Writing some ten years ago about the changing political situation in the Soviet Union, Allen Kassof made the astute observation, “Although liberalization tells something about where the Soviet system has come from, it does not say very much about where it is going. To say that the system is being liberalized is like walking away backward from a receding reference point, a procedure that gives too little information about what lies on the road ahead.” It is clear that this statement applies with even greater force to Eastern Europe—even if we were to substitute “change” for “liberalization.” Anyone reckless enough to write about the prospects for change in Eastern Europe is faced with an almost impossible task, certainly a more difficult one than for the Soviet Union, or for that matter China, where at least there is, or was, a single reference point—be it Stalinism or Maoism, totalitarianism or the “administered society.”

In the January 1984 issue of Soviet Studies, I published an article, “Is There a Generation Gap in the Soviet Political Establishment?: Demand Articulation by RSFSR Provincial Party First Secretaries,“ based on examination of 466 articles signed by twenty-four obkom and kraikom first secretaries and published between January 1976 and March 1981. I was interested in seeing whether differences in the content of published articles correlated strongly with generational differences within this sample of regional party leaders. The claim has frequently been made that the post-Stalin generation of Soviet officials is more demanding and impatient than the Stalin generation. My research was geared toward seeing whether the articles attributed to these secretaries reflected such differences.

Of all the Russian political writers of the last two centuries, there is none more eloquent in his demands for justice and liberty than Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802). Honor is due to him as the first Russian to risk his civil service career, his fortune, his family's well-being and his life itself to publish a resounding denunciation of serfdom and arbitrary government. He was the first to warn that, without timely social reforms, revolution would be inevitable and terrible; he was the first to go into exile "to blaze a trail where there was no trace," a trail "for bold men . . . for feeling hearts and for the truth . . . "

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.

Focusing on Vasily Yanovsky's prose fiction as a specific case study, this article sets modernist narratives informed by exile, dislocation, and migration in dialogue with the evolving theory of transnationalism. By engaging with the hybrid, cross-cultural nature of diaspora writing, this research challenges conventional, mono-national classifications based on the author's language and origin. Yanovsky's key texts transcending a range of boundaries (between Russian and English, fiction and nonfiction, Russian spirituality and western thought, science and fantasy) are brought to bear to demonstrate that language can be a matter of a writer's personal aesthetic choice, rather than a fixed marker of his appurtenance to a national canon. This article also argues for transnational identity as an intellectual and emotional, and thus translatable, affiliation, formed across national fault lines and cultural traditions.

In this article, I identify the Christian “hajj” to Jerusalem as an important Ottoman sociocultural phenomenon. I argue that by the nineteenth century the Balkan Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire had restructured and reinterpreted their Holy Land pilgrimages to mirror the Muslim hajj to Mecca. As a result, the ritual trip to Jerusalem was transformed into a mechanism for upward social mobility and communal empowerment. By exploring the structural and functional similarities between the Muslim and the Christian hajj, this article contributes to studies of Muslim-Christian interactions outside “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. It also reveals striking distinctions between the Balkan Christian hajjis and the Russian palomniki, calling into question the influential scholarly assumption of Eastern Orthodox practices' homogeneity, an assumption that stands largely uncontested in the field of Slavic studies.

State and Revolution has long seemed to be the most puzzling of Lenin's written works. The traditional view among western scholars has regarded State and Revolution as a Utopian fantasy that is completely out of character with the rest of Lenin's thought. The most prominent exponent of that viewpoint is Robert V. Daniels, who, in an influential article published in 1953, asserted that the ideas of State and Revolution were “permeated with an idealistic, almost Utopian spirit“ and who in a later work described State and Revolution as an “argument for Utopian anarchism” and a treatise in “revolutionary utopianism.“ Similar comments have been offered by a number of other authors. Alfred Meyer, though not dealing in detail with State and Revolution in his brilliant review of Lenin's thought, regards the essay as a reflection of the “dream of the ‘commune state'“ expressed in Lenin's statements from early 1917 through the first few months of 1918.

In 1893 Aleko Konstantinov undertook a momentous journey to the Chicago World's Fair. Mary Neuburger explores the broader implications of this journey and its consequences for the Bulgarian encounter with the west and modernity, drawing special attention to the issue of smell. As chronicled in To Chicago and Back, written after his return, Konstantinov discovers both the New World and the quintessence of his own nation on the famous Midway Plaisance, where he meets the prototype for Bulgaria's greatest literary anti-hero—the indomitable Baĭ Gano. In Baĭ Gano—a fictional travelogue about a Bulgarian in Europe—as in To Chicago and Back, Konstantinov explores the theme of Bulgarian backwardness vis-à-vis a more developed (albeit imperfect) Europe and United States. As Baĭ Gano, a bumbling and stinky rose oil merchant, travels throughout “civilized“ Europe, olfactory contrasts and ironies emerge, highlighting the role of smell in evolving Bulgarian (and European) notions of modernity and “otherness.“

On Friday, 30 August 1918, the day M. S. Uritskii, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated, Lenin was scheduled to address the Corn Exchange in the Basmannyi district of Moscow at 6:00 P.M. and the Mikhelson Armaments Factory in the Serpukhovskii section later. The first speech passed without incident; at the Mikhelson factory he gave the same fifteen-to-twenty minute speech he had delivered at the Corn Exchange, an attack on the forces of counterrevolution. In both locations he concluded his speech with the words “there is only one issue, victory or death!” As Lenin returned to his car in the factory courtyard, three shots were fired and he fell to the ground with bullet wounds in his left shoulder and the left side of his neck; the third bullet hit a woman standing nearby. The workers accompanying him to his car ran off, crying, “they've killed him, they've killed him!” and the crowded courtyard emptied quickly.

Although the study of Ukrainian historiography is rather new, it can boast of three distinguished names: Dmytro Doroshenko, Oleksander Ohloblyn, and M. I. Marchenko. To Doroshenko goes credit for the first work on Ukrainian historical writing ever published. His study, the only comprehensive survey, covers the period from the eleventh century to 1920. Doroshenko's book was supplemented and updated to 1956 by another Ukrainian historian, Ohloblyn

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.

I would like to thank the Slavic Review, and its fair-minded editor, Sidney Monas, for allowing me to break the silence on certain taboo themes and respond to critics—civilities practiced mostly in the breach in the societies we study. Due to space limitations, I shall respond fully to Robert Hayden, who raises many issues, apart from the problem of definition, and trust that in the process I may encompass also Matt Oja's thoughtful remarks. Hayden's critique of my article on Yugoslav camp literature is based on two premises, which he fails to prove: that camp literature is not well defined and hence includes a good deal of official writings, or, alternatively, that it lacks internal consistency; and that the very concept of camp literature “misrepresents the political and intellectual currents in the country.” Much of his commentary is an ad hominem argument. Curiously, much of it, even if inadvertently, substantiates my central thesis: Yugoslav prison and camp literature represents a catalyst in the current processes of liberalization, democratization, and humanization in both politics and culture in post-Tito Yugoslavia.

One of the dilemmas of revolutionary regimes is the difficulty they experience in creating new structures of rule out of resources inherited from the ancien regime. In Russia, the Bolsheviks came to power dedicated to building a socialist society and creating new institutions whose forms were predicated on an unfolding theory of how the transition to socialism would occur. Such a method of shaping institutions was deductive and synoptic, standing in sharp contrast to the evolutionary adaptation of old institutions to new functions. One may wonder how free revolutionary regimes in fact are to construct institutions a novo. The early Bolshevik attempt to establish “control” structures, that is, institutions and procedures for the external auditing and monitoring of economic and other public organizations, is a case in point. Of interest are the extent to which the Bolsheviks were successful in creating effective control bodies and the reasons behind their success or failure.

With the rise of ultranationalist organizations throughout Europe, the issue of attitudes and orientations held toward designated "out-groups" has become a critical concern of anxious observers. In Russia the strength registered by Vladimir Zhirinovskii's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party during the parliamentary elections of 1993 has been interpreted as a sign of intolerance among the Russian populace. In fact, the success of candidates associated with the Liberal Democratic Party was not only based upon appeals to strengthen the Russian nation against perceived enemies, but also upon promises of a return to price stability and upon Zhirinovskii's anti-establishment, populist program. Nonetheless, Zhirinovskii's success in the 1991 presidential elections (he attracted 7.8% of the electorate) does serve to reaffirm the importance of tracking how attitudes toward groups that have often been targeted as scapegoats in times of social or economic upheaval have evolved in the late Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period. Two major questions concern us here: first, how pervasive among Russians and Ukrainians are perceptions of significant "social distance" between themselves and designated out-groups, most notably the Jewish population; and second, to what extent do these perceptions of distance form part of a cohesive ideology of ultranationalism? Understanding the basis of sentiments toward Jewish populations is particularly important for interpreting the workings of the complex mosaic of the post-Soviet political culture.

The earliest submission of the Dalmatian cities to Venetian sovereignty, around the medieval millennial year 1000, remained fundamental for the mythology of Venice’s political culture right up to the end of the history of the republic in 1797. Giacomo Diedo, whose history of Venice was published in 1751, focused his attention upon “the first acquisitions of the Venetians in Dalmatia, which then might serve as a base for further advances.” In fact, the coastal cities of Dalmatia would serve Venice in the most literal (and littoral) sense as bases for an imperial commercial domain that advanced beyond the Adriatic to the eastern Mediterranean, but for Diedo, and his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Dalmatia was also an ideological base on which to construct a culturally convenient vision of Venetian empire. The Dalmatians, in order “to secure themselves from the molestations of the barbarians” (the Narentani along the river Neretva), appealed for the protection of Venice, so that the Adriatic armada of the Doge Pietro II Orseolo was welcomed “with acclamations by the inhabitants who saluted him as their liberator.”

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

How did the Stalin Prize function in the Soviet fine art establishment of the 1940s and 1950s and how were the awards interpreted by members of the artistic community and the public? This examination of the discussions of the Stalin Prize Committee and unrehearsed responses to the awards reveals an institution that operated at the intersection of political and expert-artistic standards within which the parameters of postwar socialist realism were negotiated and to some extent defined. The Stalin Prize for the Fine Arts played an important part in the development of the leader cult and contributed to the self-aggrandizement of an elite minority. The symbolic capital of the Stalin Prize was compromised by its role, perceived or actual, in the consolidation of a generational and ideological hegemony within the Soviet art world and the establishment of an aesthetic blueprint for socialist realism.