This article analyzes revisions of World War II history in recent Russian cinema and television, including the feature film The Match (Andrei Maliukov, 2012), Spy (Aleksei Andrianov, 2012), and the television series Liquidation (Sergei Ursuliak, 2007). All these productions rely on the logic of conspiracy theory for their reimaginations of war history: pivotal developments during the war or its aftermath are presented as the result of subterranean manipulations by enemies or intelligence services. Through a narrative and visual analysis, the article shows how these films and series use the notion of conspiracy to reformat the contexts of wartime events and to place them within a speculative “bigger picture.” In doing so, they infer that what we know about the past is merely a part or effect of larger, hidden designs. Finally, the article situates these findings within a wider “reconciliation with the Soviet” in Putin-era culture, which increasingly centers on the remembrance of World War II.

The Revival of criminology as a formal discipline in the Soviet Union is raising anew the old Marxist problem of the effect of the environment on the individual. For thirty years following the abolition of the OGPU's Institute for Studying Crime and the Criminal there had been no research facility devoted to studying the causes of crime. Then in 1964 the USSR Public Prosecutor's Office transformed its existing crime-detection research center into the All-Union Institute for Studying the Causes of Crime and Developing Crime-Prevention Methods (hereafter called the Institute for Crime Prevention). Because of its sponsorship it is rather likely that the Institute's senior researchers have access to at least part of the country's largely unpublished crime statistics, hence that they can speak with greater authority than Soviet crime specialists working in the universities and under the Academy of Sciences. It was also in the same year that criminology began to be offered as a subject at Moscow University Law School, and other Soviet law schools have followed suit.

In a society whose ideology asserts that the effect of the environment on the individual is largely known, the effort to isolate particular effects should be of some interest. The assumption that Soviet crime is a product of elements of the capitalist past surviving in the present is strongly reaffirmed by the Institute's director, Igor I. Karpets, and his deputy, Vladimir N. Kudriavtsev. Since by any Soviet definition of “environment” the Soviet citizen is exposed to the socialist present far more than to remnants of the prerevolutionary period, the problem of identifying the “survivals” is coupled with the problem of lack of positive response to the socialist environment by some persons. Karpets seeks these phenomena first of all in the human mind.

Of the Balkan peoples who regained independent national life during the nineteenth century, the Bulgarians were least favorably situated. Cut off geographically from the fertilizing ideas of the West, economically and politically under closer subjection to Constantinople, and religiously and intellectually exploited by the Greeks, the Bulgarians had in addition to cope with the contradictory interests of the great powers and the jealousy and ambition of their politically more fortunate neighbors. But because of these obstacles, the resurrection of Bulgaria furnishes examples of the workings of modern nationalism and of the impact of foreign influences on backward native conditions. Among such influences, the Serbian was one of the most significant.

To be sure, Bulgarian national feeling never completely died out, any more than Bulgaria entirely disappeared from the political map or vocabulary of Europe.