While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

The Georgian state, almost destroyed by two secessionist wars, a civil war, and an economic catastrophe, had by 1997 reestablished an orderly political life. The messianic rhetoric of the early postindependence years was replaced by a new language of civic values and pluralism. The former Soviet nomenklatura—never really ousted by the revolution or subject to lustration laws—had joined old cultural elites, industrial managers, new entrepreneurs, and intellectually minded modernizers in a heterogeneous political class. Though fractious and facing new challenges to its authority from the media, international nongovernmental organizations, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this new political class began to mediate Georgian economic and political life. Society remained fragmented, but structural changes in the economy, the Georgian leadership's restoration of order, and the activities of international nongovernmental organizations, generated embryonic interest groups and indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with claims on government policy. Today, policy conflicts are no longer just the domain of autonomous state structures, but multicornered fights—albeit unequal ones—that extend into Georgian society.

In December 1851, Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev, one of Russia's foremost specialists on the history and languages of Central Asia and the Near East, set off from St. Petersburg to build a new career as an administrator in the turbulent borderlands around the city of Orenburg. Grigor'ev's reasons for leaving Petersburg were both professional and personal. Unable to find an acceptable position in either the educational system or the state bureaucracy, Grigor'ev, formerly a professor at the Richelieu Lycee in Odessa, had subsisted for several years as assistant editor of the journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by 1851, with little prospect for advancement, he was willing to look further afield for employment. Grigor'ev's biographer also alludes to personal problems—a painful conflict with a close friend that made his presence in St. Petersburg unpleasant if not unbearable.

Since the 1930s, the zealous, idealistic proponents of musical revolution in Soviet Russia, the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov (Russian association of proletarian musicians, RAPM), have served primarily as an embarrassing footnote to the history of Soviet music and cultural politics. Scholarly opinion of RAPM is remarkably consistent in its condemnation, as Russian-Soviet scholars and westerners alike dismiss the organization for its "simplistic" (western) or "vulgar" (Soviet) ideology and aesthetics. This consensus suggests that RAPM deserves its place in the dustbin of history alongside the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (Russian association of proletarian writers, RAPP) and other militant advocates of cultural revolution. But the condescending (western) and embarrassed (Soviet) dismissal of RAPM is itself simplistic. Seeing members of RAPM as undertalented and unwitting tools of the regime's agenda, or misguided if well-intentioned deviationists, obscures the important role the proletarian musicians played in the evolution of Soviet musical culture and aesthetics.

It has been suggested that the core of Andrei Platonov's linguistic and artistic innovation as embodied in such masterpieces as Chevengur and Kotlovan (The foundation pit) lies in his masterful undermining of the Utopian project. If utopianism consists, as Gary S. Morson suggests, in an attempt to fuse the transcendent with the everyday, then Platonov's unique contribution to the genre's undoing lies in "a series of ontologically vivid parodies of the genre in which the fusion routinely fails to take place." Thus the pathos of the author's works of the late 1920s and early 1930s revolves inescapably around the failure of the ideal to materialize and become reified. This movement is reciprocal, since the material substrata of being are never infused with the animating warmth of spirit; instead matter acts as a void that condemns the spirit it would ideally preserve to entropy and finally death.