In this article, Catherine Wanner explores the historical factors contributing to a greater degree of religious pluralism emerging in Ukraine compared to Russia and Belarus and illustrates some of the cultural and political consequences of these more permissive policies. Using the intersection of foreign missionaries and evangelical communities in Ukraine as a lens, this article draws on historical and ethnographic evidence to argue that faith-based communities are sites of cultural innovation where the legacy of Soviet culture blends with values and practices born of other historical experiences to shape notions of morality and attitudes toward the state. Evangelical communities in this traditionally Orthodox land increasingly represent robust social institutions that offer new sources of self-definition, belonging, and communal life that are at once intensely local and broadly transnational in orientation.

The systematic study of the physical characteristics of human beings reaches well back into the eighteenth century. By the 1830s, scientists began to recognize that human biological outcomes were influenced, not only by inherited characteristics, but by both the natural and the socioeconomic environment. Genetic variation, by itself, did not account for the spatial, social, or temporal variation in physical stature. Only in the 1970s, however, did historians begin in earnest to explore the welfare implications of anthropometric measures. With the birth of “anthropometric history,” biological indicators, including physical stature, were used to assess the welfare of human beings as complements to such conventional indicators as income or real wages.

Of the many crises that Europe faces today, it is the migration crisis that most profoundly defines the changing nature of European politics. It is also a turning point in central and east European societies’ attitudes to the European Union, and it signals the return of the east-west divide in Europe. The article argues that what Brussels describes as a lack of solidarity is actually a clash of solidarities: national, ethnic, and religious solidarity chafing against our moral and legal obligations with respect to the refugees. The east-west divide over migration has its roots in history, demography and the twists of post-communist transition, while at the same time representing an east European version of popular revolt against globalization. The attitude divide between Europe's west and east on issues of diversity and migration strongly resembles the divide between the big cosmopolitan capital cities and the countryside within western societies themselves.

Contemporary political events in Poland provoke many questions concerning the old Polish intelligentsia. Has it survived the historical storms of the last thirty years? How potent is the value system of this stratum today? Has its dominating influence on the other strata remained, or does Poland now have a new value system derived from the goals and morals of a different class? The Polish intelligentsia can be analyzed from several standpoints–from the historical or the current perspective, in the light of its national function or its own structure, or as revealed in its aspirations and values. It is the conviction of the author that the value system determines the structure of both the spiritual and the material culture in every social class and stratum.

When World War II came to an end, vast portions of Germany and Poland lay in rubble. And, as if this were not enough, both countries were immediately inundated by large waves of migrants. In the years from 1944 to 1949, displaced persons, refugees, and expellees made up more than one-fifth of the populations of Poland and Germany. For the purpose of this article, expellees (or forced migrants) are Germans or Poles who had been living in the eastern territories of both countries as defined by their borders in 1937 and who were forcibly and permanently removed from their homelands between 1944 and 1949.

Little study has been devoted to the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity. While some attention has been paid to the Crypto-Christians of Asia Minor, who were numerous, lived in groups, and endured a long time, the Crypto-Christians of the Balkans have been largely neglected, with the exception of an occasional work referring to only a single nationality, particularly the Greeks.

In 1953, just after Stalin's death, the Soviet state machine tool publishing house released A. A. Kanaev's From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine (Ot vodianoi mel'nitsy do atomnogo dvigateli). Like other books and articles published in the popular and scientific press in the USSR in this period, From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine explored the political, economic, and cultural significance of an incipient “atomic century” and touted the nearly limitless applications of the power of the atom in agriculture, medicine, and industry. Indeed, there was little doubt among scientists, engineers, economic planners, and party officials that the Soviet Union would soon enter the stage of “communist construction”: communism would be achieved within their lifetimes, owing to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party and on the basis of the achievements of science and technology. By the end of the decade, the average Soviet citizen, too, came to believe that the glorious future had arrived. Many people wrote letters to prominent physicists with suggestions on how to tame the power of the atom to improve the quality of life. For citizens, scientists, and officials alike, successes in atomic energy provided undeniable confirmation that at long last society had embarked on the final leg of the long journey to communism.

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.

Empire has become a common analytical frame through which the Soviet state and its collapse are interpreted. Commenting on the other contributions to this forum, Mark R. Beissinger examines the limits and utility of this concept, arguing that empire needs to be understood, not as a clearly bounded transhistorical model, but as a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” whose meaning and referents have altered significantly over time. The article then probes the ways the concept of empire has been redeployed in the Soviet context, addressing in particular the role of nationalism in the making of empire, the injustices associated with empire, and the contested boundary between the multinational empire and the multinational state. It concludes by arguing for a more interpretive approach to Soviet empire as a way of relating to authority rather than a common set of political practices.

One of the firmest popular conceptions of the Soviet Union in the United States is of a system diat categorically banned private enterprise. Embraced by specialists and the general public alike, this conception reflects the official Soviet stance diat the private sector was eradicated during losif Stalin's “great break” of 1929-30. Indeed, over the course of diose two years, individual peasants were compelled to collectivize, private stores forcibly shut, private manufactures socialized, and even doctors and dentists pressured to cooperate or to close shop. The concept of an interdiction against all private economic activity found support in the words of the dictator–Stalin's assertions that the Soviet Union was a society “without capitalists, small or big,” that socialist, not capitalist, property was the “foundation of revolutionary legality,” and many other statements of a similar ilk. Stalin proved his commitment to this model by his readiness to resort to coercion against its violators: at his instigation, repressive laws threatened entrepreneurs with five to ten years in prison camp for profitable private business. Such developments appeared as unequivocal as they proved lasting; when commentators discussed perestroika in the late 1980s, the only historical precedent they could identify was Lenin's New Economic Policy six decades before.

In this article, Malgorzata Fidelis analyzes the role of gender in postwar Polish employment policies and shop floor culture and casts a new light on east European Stalinism and de-Stalinization. Focusing on the reconstruction and implementation of protective labor legislation for women, Fidelis argues that the communist definition of gender was a recast version of the western liberal notion of immutable sexual difference positioned in the body. At the same time, Polish society participated in defining gender at the site of production, most visibly in the de-Stalinization backlash against women, who had entered male-dominated skilled jobs in heavy industry under Stalinism. The party-state's use of women's reproductive function as a justification to remove women from men's jobs suggests that east European de-Stalinization needs to be reexamined in light of its different meaning for women and men.

Research on the sources of support for the communists in interwar Poland has emphasized the role of ethnic minorities, especially the Jews. To what degree did Poland's national minorities vote for the Communist Party? Using census data and electoral returns on interwar Poland's 2*72 districts, as well as a new technique for inferring individual level behavior from aggregate level data, Jeffrey Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg generate reliable estimates of ethnic group voting behavior for the Sejm elections of 1922 and 1928. The results show that it is incorrect to speak of a unified minority vote. Communist parties received disproportionate support from Belarusans. By 1928 Ukrainians voted overwhelming for ethnonational parties. The bulk of Jews drifted into establishment politics, disproportionately supporting the pro-government bloc. Contrary to the myth of the “Jewish communist,” Jews provided only a small fraction of the electoral support for the communist parties. The evidence shows that not only were the overwhelming number of Jews not communist supporters but the vast majority of communist voters were not Jews.

Based on fieldwork (primarily in southern Romania), this article treats identity-construction among professional male Romani musicians, investigating in particular the discourse that they generate as they maintain their exclusive vocational niche on the boundaries of intersecting ethnic communities. Seeking to establish the influence of Romani musicians as agents in the construction of their own identity, Beissinger discusses notions that Romani musicians provide of non-Roms and other Roms (including other musicians), as well as how they portray surrounding cultural and political phenomena as expressions of their syncretic occupational and ethnic sense of self. Beissinger argues that Romani musicians are unquestionably enclosed by socially inflicted boundaries but are themselves also agents of boundary-making as they articulate connections with and distinctions from the world around them. Throughout, she draws pertinent comparisons with Romani musicians in other east European countries.

This is a participant's account of the movement in Soviet history during the 1970s and 1980s known as “revisionism,” which Sheila Fitzpatrick understands as an iconoclastic challenge by social historians to the dominance in Sovietology of political scientists and the totalitarian model. Particular attention is paid to the debates on the nature of Stalinism, which in the context of the Cold War became highly politicized and bitterly polemical, as well as to internal arguments: for example, between Marxists and non-Marxists and between first- and second-generation revisionists. Revisionists’ early interest in questions of social support and later focus on resistance is discussed. The essay offers an assessment of the intellectual and historiographical contribution of revisionism, including an appreciation of contingency, a new approach to power and the interplay of government and society, new standards of historical professionalism, and an emphasis on archives and primary sources. Finally, a line of continuity between revisionism and its 1990s challenger, “post-revisionism,” is suggested. Comments are provided by Robert V Daniels, J. Arch Getty, Elena A. Osokina, and Jochen Hellbeck.

A number of recent comparative works have drawn attention to parallels and similarities between the Soviet Union and the early Turkish Republic. In this article, Samuel J. Hirst takes a firmly transnational approach to Soviet-Turkish interactions in the 1930s to demonstrate that the similarities were not merely circumstantial. The manifest ideological conflict between nationalist Turks and internationalist Bolsheviks has led many historians to dismiss Soviet- Turkish cooperation as a necessary response to geopolitics, a pragmatic alliance against the west. Hirst argues that opposition to the western-dictated international order was a coherent element in Soviet-Turkish exchanges that stretched beyond diplomacy into the economic and cultural spheres. The antiwestern elements of Soviet-Turkish relations suggest that convergence was more than a case of homologous responses to similar conditions; it was part of a broader narrative that, in the Soviet case at least, continued to shape international relations beyond World War II.

In this article, Francine Hirsch examines the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum as a venue for virtual tourism, where museumgoers were able to become acquainted with “the Peoples of the USSR” and where Soviet ethnographers and Politprosvet activists attempted to work out an idealized narrative about the socialist transformation of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the period of the “Great Break,” Hirsch investigates the role of “the narrative” in the process of Soviet state formation and the role of mass participation in facilitating Soviet authoritarian rule. Hirsch treats the “ideological front” as a dynamic realm and shows how ethnographers, activists, and museumgoers attempted to reconcile disparities between “the real” and “the ideal” in the Soviet Union. In addition, she evaluates how the Soviet developmentalist narrative evolved after 1931, as ethnographers attempted to formulate a nonbiological, sociohistorical explanation for the persistence of traditional culture among certain population groups in an effort to counter German racial theories.

This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the first Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia and Africa (1968). It offers an account of the festival as a highly heterogeneous and productive site for better understanding the complex relationship between the Soviet bloc and the Third World in the crucial moment between the victory of post-colonial independence movement and the end of the Cold War.

For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.