This paper critically examines the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that despite the Soviet legacy of rather strong institutionalization and discursive presentation of nationality, the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of ethnic distinctiveness and virtually abandoned the use of ethnic categories in official discourse. While several smaller minorities retained some institutional backing and discursive presence, the once very large group of ethnic Russians ceased to be publicly presented and popularly perceived as clearly distinct from the bulk of Ukrainians. At the same time, Ukrainian citizens differ greatly in their ethnocultural practices and ethnolinguistic identifications, hence Ukraine certainly remains ethnoculturally diverse, and this seems to be a more appropriate designation than “multiethnic.”

We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life ended so abruptly. We are grateful to the editors of the Slavic Review, who kindly agreed to publish her paper posthumously.

This article investigates the capacity and quality of governance through the prism of forest use regulation in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the inter-imperial transition between Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. It does so by bringing the question of access to natural resources into the frame of imperial governance formation, which is analyzed from the perspective of legal regulation of ownership and usage rights of forests. The analytical focus is set on the early phase of Austro-Hungarian occupation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was marked by political uncertainties and a legal arena where multiple and often conflicting norms coexisted. It shows how the consolidation process of legal arrangements and administration apparatuses did not follow any linear, teleological development towards a strong imperial state or homogenous Rechtsstaat that simply arrived and set up its governing institutions. Instead, governing bodies soon found their interests clashing with those of other local parties. Bureaucracy developed through time- and place-bound practices, which often had to adjust to complex social and environmental realities. During this process multiple attempts failed, while certain practices were implemented unevenly. In the process of asserting its own interests, the imperial administration relied on Ottoman legislation, which gradually became modified, resulting in legal pluralism and entangled imperial legacies.

This paper examines the rise of the “climate-kumys cure” in late imperial Russia and how it shaped perceptions of the steppes as a “curative place.” By positing that kumys (fermented mare's milk), a traditional food produced by steppe nomads, interacted with unique qualities of the steppe climate—including aromatic air, abundant sunshine, cool forest groves, rich feathergrasses, and brilliant wildflowers—to cure tuberculosis patients of their symptoms, the climate-kumys cure produced an imaginary of the steppes that contrasted with traditional Russian views of the steppes as barren, monotonous, and even dangerous. Knowledge about the steppe climate produced by proponents of the climate-kumys cure harmonized with Soviet medical professionals’ ideas about forging workers’ bodies and restoring their minds. An understanding of the steppes as healthy, however, did not stop the spread of disease, nor did it lead to preservation. Even as the climate-kumys cure rose in popularity, the steppes that had given rise to kumys were vanishing.

This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they demonstrated an ability to detect and critique the injustices of colonialism and sought out a rhetorical “middle ground” between Poles and non-European victims of empire in their work. However, their sympathy was in tension with Poland's historic role as a regional metropole, the need to assert their status as White Europeans, and the lure of settler colonialism. The “middle ground” they sought to create ultimately gave way to a “logic of elimination” that neutralized this tension, justifying colonialism to themselves and to other agents of empire.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For centuries, the steppe had served as a frontier and as a borderland to the Russian empire. In the 1930s, however, the semi-arid fields to the northeast of Stavropol became the object of intensified agricultural reclamation. Following the Central Asian example of dryland irrigation, the Soviet leadership dreamed of transforming the steppe biome into an oasis of high-modernist progress. Promises of plentiful yields fueled the planning of new hydro-infrastructures devised to counter the destructive forces of nature and to make the steppe bloom. Poverty, hunger, and natural disasters were to be threats of the past. As large swaths of land in the North Caucasus were re-imagined on the drawing boards of Soviet hydro-engineers, an agromeliorative complex evolved that favored large-scale solutions over locally adapted means. From 1965, this complex was represented by the Ministry of Melioration and Water Management (Minvodkhoz). It was supported by leading members of the nomenklatura like Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. However, their one-sided reclamation policies ignored ample warnings on soil erosion and agricultural degradation that were caused by excessive irrigation. As a result, yields declined whereas state investment continually increased. This paper shows how the vision to convert semi-arid lands into blossoming oases of progress created a path dependency with largely devastating consequences, as the hydro-engineers did not acknowledge the fragile ecosystem of the steppe. This reveals a deep and systemic sustainability crisis within Soviet agriculture that contributed to the economically fueled collapse of 1991.

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.”