This article traces the structural roots of the current crisis in US-Russia relations (the weakening of US hegemony and the resurgence of Russian power), and chronicles the series of contingencies that accompanied Donald Trump's rise to the presidency and his chaotic first few months in office. The details of Russia's influence over the results of the election through the release of hacked Democratic Party emails, and over the composition and policy of the new Trump Administration, are still emerging. The chances of a “grand bargain” between Trump and Putin look increasingly remote, however. Russia's efforts to dabble in American politics seem to have blown back, and made rapprochement between Moscow and Washington more difficult. This is unfortunate, since cooperation between the two sides to resolve a number of pressing global problems, from the wars in Ukraine and Syria to climate change, is urgently needed.

The article analyzes the instrumentalization of death during the first two decades after the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks made use of two trends in the culture of death that took shape during the First World War. One, a cult of the dead communist “leaders and heroes”, and two, the minimalist, non-religious, pragmatic treatment of the dead recommended for “ordinary” citizens, who were supposed to help build new Soviet hierarchies. As a result, by the end of the 1930s, a peculiar hybrid mass culture of death took shape that combined the surviving religious tradition with elements of the Soviet cult.

In a recent letter to the editor of Slavic Review, I took issue with the identification and interpretation of two photographs that appeared in an article titled “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising.” The scenes were mistakenly identified as taking place in wartime Warsaw. While various perspectives may be taken on how one uses and interprets photographs in other disciplines, as an historian, I believe it to be essential that a strict review of the photographs’ origin be examined since they may force us to come to different conclusions about the reality of historical events, and possibly perpetrators of crimes. The crux of my argument follows.

The article presents a biographical reconstruction of the life of the painter Isaak Izrailevich Brodskii (1884–1939) through the lens of his painting “Vladimir Lenin in Smolnyi” (1930). Brodskii (and his work) are shown against the background of the terror of the 1930s, an ideological rupture in his artistic vision and his attainment of personal success. The diaries of Pavel N. Filonov help us to see Brodskii from an unusual angle. The impulse to write articles was an exhibition of “old art” (“Ars Nobilis”), which was held in the exhibition halls of Volkswagen in Berlin from October 18–27, 2002. Two portraits of Lenin by Brodksii were displayed there: “Vladimir Lenin in Smolnyi” and “Lenin reading Pravda” (1930) from the private collection of Otto von Mitzlaff.

I would like to begin this essay by thanking Peter Pastor for his careful reading of my article “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising” which looked at the cultural portrayals of the anti-Nazi revolt and focused, particularly, on contemporary narratives surrounding the underage soldier. By spotting my misreading of the Budapest images, he opened up an important discussion on the afterlife of archival photographs, their (mis)uses, re- and misinterpretations, and crucially, their longevity and continued relevance. I believe it is a timely debate and, as the other essays in this forum show, a debate that is relevant to artists, writers, historians and cultural studies scholars, among others.

On October 28, 1917, Izvestiia published V.I. Lenin's directive on printing, which articulated his vision for reshaping the printing press as the “inseparable” literary organ of the party. Although Lenin's views on printing and publishing were known to his close associates, this directive outlined a clear process upon which the party was able to base its revolutionary goal of total consolidation, thus reshaping local publishing cultures and determining the fate of the ethnic press during and after the Russian Revolution. The end goal of this process was to create an extensive publishing apparatus, which was subservient to party orthodoxy and homogeneity. This article discusses the consolidation of the ethnic press by highlighting the case of the Tatar printing press during the early Soviet period.

The Russian and American media spheres converged to an unprecedented degree during the 2016 US presidential elections when reports of a possible dossier on Donald Trump emerged. This article considers the degree to which the media tactic of kompromat, which is the Russian abbreviation for “compromising material,” can infiltrate the US media ecology.

This essay, with a focus on Baku, Azerbaijan, demonstrates that the need to secure and hold energy resources—and the infrastructures that support them—was critical to the formation of the Soviet Union. The Azerbaijani statesman Nariman Narimanov played a pivotal role in the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan by attempting to use Baku's oil to secure prerogatives for the Azerbaijan SSR. In part, Narimanov gained his position by striking a deal with Vladimir Lenin in 1920, an arrangement that I am calling the oil deal. This deal lay the foundations of Soviet power in the south Caucasus. Lenin charged Narimanov with facilitating connections between the industrial stronghold of Baku and the rural countryside of Azerbaijan and Narimanov agreed to do what he could to help supply Soviet Russia with oil. Lenin put Narimanov in charge of the Soviet government of Azerbaijan, with the understanding that he would be granted significant leeway in cultural policies. Understanding the role of the south Caucasus in Soviet history, then, is also understanding how the extraction and use of oil and other natural resources were entangled with more familiar questions of nationalities policy and identity politics.

This essay explores political cartoons published in various journals in 1917, and investigates the legacy of that year's graphic satire. As many previous works have noted, the revolutions of 1917 brought struggles for the meaning of signs, and in political cartoons there were marked changes in subject matter and visual vocabulary. While previous studies have interpreted these developments as illustrations of political revolution, this essay, which is based on original research, will argue that the fundamental shift that began in 1917 was towards a kind of visual satirical discourse that possessed performative power. Proposing a new conceptual framework for analysis based on theories of performativity, the theoretical contribution of this essay will be to show how graphic satire reveals the performative force of cartoons, by arguing that Soviet graphic satire's aesthetic invites readers’ critical engagement with contemporary discourses, a vision that derives from the political cartoons of 1917.

In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem “To the Workers of Kursk” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anamoly (KMA). Rozhkov's series for Maiakovskii's ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov's less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii's poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Bošković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s—socialist realism.

This essay considers the Russian hacking controversy, which has been a prominent theme of the US Presidential election season. Tracking the context and contours of the scandal, I consider some of the anxieties, phobias and cultural logics that animate it (both in Russia and the US) and reflect on the dynamics that drive it.

As a comic book artist who combines surrealistic and realistic imagery, I am often forced to use different types of photographs. Some of them are just typical references for artists—anatomy, poses, gesture, facial expressions. I prefer, however, to use old photographs from family archives, documentary books, and vintage postcards, in addition to numerous photographs found on the web. I enjoy putting together and mixing various kinds of visuals because every element has its own ghost from the past and the sum of these ghosts, including some added from my imagination, gives me a sense of fullness in my graphic stories.

It seems clear that there is a common ideological foundation linking Putin, Le Pen, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump, Kaczyński, and others, but labeling that ideology has been difficult. Many in the media have called them “populists,” but this term can be misleading and imprecise. This essay focuses on Poland in order to propose a genealogy that transcends conventional divisions between left and right. The phrase “exclusionary egalitarianism” helps us recognize the intertwined commitments to both racism and nationalism on the one hand, and an opposition to inequalities of wealth and status on the other. While the analogy to the radical right of the 1930s is helpful, there is an even closer link to the “national communists” of the 1960s and 1970s.

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

In his pamphlet 5 = 100, published in Knizhnyi ugol in 1922, Boris Eikhenbaum looked back at the first few years of Formalist activity in parallel to the recent social and political upheavals, and compared the deep renovation that the OPOIAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka) circle was bringing about in the field of literary studies to the revolutions that had shaken and transformed the country in 1917. He defined the emergence of the Formal method as a filologicheskaia revoliutsiia. The correlation was not just a seductive metaphor, and not only did it gesture at the principle of the scholar as a public figure—one that the Russian Formalists, with their active participation and transformation of the cultural scene of their city and country, fully embodied. With this essay I aim to unpack Eikhenbaum's concept of filologicheskaia revoliutsiia in its manifold declensions—on the one hand, I will foreground the profound connections between the political turmoil of the late 1910s and the powerful recasting of methods and approaches that the Formalists brought about in the field of cultural studies; on the other, I will highlight the “permanent revolution” that their theories have set in motion by exploring their rich heritage a hundred years after 1917.

This article compares Tomáš Bata's development of Zlín as a company town with the architectural theory of Karel Teige. Despite political differences— Bat’a was a champion of “American” capitalism, Teige a leader of the leftist avant-garde—they had unexpectedly similar ideas about architectural design and city planning. The article uses James C. Scott's definition of high modernism as a starting point to explain these commonalities, historically contextualizing the two men's thinking as a specific iteration of this ideology. Both, for instance, paradoxically sought to incorporate liberal, democratic values (typical of the rhetoric of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia) into their authoritarian plans. This analysis helps explain subsequent, socialist architectural developments, in which Teige's theory and Bat’a's practices were combined. In this, the article contributes to an understanding of Czechoslovakia's post-1948 cultural history not in terms of impositions from Moscow, but as building on native institutions.