I guess I was a revisionist before anyone had ever heard the term used in its contemporary sense. When I embarked on Soviet studies, revisionism meant the democratic and gradualist revision of Marxism by Eduard Bernstein and his followers. That, of course, was heresy in the eyes of Marxist-Leninists, and “revisionism” became a familiar swearword in the Soviet lexicon.

My own unwitting revisionism in the new sense of deviation from the Soviet studies mainstream really began with my participation in Michael Karpovich's seminar in Russian history in 1947. In my paper, “The Russian Proletariat as a Revolutionary Force in 1917,” I highlighted the Bolsheviks and the fabzavkomy, because that was where the published sources were.

Through an ethnographic analysis of public and “everyday” discourses in the Muslim-majority area of Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article shows how gender is frequently constitutive of orientalist and balkanist representations. Both orientalism and balkanism have recently undergone a shift, precisely in the ways in which they are gendered. Women have become more visible symbols of Balkan backwardness while orientalist depictions have moved from emphasizing erotic sexuality to a focus on heavily veiled and controlled women, symbolizing the political threat of the east/Islam. In examining the everyday workings of such discourses in a community straddling the imagined boundaries of east and west, Elissa Helms shows a range of competing (re) configurations of east/west and related dichotomies, which are reconfigured precisely through notions of gender. While some of these (re)articulations seem to challenge dominant orientalist and balkanist frameworks, Helms argues that they ultimately reproduce (gendered) notions of opposing east and west civilizations.

In this article, Robert Weinberg explores the visual representation of Judaism and observant Jews in the Soviet journal Bezbozhnik u stanka (The atheist at the workbench), which appeared in the 1920s. In their efforts to promote atheism and undermine organized religion, the artists responsible for the images in this journal singled out the Jewish god to be depicted with inhuman, bestial, and bizarre features such as a single eye and a nose made out of a fist. This portrayal of Judaism and religious Jews drew upon the pervasive antisemitic tropes and motifs in Russian culture and society and served to demonize Judaism and its adherents.

In this essay, Monika Greenleaf explores some reasons for, and directions of, the Moscow theater's growth as a cultural stimulus in Vladimir Putin's increasingly imperial, ideologically unified Russia. Focusing on four factors, the first part suggests why the theater, unlike the film industry, resisted collapse in the 1990s: directors’ studio theaters, the new “writer's theater,” the development of “autonomous and self-sustaining” institutions, and theater finance. The second part examines two functions of the theater in a postliterate age: to forge a richer sense of Russian identity by offering mimetic contact with, and choice among, many epochs of its historical and verbal heritage and to offer a traditional locus of resistance to the new regime of privatized spaces and bodies. Using a selection of current plays that reproduce past prose works in the present, Greenleaf analyzes the aesthetic effect of this encounter on the audience and its potential ideational ramifications.

Sheila Fitzpatrick has provided a useful history of our field in recent times, and she has done so in a gracious and personally revealing way. She is perhaps the most prolific and influential member of the field, and her observations cannot help but be tasty food for thought, especially as they come to us without the bitterness and defensive spite to which she might be entitled.

Here I would like to reflect on some of the reasons why I think the controversy became so angry, why it went beyond the bounds of normal academic dispute. And bitter it was. In addition to vilification in print, our universities received unsolicited tenure letters suggesting that we were incompetent and dangerous. Editors published angry unsolicited book reviews submitted by our critics. One editor continued to solicit readers' reports on an article I submitted until he finally got a negative one. With five reports, four to one in favor of publishing, he nevertheless rejected the piece. Sometimes you just cannot win.

In this article Theodora Dragostinova examines the interplay between official policies and popular demands in the nationalization of the Greek minority in Bulgaria. She explores why national activists and ordinary people chose to “speak national” in the context of the conflicting national interests and territorial aspirations of Bulgaria and Greece. At the official level, the national discourse and practice showed the co-existence of essentialist and constructionist understandings of nationhood; while the rhetoric of the primordial nation was ubiquitous, politicians realized that certain policies could “improve” the national body. At the popular level, the profuse use of national rhetoric functioned as an “emergency identity,” or a discursive strategy that allowed individuals to claim social legitimacy in emergency situations. Thus, despite the fact that people were forced to adopt clear-cut national allegiances, national side-switching remained a frequent phenomenon.

In 1969, when Sheila Fitzpatrick defended her dissertation in Oxford, I lived on the other side of the “iron curtain.” Being a happy Soviet Young Octobrist at an elementary school in the small town of Klimovsk, in the Moscow region, I knew about neither Iosif Stalin nor the birth of revisionism in western historiography. Even later as a history student at Moscow State University, the institution that provided the best academic education in the Soviet Union, I did not have the slightest idea about the ongoing bitter struggle between the advocates of the Cold War vision of Stalinism and the younger generation of historians who rejected that view.

Sheila Fitzpatrick's reflections make for illuminating reading as an autobiographical text. Two basic forces, she suggests, have shaped her as a researcher over the years and were present at the inception of a tremendously productive scholarly career. These two forces in combination may also better define her research agenda than the much used and abused term revisionism. One of them is positive; it is her belief in the archive as a repository of historical truth. From this belief flows her conviction that good historians are empiricists who engage in "lots of hard work on primary sources." Fitzpatrick herself has played a pivotal role in accessing ever new source materials and suggesting ways of making them speak; there are few Soviet historians who can match her first-hand archival expertise.