Recent analyses of the economic impact of the abolition of serfdom mark a major return to quantitative approaches in the economic and social history of Russia. Tracy Dennison, Steven Nafziger, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, among others, make wide use of data produced by the zemstvo (provincial elected assembly), the Central Statistics Committee (TsSK), the Ministry of Agriculture, and local governors. These figures are particularly crucial with regard to the debate over the impact of the abolition of serfdom and the economic dynamics of tsarist Russia between 1861 and 1914. Indeed, the authors are too quick to consider the data reliable and only concerned about which statistical method should be used. Markevich and Zhuravskaya claim outright: “Historians agree that the quality of the late imperial statistics and governor reports is rather high.” Nafziger makes a similar statement regarding zemstvo statistics, which he declares are fully reliable sources. Dennison and Nafziger add: “Zemstvo publications offer a unique window into rural economic conditions in the post-1861 period, but western scholars have only begun to explore them. We consider these household surveys, other zemstvo publications, research by central government and provincial statistical authorities (including the 1897 census), and various secondary sources to develop some “stylized facts” about rural living standards in Iaroslavl' and Vladimir provinces in the post-1861 period.”

I thank Alessandro Stanziani and the editors of Slavic Review for bringing the problem of quantitative economic history to a diverse readership. Colleagues divided between departments (economics and history) and by method (positivist and critical) tend not to publish in the same journals or attend the same panels. This is a rare opportunity to share in a discussion. Allow me to use Stanziani’s points as an occasion to go further and to discuss how I have appreciated numbers in some of my research because I am, as he puts it and as I agree, radical.

Historians work with sources that are products of specific social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Thus, understanding how and why sources were produced and why they survived is an essential component of historical scholarship. At the same time, many historians often employ some sort of conceptual framework—implicit or explicit, descriptive or normative—in order to translate the sources into a coherent narrative. Modern economic historians are no different. The sources tend to be quantitative and focused on economic phenomena (with many exceptions), but doing economic history well means interrogating the origins, trustworthiness, and usefulness of the data in question. In doing this, modern economic historians are largely unapologetic about employing the tools—especially statistical—and intellectual apparatus of economics to interrogate their sources, much as social, political, or environmental historians draw on ideas and methods from related disciplines in their own inquiries. This is precisely how we make sense of the historical process of economic development.

Alessandro Stanziani’s article re-launches the discussion about the quality of Russian imperial statistics and the relevance of quantitative analysis for historical research at an important moment for Russia’s economic history, when a lot of new data are being compiled and used by scholars. Similar productive discussions took place at other critical junctions for the fields of history, economics, political science, and other social sciences. For example, Robert Fogel’s and Stanley Engerman’s “Time on the Cross” (1974) triggered a profound discussion of potential benefits and limitations of quantitative approach to studying the history of the United States. The punch line of that discussion can be illustrated by the justification of the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics dedicated to Fogel “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.” In the context of Russian history, similar discussions took place in the Soviet Union in the 1970s between Ivan Koval'chenko and Boris Litvak and then later in this journal in the 1990s.

The central argument of Alessandro Stanziani’s article “European Statistics, Russian Numbers and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”—that statistical data is socially constructed, and that the ways in which it is socially constructed should be an object of historical inquiry—helps to answer the question of why an archival researcher with literary inclinations should take note of the mass of statistical material produced throughout the nineteenth century and especially in its final decades. Statistical reports were regularly published in overtly literary publications such as Faddei Bulgarin’s Northern Bee (Северная пчела) from the 1820s onward. Vissarion Belinskii, one of the preeminent Russian literary critics of the 1830s–1840s, reviewed statistical works alongside literary fiction, poetry, and theater. In a review of a theory of statistics, he weighed in on the importance of the discipline and its place among other sciences

In a recent letter to the editor of Slavic Review, I took issue with the identification and interpretation of two photographs that appeared in an article titled “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising.” The scenes were mistakenly identified as taking place in wartime Warsaw. While various perspectives may be taken on how one uses and interprets photographs in other disciplines, as an historian, I believe it to be essential that a strict review of the photographs’ origin be examined since they may force us to come to different conclusions about the reality of historical events, and possibly perpetrators of crimes. The crux of my argument follows.

I would like to begin this essay by thanking Peter Pastor for his careful reading of my article “Heroes, Victims, Role Models: Representing the Child Soldiers of the Warsaw Uprising” which looked at the cultural portrayals of the anti-Nazi revolt and focused, particularly, on contemporary narratives surrounding the underage soldier. By spotting my misreading of the Budapest images, he opened up an important discussion on the afterlife of archival photographs, their (mis)uses, re- and misinterpretations, and crucially, their longevity and continued relevance. I believe it is a timely debate and, as the other essays in this forum show, a debate that is relevant to artists, writers, historians and cultural studies scholars, among others.

As a comic book artist who combines surrealistic and realistic imagery, I am often forced to use different types of photographs. Some of them are just typical references for artists—anatomy, poses, gesture, facial expressions. I prefer, however, to use old photographs from family archives, documentary books, and vintage postcards, in addition to numerous photographs found on the web. I enjoy putting together and mixing various kinds of visuals because every element has its own ghost from the past and the sum of these ghosts, including some added from my imagination, gives me a sense of fullness in my graphic stories.

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

In two important books, Runet (the Russian internet) is the central character, an essential component of the politics of commerce, economic policy, and strategic thinking. The first, written by an American specialist on information policy and the interaction between society and technology, looks back to the Soviet era, at the prescience and then failure of top Soviet scientists to introduce the networked society ahead of their American counterparts. The second is a collaborative work of Russian social scientists with an extensive agenda to identify, using discourse analysis, the principal political groups posting in “communities” of the like-minded in “VKontakte,” a large heterogeneous social media site combining personal interactions and extensive blogs within self-organized “communities.” The second half of this book differs substantially: Lev Gudkov, senior analyst at the Levada Center in Moscow, looks at the country as a whole through a different lens—a large number of national surveys gathered over the course of the Center’s activity. The first book chronicles the ambitious proposal by leading scientists to network the whole country in the service of the Soviet Union’s ideologically-based command economy. The second reveals a country riven by multiple, mutually incompatible ideologies espousing “anti” or negative platforms with little ideological heft until Vladimir Putin’s campaign to arouse a nationalist or, as the book puts it, an “imperialist syndrome” with the “return” of Crimea.