In the 1960s, the Catholic Church underwent a revolution in the teaching and practice of its faith, known as aggiornamento. Catholics responded by pioneering new forms of agency in world affairs in the Global Sixties. This was a cross-Iron Curtain story, affecting communist and non-communist countries in Europe, as well as developing countries across the world – a story of transfers and encounters unfolding simultaneously along multiple geographical axes: “East-West,” “North-South,” and “East-South.” The narrative anchor for this story is the year 1968. This article explores the seminal role of east European Catholics in this story, focusing on Polish Catholic intellectuals as they wrote and rewrote global narratives of political economy and sexual politics. A global Catholic conversation on international development stalled as sexual politics reinforced Cold War and post-colonial divisions, with the Second and Third Worlds joining forces against First World critics of a new papal teaching on contraception, Humanae Vitae. Paradoxically, the Soviet Bloc became the prism through which the Catholic Church refracted a new vision of international development for the Third World.

Russian liberals can easily be cast as weakhearted idealists, devoted to Western notions of fair play and moderation and naively optimistic of the chances of seeing those principles brought to life in their own country. As the opposing forces of the state and the revolution build toward their climax in 1917, the liberal Hamlets often appear incapable of seizing the moment. Yet consider the efforts of the “public organizations”—the War-Industry Committees, the Union of Zemstvos, and the Union of Towns, as well as the Progressive Bloc in the Duma—to take over the practical matter of running Russia's war effort during the First World War. Prince George Lvov, head of the Provisional Government until the July Days of 1917, seems to personify this stereotype of well-meaning yet tragically ineffective liberalism on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, but it was this same figure who energetically directed the Union of Zemstvos during the war.

Nikolai Charushin and Vera Figner, both populists of the “1870s generation,” late in their lives played a role in the events of 1917, responding first with tempered enthusiasm, and then with trepidation over the growing chaos and polarization that led up to the Bolshevik revolution in October. Despite their efforts, such populists ended up on the losing side, and have often been criticized for misreading the situation in the country, holding naïve beliefs or hegemonic and patronizing attitudes about the peasantry and having little experience with real world politics. In fact, if their full life stories, especially the two decades before 1917, are taken into account, they and others of their generation were immersed in the activities of the zemstvo, local politics in general, and newspaper affairs. Their caution, moderate stances and gradualism were based not so much on inexperience as on long exposure to the peasantry and to the needs of the countryside as well as rather prescient awareness of the potential for catastrophe in the situation at that time.

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.

In her introduction to the themed cluster “Nationalism, (Anti-)Communism and Violence in the European Cold War,” the author contextualizes the issue's research contributions on Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. She introduces the methodological rationale and highlights what binds the three case studies together: They explore how nationalism was woven into Cold War societies. The authors employ, as analytical prisms, both physical and symbolic violence in order to visualize empirically the workings of nationalism in the service of both communism and anti-communism. Hitherto, few scholars have focused on the interconnections between nationalism, (anti-)communism, and violence in Cold War east central and southeastern Europe.

Intercultural Relations are only now becoming the concern of foreign offices and other governmental bodies in the new world. In Central Europe they have long played a part, and especially so for the Hungarians. Lying as they do on the strategic divide between the Slavonic and Teutonic worlds, yet being neither Germanic nor Slavic, their problem has been one of national survival amidst two great conflicting currents. Further, Hungary's policies have been influenced by the conversion of her people to Rome instead of Byzantium in the tenth century. This fact has caused her to adhere traditionally to the civilization of Western Christianity and to claim membership in this cultural area. While the motivating forces in Hungary's intercultural efforts may have varied from time to time, their origin may ultimately be traced to these two main sources.

One of the fundamental demands of the nationality policy of the Soviet Government in its early years was the participation of native populations in the political structure of their respective administrative areas. This principle was particularly emphasized in areas such as Kazakhstan, where Russians had manned the governmental structure before the revolution of 1917. The present paper attempts through statistical evidence to describe the extent to which this was achieved in the first decade of existence of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then a part of the R.S.F.S.R. The agencies of government so examined are the soviet system, the administrative apparatus, and the Party.

National deviation or, in Soviet parlance, “bourgeois nationalism” has figured prominently in the party literature since the establishment of the Stalinist regime. It is a conveniently generic heresy and has been applied to national groups which had hardly any bourgeoisie worthy of the name prior to the Revolution. It is a label which is applied to real or imagined, to actual or potential non-Russian opponents of the regime within the country in an effort to discredit them by associating them with real or imagined external enemies. In the pre-war period, as well as to a certain extent since the war, “bourgeois nationalists” were linked with the revolutionary national non-Russian governments of the 1917–1920 period which unsuccessfully resisted the Bolshevik onslaught. Those who were charged with national deviation in the 1930's were accused of having aided foreign intelligence services in an attempt to facilitate the return of the old order and of wanting to turn the Soviet Union into a colony of the capitalist states.

The splendid growth of Polish Romantic poetry in the second quarter of the nineteenth century almost overshadowed concurrent achievements in artistic prose, which are considerable and diverse.

It is true that the prose fiction of the period did not especially flourish. Nevertheless, Polish Romanticism brought forth one interesting and original prose genre, that of gawęda. Gawęda is a kind of short story which has as narrator an old, rather simple man, telling in a loose way and in colloquial language stories from old Polish life. It is true, the genre quickly degenerated into a stale traditionalism, but at its peak gawęda could boast a volume as noteworthy as Rzewuski's The Memoirs of Soplica. The realism of detail, vivid local color, humor, and raciness of this work command a high position for it in the history of Polish fiction.

A. A. Ždanov's reference to the Serapion Brothers in his famous 1946 speech recalls a lively chapter in the early history of Soviet literature. Mikhail Zoščenko, who bore the brunt of Ždanov's attack, and the poet Tikhonov, who got off with a scolding and the loss of his position as president of the Union of Soviet Writers, were both among the twelve young writers who formed the Serapion Brotherhood in 1921.

They were a remarkable group. When their first meeting was held on February 1, 1921, all but one of their number were under the age of thirty, and three were not yet out of their teens. One of the youngest was their unofficial leader, Lev Lunc, whose death in 1924, just one week after his twenty-third birthday, cut short the career of the man whom Gor'kij considered to be the most promising dramatist in Russia.

Near the end of 1925, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was rocked at its foundations by one of the most intense and profound ideological controversies in its history. The ruling “Troika“ of Zinov'ev, Kamenev and Stalin was torn asunder over a series of crucial problems which largely turned on the question of “socialism in one country,” formulated by Stalin in the latter part of 1924. To its opponents, the theory smacked of “national narrowness” and a fatal revision of Marxist orthodoxy.

It was G. E. Zinov'ev, gifted agitator, long-time friend of Lenin, and member of the powerful Politburo of the Party, who assumed the initiative in attacking Stalin's theory and splitting the Party wide open. Having organized the “New Opposition” in October, 1925, he officially opened the attack at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December.

The importance for American scientists of closely following the published Russian researches in their fields is gaining general recognition in this country. In this connection the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages appointed about a year ago a Committee on Teaching Scientific Russian, and planned to hold, at its national meeting in Chicago, December 27-29, 1945, a session devoted to this problem.

By most accounts, the Russian Revolution began on February 23, 1917 with the women's strike for bread and suffrage. Yet for the next thirteen years (until 1930), that revolutionary beginning was celebrated on March 12, after which it was expunged from the revolutionary calendar altogether. “International Women's Day” meanwhile became March 8 because of the change in the Russian calendar in 1918 (it had been 13 days behind the European calendar), and February 23 became “Red Army Day” and subsequently (in 2006), “Day of the Defender of the Fatherland.” Over the course of the early 1920s, the connection between the women's strike on February 23/March 8 and the February Revolution was actively undermined in several ways. First, the February Revolution itself was dated not from the moment when women marched in the streets of Petrograd calling out the men to strike, but rather from March 12 (February 27), which was the day of the founding of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, soon to become the Provisional Government. Second, the celebration of the two holidays of Red Army Day on February 23 and International Women's Day on March 8 created a split between men and women in their celebrations, separating them and assigning spheres to each, the army for men and the home for women. Finally, the creation of February 23 as the anniversary of the Red Army's founding seems to have deliberately upstaged both women's involvement in the 1917 Revolution and the overthrow of autocracy.

The physical book of this century has been described as “a degenerate weakling, bent on self destruction.” In this world of “Lweaklings” Soviet publications are especially prone to self destruction, and it is a matter of serious concern to those librarians and scholars who work with the decaying books, periodicals and newspapers which record the facts, figures and ideas of Russian and Soviet civilization.

In 1957 William J. Barrow, a Richmond, Virginia, expert on paper, began a study of the deterioration of American book papers with funds granted by the Council on Library Resources, Inc., of Washington, D. C. He found that “most library books printed in the first half of the twentieth century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” The materials upon which this verdict was based were 500 non-fiction books printed and published in the United States between 1900 and 1949.

What sort of man was Paul Pestel, the unfortunate and influential Decembrist? What was the character of his mind, and what were the principles of the reforms for which he gave his life in 1826? The answers to these questions were long concealed. On the one hand, the Tsarist Government suppressed Pestel's writings and locked up the records of his mock trial until 1905; and on the other, admiration amounting to hero worship confused the minds of many students for whom any Decembrist was deemed to be a saintly martyr to the cause of freedom.

Alexander Herzen was most responsible for the hero worship. Herzen, at fourteen, was deeply moved by the execution of Pestel and four other Decembrists, and the event gave purpose to his whole life. Thirty years later, he wrote: “Before that altar [the gallows] defiled by bloody rites, I swore to avenge the murdered men, and dedicated myself to the struggle with that throne…. I have not avenged them … but for thirty years I have stood under that flag and have never once deserted it.”