In this article Chad Bryant examines how Nazi and postwar Czechoslovak officials defined and ascribed nationality in the Bohemian crownlands. Specifically, Bryant looks at how officials struggled to come to terms with so-called amphibians—people who could switch public nationality or whose nationality was unclear. Amphibians challenged officials to define what they meant by “Czech” or “German.” Although the definitions of what made a Czech or a German became increasingly absurd, confused, and contradictory from 1939 to 1946, officials continued to mark individuals as either Czechs or Germans, thus eliminating “amphibianism.” The state had now assumed the sole authority over the ascription of nationality in die Bohemian crownlands. The individual’s right to choose a public nationality—a fundamental aspect of prewar civil society—had been stripped away. The article ends with a glance at other European cases, and a suggestion for future studies of nationality politics in Europe during an era of unprecedented displacement and violence.

The peace arbitrator was created in 1861 to be the main administrative autiiority in the countryside during die implementation of emancipation. In this article Roxanne Easley examines the institution of peace arbitrator and its role in mediating interests and fostering communication between landlord and peasant and as a potential generative agent of civil society in the postemancipation countryside. After the initial shock of confrontation between landowners and peasants, coercion, arbitrariness, and custom began to share public space with dialogue, process, and law in the solution of public disputes. The peace arbitrator, as die point of intersection for each group’s ideology(ies) and as instructor in formal communication, was at the heart of this change. But a permanent, fully institutionalized vehicle for mediating public interests did not fit with the autocracy’s vision of orderly social change nor with its habitual compartmentalization of die social estates. In response to this threat, the state first neutralized the unusual public principles that underlay the institution of peace arbitrator and then eliminated it in 1874. Easley explores the unintended growth of public politicization in rural Russia as a consequence of emancipation and the boundaries of autocratic reformism.

This article turns to an unexplored genre of Russian letters—the Yiddish cartoon—in order to consider how the most popular Russian Jewish newspaper of the early twentieth century participated in the Revolution of 1905-07. By exploring cartoons published in Derfraynd (St. Petersburg, 1903-1913, renamed Dos lebn February-July 1906) Sarah Abrevaya Stein reflects on how the Yiddish press reflected and shaped evolutions in Russian Jewish popular opinion: in particular, the temporary shift away from nationalist and toward opposition and socialist politics. This article also considers why the revolution ended in the world of Yiddish letters some months earlier than it did in the Russian, in the wake of the Bialystok pogroms of June 1906. This event, Stein demonstrates, catalyzed a redirection in the aesthetic and political tenor of popular Yiddish sources, prompting the cartoon to be replaced with the photograph and the politics of opposition with nationalism.

The article analyzes the relationship of conservatives to the political order that arose after the 1905 revolution. It suggests that by the start of World War I, a dissatisfaction with the status quo had become a characteristic feature of Russian conservatism. The archaic formula “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” was the quintessential conservative discourse, both for nationalist supporters of conservative reforms and for opponents of any innovation such as Dubrovin’s All-Russian Union of the Russian People. But this formula existed in sharp contradiction to the realities of “renewed Russia.” Conservatives continually underscored the lack of correspondence between reality and their conservative dogma. In conservative circles, the growth of social tensions on the eve of the war was also understood as evidence of the inadequacy of the new political order. Because of this, Russian conservatives did not aspire to preserve the Third of June system and did not try to restore it after February 1917.

This article uses the Soviet state and party archives to describe the workings of a key Soviet economic institution and is designed to serve as a bridge between historical and economic research in the archives. Drawing on the archival records concerning the People’s Commissariats for Heavy and Light Industry, Paul R. Gregory and Andrei Markevich examine how these commissariats interacted with both superiors and subordinates. The principal/agent conflict between vertical orders and "economic rents" from unsanctioned horizontal dealings provide the theoretical framework. Gregory and Markevich explore such disfunctionalities as the tendency to conceal information, to act opportunistically, and to build autarkies as well as the primary measure used to combat these tendencies: splitting the commissariat up.