Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

Using survey data from 900 rural households, this article assesses the degree to which Soviet-era workplace inequality between rural males and females has been remediated by the introduction of democratic and market reforms. The overall effects of reform institutions are mixed. Concerning male-female workplace inequality, three continuities were found with the Soviet period. First, rural males have larger total incomes than do rural females. Second, equal pay for equal work does not exist: females holding similar positions to males earned less in all categories of employment. In addition, males continue to dominate numerically the ranks of farm managers and leaders. Third, managers and leaders of both sexes are the most entrepreneurial, measured by income from private business. Male managers, however, have over three times the income from private business as do female managers. Concerning intragender inequality, it was found that females with advanced education and specialized knowledge or skills have significantly higher incomes than women with lower skill sets.

In this article, Rozita Dimova examines the rearticulation of class and ethnicity and how class distinctions produced by a free market and neoliberal economy in Macedonia have affected the interaction of Albanians and Macedonians in postsocialist Macedonia. Dimova highlights the ethnic dimensions of changing patterns of consumption by exploring the class mobility of one ethnic group (Albanians) and thus combines class, commodities, and consumption with notions of ethnicity. The process of articulating ethnicity and class is induced by the larger neoliberal context of the post-Cold War world in which the political economy of the "free" market and privatization inform local subjectivities. The domain of consumption, therefore, offers a place from which we can understand the complex interactions of multiple actors in Macedonia and see the various economic, performative, and symbolic significance of consumption in which the social mobility of the nouveaux riches Albanians has contributed to the loss of class privileges experienced by many ethnic Macedonians.

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of “urban beauty” and “urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle” as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.

In this article, Vasiliki P. Neofotistos analyzes the reappropriation of the term Šiptar, a derogatory Macedonian term for Albanians, by male members of the Albanian community in the Republic of Macedonia. Neofotistos shows how the reappropriation of the ethnic slur reflects constellations of social value, that is to say, larger systems of meaning and action concerning who and what is valued in life, that have emerged with Macedonian independence. Albanian men tap into familiar divisions found in the larger Macedonian society and create meaningful forms of collectivity as they deal with rapid social, economic, and political change in the context of Macedonia's postsocialist transformation of social practices and ideals. This case study of Macedonia sheds light on the dynamics of social relations within socially marginalized groups.

Since the birth of mass political movements, European nationalists have lamented the failure of their constituents to respond to the siren song of national awakening. This article explores the potential of national indifference as a category of analysis in the history of modern central and eastern Europe. Tara Zahra defines indifference, explores how forms of national indifference changed over time, probes the methodological challenges associated with historicizing indifference, and examines the intersections between national indifference and transnational history. Making indifference visible enables historians to better understand the limits of nationalization and thereby helps to challenge the nationalist narratives and categories that have traditionally dominated the historiography of eastern Europe.

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

“Witnessing for the Defense” takes readers into the adversarial courtroom in postreform Russia. A fundamentally new type of public arena, the courtroom allowed representatives of the state (prosecutors) to debate with professionals (defense attorneys and expert witnesses), each side making a case about criminal behavior and justice for society (jurors and the readers who followed reports on trial) to judge. Analyzing how the defense changed over time for the same type of crime, the murder of a lover by the woman whom he had jilted, Louise McReynolds shows how the courtroom provided a place for the discussion of newly emerging concepts and theories from the social sciences. Psychiatry is especially important because it was raising questions of individual personality and personal responsibility that had the potential to undermine the status quo. Thus this article shifts the focus on the legal reforms of 1864 from politics to culture.

In this article, Carolyn Forestiere investigates political volatility as a way to explain varying levels of governance across the new democracies of east central Europe. Specifically, legislative and executive volatility are examined. The results suggest that differences in legislative volatility help explain variations in governance, especially during the beginning of a new democracy. Once party systems begin to consolidate, however, differences in executive volatility begin to matter more. A case study of Poland confirms some of Forestiere's conclusions. While the legislative party system has shown some signs of stabilization, executive volatility remains a salient political problem, which over time has led to a steady decline in the quality of governance.

In early twentieth-century Russia, personal health became a commodity in a rapidly expanding commercial culture. As medical services and products (patent medicines, gadgets, self-help books) became widely available, new advertising strategies played upon both the threat of disease and the promise of health and well-being. This marketplace helped to feed new ideas about individual and social health, including such modern concepts as life-style choices. It also promoted competing models of the modern self: images of the weak and enervated victim of modern life were countered by visions of a healthy, strong, and controlled subject, able to master life forces. Focusing upon the disease construct of neurasthenia, Susan K. Morrissey explores how “nervousness” became a mass diagnosis and an emblem of the modern era—both its illnesses and its potential for regeneration. The making of a modern social sphere, Morrissey argues, depended not just on (professional) claims to specialized knowledge and broader political forces but also on commercial culture itself.

The Soviet comic writers Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov traveled across America in late 1935–36, gathering material for the travelogue published upon their return as “Odnoetazhnaia Amerika” (One-Story America) in the journal Znamia and then as a book in 1937, just at the time of Il'f's death. The book was a popular success and remarkably influential: the architectural structures of “One-Story America“—its skyscrapers, staircases, one-story bungalows—reappear in literary and cultural monuments of the 1930s and 1940s, namely Mikhail Bulgakov's novel about the Devil's eventful visit to Moscow, The Master and Margarita, and Sergei Eizenshtein's essays on montage. These works share an interest in the construction of space and perspective: paradoxical spatial constructions, embedded spaces, verticality, the “trick of the skyscraper,” and what Eizenshtein referred to as the “charm” of “acrobatic points of view.“

The late tsarist state was a colonial empire, Willard Sunderland argues, yet it never established a colonial ministry like the other colonial empires of the era. Sunderland asks why this was the case and proposes that, while there are many explanations for Russia's apparent uniqueness in institutional terms, historians should also consider how the country's institutional development in fact approximated western and broader international models. The late imperial government indeed never ruled through a colonial ministry, but an office of this sort—a Ministry of Asiatic Russia—might have been created if World War I and the revolution had not intervened. Sunderland sees the embryo of this possibility in the Resettlement Administration, which emerged as a leading center of Russian technocratic colonialism by the turn of the 1900s.

In this article, Sergei Bogatyrev offers new insight into the problem of continuity and change during the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible by focusing on the micro-periodization of dynastic history. In modern cultural and historical studies, periodization often includes micro-periods that are based on the perceptions of contemporaries. A micro-period can open a longer historical period, mark dramatic events, or reflect day-to-day activities. Bogatyrev argues that the 1550s was an important micro-period in the dynastic history of Ivan IV's Muscovy. The dynasty was in the center of many political and cultural projects of the 1550s, including the relations between the tsar and his cousin Vladimir of Staritsa, redefining the mechanism of succession, and formulating a dynastic vision of Muscovy's past. The micro-periodization of dynastic history reveals important developments that may be easily obscured by the traditional division of Ivan's reign into good and bad halves.

Elizabeth Cheresh Allen has addressed Ivan Turgenev's strikingly ambiguous and understated narratives, arguing that Turgenev's "language of litotes" consistently serves other than conventionally realistic ends. V. N. Toporov accounts for Turgenev's "strangeness" in more personal terms. Melissa Frazier's close reading of A Nest of the Gentry suggests the importance of yet another factor: Turgenev's engagement with the feuilleton and the increasingly commercialized literary environment that produced it. Ivan Goncharov's accusation that Turgenev had plagiarized elements of A Nest of the Gentry from his own as-yet-unpublished The Precipice finally also makes the point that Turgenev's "strangeness" in this novel derives from an ambiguous language best described as "not that," not the stolen words and half-truths of a feuilletonistic and largely French press, but something nonetheless not unlike.

In this article, Peter Holquist traces both the institutional culture and personnel of one key late-imperial era agency, the Resettlement Administration, based within the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture. Holquist examines the technocratic ethos of a close-knit set of officials within the Resettlement Administration's central office, a group who from 1906 to 1917 oversaw plans to develop the empire's peripheries as well as incorporate territories annexed during World War I. Crucial to all their plans was a commitment to the rational and scientific administration of the empire's people and resources under the aegis of the central state. This ethos informed policies during the last decade of the old regime and throughout World War I, and both this ethos and this cohort of officials influenced the state policy of Red and White governments during the civil war and laid the foundation for the Soviet state's colonization programs in the early 1920s.

Why did the campaign for “trust in cadres” (doverie k kadram) come to be so emblematic of the Brezhnev era? In this article, Yoram Gorlizki argues that following the failure of Nikita Khrushchev's institutional experiments, Leonid Brezhnev turned to “trust”—ties grounded in ongoing personal relationships—as a means of lowering the Soviet system's high transaction costs. Focusing on in-depth studies of three regions, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kirov, and Krasnodar, Gorlizki suggests that the leadership system in each shifted towards a pattern marked by modest but stable institutional constraints on regional leaders, a carefully calibrated system of seniority, and a set of order-enhancing norms that are referred to as ”hierarchical ethics.“ Mirroring the new leadership arrangements in Moscow, this combination of regional institutional constraints and political norms was the most compatible with a pattern of informal devices for cooperation that would come under the label of “trust” (doverie). Gorlizki contends that while Soviet officials had always resorted to personal relationships in order to attain their official goals, the campaign for “trust in cadres” gave cover to such practices by in effect elevating them into a component part of the regime's ideology. Gorlizki concludes by describing the variety of dangers these arrangements carried with them.

In the many works published on the imperial dimension of Russian history during the past decade, it is often the mechanical or “nuts and bolts” aspects of the empire's administration that are least discussed. So it is impressive to see two articles with a common focus on a practical institution—the Resettlement Administration—both of which argue for a strong connection between technical expertise and a colonial style of rule in the eastern Eurasian steppe and borderlands. But in spite of this common denominator, Willard Sunderland's and Peter Holquist's pieces could not be more different, in part because they approach the matter from opposite directions: Sunderland from a broad discussion of colonialism, Holquist from an analysis of a specific field of expertise.

Among the chief problems in determining the boundaries of the early modern period in Russian history is die reign and reforms of Peter I the Great. In this article, Russell E. Martin situates Peter's reign within the context of dynastic marriage politics from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. He argues that the centuries from roughly 1500 to 1800 constitute a single, coherent period. Court politics were dominated by concerns of kinship and marriage: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by the search for a domesdc bride for the Russian rulers through bride shows; then, in the eighteenth century, by the gradual transformation of court politics away from domestic brides and toward a more traditional use of dynastic marriage as a tool in foreign policy. The early modern period ends, Martin argues, only with the promulgation of a new law of succession by Paul I (as modified by Alexander I). The so-called Petrine divide, then, is elided in a periodization of Russian history that very much mirrors the boundaries that are conventional in the west.

This article examines the gendered consequences of linking family support to state pronatalist goals in contemporary Russia. By analyzing the policies, proposals, and critiques circulating on the maternity capital program, Michele Rivkin-Fish demonstrates how state power and citizenship are being constructed through struggles over the meanings of gender and family. She further argues that studies of Russian demographic politics must bring attention to both institutional transformations and the symbolic levels of discourse. This holistic approach, rooted in feminist anthropology, illuminates the particular, cultural logics informing demographic debates as well as the apparent contradictions between ideologies, policies, and practices. Pronatalist discourses engage Russian politicians, experts, and laypersons in efforts to undo the troubling legacy of Soviet gender relations and the 1990s fertility crisis; in the process, these policies define and deploy state power in ways that sustain and normalize gender inequalities.

In this article, Beatrice Farnsworth suggests that Aleksandra Kollontai, Old Bolshevik, socialist-feminist, and former leader of the Workers' Opposition, survived Iosif Stalin's terror largely because in her effort to assure Stalin that she was no longer an oppositionist, she nurtured a friendly dynamic with him. Indeed, in their conversations, she pursued a gendered strategy of warm deference and flattery. Yet, while publicly serving the Soviet regime, even ingratiating herself with the party leadership, Kollontai, in diaries written for history, privately, and at risk to her life, mourned the regime's failure to develop "communist humanism." With their interlocking themes of emotion and personalities, her diaries not only provide insight into Kollontai's uncanny survival and the personal responses of an Old Bolshevik to political changes and people but offer a rare and intimate portrait of the internal life of Soviet politics at their highest level.