The article proposes an extension of the understanding of 1968 in a threefold manner: an extension of the timeframe of the events (the action in ’68), a further extension to include the legacy of 1968, and a spatial-geographical expansion to make the analysis global. By elaborating on these extensions, the article considers 1968 as a global moment in which diverse histories converge and then diverge again, while the synchronicity of events generates an enhanced consciousness of the world, making the outlines of larger structures and connections more visible. Seeing 1968 in this way, the article argues, can provide a more adequate grasp on eastern Europe's ’68 and its variegations.

This article analyzes the interactions of medical experts, minor patients, and parents in a child psychiatric institution that operated in the Soviet city of Perm΄ between 1926 and 1929. Through a micro-history of this institution, the author raises questions about the nature of violence within the realm of psychiatric care, demonstrating the multidimensional flow of power within a particular institutional setting and adding complexity to our understanding of the asylum writ large. At the same time, the article engages the question of violence in Soviet society at the end of the NEP, suggesting that the historical actors involved in the Perm΄ institution used violence as a means to explain the crisis of their time.

Tracing the emergence of the Russian Far East as a new region of the Russian Empire, revolutionary Russia, and the Soviet Union through regionalist and imperialist discourses and policies, this article briefly discusses Russian expansion in the Pacific littoral, outlines the history of regionalism in North Asia during the revolutionary and early Soviet periods, and focuses on the activities of the Far Eastern Council of People's Commissars (Dal΄sovnarkom), the Far Eastern Republic (FER), and the Far Eastern Revolutionary Committee (Dal΄'revkom). Inspired by Siberian regionalism and other takes on post-imperial decentralization, the Bolshevik Aleksandr Mikhailovich Krasnoshchekov and other regional politicians became the makers of the new region from within. Meanwhile, the legacies of the empire's expansionism, the Bolshevik “new imperialism” in Asia, and the Japanese military presence in the region during the Russian Civil War accompanied the consolidation of the Russian Far East.

Based on interviews with twenty-one women and fifteen men who expressed homosexual desires during the late Soviet period, this article seeks to shed light upon Soviet homosexual subjectivities in the Russian SFSR. As a result of the drive to “close off the entire topic of gay subjectivity to respectable inquiry, so as to prevent gayness from ever again being understood as a sickness,” queer studies has for a long time been “silent” on this topic (David Halperin). My objective here is to take into account both the effects produced by Soviet medical and penal discourse on the subjectification of individuals who experience homosexual desire and the room to maneuver open to individuals for constructing the subject of their sexuality from their experience. I suggest that men and women were able to construct homosexual subjectivities that cannot be reduced to binary stigmatization as either sickness or criminality. In reality, men and women rendered themselves the subjects of their homosexuality in confrontation simultaneously and non-exclusively with both the pathologizing and criminalizing definitions of homosexuality.

This paper focuses on some salient features of the Hungarian “long sixties” through the rear-view mirror of a highly-acclaimed popular musical album by Tamas Cseh and Geza Beremenyi entitled “A Letter to My Sister” (1977). The article argues that the “Letter” owes its enduring success to its unique chronological and narrative arch: the years of childhood set in the sombrest Stalinist 1950s, while the opening up of the country's political and cultural landscape in the 1960s shaped the freedom and hope intrinsic to modern teenage life. Finally, in the portrayal of the crisis-ridden young adulthood set in the 1970s, it is impossible to set apart the failure of the “great generation” from that of Hungarian society and, more broadly, east European socialism. Implied in this narrative arch is that this local version of the “long sixties” carried the unprocessed legacy of the “short fifties.”

Between 1956–68 economic expertise became Poland's key export product in the decolonizing world. India, a broker of social science in the Cold War, became a geopolitical gateway for Polish economists’ spread of developmental thinking that revived heterodox Marxism and peasant studies. In this article, Małgorzata Mazurek investigates epistemic and intellectual effects of Polish – Indian encounters and how they evolved separately from Soviet Third World politics. Mazurek argues that during de-Stalinization and decolonization, failures and obstacles to planning and land reforms came to be seen as a common ground between eastern Europe and South Asia. This shared perception also revived the historical legacy of central and east European social science, which was internationalized in new ways both because, and in spite, of the Cold War.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, almost three decades after consensual sodomy was declared a crime in the USSR, voices began to speak out in favor of its decriminalization. This article traces the history of the ensuing debate on this issue, conducted between Soviet criminologists and legal academics in the period from 1965–75. Through a close reading of the related texts, I explore the evolution of the different positions put forward. These fall into two camps: on the one hand, legal scholars who, together with their graduate students, made the case for decriminalization, and on the other, criminologists affiliated with the Interior Ministry, who opposed their views. The article provides the first detailed historical account of this extraordinary discussion and contributes to expanding our scant knowledge on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet Union.

This article considers Viktor Turin's 1929 film Turksib to be a “Red Western,” or film that is indebted to an American cinematic, visual, and literary tradition in its production of a vision of a Soviet frontier. Turksib engages with a discourse of frontierority that proved central to the articulation of Soviet identity in the 1920s and early 1930s. Drawing from prerevolutionary cultural paradigms for Russian national and imperial growth, as well as from the key American myth of the train's role in vanquishing the frontier, Turksib is a film meant to realize notions of territorial largesse in an ideologically-acceptable manner—that is, to reconfigure the dominant imperialist-capitalist model of the frontier in socialist terms. A close study of Turin's film in comparison to its western counterpart, John Ford's early classic, The Iron Horse (1924), reveals the challenge of distinguishing industrialization and modernization in socialist and avowedly anti-imperial rather than capitalist and colonial terms.

In the 1950s, films like Sergei Yutkevich's Velikii voin Albanii Skanderbeg symbolized Albanian-Soviet friendship, which was said to be undying. The Soviets brought their reels and their famous actors to this corner of the Mediterranean, and they also designed the country's first film agency, baptized “New Albania.” By the early 1960s, however, the friendship was dead. Albania's communist regime sided with Mao's China during the dramatic Sino-Soviet schism. From instruments of friendship, films turned into weapons in a global battle over the soul of socialism. Unexpectedly, Albanian war films assumed revolutionary meaning—far away from the Balkans—during China's Cultural Revolution. Recapturing these zigzags, this article shows how globalized socialism interacted with national imperatives. Bringing about exchange on a cross-continental scale, socialism encouraged constant mental mapping, and it also produced competing temporal frameworks. Going beyond nationalized histories of cinema, the article draws on archival sources from three countries, including previously classified Albanian materials.

The Prague Spring of 1968 did not provoke a major international crisis but at most an “incident” in the making of east-west detente. Yet it deserves to be revisited for three reasons of lasting significance for Europe. First, the Prague Spring revived, beyond the contemporary writings on Czech “democratic exceptionalism,” the European debate about the relationship between socialism and democracy. Second, it was often interpreted as part of an international generational revolt against the establishments, yet it also revealed sharp contrasts between east and west. Can the misunderstandings and different legacies of 1968 in Paris and Prague be enlightening for trans-European dialogue (or lack of) after 1989? Third, Czechoslovakia in 1968 represented the most far-reaching blueprint for reforming the system within the Soviet sphere. Its crushing prevented reform in eastern Europe and Moscow. Although it provided inspiration for Gorbachev's belated, botched attempt to save the system, this was twenty years too late, thus paving the way for its implosion in 1989.