Turkmenistan holds a special place in the Russian and Soviet imagination. At the turn of the last century, especially, Turkmenistan appeared as an imaginative object shaped by both nineteenth century tropes and images of the steppe and by the modernist's revaluation and displacement of these very tropes. This article traces this intellectual history from the late nineteenth century to the fall of the Soviet empire and elicits three main narratives through which the republic was rendered alien: Turkmenistan as a “republic from outer space,” as an “arctic desert,” and as a republic whose southern border is constantly threatened by various forces that can never be successfully defeated. Based on a wide body of literary works and films, mainly from the 1920s–30s and the late Soviet period, the paper points to intertextual references that betray both shifts and continuities within these narratives. The analysis shows how notions of political integration and climatic transformations were constantly countered by alternative imaginary boundaries, contributing to an “imaginative geography” of the republic that shaped the way Turkmenistan was perceived. The development of such an “imaginative geography” of Turkmenistan as an “alien republic” was thereby inextricably linked to its steppe and desert geography, marked by a threefold dialectic between concrete and imaginary geography, a rhetoric of appropriation and of alienation, and between present and mythical time.

In this article, I tell the history of the “national form” of Georgian socialist realism, in light of a theoretical question: Was a national (peripheral) socialist realism possible, or did it only vary the forms created at the center? If it was possible, then what were its specifics, its differences from “central” socialist realism? Furthermore, did it have a reverse impact on multinational Soviet literature? I will demonstrate that “peripheral” socialist realism not only varied the forms created at the center but generated its own forms in a complex interaction of national tradition, modernism (national, European, and Russian), and central socialist realism. I examined a form that is specific to Georgian socialist realism, the “Great Georgian Novel,” an amalgam of history and myth that interprets the history of Georgia; its “metanarrative.” I analyze the development of the national form from the beginning of the socialist realism exemplified by the poetic collection The New Colchis (1937) (the historicization of mythology), the historical novels of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (1939–56), the mythologization of history to the literary de-Stalinization exemplified by the Novels by Otar Chiladze (A Man Went Down the Road, 1973), and Chabua Amirejibi (Data Tutashkhia, 1972–75).

This article explores the myriad ways that Polish and Ukrainian residents engaged in violent and cruel behavior during World War II through a case study of the Chełm region. Under Nazi occupation, this formerly peaceful community exploded into a horrific scene of nationalist and popular violence. Jews were widely assaulted by their Polish and Ukrainian countrymen; Poles and Ukrainians engaged in mutual killings and ethnic cleansing; rural villagers were subjected to countless raids from area partisans; and escaped Soviet POWs were often denounced or otherwise attacked by area residents. Treating this outbreak as a whole, I argue that anti-Jewish violence was embedded in a vicious social transformation that engendered an array of crimes against multiple groups. By interweaving the fates of different ethnicities into a single study, my paper contextualizes Polish complicity during the Holocaust and highlights the sordid interactions between the German invaders, Jewish citizens, and local Christian society.

The keyword socialist modernity has often served as the yardstick for scholarship on socialist urban histories. Many have stressed the so-called fundamental and micropolitical characteristics of ideology to understand the material and social lives of their cities. I argue that such a historiographical stance not only sidelines the variegated and conflicting experiences of urbanization, but also marginalizes how nature and space actively conditioned urban life and its social fabrics. By looking at water and its infrastructure in post-WWII Vladivostok, I argue how groups ranging from technical experts to everyday residents built the city around the cruciality of water supplies. This spawned debates about the limits of urban planning, the corruption of the municipal authorities, and the fight against epidemic diseases. Reframing socialist urbanization as that of “assemblages” opens new avenues that fuse the work of environmental and urban histories of socialism.

This article analyzes the East German and Soviet campaign against the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer in 1959–60 as an exemplary case of how the Cold War and east-west entanglements influenced the memory of the Holocaust and Stalinist crimes. These entanglements were complex and went beyond the relations between the two German states. The article examines also the interrelations with the Soviet Union's propagandistic struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. It addresses the diverse impact that the campaign had in the two German states, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the Soviet Union. It argues that in the German context the campaign contributed to critical reckonings and remembrance of the Holocaust, which it did not do in the Soviet Union and among the Ukrainian diaspora. Moreover, in the Soviet Union it amplified an enemy image of Ukrainian nationalism that still exists today and serves Russia to justify its current war against Ukraine with the accusation that Ukraine is ruled by a “Nazi” regime.

What were the meanings of blackness in the Soviet Union? Marxist ideology offered no clear guidance for conceptualizing blackness, and the Russian Empire provided few historical references. But discrimination against people racialized as black was a major problem of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was unable to ignore. As Soviet institutions and black people from different parts of the African continent and diaspora cultivated political and cultural connections, those connections entailed collisions among multiple ways of conceptualizing difference. Blackness could not easily be translated into Soviet taxonomies, but, propelled by a series of conjunctures in global politics, people never stopped looking for linkages and analogies. Two primary challenges, recurring in different forms over several eras, were: How was the Soviet Union to conceptualize the relationship between the African continent and the diaspora? And how should it relate racial dynamics elsewhere to domestic conditions within its own borders? Drawing on two scholars’ original fieldwork and recent scholarship in an emerging field, this article proposes a novel, interactive approach to the historical construction of blackness and Africanness in the USSR.

Probing the manner in which Kazakhs attained noble status in the Russian empire, this article explores a neglected aspect of the country's social history. Recognizing that nobility is typically associated with landowning in a feudal order, we explore how this status also found application in the steppe. Based on diverse sources and comparison with other ethnic elites, we regard Kazakh ennoblement not only as a way of recognizing a traditional nomadic aristocracy, but also as a method of creating a new native elite beneficial to Russia's colonial project. We likewise propose that the distinctive character of nomads’ pastoral lifeways differentiated the Kazakh nobility from their Russian counterparts and prevented them from making full use of noble privileges. The article thus explores the nature of Russia's social order by interrogating its margins and contemplates both the possibilities and limits of social inclusion for Russia's ethnically and culturally diverse population.

The process of imposing socialist realism on Lithuanian literature, which became a part of the Soviet multinational project after the Soviet occupation in 1940, does not directly follow the general pattern of transferring the Russian model. The agents of the Soviet national literary field not only transposed standard socialist plots to local realia, but also had to transform them in order to legitimate occupation, to reject the legacy of the independent Lithuanian republic, and to reinterpret anti-Soviet resistance. In the process of inventing the national sources of socialist realism and forging “the most advanced artistic method,” overcoming the constraints of the Lithuanian literary tradition proved impossible. This article discusses the encounter of inherited literary structures with the external model and its effects on the development of Lithuanian socialist realism.

Mass population movements of Soviet residents—deportees, evacuees, accused kulaks, refugees, soldiers, and others—are a characteristic feature of early Soviet history. Some of these forms of migratory violence peaked during the experience of total war in the 1940s, but others continued well past the cessation of wartime hostilities. This was the case in the South Caucasus, which narrowly avoided German occupation and the mass civilian upheaval that stalked other parts of the Soviet Union, but nonetheless hosted successive wartime and postwar migrations that disrupted local communities.

This article examines debates, scholarly studies, and literary representations of the phenomenon of racism in socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs’ relationship to whiteness in the 1960s and 70s. I argue that the persistent activism of black African students helped provoke official, scholarly, and public discussions about the thorny question of racism in Yugoslav society during this time. The salience of black students’ accusations eventually made something that was taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s—namely, entertaining the prospect that anti-black racial prejudice existed in non-aligned, socialist, and anti-racist Yugoslavia—into an active subject of debate by the end of the decade. Importantly, the relative candidness with which academic studies and popular literature addressed racism indicates a reflexivity about “racial” questions on the part of socialist Yugoslav society, something that scholarship has largely neglected in favor of focusing on the suppression or elision of race and the inadequacy of state socialist responses to the problem of domestic expressions of prejudice.

The use of silence to characterize the dominant response of occupied populations during the Second World War recurs throughout post-war European literature and is especially prominent in Czech writing. Interpreting the meaning of this silence therefore became central to Czech efforts to establish a preferred narrative about the German occupation in the immediate post-war period. Through analysis of the motif in more and less well-known works published between 1940 and 1946, I shall map the narrowing understanding of the silence of the occupied from its varied, ambiguous portrayal in the now forgotten first Czech novel about the Occupation, Silences by Josef Horal, to its unequivocal interpretation as resistance in Jan Drda's canonical The Mute Barricade. While this narrowing reflects Tony Judt's notion of a “collective amnesia” necessary for national unity and recovery, the marginalization of certain perspectives also presages the broader move in Czech post-war society away from pluralism to nationalist authoritarianism.

In this article I demonstrate how in the post-Thaw period—the period of “soft” socialist realism—the northern indigenous minorities began to (re)invent literary writing and manifest their own version of the canon. Due to the lack of a pre-Soviet written literary tradition, “young” literatures were born as a symbiosis of folklore, beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the surrogate literary tradition of the Russian-European center: the Soviet “master plot.” Having graduated from universities in Moscow or Leningrad, the first generations of writers “(re)invented” a view of themselves as simultaneously native and Other. A consequence of the fact that the authors internalized the role of the youngest “brother” was, among others, the amalgamation of children's and adults' narrative and pedagogical zeal, which combined folklore ethics with socialist realist moralism. The study is of a transitional time: before the local authors had experienced a cardinal reevaluation of their values during perestroika and afterwards.

In this paper, we explore the entanglement of spiritual and economic life through the example of Dagestani, Salafi-oriented entrepreneurs who try to live out their religious ideals in moral economic practices. We ask how living a religious life shapes economic behavior and its moral dimensions, and how the gradual acquisition of the norms of an Islamic economy influences the everyday economic practices of Salafi-oriented Muslims in Dagestan. Drawing on Stephen Gudeman's market-community framework, and offering our research as a corrective, we show how an Islamic framing of everyday economic activities and the gradual acquisition of the norms of the Islamic economy allows Salafi-oriented Muslims to escape traditional obligations, and to some extent, “the state,” while at the same time bestowing meaning on “cold” market relations. As a result, instead of escaping the market-society script (that they criticize), they reinforce it. Our analysis is based on the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dagestan between 2014 and 2018.

The Moscow Tribune was the most prestigious and influential political discussion club in recent Russian history. In the last years of the Soviet Union, the club regularly gathered Moscow's who's who of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia and played a prominent role in the rise of movements that challenged Gorbachev's leadership over reforms. This article tells the forgotten story of the Moscow Tribune to historicize the notion of opposition in the context of perestroika, drawing on comparative studies of dissent in late communist regimes. A close analysis of the debates taking place at the club between 1988 and 1991 shows that Soviet liberals’ dramatic shift towards opposition was reluctant, reactive, and constantly disputed, thus revealing a lasting yet implicit dilemma regarding the need for opposition in democracy.

Aleksandr Aleksandrov, more commonly known under his feminine birthname Nadezhda Durova, is commonly portrayed one of Russian literature's most curious figures. Born female, Aleksandrov-Durova lived, dressed, and identified as male for most of his life, served in the Russian military during the Napoleonic Wars, given a legally-binding name change by Tsar Alexander I in recognition of combat heroism, and became a popular memoirist and fiction writer. My paper seeks to challenge and reevaluate the dominant narrative of Nadezhda Durova—that she was a woman who joined the army out of a sense of patriotism—by focusing instead on the fact that the author's narrative of masculine self has been subverted by publishers and scholars projecting their own interpretations on Aleksandrov's masculinity.

This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland's peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over 200 press articles. I argue that commentators saw the killing as the result of French policies in the factory, and interpreted these in turn as the result of either the Polish government's negligence, influenced by Paris's diplomats, or of global capitalism. The most dramatic arguments framed French policies in Żyrardów as a form of colonialism or slavery. This framing was based on the journalists’ perception of French actions as transgressions of two imagined hierarchies: a geo-racial division of the world, and the local hierarchy of labor.

In recent years, migration, foreign, and domestic policies to regulate movement and international relations have become embedded fields of study. Myron Weiner examined state-to-state relations depending on actions or inactions vis-a-vis international migration and concluded that the internationalization of migration highlighted “new and conflicting interests into considerations of policies affecting migration in both sending and receiving countries.” Stephen Castles, Mark J. Miller, and Ammendola Giuseppe wrote about “globalization of migration,” which is “the tendency” of getting the countries’ foreign and national politics “crucially affected by migratory movements.” Some scholars tried to theorize the relationship between migration, foreign, and domestic policies. Kelly Greenhill investigated widely deployed but largely unrecognized instruments of state influence on “cross-border population movements that are deliberately created or manipulated in order to induce political, military and/or economic concessions from a target state or states.” Andrew Geddes determined that migration is shaped not only by states’ foreign policy interests but also by changes in states’ domestic politics.

The article investigates explicit and implicit state language policies in Dualist Hungary (1867–1918), focusing on its eastern Romanian, Hungarian, and German-speaking parts. It sets the regulation and practices against the benchmark of the linguistic rights outlined in the 1868 Nationalities Act, the earliest modern, liberal language law on the continent. This document served as a central reference for contemporaries, an importance also bequeathed to historiographical accounts. Building on the applied linguist Janny Leung's analysis, the first half of the article engages with features that the Nationalities Act shared with most provisions enshrining legal multilingualism worldwide: a legitimating function, the under-specification of several key sections, and the fact that it referred to institutions on the move. Next, the article turns to more unambiguous paragraphs of the law, distinguishing between those that fit into the logic and were exploited for symbolic politics and those with more immediate, practical consequences for large sections of the citizenry. It further probes into the dispersed agency, ideological and pragmatic motives, and the center-periphery dynamics behind the (non-)implementation of the law.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.