the models and paradigms that guided democracy assistance, it also draws on them. Nashi respins these resources to articulate a robust national-interest alternative that is persuasive to many young people. Moreover, rather than a static, top-down political technology project, Nashi offers its participants a range of registers and voices in which they can articulate their own individualized agendas.

In this article Katerina Clark argues that Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible trilogy should not be taken as an unambiguous example of the revival of the national in Stalinist culture of the 1930s and 1940s. Clark identifies Eisenstein as a “cosmopolitan patriot” and proposes that the film can be interpreted, inter alia, in terms of this orientation, focusing on the role of the west European Renaissance in the film. This link is explicit in the Prologue and in an article by Eisenstein, which equate Ivan's ruthless exercise of power and use of violence with the record of such Renaissance giants as Henry VIII and Catherine de Medici. But the link is also implicit in some of the visual imagery and the plot structure (which draws on the Elizabethan revenge tragedy). In such allusions to the Renaissance, Clark contends, Eisenstein was effectively entering into European debates of the fascist era about “humanism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and internationalism, with a position that emerges as both nuanced and conflicted.

The Russian civil war was a fratricidal climax of seven years of war and revolution that fractured Russian society. Its traumatic effects on postrevolutionary life are beyond measure. In this article Sean Guillory examines memoirs of Komsomol civil war veterans to illuminate the ways the war shaped their sense of self. Guillory argues that veterans' memoirs reveal a shattering of the self where their efforts to narrate their experience as agents of war was overshadowed by their transformation on the batdefield into instinctual beings, imprisoned by emotions, senses, nerves, and muscles. Guillory engages the scholarship on the Soviet self and subjectivity by calling attention to the ways trauma produces a “darker side” of the self, and in particular, how the body serves as a long-term depository for experiences of loss, disorientation, and deprivation.

This article examines Vladimir Maiakovskii's frequent references to statues and monuments in his poetry in relation to traditions of iconoclasm in Russian culture in order not only to shed light on the poet's attitude toward the role of the past in the creation of a new culture but also to investigate the way in which the destruction, relocation, and transformation of monuments, both in the urban landscape and in art, reflects political change in Russia. James Rann demonstrates that, while Maiakovskii often invoked a binary iconoclastic discourse in which creation necessitates destruction, his poetry also articulated a more nuanced vision of cultural change through the symbol of the moving monument: the statue is preserved but also transformed and liberated. Finally, an analysis of “Vo ves' golos” shows how Maiakovskii's myth of the statue helped him articulate his relationship to Soviet power and to his own poetic legacy.

The development-oriented work of Moscow's religious communities is examined in this article, with a focus on how a core group of faith organizations present themselves as offering an alternative vision of intervention and improvement that seeks to protect Russian citizens from what proponents suggest are the shortcomings of previous democratizing and civil society ventures. Staff and supporters within Moscow's faith-based assistance sphere contend that religiously affiliated assistance organizations are successful, not only because they parallel secular development programs in promoting values and practices of capitalism, democracy, and global human rights, but more importantly because they also claim to move beyond these approaches to tend to the well-being and transformation of the entire human being. Consequentiy, proponents argue that faith-based organizations are more attuned to values of humane treatment and civility, thereby making them better positioned to build a new Russian society that brings citizens and the state together in productive and caring relationships. Ultimately, this attention to the perspectives and ideals of religiously oriented development organizations provides a different vantage point for reconsidering the promises and consequences of Russia's neoliberal and democratizing transformations.