The introduction to the cluster on disability history in eastern Europe and Russia provides a framework for situating the three case studies within the larger development of the field. The introduction highlights important themes and arguments presented by the three authors.

This article focuses on the use of the terms “deaf” and “deaf-mute” in the interwar Romanian press to explore the multiplicity of meanings attached to this condition in different types of public discourse. My aim is to place in the larger context of that period what meanings become most prominent in newspapers and other forms of popular press, why, and with what consequences. I offer an exploration of these discourses to better appreciate how the reading public, both able-bodied and disabled, saw disability represented. Rendering the very multiplicity of meanings attached to “deafness” visible in the relevant context is an important goal for this essay; it allows us to better understand the continued imprecision and stigmatizing framework in how Romanian society engaged with the deaf. I also explore what space existed for the deaf community to shape their own self-representations. Placing ableist discourses in dialogue with the voices of the deaf community is an important aim, as a method to de-essentialize the predominant ableist discourses and normalize accounting for disability as a significant element of modern history.

What is the graphosphere? How does it make itself visible, whether (historically) as script on a medieval bell or (now, to us) as an abstract category? Is it already present, but not yet recognized in our conceptual order? Most important, what good is it as an analytic tool? Reading Simon Franklin’s work on the graphosphere written over the last decade, I explore two issues. First, I examine the concept’s value for those of us who work in contemporary culture, including media studies, protest activism, and postmodernist literature, examples chosen because they lie centuries removed from medievalist concerns. Second, I outline four ways in which the graphosphere has robust analytic potential to situate our investigations in a new configuration, allowing connections and resonances across a larger scale of time and space. For the scholar of contemporary culture, the essays included here may serve as examples of medieval research that—through this concept—are in much closer dialogue with our work than we had perhaps earlier understood.

A Muscovite bureaucratic graphosphere, where the administrative word became visible, took shape by the early sixteenth century. The existence of such a sphere cannot be taken for granted. Prior to 1200, Rusʹ princes relied little if at all on written texts as expressions of power or politics. Later rulers and their officials gradually incorporated documents into their administrative toolkit, eventually settling on the standardized form of the scroll. This article tracks the development and limits of Muscovite administrative texts through the visual evidence of miniatures in the late sixteenth-century Litsevoi letopisnyi svod (LLS, or Illustrated Chronicle Compendium), tracking the proliferation of the scroll as a means of communication and a symbol of command. Further, still drawing on the LLS, the article demonstrates that encounters with Siberian signing and oath-taking practices perplexed those schooled in the culture of the scroll and troubled Muscovite assertions of imperial power.

This manuscript offers a historical reconstruction of the psychiatric concepts of autism in Bulgaria during the period of state socialism. The research objective includes the normative models for dealing with this disability. Such normative models are analyzed as part of the conventions of “(ab)normality”, determined by particular psycho-medical and more general socio-cultural scripts. The aim is to trace the historical dynamics of these models and answer these questions: to what extent, why, and how did psychiatrists adopt, modify, combine and/or confront such models? How did the vision of extreme isolation and social aloneness, ascribed to autism, fit into the conceptual and ideological frameworks of Bulgarian socialist psychiatry? What was the disability politics of Bulgarian socialist psychiatry towards children with so called “early infantile autism”? The empirical data of analysis includes textbooks, monographies, and articles in child psychiatry, semi-structured interviews with experts, and archival materials. Their interpretation combines social history and disability studies through discourse analysis.

Simon Ushakov wrote his signature on virtually all his extant icons, in stark contrast to most Eastern Orthodox icon painters who remained anonymous. The chronological development of his signature in content and placement parallels the trajectory of his career as Muscovite icon painter and bureaucrat over the second half of the seventeenth century. The representation of written words in visible space, a graphosphere in Simon Franklin’s apt terminology, provided Ushakov the context in which to record his intentional movement and elaboration of name and iconic descriptors ever more deeply into the sacred space of the Orthodox image, thereby elevating his artistry, his bureaucratic authority, and most tellingly, the profession of icon painter itself.

This article examines the Russian Fund for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan (RFIVA), a post-Soviet disability organization whose disabled veteran members became involved in organized crime after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ultimately culminating in the 1996 Kotliakovskoe Cemetery bombing. When the Soviet state vanished, disabled people felt the effects of its absence most harshly. But disabled veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War, who had constructed a shared identity around violent disabled masculinity, found both solidarity and profit in the sale of violence in the hyper-capitalist, neoliberal Russia. During Russia’s transition to a market economy, a small part of the Afghan veteran’s movement formed into criminal and semi-criminal organizations, including the Russian Fund for Invalids of the Afghan War (RFIVA). The organization eventually splintered over disagreements regarding its obligations to provide care for disabled veterans: a reflection of broader questions over the relationship of disabled veterans to Russian society.

In the aftermath of World War I, soldiers and poachers killed the last European bison in Białowieża Forest, the former hunting grounds of kings and tsars. Over the next two decades, Polish zoologists and hunter-naturalists—as representatives of a “restored” Polish state—worked with international organizations to revive the species from the few animals scattered on estates and zoos across Europe and restore “purebred” bison to Białowieża. Exploring archival documents, hunting magazines, specialist publications, and the popular press, this article argues that Polish naturalists and officials valued the wildness of Białowieża and wished to see the “royal animal” return to its “fatherland” but doubted the civilized status of the region’s inhabitants, who had hunted the bison to extinction. Much as the state sought to Polonize and civilize the human inhabitants of the forest, these naturalists sought to manage bison for the benefit of two superseding collectives, the nation and the species.

The article surveys the changes Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725) decreed in the form of bureaucratic documents, particularly the petition. It analyzes the manuscript of an eighteenth-century murder case to demonstrate these changes in practice.

Although Peter I’s reform of the Russian alphabet has long been studied by historians, the fact that it was a reform of print but not of handwriting has rarely been addressed. Handwriting in the eighteenth century remained messy and hard to read, only changing into a modern bureaucratic script around the turn of the nineteenth century. This article examines two factors that led to this delayed moment of change: the technology of engraved propisi and their incorporation into primary education. It also thinks about why this change that is apparent to every historian who works with archival documents from both centuries has been so little recognized in scholarship.

This article analyzes the Lviv pogrom of November 1918 as an epistemic event embedded in the postimperial transformation of east central Europe. It argues that the violence and its subsequent narration became a critical site for negotiating the boundaries of political legitimacy, historical memory, and minority recognition. Tracing competing Polish and Jewish knowledge practices—ranging from official denials and mythologized narratives of urban defense to acts of documentation, legal contestation, and international advocacy—this article conceptualizes pogroms as structured scenes of epistemic asymmetry. These dynamics reveal how emerging nation-states instrumentalized epistemic violence not only to contain minority testimony but also to stabilize symbolic authority. The case of Lviv illustrates how discursive control, no less than coercion, underwrote the consolidation of national narratives in the wake of imperial collapse. In advancing this framework, the article contributes to broader debates on political violence, memory, and the epistemology of state formation.

This essay juxtaposes Simon Franklin’s concept of the graphosphere with James Scott’s concept of legibility in the context of a specific time and place: late eighteenth-century Riga. The coming of the French Revolution made Russian authorities anxious to control the space of textual circulation, and Riga was both a major site for book imports and one of the most literate cities in the empire. Under Riga’s head censor Fedor Tumanskii, censorial ambitions far outstripped the physical capacity of the oversight apparatus, and the result was a crisis of censorship that ultimately resulted in Emperor Paul’s total ban on foreign books entering the Russian Empire.

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 contribution offers an overview of electoral practice in the Russian Empire up to 1917. The voting procedure that became standard from the 1770s onwards did not involve written ballots. But there was still an extensive graphosphere of electoral documentation, petitions, and protests. By attending to these written traces, we can observe how a pre-modern tradition of voting as community obligation evolved in the late imperial era to incorporate elements of citizenship and representation.

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.

Focusing on the official certification of horses in imperial and Soviet Russia, this article questions the dependability of the graphosphere as a “technology of authority.” While print may have served Russian institutions as “a guarantor of documentary authenticity,” the genuineness of the horses themselves proved more elusive. It was harder to produce reliable identity documents for animals than for humans, and even when accurate pedigrees could be tendered in an industry notorious for unscrupulousness, they might still be open to challenge on ideological grounds.

This lead article introduces the Crucibles of Power forum, highlighting Michael David-Fox’s groundbreaking study of Smolensk under Stalinist and Nazi rule. Crucibles of Power offers a model social history of occupation, weaving together Soviet and German sources, survivor testimonies, and decades of scholarship to dismantle binary frameworks of totalitarian theory. By reframing power as a fractured and negotiated process, David-Fox reveals how overlapping regimes shaped individual choices, collaboration, and violence. Key themes-such as ‘biographical logics,’ the entanglement of Nazi and Soviet systems, and the performative dimensions of fear, rumor, and denunciation-anchor this forum’s discussions by Jochen Hellbeck, Elena Osokina, and Anna Krylova, alongside David-Fox’s own response. Read against the present, this book warns how authoritarian regimes are assembled, naturalized, and remembered. The article argues that Crucibles of Power not only reshapes our understanding of Stalinism and Nazism but also calls for new comparative histories of violence, emotion, and survival across Eastern Europe.

This article introduces “nullary writing”—or writing whose function is to operate rather than to represent—as a salute to Simon Franklin’s graphospheric analysis of bureaucratic power. With a wave of the proverbial (digital) hand, it argues that contemporary digital systems fulfill operational capacities long embedded in Slavic manuscript traditions. Through handy examples from early tsarist stamps to early computer programming innovations, it demonstrates how handwritten inscriptions and digital writing alike enable modern surveillance continuous with, rather than distinct from, earlier bureaucratic graphospheres.

This article contributes to a journal discussion of Michael David-Fox’s new book, Crucible of Power. The book brings together the major phenomena of the 20th century: Stalinism, Nazism, WWII and the Holocaust. Emphasizing the richness of material and thought, the article focuses on such key points of the book as the dilemma of choice in people's decisions to either resist or collaborate, the role of Nazi ideology in the self-destruction of the Nazi regime and the synergy of waves of colossal Nazi crimes. In its critical comments, the article notes a marginalization of economic issues. To further conceptualize the socio-economic narrative presented in the book, the article proposes a reinterpretation of the nature of the Stalinist/Soviet economy as a symbiosis of state regulations and the market, thereby challenging the rigid bipolar vision entrenched in Cold War terminology and narratives.