Moral storytelling about urban public life in Odesa in the 1920s is at the center of attention. A key social space is in focus: streets and corners as spaces and as concepts. And a particular storyteller is central: the well-known and yet biographically mysterious feuilletonist for the city's evening newspaper, “Al. Svetlov.” Soviet journalists, like Soviet reality, were expected to offer ideological clarity: a morally unambiguous and teleologically straight story about the death of the past and the birth of a bright and healthy new world. But such temporal and moral (and thus political) consistency was elusive—in the urban spaces where “vestiges” of the old persisted, and in their telling, as observers found it difficult to sustain an unwavering and unambiguous moral orientation. The article asks also how minor and subordinated individuals understood their own lives, suggesting an orientation other than delinquency and pathology.

The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as “to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction.”

By introducing Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, the author explores the state uses of the cinematic industry—notably through the making of grandiose national epics—in the endeavor to model and, ultimately, to assimilate Muslim minorities during the so-called “Revival Process” (1984–1989) in socialist Bulgaria. Drawing attention to often-neglected aspects of film production, such as the selection of symbolically charged “national landscapes,” shooting locations, and the use of Muslim film extras, she examines the production of a state-sponsored historical master narrative, its widespread dissemination at home and abroad, and the attempt at channeling film reception by national minorities and the majority population. The visual recreation of the alleged Ottoman “forced islamization” of Christians and the blurring of the distinction between fiction and fact, as well as past and present were intended to boost the national pride of the majority, achieve support for anti-minority measures, and win the obedience of minorities.

This essay takes a media historical approach to interrogate celebrations of Vladimir Lenin's centenary in the Soviet Union, during which both the state recording company Melodiya and the monthly journal Krugozor, an educational magazine with companion recordings, reevaluated the relative merits and shortcomings of sound recordings in spreading socialist ideology. The need to create recorded materials for domestic audiences as well as socialist and capitalist countries around the world prompted a series of debates over how best to memorialize Lenin's voice and re-historicize the sonic environment of his time. Lenin's voice carried with it substantial historical, political, and cultural power. But his earliest recordings—those made during his lifetime—were of poor quality and even poorer intelligibility. As such, attempts to restore and remaster Lenin's voice necessarily involved the Soviet imagination, especially as the generation of those who knew him personally aged (and died). This tension—between creation and preservation, between artifice and authenticity—would preoccupy sound engineers and producers in the years leading to the centennial. Using archival sources alongside LPs and flexidiscs, this essay traces the connections between voice, format, and mythology across the Soviet epoch and proposes a new understanding of socialist realism in audio media.

The papers in this cluster—and sound studies more broadly—attune our ears to hearing and listening, to paying attention to that “other” important sense of modernity: the aural or sonic that so often is asked to play second fiddle to the visual. The challenge of sound studies, Jonathan Sterne reminds us, “is to think across sounds, to consider sonic phenomena in relationship to one another—as types of sonic phenomena rather than as things-in-themselves—whether they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings, performances, or another other path into sonic life.”

By focusing on the northern Iranian province of Gilan, this article rethinks the role of non-socialist revolutionary movements in the Soviets’ early retreat from West and South Asia. Drawing primarily on the records of the Russian Foreign Ministry Archive, it probes programmatic divisions within the Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran (SSRI, 1920–1921), a self-governing provincial exclave where the Soviets attempted to reorient social democratic currents toward socialism. This article asks how, in a moment of revolutionary optimism, internal factionalism and the consequent collapse of the SSRI impeded Soviet designs not only in Iran, but also on the colonized and semi-colonized fronts that lay beyond Iranian borders. In so doing, it reflects on the directions of early Soviet engagement with West and South Asian revolutionaries, and the importance of bridging socialist and non-socialist political projects to realizing the broader aim of regional decolonization.

Prince D.M. Pozharskii, who together with Kuz΄ma Minin helped to end the Time of Troubles in 1612-13, has been the focus of commemoration for centuries and has come to symbolize the defense of the Russian nation. This article focuses on three moments of his commemoration in the nineteenth century: the classical Pozharskii, as seen in the monument on Red Square, the nationalist Pozharskii, which reimagined him almost as a saint of the nation, and the regionalist Pozharskii, which presented him as a heroic forerunner of the zemstvo and the self-directed action of the Russian people. Using a wide variety of sources, the article shows how Pozharskii's grave and its commemoration were the focus of contention over what the Russian nation was and ought to be: composed of loyal and unquestioning subjects of the tsars, saint-like warriors, or a people that was self-governing at the local level. It also argues for the importance of including local narratives and sources in the historical narrative, as this was where the demand for self-government was most clearly made. Dead bodies can spark lively discussions, and when the body is Pozharskii's, the stakes can be as high as the meaning of the Russian nation itself.

Ian Satunovskii's war lyric is an extensive corpus drawn from the entirety of his poetic career (early 1940s–early 1980s). Focusing on a few closely read selections, this essay attempts to make sense of this body of work, paying particular attention to the compounding of identities and temporalities in Satunovskii's very short texts. How does Satunovskii's poetry resist the hardening and polarization of identities occasioned by war? And how can we interpret Satunovskii's identification of war as a structuring event of his biography as well as the source of his poetics?

The 1949–1952 Gosplan Affair is rarely mentioned in the literature on late Stalinism, insofar as this purge of Politburo member Nikolai A. Voznesenskii and his clients at the USSR Council of Ministers Economic Planning Committee (Gosplan) is usually conflated with the coterminous Leningrad Affair. According to most scholars, Voznesenskii played a role in Andrei A. Zhdanov's Leningrad patron-client network, which was purged after the death of its leader in 1948 on Stalin's orders. This article revisits the Gosplan Affair and the campaign against Voznesenskii on the basis of an array of newly declassified archival sources. It demonstrates much of Voznesenskii's spectacular fall to have been separate and distinct from the Leningrad Affair, and to have stemmed from rivalries within Stalin's inner circle rather than at the general secretary's behest. It also provides an unprecedentedly close perspective on postwar political infighting in the party leadership at the end of Stalin's reign and the beginning of the Cold War.

The article provides a comparative analysis of how two key poets, Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii, responded to World War II, in which they both fought, in the poems written at the front or shortly thereafter. Via Lydia Ginzburg's notion of the deductive and inductive modes in lyric poetry, the article reveals how Slutskii and Satunovskii approach the figure of the enemy and shuttle between particulars and the universal in their verse. Dissimilar in their life choices (official for Slutskii and underground for Satunovskii), they share an aesthetic kinship, with Slutskii pressing harder toward generalizations, often radically revisionist, and Satunovskii insisting on the particulars and aphoristic fragmentariness. Both poets resist the grandiose and odic in figuring out how to navigate between the collective, personal, and intimate in confronting the catastrophe.

Anthropogenic climate change necessitates rethinking the role of academic scholarship. This article addresses the question of Soviet subjecthoods from the perspective of one's affective connection to natural environments, while keeping in mind the multiscalarity of subjecthood. It traces a genealogy of environmentally-attuned selfhoods in the late Soviet-era sociocultural imagination and positions this model within the context of present-day understandings of subjecthood in Soviet studies. Soviet-era subjects did not make sense of their lives, aims and accomplishments solely in relation to the Soviet state, but also in relation to things closer at hand and in relation to ideas and conditions of a global and planetary scale. In Alberts Bels's and Jaan Kaplinski's writings, the environmentally conscious subject emerges as multiscalar: a subject who identifies both with its direct, affectively experienced environment, but who also realizes the boundedness of local, global, and planetary processes. The ethical attitude of reverence for life, promoted by Albert Schweitzer, together with the widely shared concern about both local-level environmental damage and the future of the planet provide the context for late Soviet multiscalar naturecultural subjecthood.

This article examines audio-visual discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's 2015 documentary Depth 2 and argues that this approach to sound and screen allows the audience to engage with the difficult topic of war crimes in a novel manner in order to address a failure in cultural memory in Serbian society. The documentary explores war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian state forces and paramilitaries in the spring of 1999. Depth 2 cinematically recontextualizes recorded testimonies of both survivors and perpetrators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), defamiliarizing the archive by anonymizing the source material and by removing the synchrony between voice and image. The lack of concordance between voice and screen is a key aesthetic strategy through which the film comments on pressing ethical, political, and historical issues in Serbian society.

Teschen Silesia after the First World War is typically portrayed as a region of ethnic conflict and national rivalry. Focusing on gas, electricity, and water infrastructures of the divided city of Teschen, now Polish Cieszyn and Czech Český Těšín, this article shifts the focus from nationalist discourses of animosity and upheaval to stabilization and local cross-border cooperation. In examining the cities’ conjoined utility networks’ management as well as their partial reorientation towards domestic suppliers, it demonstrates that local interests and economic pragmatism often trumped national antagonism. Moreover, by allowing municipal politics to take central stage, the article shows that small town leaders on the periphery were not only obedient servants of their respective central governments. While the Polish and Czechoslovak nation-states attempted to curb transnational municipal dependency and thus erase all remnants of the Habsburg regime, small town leaders often acted as administrators first and nationalists second.

This paper is focused on the growth of Russophone poetry after the beginning of the second phase of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (the first phase started in 2014). There have been many poetic publications by both those who support the war (in Russia) and those who oppose the war and the political repression of the current Kremlin regime; authors of the latter kind can live in Russia and in other countries. Speaking of the anti-war poetry, I write of the convergence of two movements that previously used to exist separately: poetry addressed to the widest audience (poetry-1) and aimed at analyzing language and ideology and addressed to the audience aware of complex forms of postmodern culture (poetry-2). Today the authors of these movements are developing tools not only to counter militaristic propaganda, but also to question the cultural and social conventions of contemporary Russia.

By 1989, at least one in five Soviet citizens lived outside of “their” titular territories or did not have one, yet their lived experiences—especially poignant when the USSR dissolved—are not well understood. Using archival evidence and oral interviews, this paper focuses on two events pivotal to these communities: fatal unrest over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory from 1988–1990, the first perestroika conflict that produced the phenomenon of Soviet “refugees” in the country; and the Fergana Valley Massacre of June 1989, the first mass casualty event in Central Asia that displaced tens of thousands more. It argues that these conflicts became major regional and Soviet-wide issues that exposed the growing impotency of the center and contributed widely to the impetus to flight. This paper underscores how Soviet internationalism created the foundation for intercommunal “groupness,” or the various cross-ethnic nexuses that became especially apparent vis-à-vis these episodes of titular violence.

At a 1966 Symposium hosted by a nitrogen plant in socialist Poland, artist Włodzimierz Borowski staged a performance. He declared the plant's urea furnaces to be works of art and returned them to plant management. With this “gift,” he reversed the Symposium's patronage model, which had put the plant's resources at his disposal: he gave back the gift of patronage. This article uses the device of returning the gift of state support to explore ambivalent engagements with the official art system. This formula is applied to two later actions giving back (or away) resources granted to artists by public patrons. The discussed artists—Borowski, Zofia Kulik and Łukasz Surowiec—use this device to contend with their complicity as beneficiaries of compromised funding arrangements. However, the article assesses their counter-gifts not as dissident acts against repressive regimes but as constructive efforts to arbitrate with authorities and gain purchase as working artists.

This study examines twenty years of data about Vladimir Putin's ritualized encounters with icons as a form of symbolic political discourse on the “sacred” that ultimately devolved into Russia's violent escalation of the Russo-Ukraine War in February 2022. Theories of semiotics, the sacred, and studies on iconography reveal patterns of carefully curated engagement with the sacred images that draw on historical relationships among religiosity, power, and violence in Russia. The analysis shows how semiotic signalling through iconographical forms allow Putin to sacralize and strengthen his leadership within the sphere of domestic politics. It demonstrates how Putin's interaction with icons during annual visits to regional Christmas services re-sacralized Russian territory and reinforced national security priorities to a domestic audience. Turning to the international stage, this essay shows how Putin's “icon diplomacy” establishes “sacred” space beyond Russia's national borders. The metaphor of the iconographical image is realized in Ukraine, as both sides struggle to control the narrative of the sacred. The study demonstrates the relationship between violence and the sacred as it pertains to Putin's political lexicon and the importance of understanding this relationship in order to fathom his language of icons.

In 1789, the brothers Ivan and Stepan Bashagurov escaped from prison in Perm. Before their capture two years later, they not only robbed houses and raided boats on the Kama but also worked as wage laborers and traveled to St. Petersburg. Their story does not fit into the traditional understanding of banditry in early modern Russia as a social phenomenon reflecting resistance against the state and nobility. The brothers were neither champions of the poor nor enjoyed sympathy and support in the countryside, as is commonly assumed. Through a detailed reconstruction of their case, this article underscores the seasonal and opportunistic nature of their banditry as well as the complexity of the interactions between the bandits and other members of society, which were shaped by acquaintanceship and kinship, on the one hand, and the Russian government's punitive policies against those who harbored criminals, on the other.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, giants occupied the imagination of occultists, neopagans, and nationalist writers. This article explores why those mythical colossi, a product of the pre-modern imagination, folklore, and childhood fantasy are still relevant to modern Tatars. More specifically, it centers on Fäüziyä Bäyrämova, whose fiction stands prominently in environmental public-school curricula. This inquiry provides a literary genealogy of Tatar eco-mythology, while nuancing the previous assumption in literary studies that in its evolution, the gigantic has moved away from enchantment to secularization. Unlike medieval Anglo-Saxon giants who embodied the sins of humanity or represented the uncivilized “other,” Soviet giants were builders and guardians of Tatars’ Islamic sacred geography, threatened by urbanization and secularization. In Bäyrämova's reinterpretation, they reappear not only as guardians of a nationalist cartography, but also as transmitters of Islamic reform and orthopraxy. In both Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, giants emerge as conduits of religious authority.

This article centers on one key episode in the reception of Russian formalism in western academia, the 1955 publication of Victor Erlich's acclaimed Russian Formalism. History. Doctrine. The article discusses the appearance of the monograph in the young field of Slavic Studies through novel lenses and conceptualizes the monograph as the result of the activity of a network of heterogeneous actors that contributed to the formation and publication of the book. Methodologically, I develop the concept of the scholarly by hybridizing Boris Eikhenbaum's literaturnyi byt and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory. Finally, I suggest that the methodological framework developed in the article could be productively applied to further the study of Russian formalism reception.