Nikolai Charushin and Vera Figner, both populists of the “1870s generation,” late in their lives played a role in the events of 1917, responding first with tempered enthusiasm, and then with trepidation over the growing chaos and polarization that led up to the Bolshevik revolution in October. Despite their efforts, such populists ended up on the losing side, and have often been criticized for misreading the situation in the country, holding naïve beliefs or hegemonic and patronizing attitudes about the peasantry and having little experience with real world politics. In fact, if their full life stories, especially the two decades before 1917, are taken into account, they and others of their generation were immersed in the activities of the zemstvo, local politics in general, and newspaper affairs. Their caution, moderate stances and gradualism were based not so much on inexperience as on long exposure to the peasantry and to the needs of the countryside as well as rather prescient awareness of the potential for catastrophe in the situation at that time.

Using Poland as example, the article explores the operation of east European communist welfare states, with particular attention paid to benefits offered to working mothers. By exploring a number of diverse sources, I analyze the evolution and the meaning of institutional care and maternity leave in the life of professionally-active women. Studying a variety of factors that shaped the welfare policies of the time, including post-war industrialization, consumption, the demographic panic, and the struggling economy of the twilight years of communism, I attach particular importance to the early 1970s, when Poland saw a particular shift in gender-equality discourse. Welfare benefits played a key role in communists states, serving as a guarantee of equal opportunities or, in the case of mothers, as a tool for potentially facilitating employment. In time, however, they became chiefly tools designed to control the population and female fertility.

“How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end?” asked Roland Barthes in his now-classic essay “Rhetoric of the image.” At first glance, Barthes’s questions might appear nonsensical, but as this discussion around the various uses and misuses of Evgenii Khaldei’s photographs of war-time Budapest demonstrates, the question of meaning and truth in photography is anything but simple. This is because the meaning of a photograph is shaped by a multitude of factors, both internal and external to the image itself, and because the photographic medium, more so than other visual practices, lends itself to expectations of verisimilitude that obscure the complex relationship that photographs have to reality that they purportedly record.

The most well-known practitioner of dissimulation among early modern Christians of the Eastern Rite is Meletii Smotryts'kyi (ca. 1577–1633), the Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk (in modern-day Belarus), who was suspected of being a Uniate for several years before he was openly charged with apostasy during a council of the Orthodox hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania in August of 1628. For the previous year Smotryts'kyi had lived a double life, outwardly an Orthodox archbishop but secretly a Uniate, having formally accepted the Union with Rome on July 6, 1627. In this period of clandestine Uniatism and the years leading up to it, during which he flirted with conversion, Smotryts'kyi fulfilled his official duties, playing a leading role in Orthodox synods and risking exposure that would bring public disgrace and even physical harm. Smotryts'kyi had a positive reason for keeping his conversion secret: he argued that the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition should allow him to remain in office as an Orthodox bishop so that he might convene a council of the Orthodox hierarchy and elite and, “received as a schismatic [an Orthodox], would be able to set forth and to explain the twofold causes of the present discord of the Church & and to cause doubt for them in the schismatic faith (through the reasons that had taught him himself that there was no contradiction in thing [essence], only in words, between the holy Greek and Latin fathers).” Smotryts'kyi concluded his request for secrecy by comparing his situation with that of Jesuits engaged in mission work with non-Christians: “Wherefore, indeed, if the fathers of the Society of Jesus and the other priests in India can live with the heathens in secular habit, this should cause no one scandal, especially since, with God’s help, we will hope for the much greater fruit of holy Union from his hidden Catholicism & than if he were now known by all.”

This paper argues for greater integration of considerations of women and gender in the history of the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Two key issues have long been discussed by historians: the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, and the role of class in the revolution. Neither has been adequately analyzed in relation to gender. Women's suffrage has been largely neglected despite the fact that it was a significant issue throughout the year and represented a pioneering advance won by a countrywide coalition of women and men from the working class and intelligentsia, and from almost all political parties. In this centennial year, accounts of the Revolution remain one-dimensional; women remain the other.

The erosion of boundaries was a common motif in descriptions of Soviet life during the 1920s. It provided a powerful way of signifying the different rules in operation after the Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet criminal science was a microcosm of this larger change in thought and practice. Mikhail Nikolaevich Gernet, the jurist and criminologist, was particularly fond of using the imagery of prerevolutionary boundaries and their post-revolutionary destruction to describe developments in his field. Under the autocracy, he claimed, scientists were kept away from criminals and their site of containment—the prison. It was, Gernet noted with a degree of dark humor, rather easy to gain entry to a Tsarist prison cell as a political activist, but not as a researcher, who was met at the prison door with the sign: “Entrance to outsiders is strictly prohibited.” In sharp contrast, Soviet scientists were invited into the prisons and given direct access to the inmates. Gernet wrote: “The possibility for us to go right up to living criminals first appeared under Soviet power; until then, we only saw them in the courtroom and behind prison bars, and were not given the opportunity to get near them.”

Our essay proposes that while the predominant concept of revolution as driven by the mobilization of social, political, and cultural forces has value, at least as important for understanding the revolutions of 1917 was the dramatic demobilization of army, police, state, and society. We suggest that revolutions often see a conflict between affective mobilization (in which some portion of the citizenry becomes much more enthusiastic about particular social and political projects) and structural demobilization (in which the failure of major state institutions and economic enterprises makes positive social and political change nearly impossible). In early 1917, affective mobilization on behalf of the war and the regime was in decline, but structural mobilization was at its peak. The February Revolution brought a sudden radical structural demobilization. This structural demobilization both made it possible for relatively modest numbers of revolutionary forces to succeed in October 1917 and made the emergence of widespread apathy and disillusionment in 1918 much more likely.

Sometimes, we don’t know what a thing is. Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, in Chapter Two describes some witch doctors collecting “Chinese rhubarb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar, right down to its prolegs and spiracles—while I, in the meantime, found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which represented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating which—or why.” How to tell original from copy? Which is the source and which the subsidiary? This uncertainty makes an excellent figure for the complexities in The Gift, with its elusive, shifting narrative voice. Does Fyodor, from a variety of proximities and distances, control that voice? Or is there a superior “authorial” figure nestled between Fyodor and the ultimate author, Nabokov himself? This play with the relationship between narrative form and knowledge connects Nabokov tightly with Dostoevskii’s early experiment in epistemological fiction, The Double.

What was the nature of geographic variation in peasant unrest during the Russian Revolution? What explains this variation? We discuss and compare two extant sources of information on peasant disturbances from March to October 1917, we illustrate geographic variation in the actions recorded by these sources, and we statistically identify determinants of this variation. We show that two factors robustly drive province-level variation in peasant unrest in 1917: soil quality and the historical prevalence of serfdom.

As more than a billion people had done previously, on November 21, 2013, Ukrainian journalist and activist Mustafa Nayem wrote a Facebook post; this post, however, would have a much larger impact on subsequent political developments than most that had preceded it. Frustrated with President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign a long-promised association agreement with the European Union, Nayem asked others who shared his frustration to comment on his post. Even more importantly, Nayem wrote that if the post received at least 1000 comments from people willing to join him, they should all go to Independence Square to protest. And indeed they did: starting with just a few thousand people, the protests would swell to be the largest since Ukraine’s independence, particularly after police used force against protesters at the end of November 2013. Eventually, these protests led to the resignation of the government, the exile of the former president, and indirectly to the secession of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country.