What if Sheila Fitzpatrick's string-pulling, free-loading Homo sovieticus was compelled to enroll creatively not only his compatriots but also materials and nature in the struggles for survival? What if the fuzziness of private property in postsocialist Romania in Katherine Verdery's classic article “The Elasticity of Land,” had just as much to do with meandering streams, winds, and trees dying or growing, as with the absence of proper legal or cartographic documentation due to “purely social” history? What if figurative spaces such as Alexei Yurchak's “internal exile,” “zagranitsa,” “parallel universe,” or “vnye” were real places and were in and of nature—as Douglas Weiner started to consider when he called his nature preserves and circles of conservationists “little corners of freedom”?

What leads people to vote for incumbent presidents in hybrid regimes—political systems that allow at least some real opposition to compete in elections but that greatiy advantage the authorities? Here, the case of Russia is analyzed through survey research conducted as part of the Russian Election Studies (RES) series. The RES has queried nationally representative samples of Russia's population both before and shortly after every post-Soviet presidential election there to date, those in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. Since Vladimir Putin himself ran as head of the United Russia slate in the 2007 parliamentary election, voting in that election is also considered. The analysis reveals that Putin has consistently won votes based on personal appeal, opposition to socialism, and a guardedly pro-western foreign policy orientation, among other things. Economic considerations are also very important, though they operate in a way that is more complex than sometimes assumed. President Dmitrii Medvedev generally benefited from these same factors in his election to the presidency.

In this article Luke March explores the Russian authorities’ efforts to “manage democracy” through the creation of “parties of power.” It focuses on the quasi-leftist party Just Russia, one of four parties currentiy represented in the Russian Duma and the only one that represents a “parastatal” opposition (opposition owned and controlled by the state). The history of Just Russia tells us much about the dynamics of what Andrew Wilson has described as Russia's “virtual politics“: the regime must continually organize manageable quasi-opposition parties in order to bolster its democratic credentials and channel real social discontent, yet whenever it does so effectively, it quickly creates a potential political threat that must be neutralized. Just Russia has parallels in other authoritarian party systems, such as Mexico under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) or Nigeria under Abacha and Babangida; the main difference in contemporary Russia lies in the remarkable skill with which Russian state actors conjure up and promote ersatz parties. Nevertheless, even in Russia, virtual politics may become real politics in the longer term.

How was terrorism first remembered when it surged up from the Russian underground in the third quarter of the nineteenth century? In this article, Lynn Ellen Patyk argues that memory is indispensible to terrorism and that historians’ attribution of the “invention of modern terrorism“ to Russian revolutionaries in the mid-nineteenth century is as much a testament to these revolutionaries’ mnemonic savvy as to their tactical innovation. The revolutionary-litterateur Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii (1852-1895) was at the avant-garde of this innovation, and this article analyzes his mastery of the implicit mnemonics of the terrorist deed and then of its literary commemoration in Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life (1882). Stepniak-Kravchinskii uses historical narrative to perform essential plot revisions and linguistic reclamations (for example, of the word Nihilist) and employs the device of “personal recollections” to authenticate and lend emotional and sensual immediacy to his representation of “the Terrorism” and its place of origin, Underground Russia.

In this article, Jane Costlow considers the ways in which Ivan Turgenev and Vladimir Korolenko use literary conventions—from gothic setting and narrative voice to metaphors of natural community—to reflect on poaching, violence, usufruct, and rational forestry. While both authors demonstrate concern for the fate of Russia's forests, the narratives discussed here (two stories and a travel memoir) are tempered by a sense of complex moral and political context, and the realities of property law and class both before and after 1861. Costlow considers foresters' advice and assumptions about peasant violence and the need for “enlightened” surveillance but focuses on imaginative writing that refuses simple solutions to vexed questions. Turgenev's narrative emphasizes the moral entanglements of a narrator who wants to intervene and protect, whereas Korolenko's account of the trans-Volga woodlands balances critique and ecological vision in dialogic form.

Recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is awash with emotions. Affective social science, the cognitive poetics of emotion, the philosophy of emotions, the history of emotions, and the outer markers of institutionalization and professionalization—conferences, research clusters, dissertations, publications—together create a solid impression: this is a “turn,” if there ever was one.

It appears that this turn has reached Slavic studies. That it has taken so long may seem surprising. After all, in the western European imagination, “the east,” and Russia as a part thereof, has long been linked with emotion—so unmediated and untrammeled that an indication of quantity sufficed as a description: too much emotion, extreme emotion, rather than a different kind of emotion. Whence the current emotional turn? Let me briefly map some of the roads that led to it.

In this article, Andrei Zorin discusses the generational shift in the techniques of self-analysis that occurred in Russia at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries as revealed in the diaries of Andrei Turgenev, a document that has attracted the attention of many scholars but still remains largely unpublished. Young Turgenev was influenced both by his upbringing in the circles of Moscow Freemasons and by the literature of German Sturm und Drang and especially by the early tragedies by Friedrich Schiller. In his self-reflections, his dramatic love story, and his attempts to translate Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard into Russian, Turgenev demonstrated his quest to resemble his favorite literary characters and the despair caused by his failure to meet these self-imposed standards. Both his quest and his personality as revealed in the diaries can serve as a symbol of the new emotional culture that emerged in Russia and became prevalent there throughout the Romantic age.

Postcommunist Russia has become a paradigmatic case of contemporary authoritarianism in which elections coexist with autocratic rule. In this paper, Graeme B. Robertson argues that it is vital for the stability of such hybrid regimes for incumbents to maintain an image of political invincibility. This means intensively managing challenges both during elections and in the streets. To do this, Vladimir Putin's regime has built on the Soviet repertoire of channeling and inhibiting protest, creating a new system for licensing civil society and crafting ersatz social movements that rally support for the state. This contemporary style of repression has become a model for authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space and elsewhere.

In this article, Diana Mincyte looks at subsidiary farming during the years of intense collectivization and political repressions in Soviet Lithuania, 1948-1953. Through an analysis of how peasants imagined, experienced, and interacted with their environments, Mincyte constructs agricultural labor as a site through which Lithuania's peasants negotiated their relationship to the state and nature. She argues that because the peasants’ physical survival during this period depended solely on the harvests from the farms, the peasants constructed themselves primarily as subjects of land and nature, rather than as citizens of the Soviet state. Instead of focusing on how individuals reinvented themselves according to the ideologies of the New Soviet Man/Woman, the environmental approach she develops here shows that creative agricultural labor played a significant role in the processes of building socialism in Lithuania's villages.

Beside her political and cultural legacy, Catherine II bequeathed to the nineteenth century a certain striking image of the body and spirit of the eighteenth: an aging aristocratic lady, inflexible in her behavioral routines and visibly unaware of historical change. This image was codified by Aleksandr Pushkin in The Queen of Spades and, much later, satirized by Ivan Turgenev in several of his novels. Highlighting the recurrence of these copies of Catherine the Great in nineteenth-century Russian prose, Luba Golburt interprets the narrative and historical implications of fashion and aging in this period that was fascinated with historical knowledge and imagination. The persistence of the past embodied by these figures posed a challenge to the otherwise widely embraced Hegelian notions of progress, underscoring the repetitive and ritualistic rhythms of historical experience. These figures also extended the realist narrative's historical scope and made possible a range of polyphonous temporal structures.