The formation of Soviet multinational literature is usually attributed to 1934, the activities of Gor΄kii and the created Union of Soviet Writers. In fact, institutionally, the project of Soviet multinational literature began to be implemented within the framework of the VAPP (All-Union showcase of the RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) immediately after the creation of the USSR in 1922. Since in 1932 the RAPP was dissolved and condemned, it became politically disadvantageous to associate such an ideologically important project with it, and the entire dramatic history of the creation of Soviet multinational literature of the previous decade was erased and almost never mentioned (or mentioned in a highly distorted form). Based entirely on new archival sources, this article traces and documents for the first time this formative period in the institutionalization of Soviet multinational literature.

This article zooms in on what can be called the laboratory of the notion of Soviet literature: the debates of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in which the programmatic debate at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) was prepared, followed up, and further elaborated. It puts the focus on one of its key concepts—“the critical appropriation of heritage,” and tries to distinguish between different notions of heritage (with regard to realism and modernism respectively) and modes inheriting and tracing their instrumentalization in competing aesthetic and political positions. In this context it elaborates on the attempts to conceptualize Soviet national literatures by means of national heritage and within the horizon of what in the same context was conceptualized as “world literature.”

Aleksandr Aleksandrov, more commonly known under his feminine birthname Nadezhda Durova, is commonly portrayed one of Russian literature's most curious figures. Born female, Aleksandrov-Durova lived, dressed, and identified as male for most of his life, served in the Russian military during the Napoleonic Wars, given a legally-binding name change by Tsar Alexander I in recognition of combat heroism, and became a popular memoirist and fiction writer. My paper seeks to challenge and reevaluate the dominant narrative of Nadezhda Durova—that she was a woman who joined the army out of a sense of patriotism—by focusing instead on the fact that the author's narrative of masculine self has been subverted by publishers and scholars projecting their own interpretations on Aleksandrov's masculinity.

In this article I demonstrate how in the post-Thaw period—the period of “soft” socialist realism—the northern indigenous minorities began to (re)invent literary writing and manifest their own version of the canon. Due to the lack of a pre-Soviet written literary tradition, “young” literatures were born as a symbiosis of folklore, beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the surrogate literary tradition of the Russian-European center: the Soviet “master plot.” Having graduated from universities in Moscow or Leningrad, the first generations of writers “(re)invented” a view of themselves as simultaneously native and Other. A consequence of the fact that the authors internalized the role of the youngest “brother” was, among others, the amalgamation of children's and adults' narrative and pedagogical zeal, which combined folklore ethics with socialist realist moralism. The study is of a transitional time: before the local authors had experienced a cardinal reevaluation of their values during perestroika and afterwards.

The article demonstrates the presence of (homo)sexual subjectivity in rural Poland in the early 1920s using remarkable correspondence between two men who stood trial for committing homosexual acts in 1925. It argues that their relationship should be understood as the first documented same-sex secret marriage in Poland. By investigating relations between urban and rural spaces in the spread of sexual knowledge in the Second Republic, the article also analyzes how changing notions of male friendship and masculinity at the time could be used by men loving men to develop and pursue their own distinctive visions of love and pleasure.

This article analyzes the East German and Soviet campaign against the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer in 1959–60 as an exemplary case of how the Cold War and east-west entanglements influenced the memory of the Holocaust and Stalinist crimes. These entanglements were complex and went beyond the relations between the two German states. The article examines also the interrelations with the Soviet Union's propagandistic struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. It addresses the diverse impact that the campaign had in the two German states, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the Soviet Union. It argues that in the German context the campaign contributed to critical reckonings and remembrance of the Holocaust, which it did not do in the Soviet Union and among the Ukrainian diaspora. Moreover, in the Soviet Union it amplified an enemy image of Ukrainian nationalism that still exists today and serves Russia to justify its current war against Ukraine with the accusation that Ukraine is ruled by a “Nazi” regime.

During the Khrushchev period, the journalist Frida Vigdorova charged Soviet society with a moral indifference that expressed itself through evasive language. Such language, she argued, claimed to exercise moral judgment, while in fact enabling both individuals and institutions to sidestep their responsibilities. As the state enacted reforms aimed at raising society's moral consciousness, Vigdorova applied this critique of language to the Soviet justice system. This study traces the evolution of that critique across her published and unpublished writings about legal and paralegal rituals of justice from 1955 to 1963. For Vigdorova, these rituals offered object lessons in society's failure to combat indifference: evidence that linguistic evasion plagued those very institutions charged with adjudicating morality. By cultivating a transcriptive style, Vigdorova situated herself and her readers as witnesses to that language: a community of listeners gathered in space and time. In doing so, she presented journalism as a higher court that could call society to account.

What were the meanings of blackness in the Soviet Union? Marxist ideology offered no clear guidance for conceptualizing blackness, and the Russian Empire provided few historical references. But discrimination against people racialized as black was a major problem of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was unable to ignore. As Soviet institutions and black people from different parts of the African continent and diaspora cultivated political and cultural connections, those connections entailed collisions among multiple ways of conceptualizing difference. Blackness could not easily be translated into Soviet taxonomies, but, propelled by a series of conjunctures in global politics, people never stopped looking for linkages and analogies. Two primary challenges, recurring in different forms over several eras, were: How was the Soviet Union to conceptualize the relationship between the African continent and the diaspora? And how should it relate racial dynamics elsewhere to domestic conditions within its own borders? Drawing on two scholars’ original fieldwork and recent scholarship in an emerging field, this article proposes a novel, interactive approach to the historical construction of blackness and Africanness in the USSR.

In this paper, we explore the entanglement of spiritual and economic life through the example of Dagestani, Salafi-oriented entrepreneurs who try to live out their religious ideals in moral economic practices. We ask how living a religious life shapes economic behavior and its moral dimensions, and how the gradual acquisition of the norms of an Islamic economy influences the everyday economic practices of Salafi-oriented Muslims in Dagestan. Drawing on Stephen Gudeman's market-community framework, and offering our research as a corrective, we show how an Islamic framing of everyday economic activities and the gradual acquisition of the norms of the Islamic economy allows Salafi-oriented Muslims to escape traditional obligations, and to some extent, “the state,” while at the same time bestowing meaning on “cold” market relations. As a result, instead of escaping the market-society script (that they criticize), they reinforce it. Our analysis is based on the results of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Dagestan between 2014 and 2018.

This article examines debates, scholarly studies, and literary representations of the phenomenon of racism in socialist Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs’ relationship to whiteness in the 1960s and 70s. I argue that the persistent activism of black African students helped provoke official, scholarly, and public discussions about the thorny question of racism in Yugoslav society during this time. The salience of black students’ accusations eventually made something that was taboo in the 1950s and early 1960s—namely, entertaining the prospect that anti-black racial prejudice existed in non-aligned, socialist, and anti-racist Yugoslavia—into an active subject of debate by the end of the decade. Importantly, the relative candidness with which academic studies and popular literature addressed racism indicates a reflexivity about “racial” questions on the part of socialist Yugoslav society, something that scholarship has largely neglected in favor of focusing on the suppression or elision of race and the inadequacy of state socialist responses to the problem of domestic expressions of prejudice.

Using new archival research, this article establishes key facts about the most understudied aspect of Lev Tolstoi's biography—his Samara estate—assessing its role in the Tolstoi family economy and property structure. Integrating imperial history with the theoretical perspective of settler colonial studies, the article argues that the estate functioned within the context of Russia's settler colonialism in Bashkiria. While this experience contributed to Tolstoi's rejection of private property, it never erased his enthusiasm for Russia's manifest destiny as a settler civilization. Sympathizing with the plight of Russian settlers, Tolstoi remained perplexingly indifferent to the suffering of the semi-nomadic Bashkirs they displaced. These findings complicate Tolstoi's status as Russia's premier anti-colonial writer, urging a more capacious framing of the problem of empire in Tolstoi's art and thought, one that balances his critiques of the military conquest of the Caucasus against his embrace of settler colonialism.

Turkmenistan holds a special place in the Russian and Soviet imagination. At the turn of the last century, especially, Turkmenistan appeared as an imaginative object shaped by both nineteenth century tropes and images of the steppe and by the modernist's revaluation and displacement of these very tropes. This article traces this intellectual history from the late nineteenth century to the fall of the Soviet empire and elicits three main narratives through which the republic was rendered alien: Turkmenistan as a “republic from outer space,” as an “arctic desert,” and as a republic whose southern border is constantly threatened by various forces that can never be successfully defeated. Based on a wide body of literary works and films, mainly from the 1920s–30s and the late Soviet period, the paper points to intertextual references that betray both shifts and continuities within these narratives. The analysis shows how notions of political integration and climatic transformations were constantly countered by alternative imaginary boundaries, contributing to an “imaginative geography” of the republic that shaped the way Turkmenistan was perceived. The development of such an “imaginative geography” of Turkmenistan as an “alien republic” was thereby inextricably linked to its steppe and desert geography, marked by a threefold dialectic between concrete and imaginary geography, a rhetoric of appropriation and of alienation, and between present and mythical time.

Probing the manner in which Kazakhs attained noble status in the Russian empire, this article explores a neglected aspect of the country's social history. Recognizing that nobility is typically associated with landowning in a feudal order, we explore how this status also found application in the steppe. Based on diverse sources and comparison with other ethnic elites, we regard Kazakh ennoblement not only as a way of recognizing a traditional nomadic aristocracy, but also as a method of creating a new native elite beneficial to Russia's colonial project. We likewise propose that the distinctive character of nomads’ pastoral lifeways differentiated the Kazakh nobility from their Russian counterparts and prevented them from making full use of noble privileges. The article thus explores the nature of Russia's social order by interrogating its margins and contemplates both the possibilities and limits of social inclusion for Russia's ethnically and culturally diverse population.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.

This article maps the presentation of nuclear power as valuable cultural heritage in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Drawing on the analysis of archival documents, exhibitions, site visits and interviews, it argues that the nuclear cultural heritage-making that is taking place in Russia is not limited to self-promotion by the nuclear industry but is shaped by different professional and societal groups seeking to define their identity and gain recognition in the public sphere. The selected case studies, the Polytechnical Museum (Politekh) in Moscow and Rosatom's recent attempts to institutionalize nuclear cultural heritage, add new empirical material to the existing studies of Soviet and post-Soviet nuclear culture and offer new insights into its character.

The KGB and the rest of the Soviet intelligence and policing apparatus are commonly portrayed as having been among the staunchest of conservative opponents to the reform process in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1980s. But while key leaders of the August 1991 effort to oust General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, did come from the security services, this characterization obscures how the KGB rank-and-file responded to and participated in the reforms. This article uses their own words and experiences, recorded in the KGB΄s top-secret in-house journal, Sbornik KGB SSSR, to examine how everyday KGB officers navigated liberalizing reforms in which they in fact played an active and evolving role implementing and shaping. In these firsthand accounts, which cover topics from nationalism to environmentalism, a sense of loss of control is clear, both over events unfolding in the Soviet Union and over their own leading role and privileged position within it.

Research on how faculty have attempted to subvert the casualization of academic labor, that is, the conversion of stable and well-paying jobs into temporary ones, has been going on for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have cast academic contingency in new light. Given the prevalence of contingency in Slavic and REEES, and the threat of budget cuts in the humanities, REEES faculty have a particular stake in undertaking anti-contingency efforts to protect their colleagues, institutions, and scholarship. This article will assess the conclusions of some recent studies, opinion pieces, debates, and policy recommendations with a view to their potential to address contingency in REEES and Slavic Studies.