The war in eastern Ukraine continues to produce casualties and an ever growing number of refugees and displaced persons every day. When urban public space is dedicated to commemorating the dead who have died since the Maidan protests, the frontiers of war become inscribed in the urban landscape and in the everyday life of many Ukrainians. These commemorative spaces are an unrelenting reminder of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that threatens to remake political borders once again. Commemorative practices articulate new understandings of relatedness as symbolic statements that, once inscribed in public space, have the potential to affect the thinking of locals and far outlive the actual armed conflict that produced them.

This article expands our knowledge of nationality policies, center-periphery relations, and Jewish life under late Stalinism, a period which has heretofore been viewed predominantly through the lens of Stalin's terror and marginalization. By focusing on Soviet Moldavia, the article demonstrates that developments in this region followed a different trajectory from those displayed in the center. Local expediencies, derived from the needs of a newly Sovietizing territory with “suspect” locals, encouraged the professional advancement of ethnic Jews to positions of power and prestige previously unmatched in this region. The study explores both the opportunities and limitations faced by Jews in this peripheral region, while placing these phenomena inside the framework of Soviet nationality policies and its accompanying policy toward government professionals. Simultaneously, the article highlights both the legacy of Romanian official antisemitism within this region of postwar Soviet society and the role of the “neo-korenizatsiia” program in displacing Jews within Soviet state structures.

The article offers a methodological reflection on the practical work of reading race in Russian literary texts, especially from the nineteenth century. It makes four key arguments. First, “racialization,” in the sense of an interactive process, is a more productive lens than an essentially static concept of race. Second, race is not only, and not always, a question of perception or meaning-making, but also ideology. Third, the concept of race typically engages notions of class, gender, and sexuality, an intersectionality that merits particular attention. Fourth, critiquing race can be productively furthered by paying attention to anxieties and insecurities that underlie racial hierarchies and biases, which can be revealed through readings against the grain. As we cast new light on Russia's engagement with race, it is essential that the culture of the Russian nineteen-century become part of this reappraisal.

Among the scores of unpublished manuscripts in fond 89 (“Bolotovykh”) of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg is a partially filled album spanning a forty-year period from the early 1780s to the early 1820s. One of the many long-term projects of the multitalented memoirist, landscape designer, and agronomist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov (1738-1833), the album was initiated at Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797, and continued to garner new contributions for several decades after he retired to Dvorianinovo, his estate and birthplace in northern Tula province. It has been summarized by one of the few scholars who has studied it as “an extremely interesting mirror of provincial byt.” The pretty and seemingly mimetic reflection of rural life that it provides is deceptive on a number of levels, however: for on the Russian estate during this period— and, as it turns Out, on the pages of the album itself—there is a good deal more going on than first meets the eye.

In recent decades, historians of prerevolutionary Russia have emphasized the diverse and complex nature of the group of educated Russians that has traditionally been referred to as the “intelligentsia.” In the existing historiography, there have been numerous investigations into various subgroups of the intelligentsia, including studies of noble intellectuals, students, women radicals, religious thinkers, ethnic elites, and members of political parties and of specific professions. The subgroup that contributed more to Russian professions and political movements than any other non-noble subgroup in both quantitative and qualitative terms is also the only prominent subgroup that has been neglected. The members of this neglected subgroup are Russian Orthodox clergymen's sons, referred to throughout this article by the Russian term popovichi?

On occasion of his first lecture tour of India in 2010, Źižek sparked off a debate with Nivedita Menon, a leading postcolonial feminist scholar. The debate revolves around Menon's contention that Źižek's emphasis on European, Christian Universalism as the most proactive model for countering capitalism is ignorant of the heteroglossiac postcolonial histories of South Asia. Menon's response (“The Two Źižeks”) suggests that what Źižek appears to be missing is knowledge of the fallibility of Eurocentric discourses in negotiating the colonial and postcolonial situations particular to the subcontinent. Though Źižek's debates with Badiou and Butler are well known, few outside India are aware of the Menon-Źižek debate. This paper will occasion this little known debate to consider some of the major points raised by Menon against the applicability of Źižek's theoretical arguments toward reading and understanding postcolonial politics and culture.