“Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry: Wartime and Poetic Time” raises questions about the significance of new technology, new media, and the concept of “real time” by showing how poetry, even the new forms of poetic reportage coming out of present-day Ukraine, makes its own time.

This article explores how three popular crime novels from the 2000s articulate postsocialist Poland’s most prevalent conspiracy narrative: that of a hidden network (układ) of communist-era secret service agents that have allegedly penetrated the structures and economy of the post-1989 state, thus “stealing” the transition to democracy and capitalism, and making it impossible for the new system to thrive. Whereas previous research has dealt mainly with the political content of this narrative and the way it has been employed in political discourse, this article focuses on its cultural significance and the multiple anxieties from which it stems, including a growing sense of diminished human autonomy and a generalized suspicion of social systems. The paper contributes to a growing body of work on postsocialist conspiracy narratives that takes an increasingly transnational and comparative approach. The novels analyzed in the paper are Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Uwikłanie (Entanglement, 2007), Marcin Wolski’s Noblista (Nobel Prize Winner, 2008) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Przemienienie (Transfiguration, 2008).

Soviet citizens perusing their daily copies of Pravda or Izvestiia on May 23, 1934, would have come across an essay by the famous writer Maksim Gor΄kii with an unusual title: “Proletarskii gumanizm” (Proletarian Humanism). Perhaps intrigued by this funny sounding but clearly important foreign word, inquisitive readers might have turned to the recently published first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE), which provides two entries for humanism: one referring to “a conventional but not sufficiently precise term used to characterize the culture of the Renaissance epoch, or some aspect thereof,” and a second, much shorter entry concerning “a modern movement in the theory of knowledge that arose in the early twentieth century in connection to pragmatism.” Neither entry makes any mention of proletarian, socialist, or Soviet varieties of humanism. Indeed, according to the BSE, Renaissance humanism inevitably “exhausts its progressive possibilities, degenerates, and becomes a conservative and reactionary force,” remaining “alien to the broad masses and even a significant part of the bourgeoisie.”

Recent historical studies on the origins of the postsocialist order in eastern and central Europe have adopted a “long transformation” perspective. They emphasize the importance of state socialist economic and political experts who, as early as the 1970s, began to think in ways that would prove compatible with neoliberal governance after 1989/91. Sharing this interest in longer genealogies of the postsocialist transformation, the present article shifts the focus of attention from the history of expertise to the everyday practices and “work on the self” of members of the urban and educated classes. It presents a microhistorical study of courses for students and white-collar workers that were offered by psychology coach David Gruber from the 1980s in Czechoslovakia and focused on intellectual productivity skills such as speed reading. These courses provide a unique insight into how people worked on themselves to become more effective in order to adapt to the newly emerging postsocialist world. The present article points to hitherto understudied continuities in the understandings and practices of productivity between the socialist and postsocialist periods.

This essay argues for considering wartime Ukrainian poetry in the broader context of Ukrainian artistic projects investigating the relationship between observation, agency, and responsibility. It highlights the profoundly democratic features of this process that explores the ways art can help one process trauma and engage in difficult but necessary conversations. It argues that Ukrainian poetic activity can be viewed as a unified corpus across multiple languages, while problematizing approaches to Russophone Ukrainian poetry that treat is as part of an allegedly unified Russophone discursive space. It also emphasizes the ethical imperative for greater scholarly engagement with Ukrainian literary texts.

This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace “modern” hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire’s vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.

This article examines the “East” as a performance practice in late Soviet culture through the case study of Yalla, arguably the most popular Central Asian band of the 1970s and 1980s and a hit performer across the entire socialist bloc and the Global South. It argues, first, that Yalla’s performance of the East changed over time, from the band’s origins in the Beatlemania of the early 1970s to the perestroika moment of nascent marketization; and, second, that the East functioned as an ambiguous category that evoked multiple resonances to multiple audiences and lent itself to a range of different political projects. Roosien concludes that Yalla’s performance of the East cannot be fully understood outside the material circumstances in which the band worked and the political world in which they functioned.

Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.

Over the recent years, Polish historiography has experienced a noteworthy “people’s turn.” Regrettably, these works tend to reinforce stereotypes that portray the peasantry as a politically inert “mass.” The objective of this paper is to challenge this portrayal of the Polish peasantry as a largely passive majority lacking effective means of contestation. To accomplish this, I delve into an analysis of peasant self-organization during the turn of the early twentieth century in Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland. My investigation is based on a micro-historical approach, drawing upon autobiographies authored by activists engaged in rural cooperatives written in the initial decades after World War II. The cited autobiographies provide plenty of specific evidence regarding plebeian collective agency. By juxtaposing the political perspectives of modern institutions with the vernacular categories of actors within specific historical circumstances, I aim to ground theoretical conclusions in an asynchronous and subversive vision of modernity.

Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the Western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

Abstract

This article examines Yugoslav women's transnational memories of state terror in two autobiographical texts bearing witness to the Holocaust and corrective labor camps on Goli otok and Sveti Grgur: Ženi Lebl's White Violets (1990) and Eva Israel Grlić's Memories (1997). I argue these texts recover disparate histories of state terror, coproducing shared strategies of memory and narration in the process. This article contextualizes how women's testimonies maneuvered the patriarchal cult of silence that marginalized gendered experiences of the corrective labor camps until the 1990s and women's erasure from Yugoslavia's important legacies, such as the antifascist struggle within which Ženi Lebl and Eva Grlić were actively involved. Drawing attention to how the Yugoslav state terror apparatus negated the women's revolutionary contributions and weaponized their biographies against them, this article argues that life writing reclaims their authorial agency and restores multilayered archives of the past.

The zhdanovchshina transformed Soviet culture in the late 1940s. This article examines how the late Stalinist ideological campaign affected Soviet architects whose postwar work spanned domestic projects and international engagements. Opening with an account of the controversy in Moscow in 1948 over a new textbook on the history of urban planning, the article follows architects as they traveled abroad, representing the USSR at the International Union of Architects. The article explores the interplay between these two spheres of domestic and international activity, arguing that the zhdanovshchina caused Soviet architects to alter their global behavior. It reshaped domestic discourses and practices while spilling into the international arena, fueling Cold War tensions, and reconfiguring postwar internationalism. Soviet architects deployed the zhdanovhshcina abroad, using it to forge relations with their counterparts in the communizing world. When taken abroad, the zhdanovshchina facilitated the emergence of a global socialist urbanism just beginning to form in the postwar years.

Riga and Odesa (Odessa) rank among the Russian empire's foremost nineteenth-century ports. These port cities, respectively located on the Baltic and Black Seas, enabled imperial Russia to trade huge amounts of goods, boosting its burgeoning economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that, despite the distance separating the two cities, it is only in relation to each other that their full significance emerges. This article explores the histories of Riga and Odesa, examining their situations within the Russian empire's economic geography and taking a closer look at the interrelationships between the two ports. In our view, this history is more than a narrative of competition for the premier position among the ports of the Russian empire; it is also a tale of local initiatives, engagement with the imperial center, lobbying for imperial financial support, relationships of economic interdependence, and an example of the crucial role that ports at the supposed periphery of an empire played in a globalized economy.

The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875—1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legends and much speculation. My paper reconstructs the particular circumstances surrounding the court’s decision to give Shtern a more lenient sentence and considers how the politics of science in the late 1940s and early 1950s could have influenced this decision and helped Shtern elaborate her own strategy of survival. I argue that the main reason for sparing Shtern’s life was her essay “On Cancer” written in the prison cell in the late 1951—early 1952. My work is based on a careful analysis of documents from Shtern’s personal archive and of the context of Soviet and North American medicine.

This paper explores the relationship between elegy, national mourning, and the poetics of public grief by taking as an example Jaroslav Seifert's sequence of elegies, Osm dní (Eight Days), published in 1937 to mourn the death of Czechoslovakia's first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937). An extraordinary work of poetry—exceptional both in its ambition and in the apparent speed with which it was composed and published—Seifert's Eight Days has largely been forgotten today and remains little known outside of Czech literary criticism. This article offers a reading of the sequence as a modernist elegy, with the purpose of rethinking the multidirectional relationship between poetry, nationalism and public mourning.