By approaching 'smuggling' both as an operational category of mobility control and as an analytical lens, this article contributes to the existing historiography on the administration of crossborder mobility in the aftermath of the collapse of the Russian Empire. It examines how various Soviet agencies interpreted conditions along the borders, assessed the outcomes of their 'struggle against smuggling' in the 1920s and managed contraband in practice. The article argues that the Soviet state's approach to smuggling was profoundly contradictory, with these contradictions stemming in part from the regime's politically transformative pathos. Situating the analysis within several comparative contexts, the study further identifies the key features of what may be termed Russian 'smuggling authoritarianism' in its formative phase as a part of the so-called 'Eastern border controls' regime. Its defining characteristics include a distinctive discursive and bureaucratic culture imbued with political universalism in diversity management and a tendency towards the production of the 'performative illusion' of effectiveness; the application of double standards in the treatment of smuggling; and the leading role of the Soviet political police in the instrumentalization of contraband for regime objectives. The politically and ideologically transformative effects of these practices became intertwined with the systemic, long-term criminalization of governance in the sphere of economic border control. The early Soviet state's entanglement with smuggling left enduring legacies, reflecting a cyclical pattern in Russian border governance shaped by recurring waves of political authoritarianism.
This article is situated at the intersection of the history of health and welfare, transnational expertise, and the invisibility of women in the history of science. Maksudyan focuses on an epidemiological survey on children's health in rural Turkey, undertaken in 1938 by Erna Ecsktein Schlossmann (1895-1998) and Albert Eckstein (1891-1950), an established German-Jewish paediatrician couple in exile. These village health surveys were state-sponsored tools of demographic governance and rural reform, collecting demographic data on pregnancy, abortion, childbirth and mortality, as well as hygiene data on cleanliness, water sources, housing, architecture and rural domestic spaces. Juxtaposing Albert Eckstein's official reports to the Ministry of Health and published scholarly work with Erna Eckstein-Schlossmann's ego documents, especially her travel diary, Maksudyan stresses the gendered division of labour on the terrain and in documentation and highlights the overlooked role of women both as subjects of inquiry and as co-producers of knowledge. The paper also approaches Eckstein's village surveys as a 'traveling laboratory' of travelling doctors in exile, stressing the importance of milieu du savoir, as well as mobility. The Ecksteins encountered communities shaped by forced migration and displacement, producing hierarchies between various examples of domestic practices. Ultimately, the article reveals how medical fieldwork, conducted in private homes, among women and children, rendered intimate knowledge about reproductive health, domestic hygiene and child welfare legible to the state.
This article examines the organized settlement of Nea Kokkinia, founded in 1923 in the wider area of Piraeus, as a case study of state intervention and social prevention in the resettlement of refugees in interwar Greece. It analyses the collaboration and tensions between national and international institutions, namely the Refugee Relief Fund, the Refugee Settlement Commission and the Ministry of Welfare, in addressing the housing crisis that followed the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22. Through the example of Nea Kokkinia, the article shows how housing policies became instruments of social integration and stability, shaping new forms of urban life and citizenship in the aftermath of the population exchange.
Studying the then-developing profession of visiting nurses, the article demonstrates how tuberculosis (TB) control policies penetrated domestic spaces in 1940s-1960s Turkey. Visiting nurses were instrumental in making the domestic space become a site of welfare intervention. This profession is often associated with the pre-antibiotics TB control era, when improvement of the environment - especially the interior of the home - and a change in behaviour were seen as the only two ways of fighting this dreadful, 'social' disease. However, in Turkey, the & Idot;stanbul antituberculosis league started to train the first visiting nurses exactly at a time when social and environmental measures seemed to lose their relevance, due to the introduction of antibiotic s and the beginning of vaccination campaigns for the antituberculosis vaccine BCG. This change can partly be explained by the fact that TB control held another function: promoting the values of a 'modern', 'civilised', hygienic way of life. By studying written and visual sources, the article shows that this biopolitical dimension was embodied by nurses, employed by the state or private antituberculosis leagues, who entered people's homes in order to teach them how to arrange and practise their own domestic space. This model of domesticity relied on the invisible work of housewives but was paradoxically promoted by these very visible working women who roamed the public space. The article explores how visiting nurses' prescriptions shaped domestic space and domesticity, in a country where TB control was conceived as a national battle for civilization. By doing so, the article sheds light on how welfare and health contributed to the constant negotiation and paradoxes of gender and domestic norms in the (post-)Kemalist Republic, and explores the material and spatial dimensions of welfare policies.
Nearly 18,000 people enlisted in international volunteers' units in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. With many of them being former prisoners of war and foreign workers, the technical and political integration of these recruits required a great deal of effort from the young Red Army. To do this, it relied on foreigners, among them convinced communists, apostles of the world revolution, but also former prisoners of war. The Central Federation of Foreign Groups under the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) took charge of the political training of these new recruits and dispatched political commissars and agitators to the internationalist units. This article looks back at the activities of this Central Federation both to grasp this international volunteer movement in favour of Bolshevik Russia and to explore the origins of the political commissar's role in the making of the Red Army.
This article proposes a formal framework for the historical analysis of textual omissions: intentional or structural absences in political, legal and diplomatic documents. While historians, legal scholars, political scientists and discourse analysts have independently acknowledged the interpretive significance of silences, omissions and 'what is not said', little cross-disciplinary synthesis has emerged. This article aims to close that gap by offering a methodologically neutral and historically grounded approach to what we term Omission Studies. Drawing from examples across European constitutional and unification history, the article outlines how omissions can be operationalized as evidence, compared across cases and causally linked to downstream institutional or social outcomes. Particular emphasis is placed on comparative reading strategies, archival triangulation and the use of digital corpora to trace patterned silences. The author offers a replicable methodology for identifying and interpreting strategic omission across genres and historical periods, suggesting its utility for case-based historiography as well as for computational and corpus-level historical text analysis.
The purpose of this article is to examine the position of the United States towards a crucial East-Central European question of Upper Silesia from 1918 to 1919 within the context of the US internationalist design for the post-war European order. The article reveals the approach of the administration of Thomas Woodrow Wilson to the Polish-German dispute over Upper Silesia as a problem of East-Central European and continental dimension, closely affecting both political and economic conditions in Eastern Europe. The US delegation at the Paris Peace Conference sought to establish a kind of international control over Upper Silesia, particularly in economic terms. Instead of 'nationalist' and contentious frontiers, which threatened European security, the United States intended to keep cohesion of Silesian industrial regions that harmonized with the Wilsonian idea of a democratic community of nations. Despite an apparent failure of Wilson's project of a European liberal community after 1919, the internationalist perspective determined the US attitude towards the Upper Silesian question and the Polish-German frontier as crucial East-Central European issues in this period of the twentieth century.
This article introduces the contributions to the special issue, which focus on socialist debates and reform projects in late Cold War Europe and beyond. Drawing on recent scholarship concerning 'neoliberalism', East European 1989-91 transitions and global transformations in the 1970s and 1980s, the authors examine socialist-oriented languages, projects and policies of reform intended to address the transformative crises of global capitalism and the irreversible decline of the Soviet-type planned economy. The contributions to this special issue investigate the personal connections and professional relations between experts and policymakers for two purposes. First, they seek to enhance our understanding of the interplay between politics and economics in the two halves of Europe during the late Cold War and its aftermath. Secondly, they challenge the widespread narrative that describes the end of the 'glorious thirties' (1945-75) as the inevitable result of the ideological victory of 'neoliberalism', famously epitomized by Margaret Thatcher's slogan 'There is no alternative' (TINA). As the case studies demonstrate, various alternatives based on the concept of 'socialism' were considered feasible in both Eastern and Western Europe, but lost momentum in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This article explores the origins of 'new socialism', the concept underlying the programme of market transformation drawn up by Ante Markovi & cacute;'s Yugoslav government in 1989-90. It retraces the role of a group of reform-oriented economists who had been involved in shaping the market-socialist phase of self-management during the 1960s. After being marginalized during the 'counter-reform' period of the mid-1970s, they gradually regained influence during the 1980s crisis, finally coming back on the scene in the latter part of the decade, when the political opportunity for reform re-emerged. Yugoslav reformists were well connected in transnational networks which included US, West and East European, and Soviet economists. Drawing on these combined influences, they autonomously discussed, articulated and shaped the main reform guidelines. Among those economists, specific attention is paid to the works of Dragomir Vojni & cacute;, one of the closest advisors of Markovi & cacute;'s reform package and the scholar who contributed most to the theoretical elaboration of 'new socialism'. This concept envisaged an alternative path of transition combining different approaches and solutions to the crisis (i.e. marketization intermingled with workers' shareholding, which was presented as in continuity with self-management). The original, albeit contradictory and incomplete, elaboration of this notion and its mostly unrealized implementation by Yugoslav reformists offers a better understanding of how, similarly to other Central-Eastern European countries, forms of compromise between liberalism and socialism were intellectually conceived before facing political de-legitimation.
The paper examines the regionally very different prevalence of private law disputes and criminal cases before courts in the late Habsburg Empire. The hypothesis is pursued that these two phenomena partly occur in parallel and are conditioned by common social causes. Based on an analysis of judicial and census data for the Austrian half of the Monarchy from around 1900, the paper shows that 'everyday conflicts' brought to court, such as small claims disputes, actions of trespass and convictions for petty thefts and violent acts, actually become significantly less frequent the more industrialized a region is - even if this pattern is mainly determined by the rather special situation in the eastern Crownlands. Embezzlement, trade-related disputes and lawsuits over larger sums of money, on the other hand, are more common where commerce, transport and services are more prevalent, and the density of lawyers is higher. The rate of convictions for more serious crimes, however, is difficult to explain in terms of socio-economic indicators, but points to cultural patterns of criminalization that could be linked to migration phenomena. Different social theoretical interpretations of these empirical results are contrasted and discussed. On the one hand, the correlations found could point to states of social disintegration, as they can be described with the classic sociological-criminological concept of 'anomie'; on the other, institutions of justice are strategically used 'from below' for the interests of different groups of the population. Insofar as civil litigation requires communicative actions and enables conflict resolution, the courts also provide a means of social integration to a certain extent. Patterns of harsher punishment of foreigners, by contrast, point to mechanisms of social exclusion. The article argues that research on uses of justice can benefit from considering the macrosocial framework conditions that can be described for the late Habsburg Monarchy with rich statistical sources.
This article analyses the domestic agency in Italy's course towards privatization, situating it within the broader economic adjustment process that unfolded between the 1980s and the early 1990s. It argues that privatization resulted from a contested and lengthy internal redefinition of the state's economic role. Italian authorities pursued early market-oriented reforms to rationalize public enterprises and enhance national competitiveness well before embracing a full privatization agenda. Yet, these efforts increasingly clashed with the European Commission's evolving priorities, particularly regarding competition policy. Domestic actors tactically shaped and often amplified these tensions, frequently framing Brussels as an obstacle to legitimate national interests. As macroeconomic conditions deteriorated, fiscal adjustment became a pressing exigency. The 1992 crisis marked a turning point, prompting a decisive shift towards privatization as a tool to stabilize the economy and reassure markets. By emphasizing the role of domestic agency in both managing adjustment and constructing the tensions surrounding it, the article first questions the idea of an exogenously imposed neoliberal transformation, it complicates the picture of the supranational influence of the European Commission in promoting a pro-market agenda, and it contributes to a better understanding of the contested and multifaceted economic adjustment that many countries in the continent achieved in the late twentieth century.
The Red Army, created by the Bolsheviks in 1918, relied on knowledge transferred from the Russian Imperial Army. This knowledge travelled along different routes, including special institutions established to produce manuals and guidance for the new army, staffed by former Imperial military specialists. This article examines the fate of one such institution: the Commission for the Study and Use of the War Experience, created at the Headquarters of the Red Army by Leon Trotsky in July 1918. The Commission proved highly productive, with its works being used by historians of the First World War in Russia even today. Yet, despite its influence, the Commission was reorganized in June 1921, with all of its personnel replaced and former tsarist military specialists dismissed. This article argues that the reorganization of the Commission was not simply a result of the Bolsheviks' hatred of former Imperial officers, but a clash between two different visions of military knowledge. It assesses these differences using a concept of 'intellectual virtue', usually used by historians of science and knowledge. While the tsarist military specialists saw the 'virtuous' military scientist as someone striving for objectivity, a powerful group of Bolsheviks in the army called for the creation of a class-driven 'Marxist military science' based on the experiences of the Red Army. This clash of 'virtues' manifested most evidently in the debate surrounding the study of the Russian Civil War. The conflict proved to be irreconcilable using the instruments of political control available to the Bolsheviks, such as political commissars and censorship; as a result, the Commission had to be rebuilt entirely.
