The oldest Russian document has been called an “immunity charter.“ It dates from the first half of the twelfth century. Many other immunity charters have survived and are among our most prized sources on medieval Russia. Although few date back to the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, about five hundred remain from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and a recent survey lists 1,039 for the years 1504-84. Such documents have been found from each of the sixty-three districts (uezdy) which comprised the Russian state before Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan, and newly discovered charters, or references to previously unknown charters, are still turning up. The terms of individual charters are usually clear, but scholars have advanced conflicting views on what these documents, taken together, really tell us about Old Russian immunities. Is one justified in claiming that such immunities even existed? If they did, two vexing questions remain.

In 2011, a monument commemorating a group of Polish academics killed during the Nazi occupation was unveiled at the site of their death in L΄viv, presently a Ukrainian city. This event became the pinnacle of a commemoration that had developed quite autonomously on both sides of the redrawn Polish-(Soviet)Ukrainian border. The commemorative project and memory event underpinning it are especially interesting owing to the partial recuperation of links with the prewar local genealogies of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. This article explores how a special historic occurrence that took place in wartime L΄viv/Lwów became an issue of continual political significance invested with different truth, originality, and identity claims in Poland and Ukraine. The authors focus on various actors who managed to transform memory about the murdered academics into a public commemorative project and elevate the role of translocal links in the successful realization of the commemorative initiative in question. The concluding part summarizes principal lessons pertaining to commemoration of perished population groups in east-central European borderlands that might be drawn on the basis of the discussed case.

Iurii Olesha's Short Novel Envy (Zavist', 1927) has been greatly admired and even has some claim to be considered the “great Soviet novel.“Yet comparatively little has been written about Envy since the first flood of reviews and articles, many uncritical, appeared in the Soviet press between 1927 and 1933.

Envy is a complex novel, sometimes described as expressionistic, written in a variety of styles and with many planes of meaning. Elements of realist, romanticist, and symbolist styles are present. Dreams, fantasies, and lies are introduced, often as reality. It is a work in which the author's ideological intentions are far from clear or unambiguous, a work deeply hedged with irony. And it is a work that can yield much to discerning analysis.

The Russo-Polish War occasioned some of the most anxious moments in the history of relations between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic. Within Germany, the advance of the Red Army toward Warsaw in 1920 aroused strong, but contradictory emotions. First, it led many Germans to anticipate the destruction of Poland and to hope for the restoration of the Reich’s former eastern territories. Simultaneously, however, the westward Russian march raised fears of the invasion of Germany by Bolshevik forces. Within Russia, a similar dichotomy of views about Germany existed. On one hand, the German government was considered a hostile, though negligible and temporary—a Communist revolution there was thought imminent—factor in Russia’s situation. On the other, Germany was held important enough to Russia that serious proposals of a far-reaching alliance against Poland and the Entente were made to her. The former view rested on a fundamentally optimistic assessment of Russia’s prospects; the latter, on a sober one. Grounds for concern were afforded by the Soviet Republic’s grave economic problems and by worry about whether the weary Red Army could defeat Pilsudski’s forces, whose offensive capacity had been demonstrated by their capture of Kiev in May 1920. If Germany, which had had military forces in the field against the Bolsheviks only a year before, should actively assist the Poles, Russia’s situation could be appreciably worsened. Surprisingly, therefore, although there are several recent, excellent studies of Soviet-Polish affairs and the Russo-Polish War, and a voluminous literature on relations between the Soviets and the Weimar Republic, little attention has been paid to Soviet policy toward Germany during the conflict with Poland. To explain that policy, and its apparent contradiction, is the purpose of this article.

“If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen,” writes Solzhenitsyn toward the end of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago,“what is the good of them? Are they anything more than the barking of village dogs at night?” He adds parenthetically: “I should like to commend this thought to our modernists: this is how our people usually think of literature. They will not soon lose their habit. Should they, do you think?” The statement— with its flavor of the tag-end of a Russian proverb culled from Dal', even the bit about the village dogs—is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn. What clever critic safe in his armchair, however pricked by ornery oldfangledness, would care or dare to contend with it?