Focusing on the Soviet exile of the Spanish communist and orator Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), Lisa A. Kirschenbaum brings into dialogue two topics often treated in isolation: Soviet subjectivities and the selfunderstandings of international communists. During the Spanish civil war, the Soviet media popularized Ibárruri's performance of fierce communist motherhood. The article traces Ibárruri's efforts in exile to maintain and adapt this public identity by analyzing sources in two distinct registers, both of which blurred the boundaries between public and private selves: Ibárruri's “official” correspondence and her interventions in party meetings. Reading such sources as sites of self-fashioning, Kirschenbaum argues that Ibárruri was at once empowered and constrained by her self-presentation as the mother of the Spanish exiles. Ibárruri's case both internationalizes understandings of Stalinist culture and suggests the possibility of a history of international communism structured around the interconnected and diverse lives of individual communists.

In this article Ann Komaromi proposes a new critical look at the history of Soviet dissidence by way of samizdat and the idea of a private-public sphere. Samizdat is defined in a less familiar way, as a particular mode of existence of the text, rather than in terms of political opposition or a social agenda. This allows for a broader view of dissidence that includes familiar phenomena like the civil rights or democratic movement, along with relatively little known national, cultural, musical, artistic, poetic, and philosophical groups. The multiple perspectives of Soviet dissidence correspond to a decentered view of a mixed private-public sphere that resembles Nancy Fraser's modification of Jürgen Habermas's classic public sphere. This model of a private-public sphere provokes new questions about unofficial institutions and structures, the dialectic between private and public impulses in Soviet samizdat, and the relationship of dissidents to foreign individuals and organizations. The empirical basis for this analysis is a survey of Soviet samizdat periodicals from 1956 to 1986.

The demolition of churches is a notorious episode in Soviet political history, normally discussed in the context of the history of church-state relations. Yet which prerevolutionary buildings were meant to fit into a “model socialist city” such as Leningrad and how this was to happen was also a planning issue. Soviet planners (unlike members of the militant atheist movement) drew a distinction between buildings and their (current or possible) functions. The monument protection agencies were often successful in arguing that buildings of “historic and artistic importance” should be preserved, even in the face of considerable pressure from other city departments (for example, the suggestion that Smol'nyi Cathedral be demolished for the bricks). However, they gave preference to churches that lacked an “odiously ecclesiastical appearance,” were ruthless about sacrificing churches that they deemed to be of secondary significance, and readily agreed to secular uses for “cultic buildings.” As Catriona Kelly shows in this article, most of the local intelligentsia considered these planning decisions to be appropriate; it was not until the postwar decades, and more particularly the Brezhnev era, that attitudes to “cultic buildings” began to change.

In this article, Noor O'Neill Borbieva presents research on the work of Muslim female activists in the Kyrgyz Republic and on the religious fellowships they organize, revealing these groups as important but neglected civil society actors. These religious fellowships are “hybrid,” neither complicit with coercive interests nor fully independent of diem. Borbieva explores how the religious sensibilities of her informants inspired unique responses to the institutions and discourses that otherwise shape their lives as Muslim women and Kyrgyz citizens. These women are engaged in more than a struggle for female empowerment; they are crafting a response to national and international power structures, a response informed equally by their gendered identities and their spiritual sensibilities.

This article explores democracy development efforts in the former Soviet Union as a cultural encounter between the producers and consumers of development assistance. Drawing on literature in both anthropology and development studies, Sean R. Roberts suggests that the divergent worldviews of these different actors in the development process problematizes their interaction, often leading to unintended results. Highlighting a case study of U.S. assistance to Kazakhstan's 2004 parliamentary elections, Roberts also suggests that, although democracy assistance does foster change, this change is both gradual and unpredictable. More generally, Roberts argues that the challenges of democracy development are less related to technical issues than to cultural factors. Furthermore, democracy development efforts in the long term are likely to produce a contested arena in which to negotiate the meaning of “democracy” or acceptable “good governance” in the context of globalization and today's increasingly multipolar geopolitics.

Zbigniew Wojnowski explores Soviet popular responses to Solidarity during the early 1980s, focusing in particular on Ukraine and its western borderlands. Shifting emphasis from internal Soviet dynamics to transnational interactions in eastern Europe, Wojnowski challenges dominant narratives of late Soviet and Ukrainian history. Whereas Alexei Yurchak maintains that members of the “last Soviet generation” were essentially indifferent to the Soviet state and its ideology, popular responses to Solidarity suggest that, in some contexts at least, Soviet citizens still engaged with the state in active and meaningful ways during the early 1980s. Drawing on the rhetoric of Soviet patriotism in various public forums, many residents of Ukraine claimed the right to comment on official policies. In this sense, the types of citizenship that had developed in the USSR after 1945 survived into the early 1980s. Most surprisingly, perhaps, Soviet patriotism provided a crucial source of vitality for Leonid Brezhnev's regime even in Ukraine's western borderlands, which have often been seen as the “least Soviet” part of the USSR.

Liudmila Ulitskaia's 2006 novel, Daniel' Shtain, pervodchik (Daniel Stein, Translator), explores the experience of the Russian-speaking diaspora in the aftermath of World War II through a focus on Jewish immigrants in Israel who convert to Christianity. The novel's treatment of the divisive topic of Jewish to Christian conversion is enabled by the author's reliance on the theoretical and allegorical values of translation. Evoking advancements in twentieth-century translation studies through its broad treatment of translation and critique of the investment in the notion of fidelity to the original, be it language or identity, the novel advocates for the acceptance of the transformations and the resulting hybridity of the Jewish diasporic self. Daniel Stein, Translator specifically highlights the influence of the Soviet nationalities policies and the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe on the identity metamorphoses of Soviet Jews. By promoting the legitimacy of the expressions of Jewish identity by immigrants from the USSR through her novel, Ulitskaia proposes an expanded and anti-essentialist view of Jewish identity that would include individuals traditionally viewed as apostates.

In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.

Based on a detailed analysis of Belarusian politics and the rise of Aliaksandar Lukashenka in the early 1990s, this article explores the sources, character, and impact of authoritarian incompetence and skill on regime outcomes after the Cold War. One type of incompetence—deer in headlights—emerges out of the disorientation and persistence of older regime practices in the face of rapid political change. This type of incompetence was one important but largely unrecognized source of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and other parts of the developing world in the early 1990s. Rapid change in the international environment that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War created novel demands that existing autocrats often did not know how to deal with—even when they had the structural resources to survive. The result was greater contestation and more incumbent turnover than would have existed otherwise.

This article uses life history interview data collected during a project on languages and peace support operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina to consider, as an occupational group, people from former Yugoslavia who were employed as interpreters by foreign military forces. In exploring their opportunities for temporary prosperity and the sources of precarity that were associated with this distinctive form of work, Catherine Baker discusses the socioeconomic transformation of Bosnia-Herzegovina both in light of literature on postsocialist labor and in light of a global “development-security nexus” that may be observed during and after contemporary conflicts. Neither lens is sufficient for understanding the full extent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Baker concludes by making the case for researchers of all postsocialist societies in central and eastern Europe, not just the societies that have direcdy experienced armed conflict, to take account of the global context of security, development, humanitarianism, and intervention.

Movement from the USSR's margins to Leningrad and Moscow, among groups ranging from traders to professionals, intensified in the late Soviet period. Using oral histories, Jeff Sahadeo analyzes the migration and place-making experiences of migrants from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Asian RSFSR, all of whom were often referred to then as well as now by the Soviet host population as “Blacks.” Sahadeo argues that the “two capitals,” despite being closed cities, became critical to advancement strategies for citizens unionwide, inextricably binding Soviet periphery and center. Sahadeo explores how race emerged as an important factor in place making but argues that this can only be understood through its interplay with class, gender, professional status, and other categories of identity. Soviet “Blacks” externalized experiences of difference as they sought incorporation into host societies while maintaining links between their adopted and native homes. Place-making strategies led them to see Leningrad and Moscow, not as Russian-dominated cities, but as modern spaces of Soviet progress.

Drawing on ethnographic and survey data, Madeleine Reeves explores the meanings and impact of large-scale seasonal labor migration to Russia on a group of four kin-related villages in southern Kyrgyzstan. Although remittances have come to figure centrally in domestic budgets of migrant families, it is to questions of political economy that we must turn to understand the shift away from small-scale farming toward migrant work. Reeves examines a range of factors mediating decisions to migrate, including the role of social networks and sibling hierarchies; the emergence of growing economic differentials between migrant and nonmigrant households, and the growing importance for young men of a period of work “in town” (shaarda) in proving their eligibility for marriage. Although patterns of economic activity in southern Kyrgyzstan have changed dramatically in recent years, Reeves argues that new forms of engagement in distant labor markets are also being used to sustain patterns of ritual gifting and expressions of ethnic and religious identity that are imagined and articulated precisely as expressions of social continuity.

In the spring of 1863, Lev Tolstoi, newly married and soon to be a father, began to conceive of the work that would eventually become War And Peace. That same spring he also took up beekeeping. While in practical terms his “bee passion” proved relatively short-lived, it was an exceptionally intense engagement with a miniaturized and uniquely observable biological and social universe. In this article, Thomas Newlin explores how Tolstoi's dual enmeshment in “swarm life”—that is, in the biologically fraught realms of marriage and beekeeping—influenced both the unconventional form of War and Peace and its equally unconventional ideas (in particular Tolstoi's linked conceptions of the nature of history and of consciousness). The implications of a “swarm” model of history ultimately troubled Tolstoi, however; his doubts about the imperatives of biology do not play themselves out fully in War and Peace but instead lurk just beneath its surface.

This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.

In the eighteenth-century, European rulers embraced a common policy of enlightened centralism aimed at undermining the prerogatives of local self-government, a trend that even reached the decentralized Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this article, Curtis G. Murphy investigates an example of an Enlightenment centralist policy that failed. A new reformist king sought to convert the burghers' right to produce alcohol, known as propinacja, into a state-controlled monopoly, but the effort produced only chaos and the diminishment of self-government. Contrary to the center's complaint that insufficient force undermined a beneficial effort, Murphy argues that the law failed because the priorities of the locals did not align with the government's goals and the habits of selfgovernment clashed with the bureaucratic methods of enlightened centralism. Historians of Poland have often praised the centralizing reforms of the late-eighteenth century, but the case of the propinacja law questions whether such efforts justified the costs of destroying self-government in the towns.