Almost every country in Eurasia and Africa has been labeled a "cross-roads" at one time or another. In the Balkans, every country on the Via Egnatia and the Via Militaris was a crossroads simply by virtue of being on the route. In fact, when applied metaphorically, a crossroads need only involve two directions rather than the literal four, and the metaphor often invokes problematic dichotomies—for example, Christian/Muslim, east/west, center/periphery, tradition/modernity—rather than enlight-ening complexities. Still, as crossroads go, the territory of the Republic of Macedonia has seen quite a bit of traffic over the millennia, and the presence of seven different language groups with eight centuries or more residence—Slavic, Romance, Albanian, Hellenic, Indie, Armenian, and Turkic—gives it the same linguistic complexity as Greece, although the latter country pays considerably less attention to its multilingual and multi-ethnic heritage. The illustration on the cover of this issue, with signs in two alphabets and four languages (Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and English), taken in a busy commercial district in the capital, Skopje, is intended both to illustrate the everyday nature of this complexity in Mace-donia and to acknowledge the global processes of which Macedonia is now a specific part.

This is the introduction to a cluster of Slavic Review articles that argue for retaining and expanding the analytic rubric of postsocialism beyond the era of “transition” and beyond the conventional borders of the former Soviet bloc. With primary attention to recent developments in anthropology, Douglas Rogers outlines and evaluates three strategies for unbinding postsocialisms: exploring connections and circulations that lead outward from the formerly socialist world; embarking on new kinds of critical projects that call categories of western social science into question; and developing new varieties and vectors of comparison, especially among socialist and postsocialist contexts around the world. Each of these strategies builds upon and extends the work of the first two decades of research on eastern European and former Soviet postsocialisms. Each also points to significant areas of recent scholarship that new research on postsocialisms is primed to join.

In this article, Emily Van Buskirk uses archival manuscripts to peel back layers of Lidiia Ginzburg's palimpsestic Notes of a Blockade Person. She finds in Notes the fragmentary, distanced, and carefully contained traces of Ginzburg's “A Story of Pity and Cruelty,” an intense narrative about guilt and remorse. Relying on Ginzburg's own scholarship, Van Buskirk argues that the author's transformations of experience across multiple texts were inspired by Aleksandr Herzen. Herzen provided a model for developing—out of a family tragedy, personal failure, guilt, and remorse—an elevated memoir that would serve history. Yet Ginzburg's notion of character, her ethics, and her documentary aesthetic were born of a different era and gave rise to different kinds of narratives, written in the third person about a slighdy generalized other, in a single situation. In Ginzburg's attempts to represent the typical Leningrad intellectual's blockade experiences there are tensions (characteristic of documentary literature) between desires for universality and specificity. Self-examination battles against self-exposure, while a commitment to literature of fact withstands an aversion to autobiography.

The rise of the international matchmaking industry has been particularly rapid and noticeable in the former Soviet Union, where the end of the Cold War has intersected with daily socioeconomic pressures to make cross-cultural romance and marriage newly possible and newly desirable for some women of Russia, Ukraine, and other post-Soviet states. Less acknowledged than the role of economics in women's decision making, however, is the fact that postsocialist financial strains are not experienced in social vacuums but are mediated by ideals of gender and marriage, such that the search for a foreign spouse is unlikely to be experienced as a simple desire for increased material comfort. Instead, discourses of gender “crisis” in the home country inform the desires for transnational kinship for both women from the former Soviet Union and men from the United States. When both women's and men's narratives of “crisis” (and how transnational marriage might alleviate it) are taken into account, they significantly complicate our understandings of east-west relations of “commodification” and power.

While scholars of the Balkans have frequently emphasized the importance of nationalism in the region, labor migration has long been a critical component of economic, social, and cultural life. In this article, Keith Brown examines the connections between two well-documented cases of the risks faced by long-distance migrants from the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia, separated by a hundred years. Putting each case into its larger context—U.S. industrial expansion in the early 1900s, and U.S. military occupation in the early 2000s—Brown argues that the study of contemporary Macedonia demands attending to imperial and colonial histories that make clear the larger systems of power in which the country and its people have long been suspended.

By the late nineteenth century, world's fairs had captured the imagination of Bulgarian political and intellectual elites. Bulgarians were not only enthusiastic pilgrims to the major world's fairs in the west, but by 1892 they had staged their own international trade exhibition in Plovdiv. Here, as elsewhere, the fair phenomenon was an arena for broadcasting messages of national prowess and progress, as well as a context for the performance and contestation of national identity. But for Bulgarians the fair phenomenon at home and abroad was also part of a highly contested process of negotiating its unique place between east and west, politically, economically, and culturally. The tensions and dilemmas that characterized the Plovdiv fair experience were also palpable in Bulgarian participation in fairs abroad, such as the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the St. Louis Fair of 1904, where both the nation and the west were yet again reimagined.

In her reading of Ginzburg's notes about the siege of Leningrad, Irina Sandomirskaia emphasizes Ginzburg's conceptualization of besiegement as the imprisonment of a polity inside a tautology. In the reality of the siege as depicted by Ginzburg, the extinction of life occurs in a self-devastating repetitiveness that dominates space, time, body, communication, action, thought, and ethics. Sandomirskaia interprets Ginzburg's conceptualization of besiegement from within in terms of Michel Foucault's biopower, when life is administered and selectively awarded as an entidement, depending on how the administration understands the usefulness of that life for the war economy. As a result, a dystrophic body politic develops, as the polis in besiegement is subject to devastation and implosion, reproducing the bodily processes of a patient dying from alimentary dystrophy. Ginzburg resolutely questions the biopolitical solution by presenting an alternative in the individual politics of “loopholes of lesser evil.“

This article investigates rconparticipation in politics as a rich set of moral, political, and cultural engagements. Contrary to the idea of apathy as an absence of political and social progress, Jessica Greenberg argues that nonparticipation can be an expression of complex and sophisticated responses to changing sociopolitical contexts. Greenberg also examines how such responses are affected by the global deployment of normative models of democratic success and failure. Starting with both policy and academic discourse about civic participation and popular Serbian narratives about politics and European belonging, Greenberg integrates the ethnographic material from her fieldwork in Serbia to illuminate the context in which such ideas reinforce understandings of democratic policies as elitist, corrupt, morally suspect, and disempowering. In conclusion, she suggests that researchers and practitioners should interrogate their own roles in creating and deploying frameworks for political success and failure and the impact these frameworks have on the lived experience of democracy.

In this article, Dorothy Barenscott examines die dynamic interplay between modern urban development and world exhibition in the social imaginary of nation and empire, suggesting how Hungary's identity as imperial partner with Austria was increasingly tied to the multisensory experience of, and participation in, the growth of Budapest as the empire's second capital during preparations for Budapest's 1896 Millennial Exhibition. Whether a real or only perceived “world's fair,” this exhibition provided the perfect vehicle to further the goal of modern urban expansion and define what it would mean to be “Hungarian” to an international as well as a regional public. Guided by the Millennial Exhibition, a constellation of interconnected building projects arose within the urban fabric of Budapest: the construction and refinement of Andrássy Avenue, the Hungarian Parliament building, and Budapest's underground subway.

This article examines how a discourse on international image animated Macedonian politics following the country's 2001 conflict and how it reflected a broader cultural politics of European Union expansion. Contrasting with the continual deferral of recognition that characterized European integration in Macedonia, the Macedonian discourse on image (imidž) anchored a social imaginary where a national project of marketing could facilitate Macedonia's accession into the European Union and concretize its belonging to "Europe." The analysis developed here centers on the ambivalences in this discourse and the practices it authorized. By incorporating both orientalist distinctions and key concepts from the European Union's own process of integration, the discourse of imidž supported the neoliberal reform associated with Macedonia's postconflict restructuring and European integration. But the discourse on imidž also provided Macedonian political actors with an idiom in which to imagine, respond to, and capitalize on the larger political forces engendered by discursive constructs of Europe and the international community.