The article identifies some of the rarely recalled phenomena accompanying Poland's path towards independence. First is the level of economic, cultural, and everyday integration with imperial centers. Second is the growing intensity of interethnic strife. Third, the social turmoil, at times bordering on popular revolt, started in 1917 and lasted long after 1918. Fourth is the large-scale economic transformation and deprivations that this transformation brought about. Finally is the general longing for restoring law and order, a feeling that facilitated actions by minor groups of nationalists capable of creating at least a rudimentary state apparatus. None of the newly-created states of east central Europe was a result of consequent political action. Rather, they came into existence out of the interplay of social, economic, and cultural factors.

A century has passed since the demise of the Habsburg Empire and the birth of Yugoslavia, and for the last hundred years, historians have tried to make sense of this change. I strive to answer the question, what are the loudest silences of the two states’ historiographies? I employ a mountain metaphor, and argue that although a mountain looks different from various positions, every mountain still has only one shape. I analyze how the turbulent history of the last hundred years pushed historians toward different “truths” and watchtowers, and demonstrate how both historiographies were shrouded around notions of loss and creation, in the case of both Hapsburg and Yugoslav historiographies, respectively. This essay argues that the loudest silence of both historiographies is the fact that historiography itself constitutes, at least in part, the “mountain” of both Yugoslav and Habsburg history.

Beginning with the state's successful promotion of purposeful and patriotic tourism for children in Ceaușescu's Romania, this article argues that we should move beyond traditional representations of the relationship between citizens and the socialist state in oppositional terms that emphasize resistance, subversion, and indifference, leaving historical subjects strangely disconnected from their socio-political context. Children and teachers who engaged in summer expeditions, for example, found self-fulfillment not only by opposing the regime or escaping into alternative lifestyles, but also by pursuing the socialist and national values the regime promoted and by activating forms of youth agency that were built into the socialist pedagogy of citizenship, which encouraged activism, voluntarism, and leadership in youth. To investigate young people's engagement with the socialist state, this article proposes a performative approach that has the potential to not only contribute to studies of late socialism, but also invigorate studies of nationalism and histories of childhood and youth under authoritarian regimes.

“In case of Russian invasion, would you be ready to pick up arms and fight or would you flee the country?” This morally charged question has recently been pre-occupying the Latvian collective imagination. The Latvian Ministry of Defense has conducted several nation-wide surveys to monitor the public's response to it. Focusing on two controversies that recently erupted in the Latvian public sphere, this essay maps the growing militarization in Latvia and the tensions in the symbolic space between the state and the citizen that it brings to the surface. I argue that the recent militarization brings into sharp relief the socio-economic and political tensions created by several decades of postsocialist neoliberal restructuring. To the extent that we can observe here contemporary reconfigurations of the state and political subjectivity, I propose considering the Baltics as not only geopolitical but also analytical borderlands.

Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal relations at the workplace. The study argues that the workplace was a particular context in which a post-Stalinist reassessment of the government's ideology was acted out. To elaborate this more fully, both published texts and archival materials are analyzed in the framework of the governmentality thesis, as developed by Nikolas Rose. In this context, the concept of the “human factor” crystallized different but reconcilable interests between psychology experts and party politicians.

The article examines how the post-WWI, post-Habsburg city-state Fiume (today known as Rijeka in the Republic of Croatia) tried to shore up loyalty and diminish local discontent by providing welfare and economic initiatives, in direct conjunction with how much neighboring states offered. Of particular concern were comparisons with how the Fiume state dealt with the Krone currency crisis, especially as locals in Fiume were very aware of and traded in currencies of neighboring lands using the same base money. The article calls for more work to be done on the dynamic of “on-the-ground” post-imperial Europeans questioning their new governments based on how they compared their lot with their other post-Habsburg neighbors.

In this article, I explore recent efforts to “de-Sorosize” the Republic of Macedonia, arguing that they reveal an obsession in Macedonia—and more broadly in east central Europe—with defending ethnonational interests against assumed interlopers. New, self-proclaimed patriotic associations have mobilized ideas of combined external and internal threats to national existence as though there were a war frontier. This imagined war frontier marks the dividing line between belligerent nationalists, who claim that Macedonian sovereignty and national identity are under threat of extinction, and the Macedonian center-left and liberal (moderate and left-leaning) NGOs, which tend to promote greater inclusiveness in society, are assumed to side with “the Albanians,” and to have a direct connection to George Soros. The case study of Macedonia highlights the outright public rejection of liberal ideals and the key role that populist, militant sensibilities play in the formation of civil society groups in Europe today.

Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”

This paper analyzes a poem by Osip Mandel΄shtam, his 1932 “To the German Tongue,” as it explores and reveals the tensions and dangers of Soviet discursivity and subjectivity. Tracing its semantic unfolding shaped by ambiguities, nuances, and subtle transitions, and illuminating its evocations of the cultural past, I approach the poem as a consistent, if meaningfully opaque, reflection on the Soviet experience. Mandel΄shtam built upon and self-consciously enacted theoretically-informed conceptions of the lyric, the poetic subject, and poetic language developed in Formalist scholarship and adopted in some of his own critical writing. I argue that in the poem, as well as in the criticism which framed it, these Formalist concepts revealed an undercurrent of political signification, made even more evident in the reflections on Soviet political and aesthetic experience in the memoirist writing of a Lidiia Ginzburg or a Nadezhda Mandel΄shtam.

This essay discusses the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 from Kyiv's perspective. It emphasizes that mainstream historiography (that is, a concentration on reconstructing political and military events combined with an elite-centered approach) has exhausted itself. In order to explain the revolutionary events and how they were experienced, new approaches are needed. This essay demonstrates the potential of focusing on “little people,” of examining the revolutionary years from a polycentric perspective, and of broadening our perception of the revolutionary epoch as a way out of World War I. The essay demonstrates how an inclusive urban Kyiv narrative with a focus on ordinary life raises a number of new research questions and provides a variety of fresh topics. It also shows how productive it can be to study “big events” while closely following the life of a city and its dwellers.

This article traces how Polish national activists in the Borderland Guard (Straż Kresowa) constructed the local boundaries of the nation in the multiethnic borderland of Polish-occupied Volhynia. In 1919 and 1920, as Russian imperial structures collapsed and those of the Polish state remained embryonic, these men created a series of exclusions and conditional inclusions that emerged from, rather than in spite of, their nominal celebration of democracy and equality. In addition to debating how far—and on what terms—Ukrainians (or Ruthenians) and Jews could be included in the Polish nation, they also marked out internal Polish boundaries, based on religious, linguistic, economic, class, and affective criteria. Taking readers beyond intellectual debates in Warsaw and toward competitive local questions about the grounds for national membership, the article challenges the usefulness of the broader analytical dichotomy between the “inclusive” (civic) and “exclusive” (ethnic) strains of modern nationalism.

This article discusses the possible ways of conceptualizing the revolutionary and nation-building struggles in the Ukrainian lands between 1917 and 1921. The author argues that these processes, which stemmed from the collapse of two European empires, display features not easily accommodated within the traditional interpretive model of the “Russian Revolution.” In comparison, the Ukrainian concept of “national-liberation struggle” is too reductionist and teleological. The term “Ukrainian Revolution,” which was widely used by the participants of these events, is better suited for an inclusive analysis of this period that emphasizes the significance of the national factor without ignoring the others. Rather than “nationalizing” the story of the Revolution, such an approach highlights the transnational dimensions of the Ukrainian question.

The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.

This paper is programmatic: it defines the concept of “phantom borders” and describes its heuristic potential. The proposed approach positions itself between structuralist methodologies that postulate stable social and cultural regional structures and deconstructive viewpoints that reject the former, while focusing on the discursive dimension of regions. The paper takes this tension as its point of departure. Viewed from a situational perspective, phantom borders are neither to be understood as immutable structures nor as purely discursive constructions, but rather as an outcome of the interaction between three interwoven levels, which are simultaneously: 1) imagined in mental maps and discourses, 2) experienced and perceived by the respective actors, and 3) shaped by everyday practices and continuously updated and implemented. Phantom borders are context sensitive. We argue that the topic of phantom borders is not only relevant for research on eastern Europe, but also for research in “new area studies” in general.

The article recounts the Bolsheviks’ first attempt at organizing the economic life of their young project in peace time following the establishment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. It argues that the Bolsheviks built their regime on a liberal foundation, concretely the gold standard; although this is often noted in passing, it has not been given the socio-economic weight this political decision deserves. In an attempt to establish their monetary authority within their territory—a sine qua non for the formation of state authority—and in international markets, they appealed to the legitimating institution of the gold standard. The prescriptions of that institution led to a set of policies and chronic political anxieties that structured much of the domestic and international policies of the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. The study documents the thinking behind the monetary reform that tied the Communist project to the liberal world order as well as the international economic conjunctures that determined its small failures and eventual success. The analysis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of money as a social institution, and aims to renew the historiographical debate over NEP by establishing its trajectory firmly within the international context that governed it.

This article explores the ideological implications of the Gothic mode in Panteleimon Kulish's first novel Mikhailo Charnyshenko, or Little Russia Eighty Years Ago (1843). I show that the multiple Gothic tropes employed in the novel—from Walter Scottian ruins and towers to exotic demonic villains, uncanny ethnic Others, and supernatural phantoms—produce an intricate play of temporalities, identities, and allegiances that ultimately create a highly ambivalent vision of the Ukrainian heroic past as both an object of Romantic nostalgia and a dark period of chaos overcome by the country's incorporation into the Russian empire. Rather than dismissing Kulish's engagement with the Gothic as a tribute to the fashionable western trend, I argue that this mode serves as a conduit to some of the work's most pressing ideological and historical concerns and ultimately yields a more nuanced insight into the author's complex position as a Ukrainian writer in the Russian empire.

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the “simple Soviet man” serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology.

The relationship between political posters and their intended viewers was the focus of numerous texts in the 1920s; this article analyzes the ways in which Soviet theorists sought to understand this relationship. They operated in an intellectual context that tried to conceive the modern subject as an active consumer and co-creator, rather than a passive audience. Their study of the contexts of viewing, of display practices and of the role of the viewer as an active participant in the creation of meaning, caused concern about the risk of misunderstandings and led to calls for images to address specific audiences with greater clarity. Many imagined that audiences and producers of images were in dialogue with one another, negotiating over the content, form, and function of political art. The image would thus mediate the relationship between individual and state, integrating political messages into everyday life, and aiming to integrate the individual into the process and practice of propaganda.

This article examines how the Jewish experience can change the larger picture of revolution and war in Ukraine and conventional history of “the Russian Revolution.” The case study of Kyiv's Jewish community shows that its creation as an imagined community and development in 1917 was in fact made possible by the war, which served as a catalyst for social development. The interethnic relationships in revolutionary Ukraine were built on the legacy and foundation of prewar tensions, which were reinforced by the ethnicization of politics brought by the war. The collapse of the Russian empire, the rise of nation-states, the emergence of a new order, which was neither known nor universally welcomed, pushed people to transgress old boundaries of social behavior, leading to mass violence in 1919 and 1920.