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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In the first post-war decade, Stalinist authorities resumed pre-war practices of voluntary gatherings of store patrons in large cities. Such meetings, called “consumer conferences,” constituted embryonic manifestations of proletarian governance that municipal officials considered ideologically safe to employ in a period when Kremlin elites increased their crackdown measures against the wartime liberalization initiatives. Drawing on people's insider knowledge of local communities, city authorities aimed to gather economic information about consumer needs to improve the retail system. Yet, urban working-class women, the most committed conference participants, saw stores more than as simply places of consumption: the store contributed to the local community's safety, hygiene, health, emotional comfort, and mutual trust. Consumer conferences therefore turned into a forum for women's activism as female urbanites used customer gatherings to carve out part of a state-curated public space in which they exercised a measure of control over their neighborhoods’ well-being.

A lot happens when we press play. To prepare, we select a particular format of sound storage—maybe vinyl, magnetic tape, polyethylene, or an mp3—for the parsing, processing, and amplification of that format's content. Once things start moving, we inaugurate a listening experience that may seem effortless, but which has undergone meticulous social conditioning, and which is informed by our own deep histories of listening, aurality, and attention. In the long term, this process is not as rigid as it sounds: listening has always been flexible, and historians of the concert hall have told us a twisting and turning story about audiences who did not always think it was proper to stay silent, and who did not always feel the need to pay much attention to what took place in front of them. But today, anyone who chooses to play a spoken word compilation instead of a jazz LP (long-playing record) at a cocktail party might not find such a receptive crowd. Facilitated by internet streaming and downloading, this relatively new ability to amass intensely personal sonic archives often clashes with the contextual demands of where, when, and how certain forms of listening are meant to be enacted: the cocktail party often dictates a particular aural accompaniment, one more amenable to music than an audiobook. For such a widely practiced activity, why do the modern activities of storing, distributing, and amplifying sound, which have grown kaleidoscopically complex in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, remain undertheorized in Slavic studies? What would it mean to think about these questions and their repercussions in east European modernity? And what might listening to east European history and culture tell us that our other senses cannot?

The papers in this cluster—and sound studies more broadly—attune our ears to hearing and listening, to paying attention to that “other” important sense of modernity: the aural or sonic that so often is asked to play second fiddle to the visual. The challenge of sound studies, Jonathan Sterne reminds us, “is to think across sounds, to consider sonic phenomena in relationship to one another—as types of sonic phenomena rather than as things-in-themselves—whether they be music, voices, listening, media, buildings, performances, or another other path into sonic life.”

This article examines audio-visual discontinuity in Ognjen Glavonić's 2015 documentary Depth 2 and argues that this approach to sound and screen allows the audience to engage with the difficult topic of war crimes in a novel manner in order to address a failure in cultural memory in Serbian society. The documentary explores war crimes committed against Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian state forces and paramilitaries in the spring of 1999. Depth 2 cinematically recontextualizes recorded testimonies of both survivors and perpetrators from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), defamiliarizing the archive by anonymizing the source material and by removing the synchrony between voice and image. The lack of concordance between voice and screen is a key aesthetic strategy through which the film comments on pressing ethical, political, and historical issues in Serbian society.

This essay takes a media historical approach to interrogate celebrations of Vladimir Lenin's centenary in the Soviet Union, during which both the state recording company Melodiya and the monthly journal Krugozor, an educational magazine with companion recordings, reevaluated the relative merits and shortcomings of sound recordings in spreading socialist ideology. The need to create recorded materials for domestic audiences as well as socialist and capitalist countries around the world prompted a series of debates over how best to memorialize Lenin's voice and re-historicize the sonic environment of his time. Lenin's voice carried with it substantial historical, political, and cultural power. But his earliest recordings—those made during his lifetime—were of poor quality and even poorer intelligibility. As such, attempts to restore and remaster Lenin's voice necessarily involved the Soviet imagination, especially as the generation of those who knew him personally aged (and died). This tension—between creation and preservation, between artifice and authenticity—would preoccupy sound engineers and producers in the years leading to the centennial. Using archival sources alongside LPs and flexidiscs, this essay traces the connections between voice, format, and mythology across the Soviet epoch and proposes a new understanding of socialist realism in audio media.

This article centers on one key episode in the reception of Russian formalism in western academia, the 1955 publication of Victor Erlich's acclaimed Russian Formalism. History. Doctrine. The article discusses the appearance of the monograph in the young field of Slavic Studies through novel lenses and conceptualizes the monograph as the result of the activity of a network of heterogeneous actors that contributed to the formation and publication of the book. Methodologically, I develop the concept of the scholarly by hybridizing Boris Eikhenbaum's literaturnyi byt and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network-Theory. Finally, I suggest that the methodological framework developed in the article could be productively applied to further the study of Russian formalism reception.

The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as “to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction.”

According to comparative data, suicide rates in Bohemia remained at a statistically high level in comparison to global-figures from the nineteenth-century until late in the twentieth, a matter of grave concern for successive political regimes. In the interwar-republic of Czechoslovakia, patriots were troubled that the high rates of suicide in Bohemia had failed to decline following the transition from the Habsburg empire into the new Czechoslovak state. The article uses sociological works to show how the problem of suicide was negotiated and rationalized in the context of the patriotic culture of the state. This involved eschewing the most compelling explanations of the problem in favor of those better adjusted to the political mood of the times, passing over immediate and apparent problems in favor of explanations that related suicide to the war years or the previous imperial experience. These rationalizations ultimately achieved few concrete solutions, but rather provided an interpretation of the ongoing problem that was compatible with the state-forming patriotism of the day.

The article provides a comparative analysis of how two key poets, Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii, responded to World War II, in which they both fought, in the poems written at the front or shortly thereafter. Via Lydia Ginzburg's notion of the deductive and inductive modes in lyric poetry, the article reveals how Slutskii and Satunovskii approach the figure of the enemy and shuttle between particulars and the universal in their verse. Dissimilar in their life choices (official for Slutskii and underground for Satunovskii), they share an aesthetic kinship, with Slutskii pressing harder toward generalizations, often radically revisionist, and Satunovskii insisting on the particulars and aphoristic fragmentariness. Both poets resist the grandiose and odic in figuring out how to navigate between the collective, personal, and intimate in confronting the catastrophe.

The study of suicide is an emerging and important interdisciplinary field in central and east European Studies. The importance of the topic is self-evident. Suicide is literally a matter of life and death, important in its own right; but the study of suicide is also a means of addressing larger questions in the history, culture, and politics of the region. Suicide is almost always an object of grave concern whenever and wherever it occurs, thus prompting a wealth of statistical and discursive documentation and information. It is a supremely individual act—arguably the supreme individual act—but also one that implicates and involves the community or society in which it occurs. This is especially true during times of seeming or actual spikes in the occurrence of self-killing, so-called “suicide epidemics” that demand immediate attention and explanation. But the reasons for suicide are also often highly elusive, creating what Irina Paperno has termed a “black hole” into which is drawn the explanations, rationalizations, and justifications of all those proximate to the act. In this way, to study suicide in its social context is also to study the attitudes and the anxieties of the society in question. It is to look through a glass darkly: to see a reflection of contemporary concerns and attitudes that might otherwise have gone unseen.

This article challenge scholars of religion in the early Soviet Union specifically, and scholars of early Soviet history more generally, to reconsider the ways in which we have conceived of religiosity and Soviet identity in the early years of the USSR. It argues that there was a significant subset of people who considered themselves to be both religious and Soviet in these years, in which what it meant to be both was still not clearly defined. The article draws on archival interrogation records and trial testimonies from the 1922 “Trial of the Fifty-Four” in which thirty-two laymen were charged with counterrevolutionary activity. We have the unique opportunity of hearing the voices of believers from various educational, social, and class backgrounds as they describe what they think it means to be religious and Soviet. The sources thus not only contribute to our understanding of early-Soviet religiosity, but also of early-Soviet identity in general.

In 1789, the brothers Ivan and Stepan Bashagurov escaped from prison in Perm. Before their capture two years later, they not only robbed houses and raided boats on the Kama but also worked as wage laborers and traveled to St. Petersburg. Their story does not fit into the traditional understanding of banditry in early modern Russia as a social phenomenon reflecting resistance against the state and nobility. The brothers were neither champions of the poor nor enjoyed sympathy and support in the countryside, as is commonly assumed. Through a detailed reconstruction of their case, this article underscores the seasonal and opportunistic nature of their banditry as well as the complexity of the interactions between the bandits and other members of society, which were shaped by acquaintanceship and kinship, on the one hand, and the Russian government's punitive policies against those who harbored criminals, on the other.

Ian Satunovskii's war lyric is an extensive corpus drawn from the entirety of his poetic career (early 1940s–early 1980s). Focusing on a few closely read selections, this essay attempts to make sense of this body of work, paying particular attention to the compounding of identities and temporalities in Satunovskii's very short texts. How does Satunovskii's poetry resist the hardening and polarization of identities occasioned by war? And how can we interpret Satunovskii's identification of war as a structuring event of his biography as well as the source of his poetics?

This paper situates early modern Ukrainian demonological discourse within the framework of the major religious, cultural, and political disruption that affected Ukraine between 1596 and 1686. I will argue that the confessional struggles that followed the Union of Brest, the period of civil war known as “The Ruin,” and the eschatological expectations of the year 1666 contributed to a perception of increased diabolic activity but also to the problem of recognizing the possible discrepancies between reality and non-reality. How could one distinguish true visions from illusory phenomena, if the devil could enter the mind through “bad thoughts” and threaten the stability of one's cognitive experience? Furthermore, if there was more than one church, how could one distinguish between true and false doctrine? These questions, in turn, prompted early modern Ukrainian Orthodox intellectuals to question the role and reliability of sensory perception and human cognition, with issues of epistemology and deception becoming increasingly entangled with confessional polemics and religious dispute.

This article is an exploration of how individuals in the Warsaw Ghetto discussed and remembered wartime suicide, as well as the ways in which these events were translated into legend by subsequent generations. First-person sources show how witnesses understood and evaluated suicide as one of the few choices available to Jews under Nazi occupation; Their reactions ranged from admiration or yearning to disapproval, disgust, and indifference. Although death and violence became part of daily life, suicide was not: in fact, the suicide rate in the ghetto was over a third lower than what it was in prewar Warsaw (Lindenthal, 2014). The goal of this study is not to condemn, glorify, or even understand events of suicide in the Warsaw Ghetto. Rather, the study of suicide in the context of the Holocaust presents an opportunity to rigorously question preconceived notions of agency, survivorship, and testimony. The Warsaw Ghetto existed in the physical space of the city for just three years, but its legacy of violence has endured for decades. This research builds not only on the historiography of the Holocaust in Poland, but also adds to the broader fields of the history of psychology and memory in the midst of genocide.