In the first post-war decade, Stalinist authorities resumed pre-war practices of voluntary gatherings of store patrons in large cities. Such meetings, called “consumer conferences,” constituted embryonic manifestations of proletarian governance that municipal officials considered ideologically safe to employ in a period when Kremlin elites increased their crackdown measures against the wartime liberalization initiatives. Drawing on people's insider knowledge of local communities, city authorities aimed to gather economic information about consumer needs to improve the retail system. Yet, urban working-class women, the most committed conference participants, saw stores more than as simply places of consumption: the store contributed to the local community's safety, hygiene, health, emotional comfort, and mutual trust. Consumer conferences therefore turned into a forum for women's activism as female urbanites used customer gatherings to carve out part of a state-curated public space in which they exercised a measure of control over their neighborhoods’ well-being.

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.

This paper situates early modern Ukrainian demonological discourse within the framework of the major religious, cultural, and political disruption that affected Ukraine between 1596 and 1686. I will argue that the confessional struggles that followed the Union of Brest, the period of civil war known as “The Ruin,” and the eschatological expectations of the year 1666 contributed to a perception of increased diabolic activity but also to the problem of recognizing the possible discrepancies between reality and non-reality. How could one distinguish true visions from illusory phenomena, if the devil could enter the mind through “bad thoughts” and threaten the stability of one's cognitive experience? Furthermore, if there was more than one church, how could one distinguish between true and false doctrine? These questions, in turn, prompted early modern Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals to question the role and reliability of sensory perception and human cognition, with issues of epistemology and deception becoming increasingly entangled with confessional polemics and religious dispute.

This article challenge scholars of religion in the early Soviet Union specifically, and scholars of early Soviet history more generally, to reconsider the ways in which we have conceived of religiosity and Soviet identity in the early years of the USSR. It argues that there was a significant subset of people who considered themselves to be both religious and Soviet in these years, in which what it meant to be both was still not clearly defined. The article draws on archival interrogation records and trial testimonies from the 1922 “Trial of the Fifty-Four” in which thirty-two laymen were charged with counterrevolutionary activity. We have the unique opportunity of hearing the voices of believers from various educational, social, and class backgrounds as they describe what they think it means to be religious and Soviet. The sources thus not only contribute to our understanding of early-Soviet religiosity, but also of early-Soviet identity in general.

The paper argues that Fridrikh Gorenshtein's preoccupation with evil and with the search for a proper response offers a useful lens through which to explore his conception of Jewishness and his identity as a Jewish writer working within the Russian literary tradition.