Although historians and publicists have frequentiy criticized the Orthodox Church for its failure to implant in parishioners much religious sensibility, Daniel H. Kaiser argues that the seventeenth-century church was much more successful than critics have contended. Examining litigation over bigamy and remarriage from the Russian north, Kaiser argues that clerics largely succeeded in articulating and enforcing a doctrine that affirmed the sacramental primacy of first marriage. In prosecuting bigamists and tracking down fugitives, church courts showed themselves fully competent to ascertain the facts surrounding marital disputes and then impose decisions upon the principals, many of whom, even while resisting the church's directives, betrayed knowledge of and appreciation for the church's view. Therefore, Kaiser concludes, we need to revise our estimate of the church's effectiveness in regulating domestic life in early modern Russia.

In December 1927, Alan Gregg set off for Moscow on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Medical Education to carry out a “survey of local conditions” in Soviet medical education. The visit, which had been five years in the making, was eagerly anticipated by foundation officials as the first opportunity to secure “reliable knowledge” about the new Russia. Once in the field, Gregg was confronted by important dilemmas of judgment. He had gone to Russia with a made-in-America model of medical education favored by Rockefeller Foundation officers. Was Soviet medical education a variant of the model or something radically new? In making judgments on this issue, Gregg spoke with a variety of actors involved at all levels of Soviet medical education. Which voices to credit, which to discount? Solomon examines Gregg’s landmark voyage to Russia as an instance of the challenges that face expert travelers who seek to “know” a foreign locale.

In this article, Susan Larsen argues that the plot lines, aesthetic choices and marketing strategies of the four most commercially successful Russian films of the last decade—Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun and Barber of Siberia and Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother and Brother-2—are shaped by anxieties about Russian national identity and cultural authority that these films articulate in gendered terms as threats to paternal bonds and fraternal communities. Aiming both to emulate and to displace the Hollywood films that dominate the Russian film market, Mikhalkov and Balabanov exploit the conventions of the historical melodrama and the crime thriller to construct an explicitly Russian and emphatically masculine heroism in stories of charismatic, vanished fathers and dangerous, but irresistible brothers who defy the moral decay, crass materialism, economic imperialism and cultural solipsism that all four films associate with the west and, in particular, the United States.

In this article, Sona Hoisington focuses on the evolution of the project for the Palace of Soviets and its metamorphoses during the four stages of the competition (1931-33) and after. Rather than interpreting the project as the repudiation of modernist architecture, as many scholars have done, Hoisington argues that the design evolved from the modern and functional to the eclectic and monumental. Drawing on archival materials, she demonstrates that this change came about gradually and in a contradictory fashion. Hoisington shows how the Palace of Soviets acquired mythic significance, becoming a symbol of Soviet might and determination to overtake America and a temple to the revolution and its deity, Vladimir Lenin. In conclusion, she argues that the evolution of the Palace of Soviets encapsulates the changing models in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.

This article examines variegated depictions of Europe and the west produced in the 1920s and 1930s by Aleksandr Iakovlevich Arosev, an Old Bolshevik cultural official, writer, and diplomat. Arosev traveled and worked in many parts of Europe in the prewar emigration, in the 1920s and early 1930s as Soviet ambassador to Prague and other European capitals, and during the years of the Popular Front as head of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (VOKS). The discussion refracts a much asked question—what new sources say about attitudes toward the Soviet system—through a new prism, depictions of the outside world. Although Arosev's personal diary and unpublished reports on cultural diplomacy with European fellow-travelers suggest an often startling degree of admiration and affinity for the west, higher levels of hostility are expressed in his literary output, mass-produced pamphlets, and especially his letters to Iosif Stalin. Interpreting these disjunctures, David-Fox argues that Arosev took advantage of tensions within Soviet ideology to craft depictions of Europe for different audiences. Until his execution in 1938, it was not impossible for Arosev to be both a Stalinist and a westernizer, but the combination was perilous, painful, and difficult to sustain.

Since the mid-1990s, crime drama has been the leading genre of post-Soviet television. In this article, Elena Prokhorova discusses various genres of recent crime series, both within the historical context and as coherent discourse (specifically, identity discourse). Her analysis draws narrative and ideological parallels between recent Russian productions and Brezhnev-era television mini-series, especially as an attempt to reconceptualize national mythology. The flourishing of popularized “narratives of control”—spy thrillers and police series—in the 1970s signaled both the crisis of Soviet identity and an attempt to give a boost to the waning ideology by mixing popular culture formulas with ideology. Likewise, recent Russian crime dramas use Soviet and prerevolutionary popular culture formulae as a testing ground for new social models. Prokhorova explores the attributes of crime series as artistic texts, such as genre conventions, choice of plots and heroes, visual representation, as well as broader cultural values that underlie those choices.

In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.

Historians of Russia have not analyzed the roles that the memory of World War I played in Russian life, and Russia remains largely absent from comparative studies of the war and its legacy. Russian people did have “sites of memory” where they expressed myths, displayed symbols, and mobilized public opinion around the memory of World War I. Outside the Soviet Union, a non-Soviet Russian memory of the Great War flourished in the interwar years, and the war became an important memory that military émigrés used to overcome the rupture from the past (imperial Russia) and the present (Russian territory) caused by revolution and life in emigration. The war had a different expression in Soviet Russia, where journalists and publicists evoked its image, but not its historical content, to break the USSR from the Russian past and separate the first socialist society from its enemies in the present.

Research on the sources of support for the communists in interwar Poland has emphasized the role of ethnic minorities, especially the Jews. To what degree did Poland's national minorities vote for the Communist Party? Using census data and electoral returns on interwar Poland's 2*72 districts, as well as a new technique for inferring individual level behavior from aggregate level data, Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg generate reliable estimates of ethnic group voting behavior for the Sejm elections of 1922 and 1928. The results show that it is incorrect to speak of a unified minority vote. Communist parties received disproportionate support from Belarusans. By 1928 Ukrainians voted overwhelming for ethnonational parties. The bulk of Jews drifted into establishment politics, disproportionately supporting the pro-government bloc. Contrary to the myth of the “Jewish communist,” Jews provided only a small fraction of the electoral support for the communist parties. The evidence shows that not only were the overwhelming number of Jews not communist supporters but the vast majority of communist voters were not Jews.

Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) is one of those formidable Russian thinkers who, in the early years of the last century, orchestrated a revolutionary paradigm shift across a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences that is still reverberating today. But we lack a comprehensive view of the manifold heterogeneity of Shpet's intellectual endeavors. This article focuses on one prominent lacuna in our knowledge of Shpet: the theory of history that he advanced in the 1910s. In many respects Shpet's theory anticipated the "linguistic turn" that occurred in western historiography during the last quarter of the twentieth century and that is most often identified with Hayden White's name. But while White analyzes the historian's discourse in terms of tropology and narratology, for Shpet predication is the key logical mechanism that generates production of texts about the past. The divergence of these two approaches can be explained through the hidden Kantian underpinnings of White's thought that contrasts sharply with the explicit Hegelianism of Shpet's theorizing.

In this article, Anne E. Gorsuch explores the nature and meaning of tourism in the difficult and hungry years of late Stalinism. In this period of Cold War anxiety, tourism was seen as a means of reinforcing Soviet identity. Moscow was a particular focus of Soviet patriotic education, but tourism also contributed to the construction of Soviet identity on the larger collective level of the Soviet Union. Tourism was also offered as part of the cultured "good life" due loyal Soviet citizens. In every case, tourists were reminded that it was only within the borders of the socialist homeland that Soviet citizens could let down their guard and be confident of a warm welcome.

In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

Nearly half of urban Russian households grow food on their dacha plots. This study investigates the meaning of this activity for both those who embrace it and those who reject it. Existing scholarship frames the post-Soviet dacha as a survival strategy and debates its efficiency. Ethnographic evidence reveals that the dacha provides not simply a source of food but a discursive arena for debating the rationality and morality of the transition to a market economy. Due to their rich history, dachas may be interpreted as sites of production or of consumption, as economic necessities or status signifiers. This ambiguity makes dachas particularly salient in disputes over the proper relationship between economic power and social esteem in the shifting stratification order.

Lithuania’s 2000 parliamentary elections were the first in the post-Soviet era to fail to produce a majority government. Further, neither the Homeland Union nor the Democratic Labor Party entered into the ruling coalition. In this article, Terry D. Clark and Nerijus Prekevičius explore two different ways of explaining why this occurred. To answer the broader question, the first approach focuses on the particular events that occurred in the run-up to the elections. To consider why particular parties fared better or worse than expected, the second approach evaluates a set of rational choice approaches, including spatial analysis. Neither approach is preferable to the other; instead, they are complementary, each helping to resolve certain questions that are appropriate to the particular approach. To conclude, they consider the implications of their findings for the consolidation of Lithuania’s party system.

In this article Patrick Patterson offers new perspectives on the critique of Balkanist discourse elaborated recently by Maria Todorova and others. Examining Slovenian, Austrian, and Italian commentary on contemporary southeastern Europe, Patterson concludes that Slovenia's “western” neighbors did not wholeheartedly embrace the campaign by some influential Slovenes to distance their society from other, purportedly “Balkan,” Yugoslavs. Although Balkanism marked the discourse of all three countries, Italian and Austrian opinion often rejected important implications of the Slovenes' exceptionalist rhetoric. Ultimately, the internal dynamics of Austrian and Italian identity and political culture trumped the Balkan - ist logic behind Slovenes' claims to a uniquely “central European” character. Moreover, even in Slovenian sources, Balkanist rhetoric proved less dominant and consistent than the prevailing critique admits. Accordingly, that critique, which treats Balkanism as a rigid, uniform, pervasive, and virtually inescapable “power discourse” of hegemony, should be revised to account for forces that may limit or subvert its power.