This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failures of eastern Europe alongside those limits of refugee/migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. The essay proposes that in order to understand the European political landscape in relation to migration, it is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the different configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, as well as analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between these configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

It is clear that the global impact of the Russian Revolution over the last century has been immense. What is less clear, however, is the global impact on the revolution. Historians have appreciated that contemporaries made immediate comparisons with previous revolutions, especially the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, but considerations of broader global influences on the revolution have been rare. This article explores how historians can study these global influences, exploring the circulation of ideas and their influence on people and policies. Whilst not denying the continuing primacy of traditional “internal” factors in explaining the nature and process of the revolution, the article argues that globalizing 1917, as contemporaries did, helps historians to better understand the widespread belief in progress that fueled developments as people sought to create a new country, and to appreciate how people tried to make sense of the tumultuous events of revolution.

This article analyzes national loyalty and identification by examining the language exams administered to minority public officials in Romania in 1934 and 1935. The exams aimed at testing officials’ knowledge of the state language, but given the broader political context they were more than a survey of linguistic skills. Examinees were singled out as non-Romanian and subjected to an additional requirement not demanded from their ethnic Romanian colleagues, interpreting the use of the official language as a sign of loyalty. Drawing upon theories of loyalty as a historical concept, the paper analyzes how the particular situation of minority public officials was reflected in these texts and how they created a specific identification for themselves, composed of important elements of their minority ethnicity but also expressing their identification with the state and its modernizing goals as members of a unified, professional public body. The language exams signaled the emergence of a specific category of minority public servants who were part of both the minority group and the middle-class functionaries of the Romanian state. Nationalist public discourse on both sides—Romanian and minority—have denied and erased the history of these hybrid loyalties and identities, but the languages exams help us to recover them.

Historians work with sources that are products of specific social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Thus, understanding how and why sources were produced and why they survived is an essential component of historical scholarship. At the same time, many historians often employ some sort of conceptual framework—implicit or explicit, descriptive or normative—in order to translate the sources into a coherent narrative. Modern economic historians are no different. The sources tend to be quantitative and focused on economic phenomena (with many exceptions), but doing economic history well means interrogating the origins, trustworthiness, and usefulness of the data in question. In doing this, modern economic historians are largely unapologetic about employing the tools—especially statistical—and intellectual apparatus of economics to interrogate their sources, much as social, political, or environmental historians draw on ideas and methods from related disciplines in their own inquiries. This is precisely how we make sense of the historical process of economic development.

The main argument presented in this essay is that the politics of Ataka, the most successful and influential populist party in Bulgaria, should be construed as a form of left-wing radicalism. Originally a nationalist formation, over the last decade Ataka has evolved into a broader social movement that blames free markets, neoliberalism, and US led neocolonialism for the country's misfortunes. Today its activists routinely assault liberal democracy as a political system unable to cope with the evils of capitalism, and seek to marginalize political actors and social constituencies identified as pro-western.

This essay takes the October Revolution's centennial as an occasion to consider Soviet state practices in an international context. Many features of Soviet governance reflected an interventionist ethos that first arose in western Europe and subsequently informed programs of population management around the world. From this perspective, we see that Soviet methods of rule derived not from socialist ideology but rather from pre-existing state practices. Communist Party leaders used these practices to pursue ideological goals, but both ambitions to reshape society and the means to do so originated elsewhere. This comparative approach also highlights ways the Soviet case resembled that of other late-developing countries, where educated elites similarly relied on state interventions to transform their populations. For many of them, the Soviet Union offered an alternative model of socioeconomic advancement, albeit one based on extreme state violence.

Departing from an overview of current mass media discourse on the far right, this article suggests why and how social scientists could contribute to a better understanding of current socio-political changes. In presenting an anthropological perspective, it discusses methodological, conceptual, and ethical challenges to conducting research on and with radical right-wing activists and supporters.

This contribution interprets the east-central European post-liberal governments’ recent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee and anti-human-rights hysteria in the context of the increasing dependence of the region's societies for livelihood on employment in the western EU, the widespread racialization of east European labor in the western EU, and the refusal of east European political elites and societies at large to consider possible “Left” critiques of the EU. Given those circumstances, and laboring under related anxieties, post-state-socialist political elites and societies have assumed a fundamentalist-racialist posture. They redirect their repressed anger toward incoming refugees, claim an ahistorical, essential kind of Whiteness and contribute to rigidifying European discussions of “race.”

Alessandro Stanziani’s article re-launches the discussion about the quality of Russian imperial statistics and the relevance of quantitative analysis for historical research at an important moment for Russia’s economic history, when a lot of new data are being compiled and used by scholars. Similar productive discussions took place at other critical junctions for the fields of history, economics, political science, and other social sciences. For example, Robert Fogel’s and Stanley Engerman’s “Time on the Cross” (1974) triggered a profound discussion of potential benefits and limitations of quantitative approach to studying the history of the United States. The punch line of that discussion can be illustrated by the justification of the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics dedicated to Fogel “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.” In the context of Russian history, similar discussions took place in the Soviet Union in the 1970s between Ivan Koval'chenko and Boris Litvak and then later in this journal in the 1990s.

Nikita Khrushchev's proposal to give parents of non-Russian children the choice of whether to send their children to a school with education in their own tongue, or to a Russian school, was first advanced at the end of 1958. It immediately provoked a furious response from leaders of the non-Russian republics of the multi-national Soviet Union, and was an issue contributing to political purges in Azerbaijan and Latvia in 1959. In this article, Jeremy Smith uses documents from archives in four Soviet republics to analyze the responses from the republics. Smith shows that republic leaders were mostly agreed on an alternative solution to the question of language of instruction, and pursued different strategies both to oppose the introduction of the reform and to obstruct its implementation once it was passed. The episode also underlines the uncertainty involved in center-periphery relations in the USSR.

The Russian Revolution inaugurated a period of unprecedented social agitation in Spain, which shared notable structural similarities with Russia. The instability of this period, often referred to as the trienio bolchevista (three Bolshevik years), paved the way for military dictatorship in 1923, and revealed grave defects in the Spanish political and social edifice (the national question, the land question, the inefficiency and corruption of the state, the militancy of the labor movement), which would re-emerge again with even greater virulence in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution provided a powerful stimulus for these upheavals, and the myth of Bolshevism helped spur both revolution from below and counterrevolution from above. This paper will provide a synopsis of the turbulences of these years and will gauge their ulterior significance, setting them in a transnational context. In particular, the paper will assess the specific impact of the Russian Revolution in Spain.

This article examines the history of the Soviet dissident historical collection Pamiat΄ through the lens of liminality. It argues that the publication sought to bridge the gap between dissident and professional scholarship, between grassroots memory collection, with its emphasis on the witness's voice, and historical research's reliability and “scientificity.” Although Pamiat΄ was inspired by earlier dissident historiographical projects and its editorial team was closely linked to the human-rights movement, its ambitions of objectivity and representativeness also connect it to later Perestroika projects based on citizen involvement, such as Memorial. Pamiat΄s ambiguous identity and claim to neutrality may have delayed the Soviet authorities’ response to it, but repression eventually hit the publication. By putting into question the state's monopoly on historical scholarship and connecting readers and contributors across the Iron Curtain, Pamiat΄ had clearly overstepped the boundaries of the permissible and acquired a political meaning it disingenuously claimed not to have.

In this piece, we develop a more complex picture of the East-West divisions that have characterized much analysis of the region since the crisis began. By examining how differently positioned actors have responded, the migration flows become a heuristic for other important but less visible processes in post-socialist state formation and Euro-integration. We use the complexity of Serbia's reception as an empirical ground to create a new analytic framework that moves beyond over-simplified dichotomies. Doing this allows us to bring seemingly unrelated kinds of political action into the same frame to reveal an emerging trend in citizen and noncitizen political engagement.

The central argument of Alessandro Stanziani’s article “European Statistics, Russian Numbers and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”—that statistical data is socially constructed, and that the ways in which it is socially constructed should be an object of historical inquiry—helps to answer the question of why an archival researcher with literary inclinations should take note of the mass of statistical material produced throughout the nineteenth century and especially in its final decades. Statistical reports were regularly published in overtly literary publications such as Faddei Bulgarin’s Northern Bee (Северная пчела) from the 1820s onward. Vissarion Belinskii, one of the preeminent Russian literary critics of the 1830s–1840s, reviewed statistical works alongside literary fiction, poetry, and theater. In a review of a theory of statistics, he weighed in on the importance of the discipline and its place among other sciences

This paper examines Poland, Hungary, the UK and the US the most surprising cases of populist reaction. It argues that the social polarization caused by the failures of hyper-liberal reforms to the state, and the association of Social Democratic parties with those reforms, has provoked alienation from liberal democratic politics.

Yury Zaretskiy's article examines the mass practice of composing formal autobiographies by Soviet citizens. The major part of the study covers the period from the 1950s to the 1980s when the Soviet records management protocol requested this type of document from individuals belonging to different social groups and to different occupations. Zaretskiy reviews the concrete social circumstances in which the narrative structure of formal autobiographies was fashioned before moving on to argue that their final addressee was the Soviet state, that their content changed in line with political and ideological changes in the USSR, that the practice of writing them had much in common with Christian confession, and that the spread of this practice among millions of people functioned as a mechanism of subjectification aimed at “making them Soviet.”

In 1832, an imperial manifesto established a new social estate (soslovie) of “honored citizens.” The new status was granted to successful merchants, professionals, and artists, and gave them permanent (and sometimes inherited) privilege. Honored citizens have been largely forgotten or discounted, both by literary authors of the nineteenth century and by historians. They were, however, a conscious effort on the part of the imperial state to create a middle class in the context of an estate-based social structure, an effort that followed several decades of previous experimentation and discussion. Thousands of subjects of the Russian Empire took on the new status, to the point that by 1897 honored citizens outnumbered merchants. They understood themselves as having an honorable place in the social structure, and were understood as a sign of the status of Russian towns. Honored citizen status gave a certain amount of stability to the new middle class, although not every honored citizen prospered. As a social estate, honored citizens were unique, for they were not unified in opportunity, and because they did not have a collective association—they were individuals in the law. They were, as a result, present and important but paradoxical: while defined by estate law, they were closer to individual subjects or even citizens than almost anyone else in imperial society. In addition, their lack of a collective voice muted their radical potential, masking them from contemporary and historical view.

In Langston Hughes's 1934 essay “Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” (published in Travel magazine), the author writes mournfully about the Soviet reforms that put an end to the practice of effeminized male dancers, bachi, performing in the teahouses of Central Asia for exclusively male audiences; in doing so, Hughes expresses an enthusiasm for the queer contours of the bachi tradition. This article connects that enthusiasm with Hughes's earlier involvement in cultural efforts aimed at increasing queer visibility within the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. By situating “Boy Dancers” in this context, the underexplored role of the Russian Revolution in fostering queer solidarity among global communities of color is highlighted.