Spring 2024

Scholars in this forum analyze how major nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why have China, South Africa, Turkey, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and even Saudi Arabia among others failed to condemn the brutal Russian invasion and have continued to trade with Russia? Are these initiatives simply a replay of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War Era or do they mark a substantial new reorientation in world politics? This forum appears in a hybrid format; two essays by Thomas Loyd and Katherine Stoner appear here in print. In addition, there is an online forum featuring short contributions from David Engerman and Sandeep Bhardwaj on India, Chia Yin Hsu on China, Mark Katz on the Middle East, and, Daniela Secches on Brazil.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has been roundly condemned in the West. NATO members have continued to supply Ukraine with weaponry while the EU, US and their allies have ensured that the Russian economy remains under the most extensive and intensive set of sanctions in history. Yet many leaders of countries in the global south have been far more hesitant to condemn Russian actions. Some have merely abstained in United Nations resolutions criticizing Russia, while others have remained neutral. This paper will endeavor to explain why the global south has such a different perspective from the global north on Russia’s war in Ukraine. I argue that this is a result of America’s withdrawal from the global south over the last two decades and Russia’s reemergence in many parts of the Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia.

When the UN General Assembly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces in March 2022, barely half of African states voted in favor. This lukewarm support contrasted with strong support for Ukraine elsewhere in the world. Among those abstaining from the vote was South Africa, a country with a long history of interaction with the post-Soviet space. This essay considers the interplay of historical remembering and forgetting that has contributed to the South African response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A longstanding commitment to non-alignment, the long shadow of the anti-colonial struggle, and the complicated legacy of the Soviet Union, its collapse, and who rightly carries its anti-apartheid mantle, have all played a role in shaping the South African response.

Marxists have long argued about the viability of “market socialism.” That model was dominant among professional economists in the Polish People’s Republic after the fall of Stalinism in 1956, even though they were never able to fully implement its principles. This article explores the debates over this concept in communist Poland, identifying the central issue as an attempt to combine socialist goals with neoclassical methodological principles and theoretical assumptions, particularly regarding price formation. Advocates of central planning always claimed that this mixture was unsustainable, destined to slide towards a restoration of capitalism. They were probably right.

This article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the west. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale depoliticizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the transgenerational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.

This article explores how three popular crime novels from the 2000s articulate postsocialist Poland’s most prevalent conspiracy narrative: that of a hidden network (układ) of communist-era secret service agents that have allegedly penetrated the structures and economy of the post-1989 state, thus “stealing” the transition to democracy and capitalism, and making it impossible for the new system to thrive. Whereas previous research has dealt mainly with the political content of this narrative and the way it has been employed in political discourse, this article focuses on its cultural significance and the multiple anxieties from which it stems, including a growing sense of diminished human autonomy and a generalized suspicion of social systems. The paper contributes to a growing body of work on postsocialist conspiracy narratives that takes an increasingly transnational and comparative approach. The novels analyzed in the paper are Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s Uwikłanie (Entanglement, 2007), Marcin Wolski’s Noblista (Nobel Prize Winner, 2008) and Szczepan Twardoch’s Przemienienie (Transfiguration, 2008).

This article examines how sexual health became an important component of ideal military masculinity in the final decades of the Russian Empire. Rising rates of venereal diseases (VD) in the military in the final years of the nineteenth century forced the Russian imperial state to increasingly turn their attention to the sexual health and hygienic habits of military personnel. State officials enlisted the help of military physicians, who prepared sex education brochures and lectures with the aim of reducing venereal infection. Sex education materials encouraged conscripts to abandon the habits and practices of rural life and embrace “modern” hygienic manhood. Physicians saw military personnel as an important link to the Empire’s vast lower-class population and regarded the inculcation of new norms of health and hygiene within military populations as a key method for improving public health more generally, especially in the countryside. Within this context, expert knowledge became intertwined with visions of ideal military masculinity, and good sexual health and hygiene were presented as important markers of manhood.

Russia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the nineteenth century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

The Soviet physiologist Lina Solomonovna Shtern (1875–1968) was the only defendant in the trial against the Jewish Antifascist Committee who was not sentenced to death; the circumstances surrounding the court’s leniency toward her have long remained unknown. Shtern was sentenced to five years in exile and even her belongings were not confiscated. Her story has become the stuff of legend and much speculation. My paper reconstructs the particular circumstances surrounding the court’s decision to give Shtern a more lenient sentence and considers how the politics of science in the late 1940s and early 1950s could have influenced this decision and helped Shtern elaborate her own strategy of survival. I argue that the main reason for sparing Shtern’s life was her essay “On Cancer” written in her prison cell in late 1951 to early 1952. My work is based on a careful analysis of documents from Shtern’s personal archive and of the context of Soviet and North American medicine.