Khadzhi-Murat, Tolstoi's last major fiction, stands alone in his oeuvre in flagrant violation of his late ethical and aesthetic standards—an unprecedentedly dark apprehension of the human condition and a reconceptualization of piety. At its heart are silences—literal, near-, figurative, and implicit—in unspoken critique of all nontrivial language, narrative, moralizing, and teaching. Silence first strikes the reader in the hero's refusal to murmur against God as he dies, but retrospectively turns up everywhere, despite the obvious presence of lots of words: in the peculiar plot that has nothing to say; in the refusal to perform the usual Tolstoian adjudication of the disparate viewpoints depicted; in the hero's childhood reminiscences, hidden from listeners even as the essential in them is hidden from him; in the painful taciturnity of God himself, which, like the other core themes, is purposefully barely mentioned. Khadzhi-Murat's, indirection enacts an intuition whose mere assertion would fail, since it is an intuition about assertability itself. Something central has shifted for Tolstoi; now it is through silence and absence—the gaps in the said and the sayable—that the most important truths come to us, hence that is the only truthful way to inscribe them.

Basic geographical considerations like distance and resource location do influence political and economic processes; yet, focusing on additional geographical concepts such as relative location, relational space, and embedded sociospatial relationships strengthens and deepens analysis to reveal easily overlooked factors and implications of transition. Beth Mitchneck uses the example of survey research on Russia's transition, now prevalent in study of the region, to show that identifying spatial and regional variation is not always a simple or straightforward process and that incorporating nuanced geographical concepts into both the construction and analysis of a survey instrument about local politics reveals regions as settings for social practice. By shifting from a paradigm where regions are containers in physical space to one where regions are settings in which social behavior and action is situated, she suggests that inconsistent experience of transition processes are related to regional or spatial variation.

Rallying, which originated in France soon after the birth of the automobile, has remained a popular sport in Europe and elsewhere, serving to showcase developments in automotive technology and the skillfulness of professional drivers. These, in addition to demonstrating the variety of road conditions and peoples within the country and choosing the most appropriate vehicle to import, were the main objectives of the all-Russian (1923) and all-Union (1925) rallies (avtoprobegy). But in 1929, hard on the heels of the agreement with Ford to build a car factory in Nizhnii Novgorod, Nikolai Osinskii, president of the Society for Cooperation in the Development of Automobilism and Road Improvement (Avtodor), undertook a journey that inaugurated a new kind of avtoprobeg. Expeditionary rather than sporting, it drew on and reinforced a discursively constructed geography of the Soviet Union, relying on two “moving metaphors“ central to Bolshevik discourse: the storming of fortresses and the road to socialism. The avtoprobegy of the 1930s lent themselves to narratives of adventure and accomplishment not only for the rallyists themselves but also for the peoples through whose lands they traveled. This was especially true of the most publicized road trip in Soviet history—the Moscow-Kara Kum rally of 1933.

Astonishingly, we still do not have a history of collaboration in Poland during World War II. Klaus-Peter Friedrich shows that the building blocks for such a history already exist, however. They are scattered throughout the contemporary Polish press and studies on the Nazi occupation regime. Examples include institutionalized cooperation (Baudienst, Polish Police), ethnically defined segments of the population (Volksdeutsche), informal support of Nazi projects on ideological common ground (anti- Semitism and anticommunism), and the stance of the Polish peasantry as well as the Roman Catholic Church. Friedrich concludes that collaboration eludes study because of a mental image according to which ethnic Poles were the foremost victims of the occupiers and heroically resisted them. Questionable views of national self-interest keep Polish society from coming to terms with the past. Nevertheless, debates on “Polish collaboration” continue to recur—as they have since 1939.

Memoir literature suggests that Iosif Stalin's gulag was largely populated by political prisoners and that release from detention was extremely rare. In this article, Golfo Alexopoulos notes that most gulag inmates represented criminal offenders who cycled through Stalin's labor camps and colonies in vast numbers. She argues that the gulag formed a dynamic system in which the majority of prisoners came and went and uses Stalin's largest single release of gulag prisoners to expose the movement and tension of this revolving door. Surprisingly, Stalin's amnesty occurred over the objections of the NKVD leadership and despite great cost to the gulag system; the law was not designed to address postwar labor shortages, relieve overcrowded facilities, or remove less productive prisoners. Rather, the postwar prisoner exodus constituted a political act, and one consistent with Stalinist penal practice in which most prisoners cycled through the camps, connecting the world of the gulag with the larger society.

Based on archival and other materials from Rostov-on-Don, a major industrial center in southern Russia, Jeffrey W.Jones examines the different representations of collaboration apparent in Soviet society during and after the war. Jones analyzes several different levels of discourse: inner party deliberations and reports on the subject, depictions of collaborators and their actions in the local party press, questions and comments of workers and others at public meetings as recorded by party officials, and Cold War and post-Cold War era memoirs and interviews. These sources overlap to a significant degree but deal with the complex issue of collaboration in nuanced ways, stressing different themes and asking different questions. The evidence reveals a subtle divide in the perception and representation of this issue between party leaders and the population at large while also showing that the party's public assurances of cossack loyalty contrasted with a widely shared assumption of cossack disloyalty.

Unlike the English term “stylization,” Russian stilizatsiia figures prominently in literary theory. Emerging out of debates around Vsevolod Meierkhol'd's theatrical innovations and subsequently elaborated by “Silver Age” writers (Valerii Briusov, Viacheslav Ivanov, Mikhail Kuzmin), formalists (Iurii Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Gofman), and Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian concept must be distinguished from cognate terms in other languages—something missing from both Russian and non-Russian discussions. In Russian, stilizatsiia is invoked in two distinct senses: as a critical value judgment (dismissing works considered artificial or “lifeless”) , and as a complex and well-developed strategy of borrowing another's style (thus a sense related to parody and skaz). Works accepted as representing the “voice of the people” have often been exempted from analysis as stilizatsiia; J. Alexander Ogden argues, however, that “peasant poets” (Nikolai Kliuev, Aleksei Kol'tsov, Robert Burns) can best be understood precisely as stylizers in the sense elaborated by Bakhtin and others.

This article examines the workings of the sexual closet within the enormously popular genre of the Russian detektiv, or detective story. Informed by the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and D. A. Miller, the article focuses on the dramatization of homosexual panic among various male characters in Aleksandra Marinina's Stilist (1996) and Boris Akunin's Koronatsiia (2001) in order to explore the experience of masculine subjectivity in post-Soviet culture. In both novels, a perceived crisis in patriarchal authority unleashes suspicions and anxieties regarding the experience of being and becoming a man, which is defined against the feminine and the homosexual. Figured both as an effect of and as a threat to male-male bonds, homosexual panic testifies to the interiorization of sexual and gender norms, which makes being male a highly self-conscious enterprise and fuels nostalgia for a mythic time before the appearance of homosexuality.

One of the mysteries of Joseph Brodsky's biography was that, even as Petersburg continued to haunt many of Brodsky's writings of exile, the poet himself did not return to his native city after being exiled in 1972. In this article, Andrew Reynolds explores the notion of the “Petersburg text” as it applies to Brodsky's work and reveals Brodsky's deep ambivalence toward the kenoticism central to many readings of the “Petersburg text” and the “Russian idea” itself. The article argues that Brodsky's “last” poem, “August,” is both an attempt to exorcise and, ultimately, an acceptance of the fatidic patterns which seem to make a “return to Petersburg” inevitable in art if not in life. The poem is both an elegy for a (still living?) tradition and a self-elegy, and represents Brodsky's final recognition that he is Aleksandr Pushkin's successor in more ways than one: the strongest Russian poets always die “in January,” irrespective of which month or season becomes one's “fate.“

Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.

In this close analysis of Aleksandr Sokurov's 2002 film Russkii kovcheg (Russian ark), Tim Harte explores the interplay between the medium of painting and cinema in this unprecedented ninety-minute single-shot film set in the grand halls and galleries of the Hermitage Museum. As Harte argues, the film's unique premise and setting allow Sokurov to convey how the museum, its art and history, and subsequently cinema can affirm a nation's culture, transporting die past ever so evocatively into the present in order to sustain culture's vitality. Throughout Sokurov's ninety-minute single-shot fusion of Western art and Russian history, a continual emphasis on the image of the frame prevails, with the frame constituting an important artistic and metaphysical threshold for the filmmaker. Constandy moving through the ubiquitous frames, Sokurov establishes his own cinematic rendering of culture's eternal essence.

Jeffrey Brooks argues that Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi drew on and recast a particularly Russian mythology of doomed rebellion in order to explore issues of free will, self-fulfillment, and redemption. The literary giants employed narrative structures similar to popular formulas. They imagined their work and even their lives in terms of an opposition between freedom and order, echoing themes of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol'. By linking Tolstoi and Dostoevskii to mythologies of banditry, Brooks illuminates the interaction between high and low cultures. He locates their work in the context of social and cultural transformations of the liberal postreform era, showing how readers' expectations changed in a fluid society. Readers increasingly wanted freedom to triumph over the myth's earlier doom, but censors remained vigilant. He shows how Tolstoi and Dostoevskii satisfied both censors and readers by framing tales of adventure and romance with moralistic beginnings and endings conforming to the format of the long serial novel. The formulaic sandwich that frustrated the censors was used with similar effect by N. I. Pastukhov, author of Russia's first modern popular novel, The Bandit Churkin, which was serialized in Moskovskii listok in the early 1880s. Brooks affirms the mastery of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii that transcends time and place, but shows the roots of their work in Russian preoccupations with freedom and order.