The calendar reforms of Peter the Great introduced on January 1, 1700 have produced a surprising amount of confusion and misunderstanding. This articles proposes firstly to clarify the aims and outcomes of these reforms, so far as the available sources allow. Secondly, through an examination of the New Year celebrations mandated by Peter's edicts, the article examines the legitimating arguments that have been deployed, including ideas about Russia's relation to western countries, about the position of the Orthodox Church in the polity, and about the prerogatives of the ruler in these matters. As a result of the changing arguments invoked by Peter and his entourage, the reforms introduced a regime of plural temporalities that has affected the course of Russia's development and the elaboration of its identities to this day. The reforms had little to do with heralding a secular, modern society. If initially they represented a failed pragmatic attempt to create a civil calendar aligned with Protestant countries, their justification, once it finally settled, harked back to long-standing theological ideas about the time of the Incarnation.

How is it that Poland and Hungary, formerly regional leaders in democratic progress in east central Europe, have become widely cited cases of democratic backsliding? According to the political science literature on democratization, the path by which they exited communism should have favored stable democratic outcomes. This paper reexamines that literature and argues that it misses potential populist dangers inherent in the combination of accommodation and contention in the democratization process in both countries. The paper argues that changes in the structural conditions under which Polish and Hungarian democracy operated markedly improved the chances of success for populist actors in electoral competition, explaining the rise of PiS and FiDeSz. Particular attention is paid to the role of the global economic crisis of 2008 and the European refugee crisis of 2015.

This article examines the context and content of the 1936 Soviet Yiddish publication of Neger-Dikhtung in Amerike, which remains to this day the most extensive anthology of African-Diasporic poetry in Yiddish translation. The collection included a critical introduction and translations of nearly one hundred individual poems by twenty-nine poets, both men and women, from across the United States and the Caribbean. This article examines the anthology's position amongst different notions of “the folk” in Soviet Yiddish folkloristics and the relationship of these ideas to Yiddish-language discourse about race and racism, the writings of James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, with whom Magidoff corresponded, and the Yiddish modernist poetry of Shmuel Halkin, who edited the book series in which the anthology appears. When placed alongside Du Bois's and others’ visits to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the appearance of African-American and Caribbean poetry in Yiddish translation shows how a transatlantic Jewish avant-garde interpreted and embedded itself within Soviet-African-American cultural exchange in the interwar years. Magidoff served as a Soviet correspondent for NBC and the Associated Press from 1935. He was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR in 1948.

This article is building on the analysis of affective responses to precarious conditions to argue that one such response can be described as “cheerful nonchalance.” The village of Anosovo emerged in 1961 after the construction of the Bratsk dam on the Angara River. Many villagers were certain Anosovo was a temporary settlement from the beginning. Yet more than half a century later, Anosovo is still there, even as its population diminishes. When not only the state gives up on a place, but people also adopt a kind of blasé attitude to the risks of daily life, the affect of cheerful nonchalance comes to life to help with the living. Various affective attitudes toward precarity and uncertainty in post-Soviet realities and beyond have been described as nostalgia, “patriotism of despair,” and “cruel optimism” in post-Soviet realities and beyond. Nonchalance has been overlooked, even though it is doing the work of making life possible in a place enduring socio-economic disenfranchisement. With the use of ethnographic methods, this article shows how mundane events—such as the implementation of a polygraph test by a timber harvesting firm or a refusal to abide by safety measures like wearing seat belts—are the expressions of the affect of nonchalance.

Party leaders continue to be crucial players in politics. The theories of personalization and presidentialization of party politics reflect the centrality of leaders’ roles. Little attention has been paid to the effects of leaders on the formation and development of newly emerged parties. This article aims to fill that gap by analyzing the effect of leaders on the formation, intra-party cohesion, and membership organization of three newly emerged Romanian parties between 2015 and 2019. The qualitative analysis uses content from primary (party documents and elite discourses) and secondary sources (media reports). The findings indicate that the leaders’ approaches towards party formation and organization differ substantially across the examined parties and explain their cohesion and electoral appeal.

This article argues for the importance of Princess E.S. Urusova's four poems published between 1772 and 1777 to scholarly discussions of both classical reception and noble culture. Urusova engages more intensively than any other Russian writer of the period with the European Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, formulating thereby unique responses to major literary and political concerns of the 1770s. In the literary sphere, the Quarrel allows Urusova to conceptualize with exceptional perspicacity the multifaceted cultural environment of the time: contributing to Russia's claim to be the direct heir of the Greeks and Romans, she also makes the interesting case that the emerging culture of sensibility ideally equips readers and writers to absorb the classics. In the political sphere, by evoking the framework of ancient virtue through classical intertexts, she envisages an alliance between the sovereign and a strong nobility based on both cultural refinement and a sense of duty and service to the nation. Urusova's case shows how imitating and reinterpreting the classics helped one woman to find her voice as a poet in eighteenth-century Russia.

There are many and different types of racism in contemporary Russia: institutional racism, far-right racism, everyday (bytovoi) racism, and a fourth kind to which this essay will be devoted, the racism of the liberal intelligentsia. Russian liberal media's reaction to the BLM protests of 2020 has offered abundant material for the study of its social base, main tropes, and underlying logic. This article attempts to historicize it, locating its origins in the anti-Soviet pro-western dissidence of the stagnation era and illustrating its workings through some statements made by Joseph Brodsky and his milieu. Furthermore, the article identifies the intersection of two main ideas from which this racism emerges. In the first place, this is Cold-War rejection of real or perceived Soviet alliances with newly decolonized countries of Africa and Asia or with African Americans during the Civil Rights era. In the second place, this is dissident civilizational hierarchies that placed the west at the top and saw the east or the south as a backward space best avoided.

The article examines arrest protocols drawn up from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s by local policemen investigating thousands of individuals denounced to the authorities for having voiced criticisms of the monarchy and approval of the campaign of terror in the reign of Alexander II. The discussion proceeds in two stages. It first argues that the arrest protocols constitute grounds for a revisionist challenge to the existing historiography which charts enduring, if gradually declining, popular support for the monarchy in the final decades of tsarism. It then argues for a reappraisal of the efforts by revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II to destroy the sanctity of the autocracy through the use of “propaganda by the deed.” The campaign to assassinate the tsar emerges in the arrest protocols as an effective form of political messaging that gained real purchase in the popular imagination. It prompted lower-class Russians to articulate their own local grievances in terms of popular sovereignty, natural justice and political accountability.

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.

This article examines contributions Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have made and continue to make to the interdisciplinary fabric of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES). HBCUs are a uniquely American phenomenon and reminders of the history of enslavement and segregation in the United States. But HBCUs are also vibrant intellectual contact zones, which Mary Louise Pratt defines as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” Contact zones result in intercultural competencies, multilingualism, new methodologies, and critical reassessments. Faculty and alumni have described the extent to which HBCUs function as cultural and discursive sanctuaries. As such, HBCUs are places where legally, culturally, and racially segregated communities develop(ed) alternate ways to engage, experience, and (re)envision “Russia.”

In this essay I address a gap in the study of contemporary Russia-US relations. I argue that the concepts of race and racialization are active in these relations and available for analysis, but they continue to receive very little attention as compared to concepts of democratization and securitization. My main intervention is the introduction of “race-conscious reading” as a methodological approach relevant not only to the narrow sphere of Russia-US relations, but to the field of Slavic studies more broadly. Presenting the concept of “race-conscious reading” first, I then sketch out a research agenda that extends W.E.B. Du Bois's race-conscious observation of Soviet Russia's “refusal to be white” into the contemporary era. My goal in sketching out this research agenda is to show how a race-conscious approach to reading post-Soviet Russia-US relations can bring fresh perspectives to long-standing questions—Is Russia part of the west?—and generate new questions of urgent relevance: Is there a difference between American and Russian conceptions of “whiteness,” and how and when do they clash?