Winning elections is so vital for Russian leaders that competing viewpoints on national television news channels have been scotched, together with the channels that broadcast them. This study examines the other side of the screen: how participants in focus groups in four Russian cities process national channels' treatments of an important regional electoral campaign. The study was conducted during the last period in which viewpoint diversity was still available via TV-6. Unlike findings about other news stories, election stories appear to have little connection to viewers' experiences and values and deprive them of using familiar heuristics to make sense of the stories. For the public, the election story is a genre apart, framed by the same confusing template no matter what the office or region. Even TV-6, soon to be shuttered, broadcast its combative message using that template, thus extinguishing any opportunity for identifying genuine diversity and leaving the audience unable to distinguish between state and private channels, something they easily did for other types of stories. Election stories only cue other election stories. It is mainly younger, "post-Soviet" participants who bring an alternative frame to watching: norms, acquired through their education, by which election stories in a democracy ought to be constructed.

In this paper, Martin Votruba traces the evolution of the Jánošík myth. The highwayman Jánošík is a living legend in Czech, Polish, and Slovak cultures. Contrary to common claims, the modern celebratory myth of the brigand hanged in the eighteenth century is at odds with the traditional images of brigandage in the western Carpathians. Folk songs and The Hungarian Simplicissimus of the seventeenth century often anathematize highway robbery. High literature of the mostly Slovak counties of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg empire similarly cast Jánošík as a criminal. Yet some intellectuals, such as Pavol Jozef Šafárik, inspired by the robber in German literature, singled out Jánošík from among other brigands and reduced that folklore-based opprobrium. Others, such as Ján Kollár, resisted Jánošík's rehabilitation. Subsequent Central European national revivals and ethnic activism prompted the Slovak romantic poets to reinvent Jánošík as a folk rebel against social and ethnic oppression.

The second edition of the Diary of a Writer (1876-1877) marked a crucial point in Fedor Dostoevskii's literary career: in spite of critics' attacks, many “ordinary” readers were overwhelmed by the author's charisma and began writing to Dostoevskii from different parts of Russia, expressing their views on the moral, social, and political issues dealt with in the Diary. Such success was also guaranteed by the original rhetorical and genre system of the Diary of a Writer, which, wisely modulated and addressed, aimed to involve readers and persuade them to share the author's beliefs. Raffaella Vassena explores the case of the article “The Jewish Question” in the issue of March 1877, where Dostoevskii's rhetoric actually failed to bring about what he had intended. By concentrating on new archival materials, Vassena investigates the reasons for this failure and submits a new perspective on the controversial question of Dostoevskii's attitude toward Jews.

Although Cement was a model for later socialist realism, Katerina Clark has argued that Gleb Chumalov does not achieve consciousness, a requirement for later heroes, but instead remains spontaneous. In this essay, Eric Laursen argues against Clark's widely accepted interpretation. By introducing the idea of instinct (class, worker, revolutionary), which Anna Krylova has shown to be central to Bolshevik thought in the early years of the twentieth century, Laursen argues that Gleb does gain consciousness. Gleb does not move from spontaneity to consciousness, however. Instead he learns to control and guide his own instincts and those of others. Two other characters also transform themselves. Gleb's wife Dasha illustrates a similar but distinct path forwomen. Sergei Ivagin, who must abandon conscious thought to first develop instinct, illustrates a different path for the intelligentsia. The attainment of consciousness is presented as a rebirth or maturation and involves the acquisition of “conscious language.” In the party purge at the end, those who speak unconsciously, therefore misleading and confusing the masses, are cast out of the party. The newly conscious Gleb and Dasha, who now speak properly, take their place as leaders.

As a consequence of the 17 April 1905 law on religious freedom, hundreds of baptized Jews petitioned to return to Judaism. While the law paralleled the liberalization of the attitudes and values regarding religious differences that occurred in European societies between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the reform also helped destabilize traditional social boundaries and religious identities in the empire. On one level, this essay examines the conflicts and problems authorities faced in categorizing a Jewish population that continually resisted conventional assumptions. In the context of rapid population movements, political and religious reforms, and increased acculturation, what it meant to be “Jewish” was redefined, and administrators needed to establish an acceptable criterion by which (baptized) Jews could be classified. On another level, this essay draws on individual petitions and government correspondence to analyze the personal choices and social dilemmas that baptized Jews faced when they attempted to return to Judaism.

The article explores processes of group integration and disintegration among Soviet veterans of World War II during the first postwar decade. Approaches that focus on generation, legal privilege, formal organization, social mobility, or ideological outlook miss the considerable sociocultural complexity of this group. Between the end of mass demobilization in 1948 and the foundation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans in 1956, former soldiers were integrated neither as a generation nor as a status group with formal privileges and their own organization (as would be the case in later years). What held them together was instead a shared sense of entitlement based on wartime sacrifice. During the first postwar decade, therefore, Soviet veterans are best understood as an “entitlement group.” Only in the 1960s and 1970s was this entitlement group transformed into a status group that became one of the major pillars of the late Soviet order.

This essay explicates, develops, and assesses the basic argument in Rudra Sil's Managing “Modernity”: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia. Sil presents “a flexible, integrative theoretical framework” and an interdisciplinary, comparative historical narrative. He hypothesizes that a “syncretist” strategy, when founded on durable legacies and when filtered through “congruent” intrafirm relationships, is much more likely than “modernist,” “revolutionary,” and “traditionalist” strategies to strengthen “managerial authority” and economic performance in large industrial enterprises. Four case studies (pre- and postwar Japan and Russia) attest to the benefits of “synthetic institutionalism” as a theory-building strategy and of syncretic incrementalism as an institution-building strategy. Sil's book focuses on the sources of managerial authority and the patterns of shop-floor behavior, not on system dynamics and interinstitutional interactions. Nonetheless, Managing “Modernity” is a major work for multiple authences and for multiple reasons.