The succinct definition of a graphosphere as a “space of visible words” risks appearing somewhat static. All visible words are by definition constituents of a graphosphere, but not all analyses of such words automatically reflect a “graphospheric approach” to their study. A graphospheric approach implies an interest not just in words that happen to be parts of spaces (as all visible words must be), but also in the dynamics of relations between the two, both synchronically and diachronically. In the context of the present discussion of bureaucratic graphospheres, this essay explores the relational dynamics in the micro-context of words and spaces on a page: specifically, with reference to the emergence, in Russian imperial administration, of that quintessentially bureaucratic instrument, the printed blank form.

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 examines the Soviet reception of the Latin American Boom through the example of one of its leading figures, Carlos Fuentes, and his landmark novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), the first Boom novel to appear in Russian translation. Published amid heightened Soviet efforts to engage culturally with Latin America, Margarita Bylinkina’s translation (1965/67) reshaped the novel’s modernist experimentation and symbolic treatment of national identity to align with the prevailing conventions of Soviet literature. Drawing on archival sources and close textual analysis, I trace Fuentes’s introduction to Soviet readers through strategically selected excerpts and reportage, then analyze how translators and editors navigated the ideological tensions between the novel’s modernist aesthetics and the political imperatives of Thaw-era socialist internationalism. Fuentes’s case reveals the central contradiction of the Soviet world literature project: the state’s aspiration to global literary leadership often clashed with its need to domesticate revolutionary aesthetics.

In this response to the four contributions to the Critical Forum on Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule, Michael David-Fox reflects on how our own twenty-first century crisis of liberalism may provoke new engagements with the twentieth-century age of extremes. His dialogue with commentators and critics is grouped into four areas. The first concerns how to reconceive the old comparison between Stalinism and Nazism in terms of entanglements and the non-synchronous life cycles of revolutionary regimes of far Left and far Right. The second is an explanation and defense of power and power relations as the work’s overarching focus, acknowledging decisions that entailed in terms of the research agenda. The third represents an intervention into a controversy over evidence, the Mints Commission interviews on the Great Patriotic War, and the utility of memoirs. The last section unpacks and refines the author’s approach to the concepts of choice, decision-making, and agency.

Are the underlying sources of Russia’s descent into full-blown authoritarian rule since 2012 to be found in Vladimir Putin’s professional socialization in the KGB and staffing of the state with former military and security officers—the siloviki—as has been widely claimed? The answer depends on whether siloviki actually possess a distinctly illiberal worldview that sets them apart from other members of the ruling elite. In this article, we update and expand upon previous research by using data from the 2020 Survey of Russian Elites to compare the attitudes of siloviki and civilians toward a wide range of abstract principles related to representative government, civil liberties, and criminal justice, as well as toward concrete manifestations of those principles (such as the desired level of government control of the Internet and the justifiability of various forms of protest). Our findings lend uniform support to interpretations that lay the blame for the Putin regime’s ever-higher levels of repression on the authoritarian mindset of its silovik members.

This article contributes to the study of fascist “New Europe” propaganda by initiating a poetological inquiry into literary journalism—more specifically into literary reportage—a widely used yet underexplored genre for disseminating fascist internationalism. It shows how temporally focused analysis can illuminate representational dynamics between the center and east European peripheries by explicating the modernist speed-aesthetics in both German- and domestically focused reporting by Juraj Gajdoš Breza, a reporter of the Slovak State (a satellite of Nazi Germany, 1939–45). The first section introduces the genre of literary reportage in the context of fascist(-affine) propaganda; the second analyzes Breza’s use of montage to convey the modern speed-experience. The third situates his work within alternative modernism by contrasting it with anti-modernism; also typical of east European self-conceptualizations within the fascist international order. The final section explicates Breza’s speed- and adrenaline-mediating devices, which render Slovak-German “friendship” appealing as a path to modernization, in contrast to communist and anti-modernist literary reporting

This article re-examines the origins of Russophobia as a component of nationalist discourse in the late Soviet Union and beyond, pointing to the crucial roles played by Cold War institutions in the west and the Russian diaspora. The article focuses on Radio Liberty (RL), the US-funded broadcaster to the Soviet Union, as an institution where Russian national questions were confronted and then conveyed to the Soviet public. In the late Soviet years, Russian nationalists creating samizdat were dependent on Radio Liberty and the other “voices” but became disillusioned with US détente-era policies and the perception that the US approached Russian nationalism with caution. Employment of mostly Jewish “third wave” émigrés at RL in the 1970s also shaped nationalist discourse, as different cohorts of exiles at the RL Russian Service engaged in furious polemics about Russian national history, antisemitism and World War II. The paper concludes by arguing that the entrenched discourse of Russophobia impeded efforts to formulate post-Soviet Russian nationhood during perestroika.

This paper examines patterns of involvement of the rural population of east central Europe in political movements of the first decades of the twentieth century. It analyzes experiences of Polish peasants and agricultural workers who, in the interwar period or during the Second World War, joined the communist movement. The study focuses on the “personal communisms”: the individual experiences of becoming and being a communist, and considers the choice of communism not only as a choice of a certain ideology, but also a strategy employed by the unprivileged in their search for agency. Three groups of revolutionaries originating from the countryside of central Poland are analyzed in the article: members of the pro-communist peasant parties in the 1920s, radicalized people’s activists of the 1930s, and agrarian workers who joined communist organizations directly. The last section contains reflections of challenges the rural communists faced after 1944–45 when they began taking part in exercising political power.