The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK) was founded on November 2, 1942. From the outset, photography and eyewitnesses were vital resources for conveying the horrors of the German occupation. Refuting accusations that the USSR was responsible for massacring Polish prisoners of war in Katyn forest further magnified the importance of generating an irrefutable record of Nazi guilt. This article examines the efforts of Stalin's government to bury the Katyn lie beneath images of genuine victims of Hitler's regime. Tracing the diverse origins of the ChGK's photographs and supporting testimony brings into focus the reasons why wartime observers found the Soviet falsification convincing. ChGK materials should be approached as artifacts of mass mobilization. By disentangling these pictures and pages from their propagandistic uses, researchers can move closer to understanding the symbiotic relationship between official narratives and personal truths in the USSR as well as the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Scholars in this forum analyze how major nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why have China, South Africa, Turkey, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and even Saudi Arabia among others failed to condemn the brutal Russian invasion and have continued to trade with Russia? Are these initiatives simply a replay of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War Era or do they mark a substantial new reorientation in world politics? This forum appears in a hybrid format; two essays by Thomas Loyd and Katherine Stoner appear here in print. In addition, there is an online forum at https://aseees.org/slavicreview/discussion/ukraine-war-global-south/ featuring short contributions from David Engerman and Sandeep Bhardwaj on India, Chia Yin Hsu on China, Mark Katz on the Middle East, and, Daniela Secches on Brazil.

Since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, contemporary Ukrainian poets have increasingly used Facebook as a forum for sharing their work. Unlike poets in the United States, where copyright law discourages writers from self-publishing their work, including on social media, Ukrainian poets use Facebook not only to share work in progress, but also to comment and even translate one another's poems. We argue that by using the “distant reading” method of applying statistical tools to a large archive of contemporary poetry, scholars become better close readers. Having created an archive of a large sample of recent Ukrainian poetry posted to Facebook, our article models data-driven tools that help scholars to understand how poetry, written and shared to social media in a time of war, has changed between 2014 and 2022. This novel use of Facebook as a literary tool clearly shows how poetic language changes in a time of war. It also points to ways that the large community of readers on social media has influenced what poets write.

With the Russo-Ukrainian war, the language of decolonization has become central to scholarship on eastern Europe. Yet, residents of Lielciems in eastern Latvia find it hard to orient in a political field defined by the binary of colonized and the colonizer. They live in a place that is losing its constitutive elements due to a variety of other “de” processes—deindustrialization, depopulation, and devaluation. They live amidst absences rather than unwanted presences. They wish for someone—the Chinese, NATO, or the European Union—to establish some permanent structure that could bring back life to their place of residence. Otherwise, the place is doomed to empty out completely, and their children are destined to permanently settle abroad. Based on an ethnography of an emptying town, this article outlines the limits of the politics of decolonization and argues for the use of the lens of empire for analyzing the intersecting forms of power that shape Lielciems, Latvia and eastern Europe today.

Social Media did not invent poetry. But in some ways, it reinvented it. Much like the explosion of small journals in the modernist period, social media platforms have created interconnected networks of writers who share their own and others’ work, in real time, sometimes writing poems directly onto their Facebook pages or in the comment thread. This article introduces the Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Archive, an interactive web platform, which catalogues Ukrainian poems posted to Facebook since 2013. The roughly 100 poets featured in this archive were either born in Ukraine or moved to Ukraine before 2014. The archive is multilingual, and organized by poet, theme, and language. It is also searchable by text string. This growing web resource enables and encourages scholars to engage with contemporary writing shared to social media.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been roundly condemned in the West. NATO members have continued to supply Ukraine with weaponry while the EU, US and their allies have ensured that the Russian economy remains under the most extensive and intensive set of sanctions in history. Yet many leaders of countries in the global south have been far more hesitant to condemn Russian actions. Some have merely abstained in United Nations resolutions criticizing Russia, while others have remained neutral. This paper will endeavor to explain why the global south has such a different perspective from the global north on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I argue that this is a result of America’s withdrawal from the global south over the last two decades and Russia’s reemergence in many parts of the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia.

It was about the dreams that I first thought of when reading Dace Dzenovska’s thought-provoking article. What are the residents of Lielciems dreaming about? Do they dream of empires? I wonder, if we view the former USSR as an empire, can we further disentangle the recent past of people of Lielciems as imperial actors from their overwhelmingly ahistorical present, where they seem to have been forgotten by almost everyone—or, at least, anyone who could offer them a new visibility and dignity.

This article discusses the evolution of the Belarusian Orthodox Church's (BOC) role and influence in the society, its relationship with the state, and the internal schisms within the Church leadership. Belarusian politics and society has traditionally been Russian-oriented. Close linguistic and cultural relations with Russia were embedded in the official ideology of Belarusian state and national building policies, which from the onset singled out the ideas of Slavic unity and Belarus's special role in the Eastern Slavic civilization. In this regard, the BOC was an element of two machineries, the objectives of which growingly drifted apart. Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime viewed the BOC as an important partner of the state and a control mechanism over the society. Russia, which lacked a well-defined policy of attraction towards Belarusian society, in turn mostly relied on the regime and domestic social institutions, specifically the BOC, in maintaining its influence. The two crises, regional (2014) and domestic (2020), significantly upended the “in-between” position of the BOC and raise questions about its ideational and institutional cohesion. Moreover, officially as an autonomous Exarchate functioning under the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the BOC has had to balance its position within the ROC that during this time has sought stronger status abroad. The relationship between BOC and ROC leadership grew more complex after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and after Russia's invasion to Ukraine in 2022, when the ROC leadership chose to support the political regime. The open conflict between the national, now autocephalic Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Moscow Patriarchate have revealed the intra-Orthodox (post-)colonialism in the region but also further complicated the ways the BOC can position itself within the Belarusian society.

When the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces in March 2022, barely half of African states voted in favor. This lukewarm support contrasted with strong support for Ukraine elsewhere in the world. Among those abstaining from the vote was South Africa, a country with a long history of interaction with the post-Soviet space. This essay considers the interplay of historical remembering and forgetting that has contributed to the South African response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A longstanding commitment to non-alignment, the long shadow of the anti-colonial struggle, and the complicated legacy of the Soviet Union, its collapse, and who rightly carries its anti-apartheid mantle, have all played a role in shaping the South African response.

The responses by Russian, Ukrainian, and other countries’ Russophone poets to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constitute a unified artistic discourse, animated by recurring topics, motifs, and images. This article aims to open a discussion of this body of work by examining one of its major topics—the Russian language as both a weapon and victim of war—and by offering an overarching theoretical framework, based on the concept of witnessing, for the analysis of contemporary artistic modes generated by war, extremity, and crisis. The topic of language foregrounds the problem of the speaking subject, participating or implicated in ongoing traumatic events. I examine these poems as poetry of witnessing: verses that employ digital media to respond to traumas and atrocities from within the events and as they unfold, while questioning the moral parameters of their response and the adequacy of their artistic instruments.

This response to Dace Dzenovska’s article “Emptiness Against Decolonization” engages with her account of the social and political experience of the residents of “Lielciems” in eastern Latvia, describing it as a form of inter-imperiality, which has been defined by Laura Doyle as the “fraught condition” shaped by “multiple vectored relations among empires and among those who endure and maneuver among empires.”1 In the case of Lielciems, the contradictory implications of life on the “imperial fault line” bring to light pitfalls of discourse concerning decolonization in eastern Europe more broadly. Attention to the voices of Lielciems and other places like it—the voices of people who are the object of the decolonial aspirations of others—may allow us to make necessary corrections in our use of this term and of processes of decolonization in our disciplines. First and foremost, we must remain cognizant of the multiple uses to which the term has been put across the region, not all of which are beneficent, and of the failings of western empire in the past decades, even as we condemn the neoimperial violence of the Russian Federation.

Orphanhood in Tolstoy has largely escaped critical examination, in part because though the writer himself was an orphan, his texts say little about the topic explicitly. But in fact thinking about orphans' trauma is everywhere in the pre-crisis fiction. Tolstoy draws orphans and non-orphans as fundamentally morally different. All his major protagonists are orphans and want to marry non-orphans. Further, many of his novelistic tics, and many critical insights into Tolstoy generally, actually apply only to characters who are motherless. War and Peace and Anna Karenina can be read as the author's running debate with himself: is an escape available for the traumatized from their pain later in life? If so, it would mean life is good and God is kind. Both books answer yes and demand orphans renounce their permanent sense of grievance against life for their losses. But in their final scenes Tolstoy confesses his optimism was false; life is not fair, and psyches damaged by orphanhood can never fully recover.

Poetry has proven a productive aesthetic discourse for those working in Russian and in Ukrainian, documented by a huge outpouring of verse and by both the articles in this forum. This viewpoint piece zeroes in on the ways in which poems have become a means of resistance, particularly for those writing in Russian, and on the roles played by translation as its own ethical act and as a form of further resistance. It ends with the example of Igor’ Bulatovskii's poetry and his broader actions as translator and editor.

“The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute,” the Polish author Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1951. On one side lay the east, “under the domination of Moscow,” and on the other the west, encompassing the rest of the globe. “Trampled down by History—that elephant,” Poles found themselves sequestered in the east. Unless, like Miłosz, they had somehow “escaped” to the west, they were doomed to live “behind the iron curtain” in a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world.” Thanks partly to Miłosz's influence, this Cold War vision of a bifurcated world has thoroughly shaped scholarship on postwar Poland and the rest of eastern Europe. In recent years, however, it has been increasingly contested. Historians no longer speak of “parting” or “raising” the Iron Curtain but rather see this boundary as “nylon,” “airy,” and “porous.” They have uncovered an array of east-west ties as well as linkages along a different axis, north to south. These works belie the old idea of a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world” and also restore agency to its inhabitants. No longer “trampled down by history,” Poles now appear as “global citizens” who could “be part of the larger world and transcend the Cold War divide.” And yet one key way of transcending this divide still remains largely overlooked. While scholars explore points of contact between blocs in a “world . . . torn asunder,” they have been less attentive to the institutions that bound that world together: international organizations.

Marxists have long argued about the viability of “market socialism.” That model was dominant among professional economists in the Polish People’s Republic after the fall of Stalinism in 1956, even though they were never able to fully implement its principles. This article explores the debates over this concept in communist Poland, identifying the central issue as an attempt to combine socialist goals with neoclassical methodological principles and theoretical assumptions, particularly regarding price formation. Advocates of central planning always claimed that this mixture was unsustainable, destined to slide towards a restoration of capitalism. They were probably right.

This a reply to Emanuela Grama’s and Kevin Platt’s comments to my article “Emptiness Against Decolonization: Reflections from the Imperial Fault Line in eastern Latvia.”

Mikhail Kheraskov's (1733–1807) reputation has suffered a singular reversal—perhaps the most extreme and unfortunate peripety in Russian literary history. Toward the end of his life, Kheraskov's place at the very center of the national canon, in the minds of authors like Nikolai Karamzin and Andrei Turgenev, was beyond dispute. Today not even scholars of eighteenth-century Russian literature have a deep familiarity with his works; the Rossiad, Kheraskov's chef-d'oeuvre, was last reprinted in 1895.

Karolina Pavlova (1807–1893), Russia’s foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, was a polyglot writing in Russian, German, and French. Her native trilingualism facilitated a fluid and performative ethno-linguistic identity at odds with the tenets of monolingual nationalism that pervaded at the time. While Pavlova has received considerable attention from feminist critics, her multilingualism remains an understudied topic. This article addresses Pavlova’s polyglot upbringing, her multilingual romance with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, the strategic stakes of her career as a trilingual poet and translator, the perception of her as a non-Russian by her Slavophile contemporaries, and her own conflicted attitude toward her Russianness revealed in the 1854 poem “Razgovor v Kremle” and her German adaptation of Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Rodina,” published 1893 in Germany. In a wider sense, the article argues that the nineteenth century should be put on the map of the emergent field of literary multilingualism studies.

In this essay, Rory Finnin reviews the interventions of poetry in Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine and argues for more intellectual engagement with the concept of Russian genocide in the field of Slavic studies.

The article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of Borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the West. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale de-politicizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.