November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.

Architectural practice in the Stalinist USSR saw the sudden and rapid revival of historical forms and styles. One approach interprets this development as part of a reactionary shift in Soviet temporal culture, a “Great Retreat” across all spheres of social and political life. The rival conception sees in historicism an aesthetic of “timelessness” and “perfection,” which expressed Stalinism's self-characterization as an eternal, utopian present. This paper presents a third perspective, arguing that the revival of historicism stemmed, paradoxically, from a future-oriented impulse. This revolved around the charge that Stalinist architecture “immortalize the memory” of the era, to ensure posterity's gratitude and admiration. Accordingly, Stalinist architects drew upon supposedly enduring historical styles, which they expected to remain understandable to future generations. Further, time-tested traditional materials, forms, and decorative mediums were employed to ensure the physical durability of Stalinist architectural monuments. The paper concludes by situating this logic in the global context of interwar monumental architecture and considering some implications for our understanding of Stalinist temporality.

This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland's peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over 200 press articles. I argue that commentators saw the killing as the result of French policies in the factory, and interpreted these in turn as the result of either the Polish government's negligence, influenced by Paris's diplomats, or of global capitalism. The most dramatic arguments framed French policies in Żyrardów as a form of colonialism or slavery. This framing was based on the journalists’ perception of French actions as transgressions of two imagined hierarchies: a geo-racial division of the world, and the local hierarchy of labor.

How the narrative dynamics of The Idiot shape and inform its ethics is the focus of this article by Alexander Spektor. The Idiot is one of the most radical of Fedor Dostoevskii's novelistic experiments inasmuch as it questions the integrity of the self created through the process of narrative representation and interpretation. Dostoevskii achieves this effect by contrasting the idea of the inherent distance between sign and meaning with Myshkin's initial belief in the possibility of the transcendental signifier. The reader is gradually forced to accept that any form of participation in the big dialogue of the novel is bound to cause intense rivalry for the control of its meaning, which ultimately leads to physical violence either against the self (Ippolit and Nastasia Filippovna) or against others (Rogozhin). Dostoevskii undermines the integrity of any narrative formation of the self, including the self of the reader, by framing it within nonverbal acts of violence and compassion. Hence, The Idiot can be read as a Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, traverses the distance between the novel's is—an attempt to secure positive ethical meaning (within an established) narrative—and the novel's ought, the silent and nonsensical acts of compassion that, ultimately, defy signification. To make sense of The Idiot requires the reader to participate in an ethically compromised endeavor. Forced to do justice to the text, the reader also has to bear responsibility for the violence inherent in any narrative construction of the self.

The article examines how the post-WWI, post-Habsburg city-state Fiume (today known as Rijeka in the Republic of Croatia) tried to shore up loyalty and diminish local discontent by providing welfare and economic initiatives, in direct conjunction with how much neighboring states offered. Of particular concern were comparisons with how the Fiume state dealt with the Krone currency crisis, especially as locals in Fiume were very aware of and traded in currencies of neighboring lands using the same base money. The article calls for more work to be done on the dynamic of “on-the-ground” post-imperial Europeans questioning their new governments based on how they compared their lot with their other post-Habsburg neighbors.

In this article, I explore recent efforts to “de-Sorosize” the Republic of Macedonia, arguing that they reveal an obsession in Macedonia—and more broadly in east central Europe—with defending ethnonational interests against assumed interlopers. New, self-proclaimed patriotic associations have mobilized ideas of combined external and internal threats to national existence as though there were a war frontier. This imagined war frontier marks the dividing line between belligerent nationalists, who claim that Macedonian sovereignty and national identity are under threat of extinction, and the Macedonian center-left and liberal (moderate and left-leaning) NGOs, which tend to promote greater inclusiveness in society, are assumed to side with “the Albanians,” and to have a direct connection to George Soros. The case study of Macedonia highlights the outright public rejection of liberal ideals and the key role that populist, militant sensibilities play in the formation of civil society groups in Europe today.

Works of broad historical synthesis have been rare in all periods and all countries. Modern Russian historiography is not an exception. Among the Russian historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only three names can be cited as coming under this head: Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevski. And of these three Klyuchevski occupies a position which is, in a sense, unique. Karamzin, the “Columbus of Russian history” as Pushkin has called him, discovered that subject for the general reader to whom he appealed more than to the specialists in the field. By no means a mere dilettante, as he has been so often pictured, he still was primarily a great literary artist, and only in the second place a scholar. His importance lay more in the field of general Russian culture than in that of historical scholarship. On the contrary, Solovyov has remained essentially a historian for historians. Devoid of literary brilliance, and lacking in architectonic ability, he has left us the twenty-nine volumes of his History of Russia from the Earliest Times, to be consulted with the help of the index rather than to be read through and enjoyed. Both the size and the arrangement of his monumental work have given it a somewhat forbidding nature. For a casual reader his general conception of Russian history is hidden behind the mass of detailed material, for the most part presented in a strictly chronological order. Of the three masters of Russian historiography, Klyuchevski alone combines a great literary skill, rivaling that of Karamzin, with profound scholarship, not inferior to that of Solovyov; hence his simultaneous and equally powerful appeal to the general reader and the specialist.

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel‘nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost' to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

In the eighties and early nineties of the last century Vladimir Solovëv, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was engaged in an extensive journalistic polemic against nationalism in general and Slavophilism in particular. One of his main targets was the philosophy of history of Nicholas Danilevskij, the Panslavist theoretician. In the light of the doctrines of world Christian unity enunciated by Solovëv, his strong reaction to Danilevskij's denial of the possibility of an ultimate world historical synthesis and to his espousal of a kind of cyclical interpretation of history is entirely understandable.

Solovëv addressed himself especially to Danilevskij's division of history into mutually independent civilizations or “cultural-historical types.” In particular, he criticized Danilevskij's claim that Slavdom constituted a cultural-historical type separate from “Europe.”

The United States and bulgaria stood in opposing camps during World War I. Although at war with each other's allies, they nevertheless maintained normal diplomatic relations throughout the hostilities. The explanation of this anomaly lies in the fact that both countries were guided by expediency rather than principle in formulating their mutual policies. While the Bulgarian leaders hoped by maintaining relations with the United States and appealing to Wilsonian principles to insure Bulgaria against the consequences of a possible defeat, the American policy-makers viewed Bulgaria as the weakest link in the chain of Germany's allies whose removal from the Central Alliance might expedite victory.

When, on February 3, 1917, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, President Woodrow Wilson was already formulating his famous political strategy of trying to drive a wedge between the German people and the German Government by expressing continued friendship for the former and deep hostility to the latter.

The relatonship between wage and price levels is clearly an appropriate subject for study in a number of comparisons of relative wellbeing. In measuring real wage changes within any economy, for example, we must measure the relative changes in these two levels over a specified time period. If there has been no drastic change in the number of dependents per wage earner, the measure of real wage changes should ordinarily give us some indication of the change in the level of living. Likewise, a study of the relationship between wage and price levels in two economies as similar as those of the United States and Canada would also seem to produce meaningful results. But what happens when we attempt to compare price and wage levels for economies where the institutional differences are very considerable?

After a long period of considerable discrimination and abuse neutrality has now regained a semblance of legitimacy as a valid principle of international law and international relations. This recent transfiguration of a concept, which only fourteen years ago was being reviled as morally reprehensible, can be credited to a wide variety of diplomatic developments, such as, for example, Cold War tensions, the newly won independence of former colonial possessions, and others. In great part, too, it can be explained by the strenuous sponsorship lately exerted on its behalf in world affairs by the leaders of the Soviet regime. In effect, the latter now take the initiative, at every possible opportunity, in generously lavishing praise and support on the neutrality of the so-called “bourgeois” nations in all its various manifestations.