Abstract This article challenges the conventional narrative that the transferable ruble was conceived as a Soviet means of challenging Western financial hegemony. Drawing on previously unpublished archival material from Russian state archives, it argues that the currency emerged primarily from a pragmatic need to settle accumulated debts within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). Contrary to the conventional Cold War narrative, this initiative did not originate in Moscow but was driven by other European CMEA members, who sought to balance trade and resolve financial imbalances. For the USSR, a transferable currency offered a mechanism for debt management without imposing the Soviet ruble on its socialist allies. This study traces the long genesis of this currency from early postwar bilateral clearing agreements to the establishment of the International Bank for Economic Cooperation in 1964, and it situates the transferable ruble within two broader historiographical debates: the economical pragmatic of Soviet–Eastern European relations and the concept of an “alternative globalization.” Ultimately, the transferable ruble creation was a practical, limited response by CMEA members to the inherent contradictions of their planned economies rather than a symbol of integrative ambition or a serious instrument of external economic expansion.
Abstract This article argues that the travelogue and fiction produced by Alexandre Dumas following his 1858 journey to the Caucasus constitute a form of literary extractivism: the mining of Russian romantic texts for material that he could repurpose and sell to French readers as authentic glimpses into the Russian Empire. It traces how Dumas absorbed and displaced the work of Alexander Bestuzhev‐Marlinsky—the Russian romantic writer whose stories of the Caucasus Dumas published under his own name—reducing Marlinsky from fellow author to romantic character and erasing his prior claim to narrative authority over the region. It then turns to the Russian critical response, showing how writers and satirists from across the political spectrum mocked Dumas’s pretensions and plagiarism, revealing a tension between lingering Russian insecurity about France’s cultural condescension and a growing confidence in the authority and maturity of Russian national literature. The persistence of Dumas’s romantic Caucasus long after its origins have been uncovered raises broader questions about how literary authority is established and maintained: not through accuracy or originality but through the self‐perpetuating momentum of stories that have already found their audience.
