In the thirty years since the Chernobyl disaster we have learned a great deal about the causes of the accident, the human side of the story of those who worked at the station, the operators and their families in the now-abandoned nearby town of Pripyat, the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators,” and the millions of individuals affected by fallout, including some 300,000 who were evacuated from various exclusion zones and heavily affected rural areas, mostly to the north and east in (Soviet) Belarus, Ukraine, and small parts of Russia. What are the long term consequences of radioactive fallout to land and living things? How many people have and will die from exposure to radioactivity? In Manual for Survival, Kate Brown documents the efforts of scientists and doctors in Belarus and Ukraine to understand the short- and long-term impact of radiation exposure on Soviet and post-Soviet citizens, and the challenges even to simple data collection. Her conclusions stand in stark contrast to those of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations (UN) Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation that estimated perhaps 5,000 total deaths. The numbers will be much higher, perhaps on the order of 10,000 or 50,000 excess cancers and premature deaths. But we shall never know with certainty owing to a variety of factors—including the challenges of conducting research in the former Soviet Union, the obfuscation of data in some quarters who appear to seek to minimize the impact, and scientific uncertainty itself.

This article aims to temper the myth of the sound and scale of Arsenii Avraamov's city-wide mass spectacle the “Symphony of Sirens”—a myth that has been largely unquestioned in English-language sound and urban studies scholarship on the symphony. Instead of focusing solely on the symphony's dreaded noise, I pay attention to the symphony's silence—to the limits of what can be known about its sounds. Drawing on Avraamov's untranslated writings and personal correspondences, I investigate how the symphony's ideal of proletarian unity collides with the geographic, social, and sonic reality of the cities it sought to compose. I then investigate the roots of this ideal in Avraamov's personal aesthetic philosophy, as well as his idiosyncratic views on mechanical reproduction. This article will be of interest to those who wish to explore the connections between urbanism, colonialism, sound technology, the mass spectacle, and mass media in the Soviet musical avant-garde.

Architectural practice in the Stalinist USSR saw the sudden and rapid revival of historical forms and styles. One approach interprets this development as part of a reactionary shift in Soviet temporal culture, a “Great Retreat” across all spheres of social and political life. The rival conception sees in historicism an aesthetic of “timelessness” and “perfection,” which expressed Stalinism's self-characterization as an eternal, utopian present. This paper presents a third perspective, arguing that the revival of historicism stemmed, paradoxically, from a future-oriented impulse. This revolved around the charge that Stalinist architecture “immortalize the memory” of the era, to ensure posterity's gratitude and admiration. Accordingly, Stalinist architects drew upon supposedly enduring historical styles, which they expected to remain understandable to future generations. Further, time-tested traditional materials, forms, and decorative mediums were employed to ensure the physical durability of Stalinist architectural monuments. The paper concludes by situating this logic in the global context of interwar monumental architecture and considering some implications for our understanding of Stalinist temporality.

This article contributes to the study of gender and dissidence in the Soviet Union by examining the feud between two significant authors of cultural samizdat and tamizdat—Nadezhda Mandeľshtam and Lidiia Chukovskaia—through an updated feminist lens. It draws on prose unpublished in their lifetimes and presents previously undiscovered writing by Mandeľshtam in order to examine the origins and substance of their feud. I argue that their distinctive modes of authorship date to their relationship with Anna Akhmatova and subsequent differing approaches to her legacy. These approaches reveal their shared conservative attitude regarding gender and moral authority in the nascent liberal Soviet counterpublic as well as their diverging understandings of how the transnational public sphere could help bring about much-needed changes at home. These attitudes shaped how they regarded each other and continue to have salience for our understanding of women's participation in the public sphere in Russia today.

What is the number of casualties from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Historian Kate Brown's important book grew out of apparent frustration with the controversy surrounding the accident. Brown was frustrated with the position of United Nations agencies—often repeated in the media—that only thirty-one to fifty-four died as the result of the accident, most of them emergency responders. The only recognized effect for the general population was an increase in nonfatal thyroid cancer in children. She was also frustrated with the assertions that we might never know the actual death toll.

This article examines the emergence of what I call “spectral performance” in Putin's Russia. Focusing on the Immortal Regiment initiative, I investigate the growing importance of practices that ask the living to act as surrogates for the dead. My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, applying a memory studies frame, I show how the Regiment helps preserve memory of WWII in a time of significant generational change. Second, drawing on theories of political theology and biopolitics, I show how the Regiment reaffirms the Kremlin's sovereign power to regulate the boundaries between life and death while symbolically displacing sovereignty from the “flesh” of the people to a growing ranks of “immortals.” Finally, focusing on the question of representation, I show how the Regiment helps construct an oppressive distribution of the sensible that privileges the dead over the living. I conclude by examining St. Petersburg artist Maksim Evstropov's necro-activist project Party of the Dead as a cultural critique of the Regiment.

In 1941, Sergei Eisenstein had a decision to make. Iosif Stalin commissioned him to make a film about Ivan the Terrible, and in the months that followed he vacillated about how to depict the bloody tyrant. The Nazi invasion in June temporarily distracted him from work on the film, but by the time he was evacuated to Alma Ata in October, Eisenstein was committed to making the defiantly unorthodox, transgressive film that we have. What changed? The bombing of Moscow in July compelled Eisenstein to reflect on his public and private responsibilities and on individualism and collectivism in ways that complicated those categories and clarified his determination to make Ivan the Terrible a serious study of political power and violence. His diary from this period contributes a first-hand account of the bombing, and shows us Eisenstein's thinking about the political implications of interior and exterior at this critical stage in his life and work. This text, unpublished and unintended for publication, gives us a voice and a spectrum of positions that we have not heard before on this key set of discourses in Soviet history.

When the word “bestseller” entered post-Soviet Russia, it was invested with transformational power to remake postsocialist culture according to capitalist models of exchange. From its appearance in the early 1990s to its apotheosis as the name of a new literary prize in 2001, the bestseller demonstrated the active power of cultural categories. It built a data-gathering apparatus around itself, shifted the ways that authors, publishers, and audiences interacted with each other, and even generated new modes of collective creativity specific to capitalist markets for culture. Applying insights from actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, this article focuses on the bestseller, decentering authors and other human agents. The bestseller is shown to be more than a mediator between market forces and other literary actors; it is an active force (a “real object,” in the terms of object-oriented ontology) that plays a central role in the postsocialist formation of “cultural capitalism,” or the system of cultural production and consumption based on market value, fungibility, and exchange.

I met Natalia Baranovska, a Ukrainian historian who is one of the characters in Kate Brown's book, last summer. I also read her work on the Chernobyl (in Ukrainian, Chornobyl) nuclear disaster, but I did not know her personal and academic story until I read the Manual for Survival. Baranovska began to study the Chernobyl catastrophe before any of her fellow historians in Kyiv considered it a legitimate topic for historical research. She made dozens, if not hundreds, of visits to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of documents on the disaster that she brought from the area. Natalia Baranovska is also a cancer survivor.

Russian Formalism and the Ljubljana School are two of the most influential Slavic contributions to global critical theory. Yet, cast as the prolegomena and coda of the short twentieth century's groundswell of critical theory, these two theoretical movements are rarely considered in tandem. This article seeks to challenge that perception on both historical and theoretical grounds. It begins by documenting the introduction of Russian Formalism to Slovene literary criticism, and then traces how the early Ljubljana School, while developing its own theoretical platform, was exposed to certain Formalist principles. After chronicling this historical encounter, the article concludes by considering how these two strains of Slavic critical theory might most productively intertwine, and proposes new ways of encountering Russian Formalism in the Ljubljana School.

During the last years of the Second World War, some 30,000 Yugoslav refugees found shelter in the Egyptian desert from the German occupation of Dalmatia. In the camp El Shatt, the Partisan movement, the nascent UN, western aid groups, and the British Army worked together to take care of the refugees and also to negotiate future relations. The Communist Party, with victory in Yugoslavia in sight, sought to showcase its ability to organize and motivate its future citizens. Thus, the camps in Egypt became a testing ground for state-building back home. The article will explore the tensions that emerged between the self-confident Partisans, the suspicious British and UN officials, and the refugees, who experienced the end of the war in the Egyptian desert.

The Zagreb School of Animation, one of the great achievements of Yugoslav culture, produced hundreds of films from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This paper studies the early development of the Zagreb School and the films that satirized the universal concerns of the post-World War II landscape: industrialization, militarism, environmentalism, nuclear annihilation, and urban alienation, as well as the conforming pressures of commercialization and mass culture. This paper argues that the Zagreb School, which was made up neither of dissidents nor propagandists, breaks many of the stereotypes about artists in the dictatorial states of central and eastern Europe. Its approach to the animation medium is adjacent to the two most important features of Yugoslavia's Third Way experiment: the development of workers’ self-management and a commitment to internationalism. The paper places the Zagreb School in this historical context with a formalist analysis of Boris Kolar's Bumerang (Boomerang, 1962).

In 2011, a monument commemorating a group of Polish academics killed during the Nazi occupation was unveiled at the site of their death in L΄viv, presently a Ukrainian city. This event became the pinnacle of a commemoration that had developed quite autonomously on both sides of the redrawn Polish-(Soviet)Ukrainian border. The commemorative project and memory event underpinning it are especially interesting owing to the partial recuperation of links with the prewar local genealogies of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. This article explores how a special historic occurrence that took place in wartime L΄viv/Lwów became an issue of continual political significance invested with different truth, originality, and identity claims in Poland and Ukraine. The authors focus on various actors who managed to transform memory about the murdered academics into a public commemorative project and elevate the role of translocal links in the successful realization of the commemorative initiative in question. The concluding part summarizes principal lessons pertaining to commemoration of perished population groups in east-central European borderlands that might be drawn on the basis of the discussed case.

Meykhana is spoken word improvisation, verbal recitatives, and a kind of entertainment that in the last two decades has largely spread across Azerbaijan. Contemporary meykhana, although it retains its characteristic rhythm, increasingly resembles popular songs rather than classical Middle Eastern poetry, and is now often being sung, not read. Thus, in its form and function, it has become an element of mass popular culture. At the same time, meykhana is increasingly considered to be one of the national symbols on a par with other traditional musical genres such as mugham and ashig art. Meykhana's contemporary dual nature, which is understood differently by different constituencies within the Azerbaijani population, with their own politicized agenda, is inherently nationalist in nature. Using such aspects of nationalism as ethnicity, tradition, modernization, and folkloricization I analyze different levels of meykhana and the various actors involved in its implementation. This paper contributes a case study to the rich body of literature on nationalism in musical performances by analyzing the ways in which identities are constructed and mobilized.