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Is Russia Losing in Ukraine but Winning in the Global South? Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Kathryn Stoner
Russia’s war in Ukraine has been roundly condemned in the West. NATO members have continued to supply Ukraine with weaponry while the EU, US and their allies have ensured that the Russian economy remains under the most extensive and intensive set of sanctions in history. Yet many leaders of countries in the global south have been far more hesitant to condemn Russian actions. Some have merely abstained
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The Politics of Anti-Imperial Nostalgia: South Africa's Response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Thom Loyd
When the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces in March 2022, barely half of African states voted in favor. This lukewarm support contrasted with strong support for Ukraine elsewhere in the world. Among those abstaining from the vote was South Africa, a country with a long history of interaction with the post-Soviet space
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An Adventure for All Ages: History, Post-Memory, and Romance in Tomasz Różycki's Twelve Stations Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Łukasz Wodzyński
The article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the
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Masculinity and (Hetero)Sexuality in the Late Imperial Russian Military Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Siobhán Hearne
This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted
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Archeologists Imagine Ukraine: Social Scientists and Nation Building in the Nineteenth Century Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Louise McReynolds
Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence
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Why Was Lina Shtern Not Executed? An Academic's Strategy of Survival in the Late Stalinist Period Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-09-19 Maria Mayofis
The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875—1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legends and much speculation
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Room for Noise in Soviet Sound Recording Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Matthew Kendall
When he was nearing the end of his life, Viktor Shklovskii recorded an oral interview that was recently digitized and published by the Moscow oral history project (http://www.oralhistory.ru). During the audio encoding process, Shklovskii's voice and the contents of the interview were badly distorted. This article frames noise as an important force that impacts not only how sound documents become authoritative
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Afterword: Resonant Objects Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Lilya Kaganovsky
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
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An Artistic Challenge to the Culture of Forgetting in Serbia: Audiovisual Discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's Depth 2 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Dragana Obradović
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
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A “Common Enterprise”? The Role of Utility Infrastructure in the Divided City of Teschen, 1920–1938 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Zora Piskačová
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
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Cold War Networks and the Scholarly Byt: How Russian Formalism Became an American Thing Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Lidia Tripiccione
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
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Through a Glass Darkly: Introduction to Research Cluster Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 John Paul Newman, Orel Beilinson
The study of suicide is an emerging and important interdisciplinary field in central and east European Studies. The importance of the topic is self-evident. Suicide is literally a matter of life and death, important in its own right; but the study of suicide is also a means of addressing larger questions in the history, culture, and politics of the region. Suicide is almost always an object of grave
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Suicide and the Hermeneutics of Political and National Community in the Interwar Czechoslovak Republic Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 John Paul Newman
According to comparative data, suicide rates in Bohemia remained at a statistically high level in comparison to global-figures from the nineteenth-century until late in the twentieth, a matter of grave concern for successive political regimes. In the interwar-republic of Czechoslovakia, patriots were troubled that the high rates of suicide in Bohemia had failed to decline following the transition from
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No Song for Birds in Flight: The Life and Afterlife of Suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Emily Julia Roche
This article is an exploration of how individuals in the Warsaw Ghetto discussed and remembered wartime suicide, as well as the ways in which these events were translated into legend by subsequent generations. First-person sources show how witnesses understood and evaluated suicide as one of the few choices available to Jews under Nazi occupation; Their reactions ranged from admiration or yearning
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Introduction Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Polina Barskova
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
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Ian Satunovskii: Identity and Biography, from the War to the Lyric Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Luba Golburt
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
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“Anecdote in the Vein of Herodotus”: Shuttling between Particulars and the Universal in Boris Slutskii's and Ian Satunovskii's War Poetry Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Marat Grinberg
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
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Writing within the Pain: Russophone Anti-War Poetry Of 2022 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Ilya Kukulin
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
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The Bashagurov Brothers: A Story of Brigandage and Mobility in the Urals, 1789–1792 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Andrey V. Gornostaev
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
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“Like a Magician Who Tricks the Eyes”: Demonism, Epistemological Uncertainty, and Religious Heterodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Maria Grazia Bartolini
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
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“I am a Sincere Believer”: Rethinking Religiosity and Identity in the Early Soviet Union Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Francesca Silano
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
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Evil, Theodicy, and Jewishness in Fridrikh Gorenshtein Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-26 Anna Schur
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.
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Letters from the Ottoman Empire: Migration from the Caucasus and Russia's Pan-Islamic Panic Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
This article explores the exchange of letters by Caucasus Muslims across the Russo-Ottoman border and the tsarist government's reactions to it. Between the 1850s and World War I, about a million Muslims left the Caucasus for the Ottoman empire. Many of them, especially Circassians, were expelled by the Russian army, and others, including Chechens, Abkhazians, and Daghestanis, were pushed out or emigrated
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Dangerous Illusions and Fatal Subversions: Russia, Subjugated Rus΄, and the Origins of the First World War Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Olga Andriewsky
This article examines how the annexation of Austrian (East) Galicia emerged as a distinct political—and ultimately military—mission in St. Petersburg before the First World War. The Russian nationalist project to recover the “lost lands of Rus΄ became an extension of the domestic agenda formulated by Peter Stolypin to promote Russian political and cultural hegemony in the western provinces of the empire
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Crooked and Straight: Street Stories and Moral Stories in Early Soviet Odessa Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Mark D. Steinberg
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
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Rethinking Soviet Selfhood in the Era of the Anthropocene: From the Foucauldian Paradigm to the Naturecultural Theory of the Subject Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Epp Annus
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
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As the Forest is Chopped, the Chips Fly: The Fall of Soviet Internationalism and Late Perestroika's “Refugee” Problem, 1988–1990 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Lyudmila B. Austin
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
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War and Peace: Orthodox Icons and Putin's Politics of the Sacred Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-11-01 Amy Singleton Adams
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
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Paramilitarism, Social Transformation, and the Nation in Greece during the Civil War and Its Aftermath (1940s–50s) Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Spyros Tsoutsoumpis
This article explores the association between paramilitarism and nation-building in civil war Greece. Existing studies saw paramilitaries from a purely military perspective and focused on their combat activities. The article shifts the attention to their social and political activities and discusses the transformation of social actors, structures, norms, and practices at the local level as spurred
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Pozharskii's Grave and the Search for the Russian Nation in the Nineteenth Century Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Susan Smith-Peter
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
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What Caused the Fall of Nikolai A. Voznesenskii? The Gosplan Affair, the Leningrad Affair and Political Infighting in Stalin's Inner Circle, 1949–1950 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 David Brandenberger, Nikita Iur΄evich Pivovarov
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
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In the Land of Giants: Eco-Mythology and Islamic Authority in the Post-Soviet Tatar Imagination Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Agnès Kefeli
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
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“Critical Appropriation of Literary Heritage” and the Shaping of Soviet National Literatures: A Close Reading of the Debate in the Journal Literaturnyi kritik (The Literary Critic, 1933–36) Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Susanne Frank
This article zooms in on what can be called the laboratory of the notion of Soviet literature: the debates of the journal Literaturnyi kritik, in which the programmatic debate at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) was prepared, followed up, and further elaborated. It puts the focus on one of its key concepts—“the critical appropriation of heritage,” and tries to distinguish between
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The (Un)making of a Man: Aleksandr Aleksandrov/Nadezhda Durova Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Ruth Averbach
Aleksandr Aleksandrov, more commonly known under his feminine birthname Nadezhda Durova, is commonly portrayed one of Russian literature's most curious figures. Born female, Aleksandrov-Durova lived, dressed, and identified as male for most of his life, served in the Russian military during the Napoleonic Wars, given a legally-binding name change by Tsar Alexander I in recognition of combat heroism
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The Hungarian Nationalities Act of 1868 in Operation (1868–1914) Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Ágoston Berecz
The article investigates explicit and implicit state language policies in Dualist Hungary (1867–1918), focusing on its eastern Romanian, Hungarian, and German-speaking parts. It sets the regulation and practices against the benchmark of the linguistic rights outlined in the 1868 Nationalities Act, the earliest modern, liberal language law on the continent. This document served as a central reference
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No More Godmen: Alexandre Kojève, Atheism, and Vladimir Solov΄ev Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Trevor Wilson
Prior to his influential seminars on G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the 1930s, the philosopher Alexandre Kojève was still Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, a recent émigré to Germany who studied the philosophy of Vladimir Solov΄ev in Heidelberg. As a result, Kojève published several articles in French and German on Solov΄ev's philosophy of history and divine Sophia. While he soon developed his own
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Law of the Forest: Early Legal Governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Inter-Imperial Transition between Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Rule, 1878–1901 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Iva Lučić
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
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The “Vanishing Indian” and the Vanishing Pole: From a Middle Ground to a Logic of Elimination in the European and Global Periphery, 1840–1880 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Raymond A. Patton
This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they
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“Call Me by My Name:” A “Strange and Incomprehensible” Passion in the Polish Kresy of the 1920s Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Kamil Karczewski
The article demonstrates the presence of (homo)sexual subjectivity in rural Poland in the early 1920s using remarkable correspondence between two men who stood trial for committing homosexual acts in 1925. It argues that their relationship should be understood as the first documented same-sex secret marriage in Poland. By investigating relations between urban and rural spaces in the spread of sexual
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Chełm's Unraveling: The Holocaust and Interethnic Violence in Nazi-Occupied Poland Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Jason Tingler
This article explores the myriad ways that Polish and Ukrainian residents engaged in violent and cruel behavior during World War II through a case study of the Chełm region. Under Nazi occupation, this formerly peaceful community exploded into a horrific scene of nationalist and popular violence. Jews were widely assaulted by their Polish and Ukrainian countrymen; Poles and Ukrainians engaged in mutual
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Theodor Oberländer and the Nachtigall Battalion in 1959/60—an Entangled History of Propaganda, Politics, and Memory in East and West Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Kai Struve
This article analyzes the East German and Soviet campaign against the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer in 1959–60 as an exemplary case of how the Cold War and east-west entanglements influenced the memory of the Holocaust and Stalinist crimes. These entanglements were complex and went beyond the relations between the two German states. The article examines also the interrelations with
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The Silence of the Occupied in Czech Literature, 1940–46 Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Rajendra A. Chitnis
The use of silence to characterize the dominant response of occupied populations during the Second World War recurs throughout post-war European literature and is especially prominent in Czech writing. Interpreting the meaning of this silence therefore became central to Czech efforts to establish a preferred narrative about the German occupation in the immediate post-war period. Through analysis of
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Migration and Hybrid Political Regimes: Navigating the Legal Landscape in Russia Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Olga R. Gulina
In recent years, migration, foreign, and domestic policies to regulate movement and international relations have become embedded fields of study. Myron Weiner examined state-to-state relations depending on actions or inactions vis-a-vis international migration and concluded that the internationalization of migration highlighted “new and conflicting interests into considerations of policies affecting
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Is Ukraine a Multiethnic Country? Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Volodymyr Kulyk
This paper critically examines the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that despite the Soviet legacy of rather strong institutionalization and discursive presentation of nationality, the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of ethnic distinctiveness and
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Was Tolstoi a Colonial Landlord? The Dilemmas of Private Property and Settler Colonialism on the Bashkir Steppe Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Edyta M. Bojanowska
Using new archival research, this article establishes key facts about the most understudied aspect of Lev Tolstoi's biography—his Samara estate—assessing its role in the Tolstoi family economy and property structure. Integrating imperial history with the theoretical perspective of settler colonial studies, the article argues that the estate functioned within the context of Russia's settler colonialism
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Words on Trial: Morality and Legality in Frida Vigdorova's Journalism Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Rebecca Reich
During the Khrushchev period, the journalist Frida Vigdorova charged Soviet society with a moral indifference that expressed itself through evasive language. Such language, she argued, claimed to exercise moral judgment, while in fact enabling both individuals and institutions to sidestep their responsibilities. As the state enacted reforms aimed at raising society's moral consciousness, Vigdorova
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The Islamic Framing of the Economic Activities of Salafi-oriented Muslims in Dagestan, North Caucasus: An Anthropological Approach Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Iwona Kaliszewska, Jagoda Schmidt, Marek Kaleta
In this paper, we explore the entanglement of spiritual and economic life through the example of Dagestani, Salafi-oriented entrepreneurs who try to live out their religious ideals in moral economic practices. We ask how living a religious life shapes economic behavior and its moral dimensions, and how the gradual acquisition of the norms of an Islamic economy influences the everyday economic practices
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The Soviet Steppe: Transformations and Imaginaries—Introduction Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Christine Bichsel, Ekaterina Filep, Julia Obertreis
We dedicate this special issue to the memory of Maya Karin Peterson, who passed away unexpectedly and tragically on June 16, 2021. We, the editors and authors of this special issue, are still shocked and deeply saddened by this terrible loss. We can only seek some small solace in the fact that her highly original and relevant contribution on the Eurasian steppe was ready for publication when her life
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Steppes to Health: How the Climate-Kumys Cure Shaped a New Steppe Imaginary Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Maya Peterson
This paper examines the rise of the “climate-kumys cure” in late imperial Russia and how it shaped perceptions of the steppes as a “curative place.” By positing that kumys (fermented mare's milk), a traditional food produced by steppe nomads, interacted with unique qualities of the steppe climate—including aromatic air, abundant sunshine, cool forest groves, rich feathergrasses, and brilliant wildflowers—to
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Reinventing the Steppe: The Agromeliorative Complex in the Russian Periphery Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Timm Schönfelder
For centuries, the steppe had served as a frontier and as a borderland to the Russian empire. In the 1930s, however, the semi-arid fields to the northeast of Stavropol became the object of intensified agricultural reclamation. Following the Central Asian example of dryland irrigation, the Soviet leadership dreamed of transforming the steppe biome into an oasis of high-modernist progress. Promises of
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The Alien Republic: Narratives of Deterritorialization in Imaginations of Turkmenistan from the Late Nineteenth to the Late Twentieth Century Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Clemens Günther
Turkmenistan holds a special place in the Russian and Soviet imagination. At the turn of the last century, especially, Turkmenistan appeared as an imaginative object shaped by both nineteenth century tropes and images of the steppe and by the modernist's revaluation and displacement of these very tropes. This article traces this intellectual history from the late nineteenth century to the fall of the
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Nomadic Nobles: Pastoralism and Privilege in the Russian Empire Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Gulmira Sultangalieva, Ulzhan Tuleshova, Paul W. Werth
Probing the manner in which Kazakhs attained noble status in the Russian empire, this article explores a neglected aspect of the country's social history. Recognizing that nobility is typically associated with landowning in a feudal order, we explore how this status also found application in the steppe. Based on diverse sources and comparison with other ethnic elites, we regard Kazakh ennoblement not
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Postwar Rebuilding and Resettlements in the Soviet Union: A Case of Azeri Migration Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Krista Goff
Mass population movements of Soviet residents—deportees, evacuees, accused kulaks, refugees, soldiers, and others—are a characteristic feature of early Soviet history. Some of these forms of migratory violence peaked during the experience of total war in the 1940s, but others continued well past the cessation of wartime hostilities. This was the case in the South Caucasus, which narrowly avoided German
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“A Colony of Alien Capital”: French Investments, Polish Identity, and a Story of Murder in 1930s Warsaw Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Jerzy Łazor
This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland's peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over
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Low Spirits and Immoderate Meditations in Venedikt Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Julia Vaingurt
My article analyzes Venedikt Erofeev's cultivation of weakness via alcoholic intoxication in Moskva-Petushki against the grain of its standard interpretations. The critical consensus holds that the protagonist (and by extension, the author, with whom he shares his name and autobiographical details) is a sober drunk and a holy fool. By contrast, I read the protagonist's failure to reach his destination
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Addressing Contingency in REEES Fields Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Ania Aizman
Research on how faculty have attempted to subvert the casualization of academic labor, that is, the conversion of stable and well-paying jobs into temporary ones, has been going on for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have cast academic contingency in new light. Given the prevalence of contingency in Slavic and REEES, and the threat of budget cuts in the humanities,
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An Unstable Bridge: A REEES Graduate Student Perspective on Contemporary Academia Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Caitlin Giustiniano, Zachary Hicks
Our aim in this article is to foreground the specific role that graduate students play in academia today and some structural issues that are connected with it. As both workers and students, graduate students occupy a unique position within the larger academic system. They work at what for the majority is the beginning of a continuum of casualization, precarity, and adjunctification. Meanwhile, graduate
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Slutsk in 1920: Entangled Fighters, Locals, and Conflicts Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Aleksandra Pomiecko
This article examines the armed fighting that took place in Slutsk, in present-day Belarus, in November and December of 1920, primarily between local forces and the Red Army. In contrast to existing understandings of the insurrection, this article situates the incident within more recent scholarship dedicated to better understanding the post-WWI period, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and experiences
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The Poetics of Shock: “The Pitiful Vice” in Khodasevich's “Under the Ground” Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Edward Waysband
With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich's poem “Under the Ground” (1923) both shocked and fascinated its readers. Khodasevich's intervention into two taboo themes in turn-of-the-century European culture—masturbation and public restrooms—is primarily self-reflexive, indicating his anxieties about the ambiguous place and status of a modernist poet
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The Thaw's Provincial Margins: Place, Community and Canon in Pages from Tarusa Slavic Review (IF 1.3) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Polly Jones
This article offers a comprehensive examination of the editing, publication, reception, and after-effects of the almanac Pages from Tarusa (1961), a major, but little-analyzed, Soviet publication of the Thaw. Drawing on a wide range of memoir and local archive material, it argues that Pages was crucially shaped by Tarusa's position astride dacha territory and the “101st kilometer”, the borders of the