The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK) was founded on November 2, 1942. From the outset, photography and eyewitnesses were vital resources for conveying the horrors of the German occupation. Refuting accusations that the USSR was responsible for massacring Polish prisoners of war in Katyn forest further magnified the importance of generating an irrefutable record of Nazi guilt. This article examines the efforts of Stalin's government to bury the Katyn lie beneath images of genuine victims of Hitler's regime. Tracing the diverse origins of the ChGK's photographs and supporting testimony brings into focus the reasons why wartime observers found the Soviet falsification convincing. ChGK materials should be approached as artifacts of mass mobilization. By disentangling these pictures and pages from their propagandistic uses, researchers can move closer to understanding the symbiotic relationship between official narratives and personal truths in the USSR as well as the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Scholars in this forum analyze how major nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why have China, South Africa, Turkey, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and even Saudi Arabia among others failed to condemn the brutal Russian invasion and have continued to trade with Russia? Are these initiatives simply a replay of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War Era or do they mark a substantial new reorientation in world politics? This forum appears in a hybrid format; two essays by Thomas Loyd and Katherine Stoner appear here in print. In addition, there is an online forum at https://aseees.org/slavicreview/discussion/ukraine-war-global-south/ featuring short contributions from David Engerman and Sandeep Bhardwaj on India, Chia Yin Hsu on China, Mark Katz on the Middle East, and, Daniela Secches on Brazil.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been roundly condemned in the West. NATO members have continued to supply Ukraine with weaponry while the EU, US and their allies have ensured that the Russian economy remains under the most extensive and intensive set of sanctions in history. Yet many leaders of countries in the global south have been far more hesitant to condemn Russian actions. Some have merely abstained in United Nations resolutions criticizing Russia, while others have remained neutral. This paper will endeavor to explain why the global south has such a different perspective from the global north on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I argue that this is a result of America’s withdrawal from the global south over the last two decades and Russia’s reemergence in many parts of the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia.

This article discusses the evolution of the Belarusian Orthodox Church's (BOC) role and influence in the society, its relationship with the state, and the internal schisms within the Church leadership. Belarusian politics and society has traditionally been Russian-oriented. Close linguistic and cultural relations with Russia were embedded in the official ideology of Belarusian state and national building policies, which from the onset singled out the ideas of Slavic unity and Belarus's special role in the Eastern Slavic civilization. In this regard, the BOC was an element of two machineries, the objectives of which growingly drifted apart. Aliaksandr Lukashenka's regime viewed the BOC as an important partner of the state and a control mechanism over the society. Russia, which lacked a well-defined policy of attraction towards Belarusian society, in turn mostly relied on the regime and domestic social institutions, specifically the BOC, in maintaining its influence. The two crises, regional (2014) and domestic (2020), significantly upended the “in-between” position of the BOC and raise questions about its ideational and institutional cohesion. Moreover, officially as an autonomous Exarchate functioning under the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the BOC has had to balance its position within the ROC that during this time has sought stronger status abroad. The relationship between BOC and ROC leadership grew more complex after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and after Russia's invasion to Ukraine in 2022, when the ROC leadership chose to support the political regime. The open conflict between the national, now autocephalic Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Moscow Patriarchate have revealed the intra-Orthodox (post-)colonialism in the region but also further complicated the ways the BOC can position itself within the Belarusian society.

When the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces in March 2022, barely half of African states voted in favor. This lukewarm support contrasted with strong support for Ukraine elsewhere in the world. Among those abstaining from the vote was South Africa, a country with a long history of interaction with the post-Soviet space. This essay considers the interplay of historical remembering and forgetting that has contributed to the South African response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A longstanding commitment to non-alignment, the long shadow of the anti-colonial struggle, and the complicated legacy of the Soviet Union, its collapse, and who rightly carries its anti-apartheid mantle, have all played a role in shaping the South African response.

Orphanhood in Tolstoy has largely escaped critical examination, in part because though the writer himself was an orphan, his texts say little about the topic explicitly. But in fact thinking about orphans' trauma is everywhere in the pre-crisis fiction. Tolstoy draws orphans and non-orphans as fundamentally morally different. All his major protagonists are orphans and want to marry non-orphans. Further, many of his novelistic tics, and many critical insights into Tolstoy generally, actually apply only to characters who are motherless. War and Peace and Anna Karenina can be read as the author's running debate with himself: is an escape available for the traumatized from their pain later in life? If so, it would mean life is good and God is kind. Both books answer yes and demand orphans renounce their permanent sense of grievance against life for their losses. But in their final scenes Tolstoy confesses his optimism was false; life is not fair, and psyches damaged by orphanhood can never fully recover.

“The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute,” the Polish author Czesław Miłosz wrote in 1951. On one side lay the east, “under the domination of Moscow,” and on the other the west, encompassing the rest of the globe. “Trampled down by History—that elephant,” Poles found themselves sequestered in the east. Unless, like Miłosz, they had somehow “escaped” to the west, they were doomed to live “behind the iron curtain” in a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world.” Thanks partly to Miłosz's influence, this Cold War vision of a bifurcated world has thoroughly shaped scholarship on postwar Poland and the rest of eastern Europe. In recent years, however, it has been increasingly contested. Historians no longer speak of “parting” or “raising” the Iron Curtain but rather see this boundary as “nylon,” “airy,” and “porous.” They have uncovered an array of east-west ties as well as linkages along a different axis, north to south. These works belie the old idea of a “hermetically sealed . . . Eastern world” and also restore agency to its inhabitants. No longer “trampled down by history,” Poles now appear as “global citizens” who could “be part of the larger world and transcend the Cold War divide.” And yet one key way of transcending this divide still remains largely overlooked. While scholars explore points of contact between blocs in a “world . . . torn asunder,” they have been less attentive to the institutions that bound that world together: international organizations.

Marxists have long argued about the viability of “market socialism.” That model was dominant among professional economists in the Polish People’s Republic after the fall of Stalinism in 1956, even though they were never able to fully implement its principles. This article explores the debates over this concept in communist Poland, identifying the central issue as an attempt to combine socialist goals with neoclassical methodological principles and theoretical assumptions, particularly regarding price formation. Advocates of central planning always claimed that this mixture was unsustainable, destined to slide towards a restoration of capitalism. They were probably right.

Mikhail Kheraskov's (1733–1807) reputation has suffered a singular reversal—perhaps the most extreme and unfortunate peripety in Russian literary history. Toward the end of his life, Kheraskov's place at the very center of the national canon, in the minds of authors like Nikolai Karamzin and Andrei Turgenev, was beyond dispute. Today not even scholars of eighteenth-century Russian literature have a deep familiarity with his works; the Rossiad, Kheraskov's chef-d'oeuvre, was last reprinted in 1895.

The article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of Borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the West. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale de-politicizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.

This article explores how three popular crime novels from the 2000s articulate postsocialist Poland’s most prevalent conspiracy narrative: that of a hidden network (układ) of communist-era secret service agents that have allegedly penetrated the structures and economy of the post-1989 state, thus “stealing” the transition to democracy and capitalism, and making it impossible for the new system to thrive. Whereas previous research has dealt mainly with the political content of this narrative and the way it has been employed in political discourse, this article focuses on its cultural significance and the multiple anxieties from which it stems, including a growing sense of diminished human autonomy and a generalized suspicion of social systems. The paper contributes to a growing body of work on postsocialist conspiracy narratives that takes an increasingly transnational and comparative approach. The novels analyzed in the paper are Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Uwikłanie (Entanglement, 2007), Marcin Wolski’s Noblista (Nobel Prize Winner, 2008) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Przemienienie (Transfiguration, 2008).

Soviet citizens perusing their daily copies of Pravda or Izvestiia on May 23, 1934, would have come across an essay by the famous writer Maksim Gor΄kii with an unusual title: “Proletarskii gumanizm” (Proletarian Humanism). Perhaps intrigued by this funny sounding but clearly important foreign word, inquisitive readers might have turned to the recently published first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE), which provides two entries for humanism: one referring to “a conventional but not sufficiently precise term used to characterize the culture of the Renaissance epoch, or some aspect thereof,” and a second, much shorter entry concerning “a modern movement in the theory of knowledge that arose in the early twentieth century in connection to pragmatism.” Neither entry makes any mention of proletarian, socialist, or Soviet varieties of humanism. Indeed, according to the BSE, Renaissance humanism inevitably “exhausts its progressive possibilities, degenerates, and becomes a conservative and reactionary force,” remaining “alien to the broad masses and even a significant part of the bourgeoisie.”

This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace “modern” hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire’s vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.

Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.

Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the Western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875—1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legends and much speculation. My paper reconstructs the particular circumstances surrounding the court’s decision to give Shtern a more lenient sentence and considers how the politics of science in the late 1940s and early 1950s could have influenced this decision and helped Shtern elaborate her own strategy of survival. I argue that the main reason for sparing Shtern’s life was her essay “On Cancer” written in the prison cell in the late 1951—early 1952. My work is based on a careful analysis of documents from Shtern’s personal archive and of the context of Soviet and North American medicine.