This article examines several documentary films made by and about the Russian oil industry in the period from 2003 to 2016, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which they portray intersections between oil and post-Soviet “life.” It divides these films into two major sub-genres: the corporate documentary (2003-present) and the conspiracy documentary (most widespread after about 2012). Corporate documentaries have been instrumental in fashioning new, post-Soviet links between the oil industry and everyday life, especially through “commodity chain” documentaries shown widely on television and in other media. The conspiracy films of the 2010s then extended these commodity chains into the realm of shadowy international cabals and, in some cases, fantastic alien worlds. Together, these sub-genres speak to the cultural imagination of life in Russia as a petrostate, complete with agents and victims, usable pasts and presents, and a variety of energopolitical subject positions that viewers might inhabit and shift among. Although oil documentaries and science fiction generated around the world have long imagined non-hydrocarbon energy futures for humankind, recent Russian oil documentaries in both sub-genres envision a world in which oil and human life will become ever more tightly enmeshed.

Stalin's little-known 1928 caper, the production and distribution of bogus hundred-dollar bills, was preceded by an even less known venture of the same sort. Specialists in East European history have left it unexplored during the decades which have passed since it occurred, and several aspects of the plot behind it, as well as some of its most powerful supporters, remain unknown. It happened in 1925, and involved a string of high-ranking Hungarian civilian and military personages, with a prince at one end and a bishop at the other.

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

The origins of Russian factory legislation date essentially from the decade of the 1880s, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the economy and society of the Russian Empire. During the reign of Alexander II there had been a growing dissatisfaction with the poor working conditions in Russian factories. Desire on the part of certain officials to eliminate some of the worst abuses of the factory system led to the formation, beginning in 1859, of a number of commissions to study conditions in the factories and to make recommendations for their improvement. But, with the exception of a decree issued by the government in 1866 which sought the enforcement of more stringent sanitary measures, attempts to introduce legislation of the character recommended by these commissions were for a long time unsuccessful.

The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.

The nine years between 1979 and 1987 have been banner years for Hungarian publications on the history of the Hungarian Communist Revolution and its leader, Béla Kun. Occasioning the increased output were two anniversary dates: the sixtieth anniversary of the short-lived soviet republic in 1979 and the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of its leader, Béla Kun, in 1986.

Historical evaluations of Béla Kun's life started with a frenzy in 1979 when his political biography, written by György Borsányi, was published; they ended in a whimper with the publication of several Kun biographies in 1987. The controversial B61a Kun has been negatively judged not only by western historians and by Hungarian historians writing during the interwar years, but also by such prominent Russian revolutionaries as the Marxist Lev Trotskii and the anarchist Victor Serge. Both considered him an incompetent fool.

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of “urban beauty” and “urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle” as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.

The sage of Yasnaya Polyana haunted Babel'‘s imagination as a paragon of professional greatness: "What Tolstoy knows and may do–may we do that? You read Tolstoy and it seems: one more…page and you'll finally understand the secret of life…After you know what Tolstoy thinks of death, there is no reason to know what a Fedor Sologub thinks on this issue." In an early story ("Inspiration," 1917) the young narrator says to his friend, a would-be literary genius: "Well, Leo Tolstoy [Lev Nikolaevich], when you write your autobiography, remember me" (1966: 32). Living at one time near a stud farm in Molodenovo, Babel' cultivated the acquaintance of an aged local horseman.