Late in October 1918, in the shadow of impending defeat, nationalist revolutions rocked the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time the Austro-Hungarian representatives signed the Padua Armistice on November 3, imperial authority no longer existed in the Dual Monarchy. In Hungary the revolution of October 30 brought to power a coalition government led by the liberal pacifist, Mihaly Karolyi. The coalition included the Karolyi-led Independence Party, the Social Democrats, and the Radicals of Oszkar Jaszi. This revolutionary government's aim was to liquidate the semifeudal remnants of the old order by introducing democratic, political, and social reforms.

Since the collapse of communism, much scholarship has examined the efforts by the countries of east central Europe and the former Soviet Union to develop democratic regimes. The majority of such studies have focused on institutional development and the problems of democratic transition at the national level. Although this focus is not at all surprising given the highly centralized political structures that have been the legacy of the communist past, the efficacy, indeed the ultimate success or failure of democratization, may well rest largely on the ability of local government to satisfy citizen demands. Local government is most directly involved in delivering the goods and services that affect people’s daily lives. Hence, citizens often form their judgments of political systems based on the performance of local government. To the degree that democracy depends on the loyalty of the citizenry, local government is important to the survival of democracy.

Who rules is the central question posed by scholars studying local government. This issue lies at the heart of democracy. While it is nowhere the case that citizens rule directly, in a democracy their preferences must have some effect on public policy.

This forum has attracted six richly varied responses to Larry Charles's film Borat. That Slavic Review would bring together, among others, a political scientist, an anthropologist, a historian, and two ethnographers (if I discern their fields correctly) to discuss a Hollywood film attests both to the journal's vitality and to the film's skill in marshalling interesting questions. In light of the range of issues raised here, my comments attempt, with inconsistent success, to restrict themselves to the questions broached in the preceding essays, rather than supplying an altogether new line of argument.

In this article, Joanna Niżyńska explores the modes used by poets of the bruLion generation (whose debuts coincided with the end of communism) to import Frank O'Hara's poetics into Polish literature and the significance of their doing so. By employing Harold Bloom's concepts of the “anxiety of influence,” “kenosis,” and “daemonization,” Niżyńska analyzes the intergenerational impulses manifested in O'Harism in relation to the Romantic paradigm in Poland's poetic tradition. Niżyńska claims that in turning to O'Hara, such poets as Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Podsiadło, and Miłosz Biedrzycki engaged in dialectically related modes of revisionary reading of both domestic and foreign traditions. O'Harism is interpreted as a sign of a multifaceted cultural morphogenesis that was simultaneously an act of compensation for Romantic “Polish complexes,” a self-exploration of a new poetic generation in the face of a new political and cultural reality, and a misreading of a foreign source.

Numismatic advertisements of competing claims to the title of grand prince served as a useful propaganda medium during the Muscovite succession struggles of the 1400s but also yielded a persistent slippage between coins' function of proclaiming political legitimacy and conferring that legitimacy. This article outlines the mutually symbolizing relation between coinage and succession in the cultural imagination of the Daniilovich dynasty and beyond. It focuses on verbal tropes, succession practices, and economic functions by turns in order to elucidate the rhetorical matrix that identified the legitimacy of the tsar and of money and to sketch out its evolving applications. First, I read passages from Ivan IV's first letter to Prince Kurbskii to show how the tsar conceived of usurpation as a falsified succession suggestive of falsified coin. Then, I treat early Muscovite coins that articulated family relationships, especially conflicts between primogenitary and collateral principles of inheritance. Finally, I relate the sovereign to the material artifact of money, particularly coins representing him as a mintmaster or as an executioner poised to punish counterfeiters, in order to contextualize efforts by enemies of the state to command numismatic symbols. In all of these contexts, the perception of legitimate succession is intertwined with a currency of signs and the circulation of specie.