This article outlines an emerging approach in the spatial history of the Romanov empire. Similar to other empires of the long nineteenth century, the Romanov empire has traditionally been understood as a spoked wheel, whose vertical axes of power and lines of communication flowed between the metropolitan “core” and the “peripheries.” We argue for the need to move beyond this well-worn image of the empire as a vertical structure of “center-periphery” relations. Instead, we consider the heuristic potential of studying horizontal “periphery-periphery” entanglements interconnecting this state, following threads which were not necessarily woven through the metropole. The argument is illustrated through a discussion of several examples from the Baltic and southwestern provinces, which highlight both the challenges and potentials of intra-imperial entangled history.

Chronology is an important framing mechanism in history and changes significantly based on who defines historical eras. The area studies field has recently grappled with the need to decenter perspectives and reconsider the sources that scholars use. This article uses deep learning artificial intelligence methods to process 169,634 images from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD), a major archive of photography in the region, as containing a statist chronological logic, one defined by political change in the center. By peering under the hood of the algorithm’s predictions, by thinking with the machine, it is possible to see patterns in the images that may not seem crucial to the human eye. Looking at RGAKFD as a potential source of data for AI raises parallels between algorithmic bias and the Moscow-centric bias of sources, while also providing opportunities to use such methods as a tool for exploratory research.

This “viewpoint” essay offers a response to the article by Catherine Gibson and Anton Kotenko, “Horizontal Threads.” After recounting the article’s main propositions, the essay assesses its argument and the potential that its program represents for the study of the Russian empire’s spatial history.

This article uses computational text analysis to examine Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Double, responding to the long-standing critical debates surrounding the text and particularly its form, which Dostoevskii saw as having failed his idea. It asserts that the problem of the ontological status of Goliadkin’s double can be productively considered through an analysis of the text’s use of liminality, a hallmark of romantic fantastic literature. TEI-XML encoding of liminality identified in the text enables a series of visualizations that show that liminality is primarily concentrated in interior spaces. Analyzing the visualizations, the authors argue that liminality is associated with Goliadkin’s social shame, suggesting that the double is an extension of Goliadkin’s psychology rather than a fantastic apparition. Using The Double as a case study, the authors argue that computational text analysis can extend and enrich traditional philological methods by enabling deep structural analysis of the text.

The wide-ranging spaces of Russia in its various guises have not always been reflected in historical narratives, which for many years focused on Moscow and St. Petersburg. This viewpoint piece focuses on how the entangled histories approach could be applied to tell the empire’s story without telling an imperial story. It ends with asking which vertical threads from the center are necessary to weave together a coherent narrative.

In 1940s Hungary, there were two political parties—National Socialists on the right and communists on the left—typically depicted in mainstream media as extremist and prone to violence. They shared one crucial feature: both published joke magazines. Clearly envisioned as tools to recruit followers, their periodicals also served a broader purpose in transforming extremist ideas into commonsensical propositions for debate. Their rhetorical strategies were remarkably similar, consisting of three stages: 1) depicting disturbing conditions intended to inflame sentiments, 2) presenting a different view to convey the party’s preferred political stance, and finally 3) sketching ambitions for the future. Readers were led along a carefully orchestrated path into an alternative view of political possibilities, more effective for being dispersed along familiar avenues in Hungarian humor. The analysis is informed by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sara Ahmed, and Thomas Szanto on the pleasures of hating and the allure of a community who hate together.

This response to “Horizontal Threads: Towards an Entangled Spatial History of the Romanov Empire,” reflects on shifting approaches to the structure of empires and the power of entanglement as an analytical tool for making sense of the incorporationist work of empire.

The vast majority of Polish citizens lived through World War II and the Holocaust in the countryside. Nevertheless, power relations in rural communities have been largely overlooked by contemporary historiography. This study examines a profoundly liminal position of Polish village heads (sołtysi) in village communities during WWII. These lowest level clerks present in every Polish village faced intractable dilemmas and were often torn between the Nazi regime and their own communities. The case of village heads serves as a prime example of how the German occupier outsourced daily management of the occupation, exploited pre-existing structures and traditions, and used indirect rule in the communities it controlled. The paper discusses the role of village heads in creating the reality of occupation in the Polish countryside and the extent to which these village officials facilitated and participated in the Holocaust. The study is based primarily on early postwar trial documentation, Holocaust survivors’ testimonies, and village community records, most of which originate from the former Radom District of the General Government (today central Poland).

How can an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism be refashioned into a tool for building Soviet internationalism? This article tells the story of the bandura—the musical instrument constructed in the nineteenth century as an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism—and its fraught integration into the culture of Young Pioneers in early Soviet Ukraine. Focused on the shift in cultural policy from Leninist korenizastiia to Stalinist socialist realism, this article examines how the emancipatory and universalizing claims of Soviet internationalism became premised on Russified culture that inhibited the possibility of non-Russians’ full assimilation into the project of Soviet revolution. In the hands of Young Pioneers, who were appointed as Soviet “revolutionary agents” and as targets of the state’s pastoral care (“Stalin’s flowers”), the bandura became a particularly vexed symbol, epitomizing the irreconcilable tensions and the apparently inevitable violence inherent to nationalities policies in Soviet Ukraine. Following the intergenerational saga of a family of bandurists, the article shows how the disciplining technologies of Soviet musical-political education yielded often unexpected results.

This article examines the Soviet state’s contribution to the liberalization of international trade from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Looking at the USSR’s participation in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN agency dedicated to trade liberalization, the article reveals the Soviet state as an actor that pursued multiple and often contradictory goals at once. The purpose of the article is to complicate the view of the Soviet state as a “liberal subject,” an actor that always sought its self-interest. It calls for historians of the Soviet state to engage with the political, ideational, and emotional dimensions of economic exchanges to investigate the USSR’s place in the global economy.

The films Valley of Peace (1956), Jagoš i Uglješa (1976), Tit for Tat (1978), and A Great Guy at Heart (1981) represent exceptions among the Yugoslav film canon because they include Black actors among their casts. Given that the majority of Yugoslavs were racialized as “white,” the Black actors in these films emerge as a type of filmic device, providing social commentary on the post-World War II geopolitical priorities of Yugoslavia, including antiracism, international nonalignment, and Third World solidarity. Film was easy to distribute and consume and it became integral to the creation and maintenance of post-WWII Yugoslav culture. Through its content, storylines, and plot, an image of the idealized national Yugoslav body emerged that included Black men. In this article, I analyze the aforementioned films against the backdrop of the goals and traditional frames of Yugoslav cinema to highlight and offer insight into the uses and symbolism of blackness on screen.

This article closely examines the diary of Ivan Khripunov (1923–1942?), a peasant teenager from the south of Russia. I argue that in his diary, Ivan did not narrate his self with the use of Soviet language but rather aspired to develop as a narrator, learning how to write according to Soviet guidelines to then pursue a writing career. I rely on Iurii Lotman’s theory of communication, which allows me to regard the diary simultaneously as a “message” (representation of the diarist’s experiences) and a “code” (the diarist’s self-instructions on how to make sense of those experiences). The article is divided into three parts: in the first section, I discuss Ivan’s claim that his diary was a chronicle and explore how Socialist realist categories shaped his writing. In the second section, I analyze his autobiography written as one long diary entry and modelled after Maksim Gorʹkii’s autobiographical novel My Childhood (1914). I show that Ivan intended to assemble his future writer’s reputation on Gorʹkii’s example. Lastly, I look into a fictional story The Death of Vasilii Rebrov, also incorporated into the diary to solidify the creation of Ivan’s narrator-self.

This article argues that the late Soviet period saw a new form of Ukrainian nationhood emerge, one based less on ethno-historical commonalities than on territorial and institutional cohesion. Combining Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism” with Alexei Yurchak’s analysis of “hypernormalized authoritative discourse,” it shows that Soviet Ukrainian leaders reproduced the assumption of Ukrainian nationhood even as they deprived it of concrete political and cultural content. While First Secretary Petro Shelest still promoted ethno-historical topoi alongside pride in Ukraine’s republican quasi-statehood, his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsʹkyi preferred an image of Ukraine as a productive economic space free of ethnic specificity. Late Soviet Ukrainian banal nationalism left traces in everyday life, whether in sports reporting, school curricula, or in a specific visual language combining institutional emblems with politically empty ethnic symbols. During perestroika, late Soviet banal nationalism was appropriated and instrumentalized first by the national-democratic opposition, and later by “national communists.”

This article examines Bronisława Niżyńska’s (Bronislava Nijinska) ballet, Pieśń o ziemi (1937), in the Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny’s (Polish Representative Ballet) inaugural 1937–1938 season. The Polski Balet Reprezentacyjny was an ensemble instituted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to represent the Second Polish Republic as cultural diplomats. Domestic reviews betray conflicting opinions regarding Niżyńska’s role as an artistic representative of the Second Polish Republic. Therefore, this article argues that tepid reception of her choreographic work reveals an underlying hesitancy towards accepting her as a national artist. At the center of these questions remains the puzzling consideration of Niżyńska, who was situated between Europe’s modernist ballet tradition, heavily shaped by Russian émigrés, and Polish national culture. Examining Niżyńska’s choreographic praxis and complex biography suggests the reconsideration of Niżyńska as a purely Russophone artist, bringing to the fore the hitherto underexplored Polish dimension of her identity.

The question of the genre of The Kolyma Stories continues to perplex readers: the tales resemble fiction and are at the same time intended to serve as document, evidentiary proof of the evils of Stalinism. In this article I reconsider Walter Benjamin’s “Storyteller” essay, arguing that Shalamov is, in significant ways, a Benjaminian storyteller, updated to catastrophically unfree conditions minus any nostalgic lens. Taking Shalamov’s prose not just as document and fiction, but more specifically, as document and story allows for a deeper understanding of his creative process, aesthetics, and how his prose is intended to act on the reader. Shalamov becomes a storyteller in part to break free from what he saw as the didactic tradition of the Russian novel. I compare Benjamin’s notions of storytelling to Shalamov’s concepts of “new prose,” and then scrutinize Shalamov’s contradictory stance on whether his stories contain “lessons” (advice is central to Benjamin’s framework). I touch on the fusion of document and folktale in several stories, referring to Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Finally, I examine “Galina Pavlovna Zybalova” (1970–71), which, I argue, demonstrates how skazka and story function in relation to memory and advice.

Victor Pelevin’s novel Generation P has attracted both popular and academic interest for its ability to capture the zeitgeist of Russia in the 1990s and a generation searching for a new identity in the ruins of the Soviet Union. However, one element has been largely ignored by scholars: the role of fungi and, specifically, the entheogenic mukhomor. Here we discuss the history of mukhomor in the Russian context and demonstrate how Pelevin’s representations of mukhomor advance the novel’s critique regarding the reinvention of Russia’s identity after the fall of the Soviet Union. We argue that via its mukhomor-induced hallucinations, the novel ironizes the imperial narratives which sought to restore a mythical but allegedly authentic Russian past. The novel plays with the idea that if there is a future that can qualify as authentically Russian, then it should be one where the very notion of Russianness is abandoned. What renders this future authentically Russian is the genetic origin of mukhomor in the Russian hinterland, the very element which enables a vision of the world as such, devoid of symbolic order and of all identities.