Summer 2024

The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia, ChGK) was founded on November 2, 1942. From the outset, photography and eyewitnesses were vital resources for conveying the horrors of the German occupation. Refuting accusations that the USSR was responsible for massacring Polish prisoners of war in Katyn forest further magnified the importance of generating an irrefutable record of Nazi guilt. This article examines the efforts of Stalin’s government to bury the Katyn lie beneath images of genuine victims of Hitler’s regime. Tracing the diverse origins of the ChGK’s photographs and supporting testimony brings into focus the reasons why wartime observers found the Soviet falsification convincing. ChGK materials should be approached as artifacts of mass mobilization. By disentangling these pictures and pages from their propagandistic uses, researchers can move closer to understanding the symbiotic relationship between official narratives and personal truths in the USSR as well as the post-Soviet Russian Federation.

This article discusses the evolution of the Belarusian Orthodox Church’s (BOC) role and influence in the society, its relationship with the state, and the internal schisms within the Church leadership. Belarusian politics and society has traditionally been Russian-oriented. Close linguistic and cultural relations with Russia were embedded in the official ideology of Belarusian state and national building policies, which from the onset singled out the ideas of Slavic unity and Belarus’s special role in the Eastern Slavic civilization. In this regard, the BOC was an element of two machineries, the objectives of which growingly drifted apart. Aliaksandr Lukashenka’s regime viewed the BOC as an important partner of the state and a control mechanism over the society. Russia, which lacked a well-defined policy of attraction towards Belarusian society, in turn mostly relied on the regime and domestic social institutions, specifically the BOC, in maintaining its influence. The two crises, regional (2014) and domestic (2020), significantly upended the “in-between” position of the BOC and raise questions about its ideational and institutional cohesion. Moreover, officially as an autonomous Exarchate functioning under the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the BOC has had to balance its position within the ROC that during this time has sought stronger status abroad. The relationship between BOC and ROC leadership grew more complex after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and after Russia’s invasion to Ukraine in 2022, when the ROC leadership chose to support the political regime. The open conflict between the national, now autocephalic Ukrainian Orthodox Church and Moscow Patriarchate have revealed the intra-Orthodox (post-)colonialism in the region but also further complicated the ways the BOC can position itself within the Belarusian society.
Keywords: Belarus, Orthodox Church, Russia, nation-building, identity

Orphanhood in Tolstoy has largely escaped critical examination, in part because though the writer himself was an orphan, his texts say little about the topic explicitly. But in fact thinking about orphans’ trauma is everywhere in the pre-crisis fiction. Tolstoy draws orphans and non-orphans as fundamentally morally different. All his major protagonists are orphans and want to marry non-orphans. Further, many of his novelistic tics, and many critical insights into Tolstoy generally, actually apply only to characters who are motherless. War and Peace and Anna Karenina can be read as the author’s running debate with himself: is an escape available for the traumatized from their pain later in life? If so, it would mean life is good and God is kind. Both books answer yes and demand orphans renounce their permanent sense of grievance against life for their losses. But in their final scenes Tolstoy confesses his optimism was false; life is not fair, and psyches damaged by orphanhood can never fully recover.
Key terms: Leo Tolstoy, orphans, orphanhood, trauma.

Through a case study of the writer Antoni Słonimski (1895-1976), this essay shows how residents of Cold War Poland could make use of international organizations to navigate a bipolar world. Słonimski worked for UNESCO in 1946-1947 as the first head of its Literature Section. For the rest of his life, he leaned on his UNESCO ties to travel between East and West, to circumvent both blocs’ constraints, and to push for greater openness between them. UNESCO helped Słonimski to transcend Cold War divisions, allowing him to build an international career in communist Poland. His story illustrates how international organizations could empower residents of the Eastern Bloc to cross its borders and contest its limits. Although they have so far been marginal in histories of the Bloc, such organizations deserve more attention.

Building on the recent work in Russian historical semantics (a philologically attuned method of studying history of concepts), the article offers a critique of the prevalent scholarly preoccupation with state-sponsored ideological projects. As an alternative, it proposes a turn toward the study of ethical concepts, often elaborated by intellectuals who were discomforted by the autocratic status quo. The method is applied to the moralistic poetics of Kheraskov’s Rossiad. Uncovering a republican strand in this seemingly pro-monarchical work, the article demonstrates that Kheraskov ponders the evils of tyranny and empire by means of a distinct poetics of abstract concepts. In particular, the climatic metaphor of Winter is developed into an extended personification allegory that captures the near impossibility of living ethically under the empire. Turgenev’s and Tyutchev’s different responses to the Rossiad capture the later impact of Kheraskov’s carefully modulated yet incisive critique of what Zhivov termed Russia’s “state Enlightenment.”

This article examines the invention of a Soviet concept of humanism during the 1920s to mid-1930s and the central role played by the writer Maksim Gor’kii in this process. Having engaged with humanism in his early writings, Gor’kii became increasingly preoccupied with the concept through his involvement in the genesis of Aleksandr Blok’s essay “The Collapse of Humanism” (1919). During the 1920s, the Pereval literary faction led by Gor’kii’s associate Aleksandr Voronskii defended humanism against the militant “proletarian” writers of RAPP, who associated the term with bourgeois degeneration and Christian mercy. Gor’kii held similar views, but the threat of fascism drove him to reconceptualize humanism as a socialist value connoting the defense of “culture” and predicating love for humanity on hatred for enemies. In doing so, he underwrote Stalin’s 1934 pivot to a Popular Front with European antifascists, many of whom had already seized upon the concept of humanism themselves.

Drawing on the classic question of feminist art history, this article asks how and by whom the contemporary canon of Czech art history was constructed, and when the exclusion of women artists of the 1980s generation from it took place. It shows that the 1960s generation of women artists emerged from the disruption of the traditional gender order in the Stalinist era. In contrast, the generation of women artists who entered the art scene in the 1980s was disadvantaged by the declining power of art institutional structures and the growing importance of informal networks for career success in late socialism. Their lack of social capital, combined with the re-emergence of macho culture in the 1980s art scene, the persistence of traditional gender roles in the home, and the loss of more substantial state support for artistic production after 1989, led to their “invisible” role in the post-1989 art world.