Soviet Studies Research Articles

Visible Difference, Audible Difference: Female Singers and Gay Male Fans in Russian Popular Music

Studies of Soviet and post-Soviet popular musics have tended to give scant attention to the variables of gender and sexuality, often positing a tacit and de facto heterosexuality on the part of both performer and audience. In this article, I focus on the dynamic of difference—musical, visual, and discursive—in the musics of three post-Soviet, female singer/musicians (Zhanna Aguzarova, Eva Pol'na, and Zemfira Ramazanova), showing how such difference serves as a locus of attraction for many gay male listeners, and performatively questions hierarchies based on gender and sexuality. In conclusion, I posit the potency of the female voice as a variable that short-circuits the “gaze,” setting up a relationship of mutually salubrious reciprocity between artist and (gay) audience.

University Theses in Russian, Soviet and East European Studies 1907-2006: A Centennial Bibliography of Research in the British Isles

University Theses in Russian, Soviet and East European Studies 1907-2006: A Centennial Bibliography of Research in the British Isles

Comment: Revisionism Avant la Lettre

I guess I was a revisionist before anyone had ever heard the term used in its contemporary sense. When I embarked on Soviet studies, revisionism meant the democratic and gradualist revision of Marxism by Eduard Bernstein and his followers. That, of course, was heresy in the eyes of Marxist-Leninists, and “revisionism” became a familiar swearword in the Soviet lexicon.My own unwitting revisionism in the new sense of deviation from the Soviet studies mainstream really began with my participation in Michael Karpovich's seminar in Russian history in 1947. In my paper, “The Russian Proletariat as a Revolutionary Force in 1917,” I highlighted the Bolsheviks and the fabzavkomy, because that was where the published sources were.

Istorik i vlast': istoricheskaia nauka v SSSR i kontseptsiia istorii feodal'noi Rossii v kontekste politiki i ideologii (1930-1950-e gg) by A. M. Dubrovskii (review)

REVIEWS 173 Unfortunately, Meerovich's failure to contextualize his intricate narratives in either thewider history or historiography of the period renders his two books of little interestor use to all but themost specialized of readers. This is an immense pity, as the author isnot shyof posing broad questions which are currently of central concern to historians ? the titles of the two books are evidence enough of this.A range of studies of early Soviet 'everyday life',by both Russian scholars such as Natal'ia Lebina, Katerina Gerasimova and II'ia Utekhin, and Western researchers such as Julia Obertreis, Svetlana Boym, Stephen Kotkin, Steven E. Harris, Monica R?thers, Susan Reid and many others, have engaged carefully and subtlywith the regime's strategy of trans forming consciousness through housing policy and practice, as well as with occupants' lived experience of domestic space. Studies of passportization, population policy, migration and settlement by David Shearer, Nathalie Moine, Gijs Kessler, Peter Holquist, Peter Gatrell and myself, among others, have explored the regime's impulse to 'sedentarize' its population. All these historians would agree with Meerovich's claim that Soviet housing policy was a function both of ideological precepts ? itsambition to create a new type of socialist citizen ? and of its political strategies of control, surveil lance and discipline. Meerovich's glib dismissal of other scholarship and his almost exclusive focus on published laws and decrees, however, mean that his work does little to deepen or extend this rudimentary and limited insight, giving us no new or better understanding of themultiplicity of interests which competed to translate their own priorities and preoccupations into policy, of the extent to which state-decreed housing policy was implemented or effective in creating new forms of everyday life,or of the character of popular negotiation or subversion of normative spatial structures. Not only do the two books fail to take account of or relate their findings to the existing literature, but they present their narratives in an untidy, unstructured and convoluted manner, making ithard to follow the sequence of complex, sometimes microscopic changes in the statutory and administra tive basis of policy. Granting that the objective of the Ibidem book series to specialize in 'narrowly focussed' and 'empirical' scholarship is in itselfvery valuable, the internal organization of these two slim editions makes it difficult even to use them as reference handbooks for the evolving legislative and administrative framework governing housing policy during the interwar period. School of History NickBaron Universityof Nottingham Dubrovskii, A. M. Istorik i vlast': istoricheskaia nauka v SSSR i kontseptsiiaistorii f?odal'noi Rossii v kontekste politiki i ideologii(igjo-igjo-e gg.). Izdatel'stvo Brianskogo gosudarstvennogo universit? ta im. akad. I. G. Petrovskogo, Briansk, 2005. 800 pp. Notes. Index. Price unknown. A. M. Dubrovskii, who in 1992 published a biography of the historian S.V. Bakhrushin (1882-1950), has in thisnew book expanded his scope to examine 174 SEER, 86, I, 2008 the historiography ofmedieval and early modern Russia in the Stalin era, placing it in the context of the development of Bolshevik ideology and the relationship between the Soviet authorities and the historical profession. The broad outlines of thisprocess are of course well known, but Dubrovskii adds valuable new detail, much of itdrawn from archival sources, and provides a more nuanced interpretation than many of his predecessors. In common with others who have written on this theme (most recently, theAmerican historian David Brandenberger), the author identifies a gradual ideological shift in the course of the 1930s away from proletarian internationalism towards Soviet patriotism, Russian nationalism and great-power statism. But Dubrovskii argues that, alongside this new trend, elements of the earlier revolutionary class-based approach persisted. The balance between the two strands changed in response to changing external circumstances: the patriotic line was of course strongest in the early years of the Second World War, but Soviet Marxism began to reassert itselffrom 1943,when themilitary tide turned in favour of the Soviet Union. In contrast tomany critics of Stalinist historiography, the author sees some positive features in this revival of Soviet Marxist ideology ? in particular, the fact that its emphasis on thematerial base and on the class-struggle inspired a new agenda for historians...

The Black Box: Notes on the Anthropology of the Enemy

AbstractThis article critically revisits the Foucauldian perspective on modernity by exploring the constitutive importance of limits of transparency in relations of power and knowledge. It differentiates between Foucault's Panopticon as a model for modernity, which posits a total visibility of subject under modern gaze, and what I call cybernetic ways of knowing that posit the 'black box' of the inner self that is blocked from visibility. The case in point is a comparative study of two anthropologies – two groups of anthropological cadres – the American anthropologists who in the 1940s were involved in emerging Soviet studies, and Soviet anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s who took part in Soviet reforms. The article draws attention to similarities in their perspective of images and notions of the enemy: the 'enemy of the people' within Soviet society and the Soviet society as the West's Cold War enemy. In doing so, the aim of this article is to develop an ethnographic perspective on state socialism that does not depend on a foundational dualist distinction between 'Soviet' and 'Western' or 'socialist' and 'capitalist' modernity as a starting point.

Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World by Andrew Wilson (review)

REVIEWS 589 Szlachta's choice of contributors is also somewhat tendentious. Rather than being presented with 'the criticism of some of themost eminent represen tatives of Polish social and humanist thought' (p. 19), the reader is 'over whelmed' by conservative writers, only a few of whom could be described as 'prominent' in Polish culture. The lecture of biographical notes indicates threemain categories under which the authors could be grouped: catholic priests (A. Szymanski, J. K. Rostworowski, S. Wyszyriski, J. M. Bocheiiski, W. Kalinka), catholic/conservative activists (H. Dembinski, A. Kliszewicz, W. L. Jaworksi, J. Gofuchowksi, Z. Krasinski) and nationalists (Z. Stahl, I. Czuma, J. Kucharzewski, R. Dmowski, K. Grzybowski). Hardly a representative selection. On a more positive note, however, and looking at it from a completely different point of view, this collection serves, albeit unintentionally, as a useful resource for those interested in the development of Polish catholic, nationalistic and conservative thought. School ofSlavonic andEast European Studies Robert Kulpa University CollegeLondon Wilson, Andrew. VirtualPolitics: Faking Democracy in the Post-SovietWorld. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2005. xviii + 332 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Index. -?20.00. For those of us following the break-up of the Soviet Union and rise of newly independent states with some enthusiasm, the emergence of democracy in countries likeRussia and Ukraine has been an increasingly perplexing process during the last ten years. Though all themajor institutions thatmake the Western states what they are were created in the early 1990s, and have been in existence for some time now, there has been a growing feeling that some thing is going not quite right.One expected that democracy would consoli date and mature with every year passing. But thisdid not happen. A proper conceptualization of what has been taking place in the post-Soviet republics (excluding the Baltics) instead was missing until recendy. Andrew Wilson has now given us the long-needed clue to solving this contradiction with his elaborate notion of 'virtual polities'. Without doubt, this book will have a formative influence on future post Soviet studies and should lead to re-assessment ofmany former findings on post-Soviet politics. To be sure,Wilson has neither introduced here any neologisms, nor produced a criminological study with entirely new data. Yet, he has still done political science a service by demonstrating in admirable detail how hidden control of information flows, party-building and electoral processes by the powers-that-be have been perverting democracy, in the post Soviet world, to such a degree as to create a relatively novel system of state society relations in which fundamental democratic procedures are formally observed, but made largely senseless through theirmore or less sophisticated manipulation. Thus, Wilson does make a terminological innovation in so far 590 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 as he, inmy reading, liftsthe, until now, largely colloquial, peculiarly post Soviet construct of 'political technology' to a proper political science concept, i.e. to a term specifically designed to distinguish certain post-Soviet political practices from those political PR campaigns that are also well-known in the West. What to this reader seems particularly important in Wilson's argument is that he explicidy argues that 'political technology' should only partiy be understood as a radicalization of some dubious Western political practices, such as themassive negative advertising that has been typical of recent US presidential election campaigns. Instead,Wilson shows that 'political technol ogy' is, above all, rooted in Russia's and the other republics' Soviet past, namely in thepeculiar manipulation strategies that theKGB and other Soviet bloc security services had developed in theirfight against anti-Soviet dissent. On the one hand, Wilson has strengthened the Soviet element within the construct 'post-Soviet transitions', lending support to those researchers emphasizing the continued relevance of the area studies element ? as opposed to cross-civilizational comparative approaches ? in the study of con temporaryRussia, Ukraine, etc.On the other hand, we might be dealing here with a case where post-Communist studies can make a contribution to general political science: 'Political technology' or 'virtual polities', as introduced byWilson, might be concepts thatwill travel to other regions of theworld and could help us to understand better various perversions of democratic procedures...

Soviet and Post-Soviet Planning in Almaty, Kazakhstan

■ Through the case study of Soviet and post-Soviet Almaty (the former capital of Kazakhstan), this article considers how the idea of rational planning was bolstered in the Soviet era by a belief in universalizing approaches and the primacy of scientific truth over local ethics and knowledge. However, in practice, plans were rarely implemented. A succession of contingent events left city officials caught between an immediate necessity for basic shelter and grand plans for quite different futures. This also revealed the tension between rationality as the goal of harmony between man and nature, and rationality as the means to get there. Many citizens believed harmony had in fact been destroyed by statist intervention. The revolutionary logic — supposedly natural laws framing rationality — appeared again after the end of the Soviet period. This time, however, the inverse resulted. The emergence of the market was retrospectively rationalized through the bureaucratic form as an inescapable result of historical determinism.

Mongol Commonwealth?: Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space

Suddenly, is everywhere. Just a few short decades ago, even at University of Washington--which back then stood out starkly for its atypical efforts integrate histories of Slavs and of Asia--the term was hardly heard. (1) Today, we have Group (www.eurasiagroup.net), a money-making consultancy in New York, and Foundation (www.eurasia.org), a money-awarding agency in Washington, with branch offices in Moscow, Kiev, Tblisi, Almaty, and elsewhere, funded mostly by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In academia, old Soviet Studies centers are now called Eurasia: Columbia (Harriman Institute: and Eastern European Studies), Harvard (Davis Center for and Eurasian Studies), Berkeley (Institute of Slavic, East and Eurasian Studies), Stanford (Center for East and Eurasian Studies), Illinois Champaign-Urbana (Russian, East and Eurasian Center), Toronto (Centre for and Eurasian Studies), and on and on. (2) The Committee apparat on Old Square is now Presidential apparat on Old Square. Of course, along with nameplates, substance can change, too. But maybe, as Karl Kraus quipped of psychoanalysis, is disease masquerading as cure? A confession: I'm a perpetrator. In 2005, Princeton University's Studies Program became and Eurasian Studies, after a process in which some faculty objected that addition of would dilute Indeed, everyone is going Eurasia. Miami University of Ohio still has its Center for and Post-Soviet Studies (which, however, organized a 2006 conference on Performance in Eurasia). More pointedly, consider joint Kennan Institute-University of Washington 2004 symposium on future of Russian Studies. (3) The well-intentioned organizers at U. Washington--whose own program is now called Russian, East and Central Asian Studies--informed me that handling Russia is challenge enough. And look at American Association for Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)--no added that long-standing name (after considerable discussion and inability find consensus on a new designation). The 1990s membership drop off in AAASS has been paralleled by upsurge in membership in a new Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS), which has ballooned more than a 1,000 members and in 2006 held its seventh annual meeting. CESS define[s] Central Eurasian region include Turkic, Mongolian, Iranian, Caucasian, Tibetan, and other peoples. Geographically, Central extends from Black Sea region, Crimea, and Caucasus in west, through Middle Volga region, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, and on Siberia, Mongolia, and Tibet in east. (4) CESS does mention Russia. Indiana University's Department of Central Studies--formerly Uralic-Altaic--deems Central the home of some of world's greatest art, epic literature, and empires, from the vast heartland of Europe and Asia extending from Central Europe East Asia and from Siberia Himalayas. Indiana, too, omits explicit mention of Russia or Soviet Union as well as of China or East Asia. So, there are at least a few holdouts sticking Russia (or Slavs), and some invoking an expansive yet seemingly self-contained Central that conspicuously does mention Russia. (5) Perhaps seemingly innocuous character of term Eurasia--the choice to Eurasia or not Eurasia--is so innocent? (6) Consider peer-reviewed journals. The American Kritika, founded (or re-established) in 2000, subtitled itself Explorations in and Eurasian History. (A second confession: Kritika editors substituted Eurasian, instead of European, largely at my insistence.) Kritika admirably pays close attention Russian-, German-, and French-language scholarship, but its team of editors has been able invoke and mean little by it, other than a vague appeal empire, borderlands, and non-Russians. …

The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, and: Moscow Stories, and: Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, and: Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections (review)

Reviewed by: The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, and: Moscow Stories, and: Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, and: Understanding the Cold War: A Historian’s Personal Reflections David C. Engerman Nicholas Dawidoff , The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World. ix +353 pp. New York: Pantheon, 2002. ISBN 0375400273, $26.00 (cloth). Reprinted as The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character. 368 pp. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. ISBN 0375700064, $14.95 (paper). Page references are to the cloth edition. Loren R. Graham , Moscow Stories. 305 pp., illus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. ISBN 0253347165 $22.95. Richard Pipes , Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger. 264 pp., illus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.ISBN 0300101651, $30.00 (cloth); 0300109652, $19.00 (paper). Adam B. Ulam , Understanding the Cold War: A Historian’s Personal Reflections. 2nd ed.410 pp. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002.ISBN 0765808854. $29.95 (paper). In April 1969, a small group of students took over Harvard's University Hall to protest the institution's involvement in the Vietnam War. The students rifled through official files for two days before being evicted by the administration (with the help of the state police). Some of their findings—what they called "newly liberated documents"—soon appeared in a pamphlet, How Harvard Rules. That pamphlet outlined Harvard's importance to the national-security apparatus, showing how Harvard faculty members conducted research for the Departments of Defense and State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the White House, and (perhaps less surprisingly) the Council of Foreign Relations. As two wry historians of Harvard note, the pamphlet's "assumption of Harvard's omnipotence in the corridors of power … differed more in disapproval than in substance from the hubristic Harvard tone of the Kennedy years." 1 [End Page 689] This brief episode neatly illustrates both a defining feature of early Sovietology and the conflicts that engulfed it in the 1960s. The protestors' pamphlet excoriated Harvard's Russian Research Center (RRC), now the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, calling it a "Cold War baby" that brought a "new politicization of the content of the social sciences," the purpose of which was "to provide the needed data and intelligence to expand and manage the [American] Empire." 2This vision, minus the word "empire," would have caused little trouble for the founding fathers (no mothers here) of the RRC; they clearly viewed their work as serving the interests of both government and scholarship. They saw their work as scholars and as consultants/advisors to government as undivided, even indivisible, aspects of their professional careers; their connections brought new ideas to the policy/intelligence world and new funds and attention to the academy. This model of Soviet Studies did not survive the 1960s, as it attracted direct and indirect attacks from a younger generation of scholars who saw the government ties as stigmata that demonstrated the field's corruption. The events that shook Harvard and other campuses in the late 1960s left echoes across American academic life, reflected in the four life histories under review here. These life stories cover three scholarly generations, from Alexander Gerschenkron (arrived at Harvard as a full professor in 1949) to Richard Pipes and Adam Ulam (graduate students and then junior faculty members at Harvard in the 1950s) to Loren Graham (whose Harvard connections are looser and later; he embarked on his teaching career at Indiana before stopping off at Columbia for most of the 1960s and arriving in Cambridge in the late 1970s). Taken together, they reveal not just the personalities and politics of their subjects, but also some of the forces that united and divided the field of Soviet Studies. As such, they offer the chance to think through the intellectual and social history of Soviet Studies—and add to those histories the institutional history that so animated the 1960s debates but is notable for its absence from these life stories. Nicholas Dawidoff's book The Fly Swatteris a biography of an intellectual—his grandfather, Alexander Gerschenkron—but not an intellectual biography. A journalist whose previous work includes a book about a Chicago White Sox player...

From Post-Soviet Studies to Armenianology

This article is an attempt to map the field of Armenian and on Armenia following the collapse of the Union. To manage this task, I trace the developments the literature on post-Soviet independent Armenia has undergone through a mix of reviewing and analyzing published material from the field of Armenian studies. Although this exercise might have loopholes and may not be inclusive, it should serve as a stepping stone for scholars wishing to venture into the field of Armenian or utilize Armenia as a case study for research in their respective disciplines.Armenian or Armenianology?Labeling the conducted on modern Armenia can be accomplished by utilizing techniques used to define the field studying the Union. Beginning in the mid-1960s and continuing well into the early 1980s, a great number of texts attempted to address the conceptual/methodological difference between Soviet studies and Sovietology.1 Ironically, it was the end of the subject of the study-the Union-that made it possible to develop finite parameters of what was meant by these two terms. Aryeh L. Unger made one of the clearest distinctions in an article published in 1998:Sovietology concerns first and foremost the study of politics thus making it a field or sub-discipline of political science. While not the exclusive preserve of political scientists, specialists from other disciplines-history, economics, sociology, law, among others-may be considered as practicing to the extent that their work touches on aspects of politics.2He continued:Soviet Studies suggests itself as an obvious candidate for the generic term designating in the humanities and social sciences that have the Union as their object, leaving Sovietology as the specific term designating the study of politics.3Furthermore, by looking into the classic definitions of area studies' goals, one observes four main trends: (1) providing knowledge of practical value about important world areas, (2) providing students and scholars with awareness of cultural relativity, (3) presenting an understanding of social and cultural entities as they exist in areas, and (4) furthering the development of a universal social science.4Based on these classifications and the distinction between ologies and area studies, it might be possible to operationalize the concepts of Armenian and Armenianology, as well as include the various publications dealing with post-Soviet Armenia under one or both of the two categories. The problem of Armenian studies, however, is that its lack of structure prohibits a multidisciplinary approach utilizing the various social sciences and language instructions, supplemented with strong supporting courses in history, government, or religion.5 Instead, those scholars dealing with Armenian issues have chosen to observe and analyze problems from the prism of a single discipline, pigeonholing their concerns and thus rendering the field as Armenianology rather than Armenian studies.This phenomenon is peculiar considering that there are more than a dozen chairs of Armenian outside of Armenia scattered all over the United States and the world, and it is expected that these chairs promote the development of robust Armenian programs. The problem with this expectation is that most of these chairs focus their scholarly effort on specific issues, such as medieval history, art, language, or literature, and do not bring together resources from a range of disciplines to enable various methodologies to simultaneously answer a given question. Concordantly, post-Soviet Armenian have remained within the realm of social sciences' political branches, entrenching most dealing with modern Armenia within the field of Armenianology.A Country and Its Study Defined by ConflictThe convergence of the Union's collapse, Armenian independence, and the rise of the Karabakh movement provided many historians, political scientists, and sociologists fertile ground to study the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and use it as transitory scholarship to venture into and define the field of Armenianology. …

Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G.V. Vernadskii, M.M. Karpovich, M.T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: "Garvardskii Proekt" (review)

Reviewed by: Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: “Garvardskii Proekt” Richard Pipes Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov . Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA [Russian Scholarly Emigrants (G. V. Vernadsky, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinsky) and the Rise of Russian Studies in the United States]. 140 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2005. ISBN 582430162. Evgenii Vladimirovich Kodin . “Garvardskii Proekt” [The Harvard Project]. 207 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2003. ISBN 5824303851. These two slender volumes have one feature in common: they both deal with some aspects of American–Russian relations. In all other respects, they are vastly different: different in subject matter and quality. Kodin's volume, though published in 2003, breathes the air of the Cold War and could have been written by a Soviet propagandist. Its author is identified as the rector of the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. By contrast, the work of Bolkhovitinov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is emphatically post-Soviet in its striving for objectivity and in its sympathetic understanding of the United States. The "Harvard Project" in the title of Kodin's book refers to the Émigré Interview Project launched in 1950–51 by the newly formed Russian Research Center and funded by the U.S. Air Force. It was overseen by the center's director, Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist, and carried out under the direction of two sociologists, Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. The three brought out in 1956 a volume under the title How the Soviet System Works, which summarized the findings of the project.1 Like the Russian Research Center itself, this endeavor had as its mission, by the application of sociological methods, to gain an understanding of the Soviet Union, which by this time had emerged as a dangerous enemy. Given the determined effort by Moscow to prevent Westerners from gaining access to the country and the unprecedented harshness of its censorship, which imposed absolute uniformity on public opinion, it seemed essential to find [End Page 383] some means of penetrating the wall that Stalin had constructed around his country and learn what the regime was really like. Was it effective? Was it popular? Was it stable? The means chosen to answer these questions were in-depth interviews of several thousand of the 250,000 Soviet refugees stranded in the West after the war. Obviously, since they had refused repatriation, these war refugees could not be regarded as objective witnesses, and extreme care had to be taken to filter out personal grudges and prejudices. The results have well stood the test of time. Kodin is fair in presenting these results but rigidly partisan in describing the Harvard Project itself. If one is to believe him, the Cold War was started by J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Referring to an opinionated 1990 UCLA doctoral dissertation by one Charles Thomas O'Connell on Soviet Studies at Harvard, he describes the project as a "socio-psychological study of the Soviet Union for the planned operation of the Air Force to subject the USSR to atomic bombardment." According to Kodin, Harvard of the 1950s was a hotbed of anti-communist hysteria. The results of the interviews contradict Kodin's premise that the entire Harvard Project was inspired by anti-Sovietism, for they challenged the prevalent belief that the USSR was loathed by its citizens and ready to explode. They revealed that only 5 percent of the respondents wanted to overthrow the communist regime, and that a similar number, consisting mostly of apparatchiks and military, were loyal to it. The great majority accepted the regime as a given and felt pride in its great-power status. The peasants were most hostile to it, and the young most devoted. The majority of the refugees were identified as socialists: only 14 percent favored capitalism. A major conclusion of the study, cited by Kodin, was thus summarized by the participants in the project: One of the things which the project staff has found most striking and challenging is the relatively low rate of active disaffection from the underlying ideas of the Soviet system as a way of...

The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941-1944. By Alexander Hill. Cass Series on the Soviet (Russian) Study of War. London: Frank Cass, 2005. xxvi, 195 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Photographs. Figures. $65.00, hard bound.

The War behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941-1944. By Alexander Hill. Cass Series on the Soviet (Russian) Study of War. London: Frank Cass, 2005. xxvi, 195 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Photographs. Figures. $65.00, hard bound. - Volume 65 Issue 1

Trading or Teaching: Dilemmas of Everyday Life Economy in Central Asia

AbstractThe paper discusses the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union on teachers’ life and work in Badakhshan and Osh provinces of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Challenging some of the assumptions of the Soviet studies about the interaction between teaching and other sources of moneymaking by teachers, the paper illustrates continuities and changes in the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet times in terms of role, nature, forms, and ethics of trading and commercial activities in the life of the teachers in the two countries. The paper draws from the two ethnographic case studies carried out in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan between 1999 and 2005. The drastic actual changes in the status and work of the teachers in post- Soviet Central Asia has presented teachers with tough choices. One of such choices was whether to become involved in trading and commerce. Teachers’ experience of trading and commercialisation has been contradictory: necessary, possible, rewarding; yet challenging and often disgusting and contrary to the very morality of the teaching profession. The teachers’ life and work serves as windows to the larger issues that have both local and global ramifications. The challenges teachers face in the paper speak to basic issues of human experience: dignity, justice, hope, equity, care and humanity. The paper’s major argument is that while teachers are increasingly gaining from their involvement in trading, it is the societies that are losing, both by loss of the best teachers and by the implications of trading and commercial activities on the education systems in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The policy makers must make decisions about how teachers could be provided with conditions that enable them to focus on the major priority of their work for the benefit of the future generations of Central Asia.

After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions

After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions. Edited by Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 272p. $60.00.Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's edited volume constitutes a useful introduction to important research frontiers in the analysis of postcommunist polities. The editors explicitly set the contributors the task of transcending conventional (post-)Soviet Studies and contributing to a social science analysis of formerly communist polities. Through that lens, “legacies” of the old regimes are important inasmuch as causal mechanisms can be spelled out that show their continuing relevance for the dynamic reconfiguration of politics in the region.

Abram Bergson, EconomistApril 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003

Over the last two‐thirds of the twentieth century, Abram Bergson was a leading American and world mathematical economist. He was a creative theorist, both literary and statistical. Also Bergson was a careful empiricist who, from a bully pulpit at Harvard, earned a reputation as the dean of Soviet studies and teacher of that subject’s major scholars over two generations. At a young age in 1933 Abram came to the Harvard Graduate School in economics, after undergraduate training at Johns Hopkins. Adolph Hitler was responsible for new foreign blood arriving in Cambridge to trigger an overdue pre‐war Harvard renaissance in economics. When Bergson died at age 89, he was the last survivor of Harvard’s age of Frank Taussig, as well as being a young star in the new age of Joseph Schumpeter, youthful Wassily Leontief, eclectic Gottfried Haberler and, after 1937, Alvin Hansen, the ‘American Keynesian’. As Leontief’s second protegé, I am proud to have been preceded by Abram Bergson, his first protegé. I would be honoured to be known as Bergson’s first protegé, for much of my own work in welfare economics owes virtually everything to his classic 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article that for the first time clarified this subject as treated by Lionel Robbins, Abba Lerner, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Tibor Scitovsky ‐ and, of course, earlier by Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, F.Y. Edgeworth, and A.C. Pigou.

Encounters with Mackinder: a personal memoir

ackinder's world view, enshrined in particular in his heartland or pivot concept, has gained more attention than any other specifically geographical theory across the world in the twentieth century. Further, it is difficult to think of another British geographer of the early twentieth century who stands higher in terms of intellectual power, breadth of vision and inspiring prose. He has been on the horizon of my life as a geographer for over 60 years, with a special significance when I was immersed in Soviet studies in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

“No Place to Go”: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia

Previous articleNext article No Access“No Place to Go”: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia*Yanni Kotsonis Yanni KotsonisNew York University Search for more articles by this author New York UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 76, Number 3September 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/425440 Views: 90Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref ©2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Andrés Biehl, José Tomás Labarca Global Uncertainty in the Evolution of Latin American Income Taxes, (Nov 2017): 89–122.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60119-9_4 Bibliography of Secondary Sources, Historical Research 90, no.247247 (Jan 2017): 250–266.https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.12174Tatiana Borisova, Jukka Siro Law between Revolution and Tradition: Russian and Finnish Revolutionary Legal Acts, 1917–18, Comparative Legal History 2, no.11 (May 2015): 84–113.https://doi.org/10.5235/2049677X.2.1.84Brigid O’Keeffe Gypsies as a litmus test for rational, tolerant rule: Fin-de-siècle Russian ethnographers confront the comparative history of Roma in Europe, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 38, no.22 (Jun 2013): 109–131.https://doi.org/10.1080/01924036.2013.804638Anna M. Mirkova “Population Politics” at the End of Empire: Migration and Sovereignty in Ottoman Eastern Rumelia, 1877–1886, Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no.44 (Sep 2013): 955–985.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417513000479Catriona Kelly What Was Soviet Studies and What Came Next?, The Journal of Modern History 85, no.11 (Jul 2015): 109–149.https://doi.org/10.1086/668800Olga Velikanova Rural Consolidation against Soviet Politics: The Peasant Union Movement in the 1920s, (Jan 2013): 118–159.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030757_5Choi Chatterjee, Karen Petrone Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective, (Jan 2013): 205–229.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304339_11Peter Holquist “In Accord with State Interests and the People's Wishes“: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia's Resettlement Administration, Slavic Review 69, no.11 (Jan 2017): 151–179.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0037677900016739 Daniel Beer Blueprints for Change: The Human Sciences and the Coercive Transformation of Deviants in Russia, 1890–1930 Daniel Beer, Osiris 22, no.11 (Jul 2015): 26–47.https://doi.org/10.1086/521741

Dostoevsky and the Literature of the American South

Many prominent southern writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Walker Percy, among others, have attested to the importance of Fedor to their work. (1) Many of these writers suggested that they identified with not just as American writers but specifically as southern writers and that their southern heritage had a lot to do both with their attraction to and interpretation of novels. It is surprising then that there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of impact on southern writers as a group. (2) Certainly, isolated and cursory remarks on the issue of reception by southerners may be found in the studies of individual southern writers, but even Jean Weisgerber, the author of the only book-length study discussing influence on a southern writer (Faulkner et Dostoevsky; et influences [1968]), in which he attempts to provide some context for Faulkner's reading of Dostoevsky, avoids the subject entirely. Several interesting observations on importance to southern writers are made in A. N. Nikoliukin's pre-Perestroika Soviet study, Vzaimosviazi literatur Rossii i SShA; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii i Amerika [Interrelations of and (American Literatures: Turgenev, Tolstoy, and America] (1987)--a significant work, despite the tendentiousness dictated by the time and place of its publication. Note must also be taken of Bertram Wyatt-Brown's provocative article, Russian Literature and the Southern Literary Modernists (1998), in which Wyatt-Brown, a prominent scholar of southern culture and literature, considers the affinities between the classical nineteenth-century novelists, including Dostoevsky, and modern southern writers. (3) To date, however, the only scholarly article that focuses specifically and exclusively on impact on a group of southern writers is Temira Pachmuss's essay, Dostoevsky and America's Southern Women Writers: Parallels and Confluences (1981), in which Pachmuss examines the works of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and of Eudora Welty--the latter, in a much sketchier fashion--for signs of possible influence. Pachmuss's essay, written for a Festschrift more than twenty years ago, is frequently cited in discussions of influence on individual southern writers, not only because it represents one of the very few attempts to account for the ways in which the southern identity of a group of writers mediated these writers' reception of Dostoevsky, but because Pachmuss has an in-depth knowledge of writings and philosophy (she published extensively on his work), which makes her analysis particularly noteworthy. Pachmuss begins by claiming that despite originating from two completely different cultural backgrounds, the works of on the one hand, and of some of America's southern writers on the other, demonstrate a remarkable concurrence in themes, ideas, and techniques (115). She then proceeds to analyze the treatment of loneliness, love, spiritual searching, physical deformity, and violence in the writings of O'Connor, McCullers, Welty, and Dostoevsky. Throughout her essay, Pachmuss maintains that it is Christian credo that impresses southern writers most, namely, Dostoevsky's message that the existential, grotesque world of today ... may be saved from its spiritual perdition by the revelation of the fundamental principle of an all-forgiving and all-embracing (126). She posits earlier, by the way, that Dostoevsky ... argues that genuine love ... lies in Christ and radiates from Him (116). She concludes by saying that was a formative influence on twentieth-century Southern literature (126). The claims that Pachmuss puts forth in her article are generally well-argued, despite the fact that she never explains why southern writers would have to turn to a novelist for the message Jesus Saves--a notion that they were surely familiar with, if only through roadside signs and bumper stickers. …

Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography by Oksana Bulgakowa (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1067 Annette Aronowicz examines the Jewish Communist Chaim Sloves's attempts to reconcile his allegiances to the Jewish community and to Communism in the period from 1948 to the mid-1960s, when the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of Yiddish culture had rendered this dual allegiance untenable. Aronowicz argues that Jewish Communists' unwillingness to abandon Soviet Communism was grounded in their refusal to believe that the regime that had granted Jews rights as a nation, allowed the flowering of Yiddish-language institutions, and defeated Hitler, could betray Jews. She demonstrates how Sloves, in his attempts to reconcile Yiddishism and Soviet Communism, becomes ensnared in contradictory arguments. For example, he extols the intrinsic value of Yiddish in the brotherhood of diverse cultures united around Communist principles, while also arguing forits value as an instrument forthe cultural assimilation of Soviet Jews. In conclusion, with its well-chosen assortment of essays addressing the contribu? tions ofindividual figures,as well as a variety ofprogressive movements and their insti? tutions, the volume provides a comprehensive and well-rounded picture ofthe diver? sityofthe Yiddish Left. The uniformly high quality ofthe collection and its breadth of topics and approaches make it an important contribution to interdisciplinary Yiddish studies and to related fields of enquiry (foreign-language and immigrantjournalism, bilingual education, minority and exile literatures, African colonial literature, Soviet studies). The volume's only inconsistency is its organization. The division ofthe vol? ume into two parts, 'Politics' and 'Culture', seems artificial and unnecessary, as the contributions in both sections demonstrate so clearly that the two were inseparable in the Yiddish Left. It is unclear, for example, why Daniel Soyer's reading of Abraham Cahan's travel narratives (especially given the current interest in travel literature in lit? erary and cultural studies) is relegated to 'Politics', while EffraimZadoff's comparison ofthe status ofYiddish in Jewish schools in Mexico and Argentina (in which he focuses on the role of the political ideologies of various school organizations in determining the status of Yiddish with respect to Hebrew and Spanish) is labelled 'Culture'. University of Illinois at Chicago Elizabeth Loentz Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography. By Oksana Bulgakowa. Berlin & San Francisco: Potemkin Press. 2001. xii + 292pp. ?25 (pbk ?20). ISBN 3-9804989-9-9(pbk 3-9804989-8-0). Oksana Bulgakowa's biography of the Soviet film-maker and theorist Sergei Eisen? stein was firstpublished in German in 1998, and this translation is a most welcome addition to the growing literature on Eisenstein in English. Bulgakowa's is the firstscholarly biography of Eisenstein since that by the Romanian scholar Yon Barna, published in English translation in 1973. It is also the first biography to make use of improved access to the Russian archives since the disinte? gration of the Soviet Union. In particular, the author has been able successfully to weave Eisenstein's own private thoughts, consigned to his hitherto inaccessible diaries and correspondence, into the more public accounts of his activities used by earlier biographers. Furthermore, Bulgakowa has not shrunk from confronting some of the more awkward or embarrassing questions surrounding Eisenstein's life and work, questions that less adventurous guardians of Eisenstein's reputation would probably prefer had remained unasked, let alone unanswered. Bulgakowa handles these questions with confidence and sensitivity. As the rear jacket blurb remarks: 'Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers.' It therefore needs a biographer with broad knowledge and experience of Soviet, Russian, European, and indeed 1068 Reviews Transatlantic cultural life in the firsthalf of the twentieth century to do justice to a biographical subject of Eisenstein's complexity. The author draws upon original source materials in a large variety of languages, including Russian, German, French, and English. Bulgakowa's previous work on Russian and Soviet culture in general, and on Eisenstein in particular, is well known in Germany, but only now becoming properly appreciated in the English-speaking world. Her biography takes Eisenstein's life in chronological order but manages to deduce a thematic thread from each chapter and section of his life. The biography also contains a useful chronology of Eisenstein's life,a bibliography ofworks about Eisen? stein, a list of...

Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by Walter G. s> Moss (review)

REVIEWS 743 the early decades mainly by women of the privileged classes. Their main objectiveswere to widen the sphere of women's legitimate activityand secure greaterautonomy and equalityin the law. All in all this is an important book, on an under-studied subject, and it makes a very valuable contribution to our knowledge of Russian women's history. CentreforRussianandEast EuropeanStudies LINDAEDMONDSON University ofBirmingham Moss, Walter G. Russiain theAgeofAlexander II, Tolstoy andDostoevsky. Anthem Press, London, 2002. Vi+ 295 PP. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. f I8.95 (paperback). THIS is a hard studyto adjudge.The principalemphasisis on what one might broadly call the intellectual atmosphere of the age of Alexander II, but since the expertise of the author would seem to lie in two respective fields, that of the ideas of Vladimir Solov'ev and the historyof royalty, the treatmentveers between fairly simple examination of ideas relevant to the age of Alexander II, descriptions of their exponents and reasonably detailed accounts of the eventsatAlexander'scourt,particularlyhisrelationshipwithKatia (Catherine Dolgorukova [sic]), his longtime mistressand second wife. The material for the study is drawn from a very wide range of memoir material,letters,biographiesand accounts (thebibliographyisvaluable in this respect) and is skimmed for general interest. Mercifully, economics, foreign affairs,sociological issues and statistics the staple of so many histories are absent from this study. It is a relief, in a sense, not to encounter a text hamperedby the kindsof considerationthatwere uppermostin Soviet studies. On the other hand, the emphasis on the Tsar's own activities,his ceremonial and governmental functions, not to mention the emotional pressures that preoccupied him towards the end of his life, provides a keyhole view of his reign no more -and necessarilyleaves out of account a whole range of broaderissuestroublingRussia at the time. The chapters devoted to Tolstoi and Dostoevskii deal almost exclusively with biographical matter and hardly touch on their writings save to outline theirprincipalideas. These are not subjectedto any close analysis,nor do they convincingly help to explain the unusual authority unusual, that is, by European standards of theirrole in influencingand possiblyguiding social opinion. This is not to deny that in many respectssuch an approachmakesfor easy reading. The prioritygiven to the activitiesof royaltypossibly skewsthe emphasis even in discussingDostoevskii. It is slightlyodd, for instance, to find special mention made (among the host of things that concerned him in his correspondence with his wife while he was in Ems in I874) of the fact that 'Several days afterhe had arrived,Dostoevsky came acrossEmperorWilliam . . .' (P. 156) and compared him unfavourablywith Alexander II. It is indeed odd to 'come across'a German emperor,just like that, as it were, and to find it then assertedthat 'Dostoevskywas undoubtedlyamong the minorityin Ems who admired the Russian monarch more than his German uncle' (ibid.). 744 SEER, 8i, 4, 2003 Since the Russianswere in any case a minorityin Ems, that is hardly surprising. Partoftheproblemiskeepinga straight face.Whatisonetomake of a statementsuch as: 'In Nikolaevthe Tsar approvingly overlookedthe improvement of theNikolaevdefensesby GeneralTotleben. . .' (p. I4). Did he, one wonders,actuallyseethem?Did AlexanderII actuallymake'a brief trainrideouttoChistlehurst [sic]' (p. I54) in I874? The best and most sympathetic parts of this study are to be found in the chapters devoted to Vladimir Solov'ev. The description of his mysticism (pp. I70-77) and his relations with Dostoevskii are genuinely revealing and helpful. As for those sections concerned with the People's Will, the emphasis falls on the activities of such revolutionaries as Sophia Perovskaia and Zheliabov and a clear outline account is given of their self-sacrifice and martyrdom. This work, for all its shallowness, can justifiablyclaim to demonstrate the existence of certain similaritiesbetween the age of Alexander II in the third quarterof the nineteenth century and the post-Soviet state of mind in Russia in the last decade of the twentieth century. 'Not only has the tone of postSoviet debates', the author concludes, 'sometimes been reminiscent of those of Alexander II's time, but often so too has the content for example, the question of Russia's relationship to the West' (p. 256). The geniuses of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Solov'ev and others contributed to these debates, for sure, and enormously enriched the intellectual atmosphere of the age of Alexander II;the...