In light of the historical circumstances surrounding Anton Chekhov's early writing career and his own statements about the importance of medicine to it, there is surprisingly little scholarship on how medicine shaped his prose. What ideas was he introduced to in medical school and how did he apply them? Which of these drew his attention as he strove to articulate a new artistic vision? How did Chekhov draw on his experience with medicine to experiment with new themes and forms in his literary writing? This article addresses these questions by focusing on the aspects of medicine that had the most discernable influence on Chekhov as he developed his literary writing: hygiene, clinical medicine, and psychiatry. It argues that Chekhov engaged with core issues of medicine not only as a medical student who wrote case histories of his patients, but also as a groundbreaking writer. As he transcodes insights from the clinic into his prose, he creates a new conception of details that disclose relationships between settings and characters and an environmental psychology emerges across his medical writing and fiction. His stories envision relationships between physical and mental life with such originality that he becomes a new literary force not long after completing his medical education.

The paper investigates past and current research on the executions at Kurapaty, in the northern suburbs of Minsk, Belarus, in 1937–41, covering the period from the discovery of mass graves in the 1970s to the establishment of an official monument in late 2018. It deals with several issues: archaeological excavations of the site in the 1980s and 1990s; the numbers, ethnic origin, and identities of the victims; the continuing debates between the authorities, scholars, and the nationalist opposition; the protection of the site from various incursions; and the role of Kurapaty as an alternative national symbol to the Great Patriotic War victory. It also looks at Kurapaty victims in the context of the Stalin Purges in the USSR as a whole. The authors conclude that while the number of deaths and the scale of repressions did not differ significantly from the Soviet average, the impact on the modern state has been largely concealed because of the politicization of the event, and the tardiness and unwillingness of the post-independence government to peruse the harsher aspects of the Stalin era.

I woke one day the spring of 2019 to a jammed inbox and the realization that I had become a character in my own history. I have not shied away from writing in the first person, but publishing Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future involved a heightened level of exposure that left me for a time wishing I could sink down under the earth's crust, the book with it.

This article discusses a specific type of religious travel—not pious pilgrimage to the Holy Lands—but more mundane trips performed by Eastern Orthodox sisters to beg for donations within and between three multi-confessional empires. More specifically, it focuses on how nuns’ spatial movements put them on the bigger imperial and transnational maps of church, state, and society and contributed to negotiating space for gender. By combining mobility and gender as categories of analysis, I position the sisters’ acts within three broad themes: travel, women's education, and social networks. I suggest that nuns’ involvement in local communities and the establishment of schools for girls provides evidence for worldly as well as pious concerns. By encompassing rich social interactions, the sisters’ story presents gender imbalances in more palpable form and embodies larger experiences of nineteenth-century women who strove to achieve self-development and to assert social visibility.

The contemporary Islamic landscape in Bosnia-Herzegovina is often depicted as marked by fault lines between different Muslim groups, many of which are described as products of foreign intervention. This paper argues that this image does not reflect the multiplicity of Islamic discourses and practices, and the many ways that Bosnian Muslims engage with, promote, and resist them on the ground. It explores how pious Muslim women can move between different approaches to Islam over time, engage with a range of Islamic actors simultaneously, and draw on their teachings selectively or situationally without necessarily claiming group membership. By engaging with a range of actors making competing claims to authority, women contribute to both the pluralization of Islamic authority and the continued relevance of authoritative actors. The paper argues that paying attention to pious women's practices allows us to challenge crude characterizations of the transformations of Islam in Bosnia and question the narrative of distinct Muslim groups at odds with each other.

Supported by new archival material, this article delves deeply into one landmark criminal case to explore key aspects of the social, economic, and cultural history of illegal production and markets in the Soviet 1950s–60s. The goal of the article (and the larger project from which it draws) is to use archival research to shed light on major themes in Soviet history. It touches on three important and promising fields: everyday life under late Soviet socialism; the vibrant history of crime and law in this period; and the history of entrepreneurial activities within the hyper-centralized state-planned economy, focusing on the dynamics of the shadow economy. The so-called Kyrgyz Affair, a famous and expansive shadow economy operation centered in clothing factories in Frunze (Bishkek), Kyrgyz Republic, is at the center of the article. I argue that the scope, sophistication, ambition, and success of this and similar operations helps us understand a significant reason why Nikita Khrushchev decided to introduce the death penalty for aggravated cases of theft of state property and bribery in 1961–62. Associated with and fully permeating the shadow economy, one sees many varieties of practices, attitudes, informal institutions and agreements, and relationships.

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

One of the many achievements of Kate Brown's remarkable new book is to relocate the Chernobyl disaster and its official medicine internationally, but Manual for Survival also certainly illuminates the particularities of Soviet and post-Soviet medicine. The Soviet Union had a penchant for secret medicine with regard to radiation. Brown's readers learn early of Angelina Gus΄kova, who was the first expert in Moscow to be called by the accident-stricken staff at the reactor, had treated more patients with radiation sickness than anyone else in the world, and had written the Soviet manual on the subject. Yet she did this having been forbidden to ask any patient directly about their exposure.

Between 1896 and 1917, the Perm΄ “Guardianship of Popular Sobriety”—an organization funded by the Ministry of Finance and supervised by the provincial governor—ran a popular choir program that engendered enthusiastic artistic collaboration between peasants, workers, the regional intelligentsia, and state officials. One major achievement of participants were amateur performances of Glinka's monarchical opera A Life for the Tsar throughout Perm΄ province. This article focuses on the musical activities of one peasant women, E.N. Shniukova, and argues that provincial and otherwise unknown musicians, many of whom were women, played a key role in spreading cultural values and shaping musical life in the early twentieth century. These regional musicians rejected the peripheral position that their location and social position otherwise suggested and proudly viewed their villages as centers of artistic creativity.

This article analyzes the causes and consequences of Islamophobia in the Russian Federation following the story of the Russian ban on the works of a scholar of Islam from Turkey, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878–1960), despite the overall positive reception of his ideas and followers by Russia's Muslims. It positions Russia's existing domestic anti-Muslim prejudices, which evolved in the contexts of the Chechen conflict and the influx of migrant workers from culturally Muslim former Soviet republics to cosmopolitan Russian cities, against the background of the post-9/11 global fear narrative about Muslims. These Islamophobic attitudes in turn informed and justified anti-Muslim policies in Russia, as the Russian state, following broader trends of centralization and illiberalization in the country, abandoned the pluralist policies toward religion of the early post-Soviet years and reverted to the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment in the past two decades.