In this article, Gregory Stroud considers the modern ruin as a site of common urban conversation and identity for large, diverse, and otherwise fractious populations of Petersburg and Moscow residents. Stroud argues that what began at the turn of the century as a relatively narrow nostalgic intellectual movement anxious over the perceived modern loss of timeless beauty and value exploded with the frustrations of the Christmas holiday during World War I into a common boulevard conversation concerning the loss of holiday, ritual, authenticity, and habit. The failure of the old regime to satisfactorily engage this conversation and to offer meaningful solutions would render such nostalgia into a biting critique of autocracy, mass consumerism, private property, and shopkeeper capitalism.

Empire has become a common analytical frame through which the Soviet state and its collapse are interpreted. Commenting on the other contributions to this forum, Mark R. Beissinger examines the limits and utility of this concept, arguing that empire needs to be understood, not as a clearly bounded transhistorical model, but as a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” whose meaning and referents have altered significantly over time. The article then probes the ways the concept of empire has been redeployed in the Soviet context, addressing in particular the role of nationalism in the making of empire, the injustices associated with empire, and the contested boundary between the multinational empire and the multinational state. It concludes by arguing for a more interpretive approach to Soviet empire as a way of relating to authority rather than a common set of political practices.

Although Cement was a model for later socialist realism, Katerina Clark has argued that Gleb Chumalov does not achieve consciousness, a requirement for later heroes, but instead remains spontaneous. In this essay, Eric Laursen argues against Clark's widely accepted interpretation. By introducing the idea of instinct (class, worker, revolutionary), which Anna Krylova has shown to be central to Bolshevik thought in the early years of the twentieth century, Laursen argues that Gleb does gain consciousness. Gleb does not move from spontaneity to consciousness, however. Instead he learns to control and guide his own instincts and those of others. Two other characters also transform themselves. Gleb's wife Dasha illustrates a similar but distinct path forwomen. Sergei Ivagin, who must abandon conscious thought to first develop instinct, illustrates a different path for the intelligentsia. The attainment of consciousness is presented as a rebirth or maturation and involves the acquisition of “conscious language.” In the party purge at the end, those who speak unconsciously, therefore misleading and confusing the masses, are cast out of the party. The newly conscious Gleb and Dasha, who now speak properly, take their place as leaders.

This article explores Aleksandr Herzen's use of the lovesickness topos in his novel Kto vinovat? (1847) in the context of the long literary and medical traditions of lovesickness and the specifically Russian situation of the 1840s. Valeria Sobol argues that Herzen was among the first Russian writers to exploit the semiotics and diagnostics of lovesickness in order to address the questions of human spirituality and the status of scientific knowledge. Given Herzen's frequentiy proclaimed antispiritualist and antidualist position and the novel's apparent anti-Romantic pathos, one would expect him to reject the essentially dualist notion of lovesickness as a “malady of the soul,” but the novel presents a far more complex picture. Herzen's struggle to reconcile the new scientific spirit of his age with the Romantic heritage reflects the transitional nature of the decade in which the novel was written.

In addition to examining the ideological and artistic origins of Fedor Dostoevskii's portrayal of the underworld in his short “cemetery story” “Bobok” (1873), Ilya Vinitsky probes the theosophical context of Dostoevskii's “fantastic realism.” Vinitsky considers this story a programmatic “theosophical menippea” that artistically “voices” and “tests” Emanuel Swedenborgs doctrine of posthumous self-exposure of the wicked souls who are no longer restrained by “fear of the law, of the loss of reputation, of honor, and of life” and laugh shamelessly “at honesty and justice.” Vinitsky argues that Dostoevskii was interested in Swedenborg's spiritual psychologism as an epistemological method and contends that Swedenborg's interpretation of devils as former humans, with their “earthly” consciousness, inner sufferings, and memories, perfectly corresponded to Dostoevskii's symbolic anthropology. Vinitsky also proposes that the comic narrator of “Bobok” can be seen as a literary mask of Dostoevskii himself, who employs philosophical irony as a means of conveying a metaphysical message in the age of positivism and disbelief.

As a consequence of the 17 April 1905 law on religious freedom, hundreds of baptized Jews petitioned to return to Judaism. While the law paralleled the liberalization of the attitudes and values regarding religious differences that occurred in European societies between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the reform also helped destabilize traditional social boundaries and religious identities in the empire. On one level, this essay examines the conflicts and problems authorities faced in categorizing a Jewish population that continually resisted conventional assumptions. In the context of rapid population movements, political and religious reforms, and increased acculturation, what it meant to be “Jewish” was redefined, and administrators needed to establish an acceptable criterion by which (baptized) Jews could be classified. On another level, this essay draws on individual petitions and government correspondence to analyze the personal choices and social dilemmas that baptized Jews faced when they attempted to return to Judaism.

As Pål Kolstø explores in this article, attitudes towards Lev Tolstoi's religious teaching differed wildly among Russian Orthodox believers at the turn of the last century. Some felt that his philosophical notions were remarkably congenial to church doctrine, while others saw Tolstoianism as the radical negation of everything the church stood for. An image often conjured up was Tolstoi as the Antichrist. To some, it was precisely the features that made others see Tolstoi as an Orthodox double that led them to this conclusion: The Antichrist will manage to lead the faithful astray precisely because he will seem to imitate Christ himself. This was the point where the most extreme positions in the Orthodox debate on Tolstoi and Tolstoianism converged. All told, some 85 books and booklets and 260 articles on Tolstoi were published by professed Orthodox authors, many of them laymen. Taken together, they bear witness to the breadth and vitality of Orthodox public opinion.

The building of socialism, in its concrete and metaphorical sense, has been in a state of constant decay—in ruins—from its very foundation. For those who inhabited it, endurance became a way of life. It is precisely this endurance that explains the resistance, by both people and the landscapes in which they live, to the market. Nostalgia for socialism has become a commodity, but not for those who still live in its ruins, because they are home. This essay by Thomas Lahusen explores this ruined landscape, from the vanishing Palace of the Republic in Berlin and the decrepit-looking buildings made of precast concrete slabs of real socialism, to its culture, which shares decay and ruin with its built structures. Lahusen juxtaposes this landscape to philosophical essays on the collapse of communism and to recent histories, some of which yield new fetishes and new commodities.

The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments over Russian social structure played a central role in discussions of eating establishments. The Russian state controlled these establishments in part through legislation that kept social groups apart; it focused particularly on the extremes of the social hierarchy, showing little interest in the middling groups. In more narrative descriptions of eating establishments, however, the middling groups—or their absence—seemed remarkably important. Foreign observers generally felt that Russia lacked both a middle class and middling eating establishments. Russians in part agreed, but by the middle of the century they were more likely to locate a middle class among one particular group: Moscow's merchants.

This new reading of Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog challenges the two lines of thought that dominate existing interpretations. Cold Warinspired critics saw in the banned novella an anti-Soviet political allegory and ignored its astute treatment of Soviet debates on biosocial issues. Most other critics have cast Preobrazhenskii as a mad scientist in the Frankenstein tradition, unleashing forces he himself cannot control. Putting aside false antitheses, Bulgakov's novella emerges as a fictional exploration of ideas in eugenics, hormone replacement therapy, and the nature-nurture debate that had real urgency for early Soviet geneticists struggling for ideological support, and for Bolshevik policymakers trying to create a “New Soviet Man.” In this article, Yvonne Howell describes the competing scientific paradigms that provide a backdrop to Bulgakov's work and shows how attitudes from across the “nature-nurture” spectrum appear and interact in Heart of a Dog through the voices of its principal characters.

In the last decade, the international copyright environment has been transformed by the rise of digital technology and by a new emphasis on intellectual property as a key to global economic growth. Recent trends have coincided with developments in the postcommunist nations of central and eastern Europe and Eurasia and have changed the rules for the use and dissemination of works originating in these nations. In this article, Janice T. Pilch examines recent developments in a historical context, from the origins of the international copyright system in the mid-nineteenth century and the establishment of U.S. copyright relations with central and east European nations in the early twentieth century, to integration within the international copyright regime today. The chronology details the application of U.S. copyright law to works from these nations, illustrating the effects of copyright restoration in the mid-1990s to foreign works that had previously been in the public domain in the United States, a development of foremost concern to scholars, educators, and librarians whose efforts depend on the continued availability of information.

This essay explicates, develops, and assesses the basic argument in Rudra Sil's Managing “Modernity”: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Sil presents “a flexible, integrative theoretical framework” and an interdisciplinary, comparative historical narrative. He hypothesizes that a “syncretist” strategy, when founded on durable legacies and when filtered through “congruent” intrafirm relationships, is much more likely than “modernist,” “revolutionary,” and “traditionalist” strategies to strengthen “managerial authority” and economic performance in large industrial enterprises. Four case studies (pre- and postwar Japan and Russia) attest to the benefits of “synthetic institutionalism” as a theory-building strategy and of syncretic incrementalism as an institution-building strategy. Sil's book focuses on the sources of managerial authority and the patterns of shop-floor behavior, not on system dynamics and interinstitutional interactions. Nonetheless, Managing “Modernity” is a major work for multiple authences and for multiple reasons.

In this essay Galina Yankovskaya explores the economic aspects of Soviet artistic life, which were often as important as political factors or censorship in determining the formal features and content of art production. Yankovskaya considers a complex of multisided trends: Russian artists' egalitarian imagination, the expectations of a new art audience, and the authorities' intentions. Exploring the confusing history of art institutions (mostly Vsekokhudozhnik, but also the Union of Artists and the Artistic Fund) within the everyday routines of the Soviet planned economy enables Yankovskaya to examine the clash of economic, ideological, and political motives in Stalinist culture and to look at how artists escaped from official ideology or exploited it for their own goals of appearing “busy.” Certain specific practices from this system of art production and distribution, such as the state's financial support as well as regulation of the art market, copyright law, and the mass production of handmade copies, survived into the post-Stalinist period.