With his book Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule , Michael David-Fox joins one of the most consequential academic conversations that over the past forty years has redefined the way historians and social scientists approach the study of society. It is the conversation on the nature of power and human agency under imposing conditions of modernity. David-Fox’s particular intervention into the problem might strike a well-informed reader as somewhat counterintuitive. Tracing the political history of Stalinism from the 1920s into the 1940s, he proposes to rethink the workings of modern power in its revolutionary-Stalinist incarnation not from the grounds of its center but from a “place far from Moscow”: the Smolensk region and its local institutions and actors. Into the foreground thus come regional party bosses, rank-and-file activists, peasants, collective farmers who confront the grand historical events that invade and shatter their lives—the Smolensk Affair, the collectivization, the Great Terror, the Great Patriotic War, the German occupation—with savvy resistance, manipulation, and perseverance. Be it entrenched regional elites with a mind of their own or village youth such as Vasilii Maslennikov, determined to escape the collectivized and malnourished countryside, the collective portrait of David-Fox’s historical protagonist captures the infinite dynamics of choice, life, and death in the middle of the long Stalinist Revolution. It brings into full view how ordinary people living in extraordinary times confront challenges, make choices, ultimately exercise agency, and, in David-Fox’s words, “could potentially become both victims and perpetrators, powerless in one area and powerful in another.” 1
This article presents a new reading of one of the most famous images of Russian visual culture: the anonymous, untitled, eighteenth-century popular print (lubok) known as "The Barber Wants to Cut the Beard of the Old Believer." After reviewing the existing historiography and offering evidence for an alternative dating, I argue that this xylograph is less a folksy illustration of Peter I's "cultural revolution" than a manifestation of the tastes of mid-eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox city-dwellers, the social group that was the primary audience for this cheap, commercially-produced, consumer product. A contextualized reading of this artifact of early modern Russian print culture provides a concrete example of how the re-circulation of negative stereotypes about religious dissenters contributed to the construction of an imagined community of "pious and reasonable" sons of the imperial church and state. It also leads us to consider why the Petrine-centric interpretation first offered by the nineteenth-century creators of the Russian national canon still informs our understanding of this popular print, and what, if anything can be done about it.
This essay examines the project Russian Style (2022-) as a "flagship" example of pro-war contemporary art in Russia. It investigates the cultural logic of Vladimir Putin's Russia, conceptualized as Ruscism/Russism: an articulation of Russian-identitarian, nationalist, and imperialist segments of society. Linked to populist resentment and the ongoing struggle for hegemony, Ruscism/Russism operates as a mindset, geographic imagination, spatial identity, and technology. To illuminate its syncretism and its formation within-and reshaping of-the art field, this essay examines three principal sources: late-Soviet official art, nonconformist art, and Neo-Eurasianism as a transgressive subculture through case studies of Oskar Rabin, Nikolai Andronov, and Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt, leading figures in these strands. Ruscism/Russism has coalesced from the geoculturally specific, nationalist, and imperialist elements present in these sources, appropriating and intensifying them in novel ways. Methodologically, this study draws on art history, cultural criticism, and cultural geography to investigate contemporary Russia through its art and culture.
This article is a comparative study of Fedor Dostoevskii and Martin Heidegger's messianic nationalism as understood in terms of their conceptualization of primordialism and racial purity. It offers, and further invites, a critical lens especially on Dostoevskii's prejudices, viewing them as systematic rather than isolated. This article endeavors to offer a comprehensive exploration of the novelist's essentialist premises through Heidegger's philosophical framework of similar views on the "other." Both authors claim that certain "truths" could only spring from the people, whether narod or das Volk. I argue that Dostoevskii and Heidegger arrive at similar warped visions of national destiny due to their formulation of the so-called primordial "call of conscience" and its attachment to their preferred poets. The point of my interdisciplinary effort here is to demonstrate that their racial bias is not limited to incidental remarks but that these biases are deeply embedded in the authors' broader intellectual projects.
This article investigates the history of displaying nuclear energy from the 1980s to the present by tracing the cultural biography of a scale model of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, which operated in Lithuania between 1983 and 2009. By reconstructing the model's trajectory, from its initial role as a promotional exhibit in Soviet-era industry showcasing to its contemporary status as an artifact of nuclear cultural heritage, the study highlights a shift in the politics and practices of exhibiting the atom, as well as evolving theoretical frameworks and cultural discourses surrounding nuclear energy. The author argues that the model's movement through industrial, technological, artistic, and heritage domains, along with its diverse functions, has rendered it a techno-political actor that, alongside human and institutional agents, plays a significant role in shaping the dynamics of nuclear culture.
“Blackness” in the meaning under discussion here is too elusive to consistently discern because it defies clear definition. For instance, it was not Africans who designated themselves as “black,” nor even as Africans, since their self-identification was with their own respective cultures. The concepts the term “blackness” evokes are mainly what others have associated with Africans and other people of Black African descent. In many respects the purveyors of the trans-Saharan and Atlantic slave trades committed the greatest identity theft in world history. When the concept of “blackness” is brought to earth, a common thread that runs through it is a struggle over personal and group identities. It is also at times cloaked in other cultural behavior such as xenophobia. The original European attitudes evincing “blackness” were significantly influenced by Christian tradition surrounding the so-called Curse of Ham, an age-old myth concerning human beings of darker complexion that was shared by the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religious traditions and came to foster racist concepts positing inherent inferiority of Black Africans in many modern societies. Especially pertinent here, the Russian Primary Chronicle of the early twelfth century begins with an overview of the genesis of nations based on this Hamitic myth. 1 Therefore, because of shared Christian traditions, Russians and other Slavs spread this concept alongside western Europeans even in the period before close direct contacts with the west were established. This is the broader historical background of the themes treated in this timely collection of essays “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies.”
