How is it that Poland and Hungary, formerly regional leaders in democratic progress in east central Europe, have become widely cited cases of democratic backsliding? According to the political science literature on democratization, the path by which they exited communism should have favored stable democratic outcomes. This paper reexamines that literature and argues that it misses potential populist dangers inherent in the combination of accommodation and contention in the democratization process in both countries. The paper argues that changes in the structural conditions under which Polish and Hungarian democracy operated markedly improved the chances of success for populist actors in electoral competition, explaining the rise of PiS and FiDeSz. Particular attention is paid to the role of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014, a view that interprets Russian-Ukrainian relations as colonialism has gained ground in historical scholarship. However, based on an analysis of the terms “colonization” and “colonialism” and a comparison between Ukrainian territories and the Governorate-General of Turkestan in late imperial Russia, this article argues for a more cautious use of the term “colonialism” in relation to Ukraine. It shows that contemporaries rarely viewed tsarist rule in Ukraine through the prism of colonialism, while in the case of Central Asia this perspective was pervasive. Moreover, tsarist policy toward Central Asia and its predominantly Muslim population was much more in line with colonial practices than it was in the case of Ukraine. While colonial rule is generally based on the institutionalization of difference, the opposite was the case in Ukraine: Ukraine was appropriated as part of the Russian nation. Therefore, this article argues that Russia’s claims on Ukraine, which deny Ukraine’s right to national self-determination and statehood, are not an indication of colonial subjugation, but rather of nationalist usurpation.

Building on my research about racialization and marginalization, this article examines race and the global color line in terms of antiblackness and anti-Romani racism, asking how such inquiries can shed light on the ways that blackness and whiteness are configured across southeast Europe and Europe as a whole. This paper has three primary goals: the first is to probe the complexities of the meanings of blackness. The second aim is to examine antiblackness and anti-Romani racism as parallel processes configured by European whiteness. The third objective is to explore how this type of critical analysis can expand scholarly inquiry beyond the discourses that move past race as individualized and immoral, and towards more comprehensive examinations of regional and global racial logics that structure social relations.

What were the meanings of blackness in the Soviet Union? Marxist ideology offered no clear guidance for conceptualizing blackness, and the Russian Empire provided few historical references. But discrimination against people racialized as black was a major problem of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was unable to ignore. As Soviet institutions and black people from different parts of the African continent and diaspora cultivated political and cultural connections, those connections entailed collisions among multiple ways of conceptualizing difference. Blackness could not easily be translated into Soviet taxonomies, but, propelled by a series of conjunctures in global politics, people never stopped looking for linkages and analogies. Two primary challenges, recurring in different forms over several eras, were: How was the Soviet Union to conceptualize the relationship between the African continent and the diaspora? And how should it relate racial dynamics elsewhere to domestic conditions within its own borders? Drawing on two scholars’ original fieldwork and recent scholarship in an emerging field, this article proposes a novel, interactive approach to the historical construction of blackness and Africanness in the USSR.

In 1877, Russian authorities in Turkestan arrested an Ottoman mullah who was reportedly spreading anti-tsarist propaganda in the Kazakh steppe. Upon closer inspection, the man turned out to be neither an Ottoman subject nor a Muslim religious leader. This article follows the travels of Hajji Ahmed, a young merchant from Dagestan who was at different times accused of being a Russian spy and an Ottoman spy. His three petitions and tsarist investigative reports reveal that he had traded throughout the Khanate of Khoqand, the Emirate of Bukhara, and tsarist Turkestan in the 1870s. This microhistory of a Muslim peddler offers a glimpse into tsarist anxieties about Muslim mobility and local fears of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It demonstrates that Russia’s colonial expansion provided new opportunities for tsarist Muslim subjects but also destabilized Central Asian societies and institutions, making the conditions of travel perilous. Tsarist paranoia about Ottoman emissaries, Tatar missionaries, and prospects of an anticolonial uprising led to Russia’s restrictions on transregional Muslim mobility.

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK) was founded on November 2, 1942. From the outset, photography and eyewitnesses were vital resources for conveying the horrors of the German occupation. Refuting accusations that the USSR was responsible for massacring Polish prisoners of war in Katyn forest further magnified the importance of generating an irrefutable record of Nazi guilt. This article examines the efforts of Stalin's government to bury the Katyn lie beneath images of genuine victims of Hitler's regime. Tracing the diverse origins of the ChGK's photographs and supporting testimony brings into focus the reasons why wartime observers found the Soviet falsification convincing. ChGK materials should be approached as artifacts of mass mobilization. By disentangling these pictures and pages from their propagandistic uses, researchers can move closer to understanding the symbiotic relationship between official narratives and personal truths in the USSR as well as the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

This article outlines an emerging approach in the spatial history of the Romanov empire. Similar to other empires of the long nineteenth century, the Romanov empire has traditionally been understood as a spoked wheel, whose vertical axes of power and lines of communication flowed between the metropolitan “core” and the “peripheries.” We argue for the need to move beyond this well-worn image of the empire as a vertical structure of “center-periphery” relations. Instead, we consider the heuristic potential of studying horizontal “periphery-periphery” entanglements interconnecting this state, following threads which were not necessarily woven through the metropole. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of several examples from the Baltic and southwestern provinces, which highlight both the challenges and potentials of intra-imperial entangled history.

This article challenges historians’ recent Russian-Ukrainian war-related claims that the field of Russian history in the west, and in the United States in particular, has overlooked the imperial and colonial dimensions of Russia’s past. It argues that far from overlooking Russian and Soviet imperialism and colonialism and marginalizing the histories of non-Russian peoples in that context, Anglophone historians have been documenting and explaining them for almost a century. It shows that as early as the 1940s and 50s, Michael Karpovich and his former Harvard University students emphasized the need to pay greater attention to the history of Russian imperial expansion and colonization, Russia’s borderlands and its non-Russian peoples. By tracing the ways in which Anglophone historians over the next fifty years sought to make sense of Russian and Soviet empire, it becomes possible to see the so-called “imperial turn” in Russian historiography as a return to research agendas that had been established decades earlier and helped make possible the production of historical accounts of Russia arguably free from what Mykhailo Hrushevsʹkyi famously dubbed the “traditional scheme of ‘Russian’ history.”

The KGB and the rest of the Soviet intelligence and policing apparatus are commonly portrayed as having been among the staunchest of conservative opponents to the reform process in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1980s. But while key leaders of the August 1991 effort to oust General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, did come from the security services, this characterization obscures how the KGB rank-and-file responded to and participated in the reforms. This article uses their own words and experiences, recorded in the KGB΄s top-secret in-house journal, Sbornik KGB SSSR, to examine how everyday KGB officers navigated liberalizing reforms in which they in fact played an active and evolving role implementing and shaping. In these firsthand accounts, which cover topics from nationalism to environmentalism, a sense of loss of control is clear, both over events unfolding in the Soviet Union and over their own leading role and privileged position within it.

This article uses Alexei Yurchak's account of late socialist performance and the deterritorialization of authoritative discourses to discuss the half-Korean identity of Viktor Tsoi, the most prominent rock start emerging from the perestroika period. It uses representations and perceptions of Tsoi from the 1980s to argue that in this period, it was possible to perform the nationalities listed in each Soviet citizen's passport, as well as official slogans like “the friendship of peoples,” in ways that allowed for flexible understandings of group identity—what the article conceptualizes as “deterritorialized nationality” via overviews of Soviet nationalities policy and the history of Soviet Koreans. The article illustrates deterritorialized nationality through readings of the landmark films Assa (1987), which concludes with a performance by Tsoi, and Needle (1988), which stars and features the music of Tsoi. In both films Tsoi's racial difference is evident in ways not possible in his music alone, but race takes on unanticipated meanings—hearkening to radical internationalisms that help us to think beyond our ever more polarized discussions surrounding identity in the west, as well as the renewed polarization of Russia and the west.