This article surveys theories of ruins and discusses their applicability to Russian history and culture. It identifies four major approaches to ruins: the ruin as a site of freedom from social norms and practices (Denis Diderot, Peter Fritzsche, Tim Edensor), the ruin as a reconciliation with nature (Georg Simmel), the ruin as the affirmation of modernity at the expense of the past (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), and the ruin as the emblem of on-going historical decay (Walter Benjamin). In contrast to western approaches to ruins, Schönle identifies a reluctance to aestheticize ruins in Russian culture. Yet ruins acquire a distinctive meaning in Russian culture, be it that they occur and disappear as a result of political will, that they serve as exemplars of imperial legitimacy and might, that they reveal the vulnerability of Russia's identity between east and west, or that they betoken the crushing of Utopian projects and the magnitude of historical devastation.

In 1893 Aleko Konstantinov undertook a momentous journey to the Chicago World's Fair. Mary Neuburger explores the broader implications of this journey and its consequences for the Bulgarian encounter with the west and modernity, drawing special attention to the issue of smell. As chronicled in To Chicago and Back, written after his return, Konstantinov discovers both the New World and the quintessence of his own nation on the famous Midway Plaisance, where he meets the prototype for Bulgaria's greatest literary anti-hero—the indomitable Baĭ Gano. In Baĭ Gano—a fictional travelogue about a Bulgarian in Europe—as in To Chicago and Back, Konstantinov explores the theme of Bulgarian backwardness vis-à-vis a more developed (albeit imperfect) Europe and United States. As Baĭ Gano, a bumbling and stinky rose oil merchant, travels throughout “civilized“ Europe, olfactory contrasts and ironies emerge, highlighting the role of smell in evolving Bulgarian (and European) notions of modernity and “otherness.“

Much recent scholarship has seen Soviet Central Asia as directly comparable to the overseas colonies of modern European states. In this article, Adeeb Khalid takes issue with this trend. European colonial rule, he argues, was predicated on the perpetuation of difference, while the Soviets sought to conquer it. Central Asia was indeed subject to colonial rule in the tsarist period, but its transformation in the early Soviet period was the work, instead, of a different kind of polity—an activist, interventionist, mobilizational state that sought to transform its citizenry. Khalid compares the transformations of the early Soviet period in Central Asia with the reforms of the early republic in Turkey, which were strikingly similar in intent and scope. This comparative perspective brings out the substantial differences between colonial empires and modern mobilizational states; confusing the two can only lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of modern history.

Winning elections is so vital for Russian leaders that competing viewpoints on national television news channels have been scotched, together with the channels that broadcast them. This study examines the other side of the screen: how participants in focus groups in four Russian cities process national channels' treatments of an important regional electoral campaign. The study was conducted during the last period in which viewpoint diversity was still available via TV-6. Unlike findings about other news stories, election stories appear to have little connection to viewers' experiences and values and deprive them of using familiar heuristics to make sense of the stories. For the public, the election story is a genre apart, framed by the same confusing template no matter what the office or region. Even TV-6, soon to be shuttered, broadcast its combative message using that template, thus extinguishing any opportunity for identifying genuine diversity and leaving the audience unable to distinguish between state and private channels, something they easily did for other types of stories. Election stories only cue other election stories. It is mainly younger, "post-Soviet" participants who bring an alternative frame to watching: norms, acquired through their education, by which election stories in a democracy ought to be constructed.

This article uses the career of Theodor Kohn (1845-1915), archbishop of Olmütz/Olomouc between 1892 and 1904, to examine various trends in the last decades of the Habsburg empire: the burgeoning Czech-German conflict, the brewing social crisis within the Catholic Church, the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and the countervailing force of Jewish national pride. Drawing on a wide range of literary, publicist, and archival sources, Michael L. Miller shows how Archbishop Kohn's Jewish ancestry served as a lightening rod for various disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disheartened groups in the Bohemian Lands of the Habsburg empire. Even Jews latched onto this “Jewish archbishop,” first as a symbol of “racial aptitude,“ then as a cautionary tale about the futility of assimilation. Kohn himself endowed his quintessentially “Jewish” name with Christian significance, viewing it as the source of his suffering—albeit a suffering that he cherished as the cross he had to bear.

In this paper, Martin Votruba traces the evolution of the Jánošík myth. The highwayman Jánošík is a living legend in Czech, Polish, and Slovak cultures. Contrary to common claims, the modern celebratory myth of the brigand hanged in the eighteenth century is at odds with the traditional images of brigandage in the western Carpathians. Folk songs and The Hungarian Simplicissimus of the seventeenth century often anathematize highway robbery. High literature of the mostly Slovak counties of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg empire similarly cast Jánošík as a criminal. Yet some intellectuals, such as Pavol Jozef Šafárik, inspired by the robber in German literature, singled out Jánošík from among other brigands and reduced that folklore-based opprobrium. Others, such as Ján Kollár, resisted Jánošík's rehabilitation. Subsequent Central European national revivals and ethnic activism prompted the Slovak romantic poets to reinvent Jánošík as a folk rebel against social and ethnic oppression.

In this essay, Adrienne Edgar compares Soviet policies toward Central Asian women in the interwar period with gender policies in two other types of Muslim societies—those ruled by European colonizers and those governed by indigenous national elites. She argues that the Soviet “emancipation” of Muslim women in the 1920s and 1930s had little in common with the policies of French and British colonial rulers. Instead, it resembled much more closely the gender reforms of the neighboring independent Muslim states of Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. In these Muslim states, as in the Soviet Union, the drive for female emancipation was part of an attempt to create a modern, homogeneous, and mobilized population. Because many Central Asians perceived the Soviet state as fundamentally alien, however, the political dynamic that emerged in response to Soviet gender reforms resembled the situation in the colonized Middle East, where feminism and nationalism came to be seen as mutually antagonistic.

Through the prism of Gavriil Derzhavin's 1797 poem “Razvaliny” (Ruins), Luba Golburt explores two concurrent developments in Russian cultural history: the fragmentation of Catherine the Great's overwhelming legacy after her death in 1796 and the contemporaneous weakening of the classicist genre system, which gave rise to such hybrid genres as the historical elegy. In its temporal polyvalence, the historical elegy bears great resemblance to the ruin, a semi-preserved historical artifact, which in the late Enlightenment/early Romantic period becomes the central image for experiencing history. Derzhavin's poem appropriately enacts historical recollection in a place overpopulated by ruins and pregnant with memories of recent history, Tsarskoe Selo. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, the essay tracks the emergence of this summer estate as the central locus memorii in Russian poetry and disentangles the intertwining threads of textual and pictorial representation in Derzhavin's work.

Soviet nationality policy was one of several political responses to cultural diversity in the interwar period. Peter A. Blitstein situates that policy in its comparative context, contrasting the Soviet Union to its eastern European neighbors and to British and French rule in Africa. Contrary to the nationalizing policies of the new states of eastern Europe, which sought national unity at the expense of ethnic minorities, Soviet nationality policy was initially based on practices of differentiation. Contrary to the colonial policies of Britain and France, which were based on ethnic and racial differentiation, Soviet policy sought to integrate all peoples into one state. In the mid-to-late 1930s, however, Soviet policy took a nationalizing turn similar to its neighbors in eastern Europe, without completely abandoning policies of ethnic differentiation. We should thus understand the Soviet approach as a unique hybrid of contradictory practices of nationalization and differentiation

It has long been common to interpret the mythology of St. Petersburg through the prism of eschatological prophecy. But what happens to the cultural tradition when the prophecy of doom comes to be experienced as reality, and predictions give way to reaction? How did the discourse of the end of Petersburg change when the legendary curse of Peter's estranged wife—“This city will be empty”—turned into the devastation of postrevolutionary Petrograd: violent, starved, frozen, and diseased? In this article Polina Barskova explores various cultural expressions of the urban crisis in the years just after 1917. These artistic reactions come from Viktor Shklovskii, Pavel Shillingovskii, Semen Pavlov, and Grigorii Kozintsev, among others. Here, the focus is on the tension between two impulses: to distance and aestheticize the ruins or to bring them closer to author and recipient, rendering these signs of urban disaster maximally incoherent and ugly. The article argues that the Petersburg authors use both strategies, as well as their hybrids.

The second edition of the Diary of a Writer (1876-1877) marked a crucial point in Fedor Dostoevskii's literary career: in spite of critics' attacks, many “ordinary” readers were overwhelmed by the author's charisma and began writing to Dostoevskii from different parts of Russia, expressing their views on the moral, social, and political issues dealt with in the Diary. Such success was also guaranteed by the original rhetorical and genre system of the Diary of a Writer, which, wisely modulated and addressed, aimed to involve readers and persuade them to share the author's beliefs. Raffaella Vassena explores the case of the article “The Jewish Question” in the issue of March 1877, where Dostoevskii's rhetoric actually failed to bring about what he had intended. By concentrating on new archival materials, Vassena investigates the reasons for this failure and submits a new perspective on the controversial question of Dostoevskii's attitude toward Jews.

This article explores the associational life of late imperial Kiev to gauge the extent of Jewish participation in the city's civil society and the nature of interethnic relations in the voluntary sphere. Natan Meir demonstrates that, despite political and societal circumstances that often discouraged positive interactions between Jews and their Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, the voluntary association made possible opportunities for constructive interethnic encounters. These opportunities included a range of experiences from full Jewish integration to a segregation of Jewish interests within the sphere of activity of a particular association. While taking into account the central role of intergroup tensions and hostility in Kiev, Meir notes that the frequency of contacts between Jews and non-Jews was higher than most scholars have assumed. By placing the case of Kiev against the larger framework of the Russian empire as well as other European states, Meir contributes to our understanding of the development of late imperial civil society and of the modern Jewish experience in the late Russian empire and across urban Europe.