After Empire: The Breakup of the Soviet Military System

This article examines an understudied topic: after imperial political sovereignty has ended, how does the empire's infrastructural power physically disintegrate along national lines. By tracing the breakup of the Soviet military establishment from 1992 to 1993, this article shows that physical dissolution is a multifaceted process that cannot be equated with political termination of an empire. Drawing on the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda over 1992 and 1993, I identify three ways by which successor states exited the Soviet military system: (1) quitting, withdrawing from the Soviet military and establishing a national military from scratch; (2) partitioning, seizing the Soviet military's manpower and assets to establish a national military; (3) staying, maintaining a unified federative military opposed to the idea of developing national militaries. The tracing of these three paths shows that this trifurcation stemmed from the complicated combination of four factors of successor states: the existing capacity to maintain a national military, the security situation at the moment of independence, the expected availability of foreign aids, and the professional backgrounds of nationalist elites. This article concludes that physical disintegration is a process largely distinct from the political termination of empire, and therefore, ought to be carved out as a research area of empire study.     

Lenin in Heidiland

In July 1916 Vladimir Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia left on their annual holiday in the Swiss Alps. For eight weeks they stayed in the remote Kurhaus Tschudiwiese, high in the St Gallen Oberland south of Zurich, in a region now known as Heidiland. Lenin’s interest was in hiking, certainly not in Heidi, nor in plotting the revolution that was to topple Tsar Nicholas II less than six months after his return to civilization. As a result, this episode was ignored by virtually all Soviet writers and by most Western biographers. This article seeks to fill that lacuna by discussing Lenin’s little-known holiday pursuits and the limited work he pursued in his mountainous retreat. Particular attention is given to his extensive but often divisive and partially suppressed correspondence with Grigorii Zinov'ev, Inessa Armand, Roman Malinovskii, and Nikolai Bukharin. The picture that emerges is of a more human, non-geometric individual than that found in his Western and Soviet biographies. Visitors to Heidiland today will see many reflections of the fictional orphan and her idyllic stay in these mountains but none of the authentic Russian revolutionary who was to become the first leader of the new Soviet state.     

Filming a Stalinist War Epic in Ukraine: Ihor Savchenko’s The Third Strike

Abstract

The article examines the production history of Ihor Savchenko’s film Tretii udar [The Third Strike, 1948], a World War II epic and the most significant project of the Kyiv Film Studio in the first post-war years. Using the example of The Third Strike, the author demonstrates how Stalinist cinema as an institution influenced Soviet film directors’ thematic and ideological choices as well as their style. Specifically, the supervision of such projects by the USSR’s political centre served to integrate Ukrainian film makers into Soviet cinema by fostering Soviet versions of the country’s political and social history and by preventing Ukrainian film makers from pursuing stylistic practices that might have become foundational to Ukrainian cinema. Filming a Stalinist war epic in postwar Ukraine was especially difficult in view of the Soviet struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. By featuring soldiers of different nationalities, The Third Strike underscored the idea of the “fraternal friendship of the Soviet peoples” during the war, which became a canonical element in Soviet depictions of the war. In this way, Ukrainian artists ingratiated themselves with the Soviet authorities and proved their loyalty to Russia.     

Kitsch is Dead—Long Live Garden Gnomes

ABSTRACT

This visual essay examines the garden gnome as a product of both low and high culture. Its essence of ambiguity and unreliability has through the ages made it a favored object for ironic comments, social and political statements, popular aesthetics and religious folklore. The gnome's more or less hidden nature of rude male (homo)sexuality saw him banished from the bourgeois sphere and transformed into childish triviality often conceived as kitsch. However, in the period of post-modernity, when many artists and cultural producers are inspired by “kitsch,” it seems pointless, if not impossible to maintain the concept of kitsch.     

State‐led transnationalism and migration: reaching out to the Argentine community in Spain

Abstract This article focuses on when and how states develop transnational policies. It presents a case study of a relatively small emigrant community, whose departure was not simply caused by poverty or crisis, but most recently by an economic and political debacle that questioned people's values and expectations. I focus on the state side of the equation and identify a shift in Argentina's policy after 2003, though also show how such policies came out of a long history of state intervention in population and migration and are now related to human rights concerns and the unfinished process of democratic consolidation. I argue that the state initiates political transnationalism, not migrants, and highlight the importance of some relatively unexplored factors in the understanding of the motivation, intensity and impact of the state's involvement, such as the characteristics of the emigrant community, the existence of specific political projects, the role of some domestic actors and processes, and the nature of international agreements.     

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses

In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.     

From communist control to glasnost and back?: Media freedom and control in the former Soviet Union

The last decade has seen dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: the end of the Cold War with the West; the loosening of the Soviet Union's hold on part of Germany; movements for independence by regions in the USSR; and the public rejection of Communism by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, as well as by key leaders within the Soviet Union. Radical changes in political philosophy have been accompanied by transformations in mass media communication.These changes are inextricably linked to how public relations is practiced in these nations, many of which are attempting, to varying degrees, to adopt a democratic system of government. This article frames the role of public relations in a self-governing society; discusses three environmental factors that affect the practice of socially responsible public relations, reviews the historical media philosophy of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; and examines examples of media practice that have occurred during the region's transformation and their implications for media freedom and independence, and for the practice of public relations.     

THE SUPERVISED STATE

This article addresses an arresting conjuncture: the fact that the international community's involvement in states' affairs frequently coalesces around a state's management of internal difference. I outline striking parallels in the ways relations between supranational bodies, some European states, and their minorities were reconfigured in two post-imperial moments: the decade following the Great War and the present period of post-socialist transformation. In both periods supranational bodies developed regimes of supervision whose rationale and focus were minority rights and the state's governance of difference. Examining a figure I call “the supervised state,” I reflect on its implications for theorisations of state and sovereignty. I place these moments of intensified supervision of selected states within a larger history of supranational scrutiny and a political landscape that entailed a spectrum of sovereignties.     

Analyzing Politics and Change in Women's Organizations

Research on women's political action too often passes over women's organizations that do not officially adopt a feminist ideology and do not explicitly set out to change gender power relations. Based on implicit notions that such women's organizations are nonpolitical (or less interesting), the research often supports a false dichotomy between feminist and nonfeminist organizations rather than illuminates women's common political ground. This study addresses women's collective action, politics and change by focusing on the case of Nicaraguan Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs - women who lost a son or daughter in the revolution or Contra War. Although some members in Matagalpa critiqued male domination, the organization itself did not set out to challenge the gendered division of labor; indeed, their collective demands relied upon and in many ways reinforced traditional gender identities. I argue that such movements are important to feminist political analysis. As I demonstrate in this article, an organization's lack of an official feminist ideology does not mean that individual members do not express interests, identities and ideals that challenge the gendered status quo. Such research, however, requires a nuanced approach, recognizing women as both accommodating and resisting gendered social structures. Thus, this study challenges the dominant feminist-feminine dichotomy by demonstrating that women's collective action is not only per se political (and politically important) but may also challenge as well as reinforce gendered power structures.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

Intimate circuits: modernity,migration and marriage among post‐Soviet women in Turkey

The study of migration too often ignores the ways that labour migrants' emotional entanglements and complicated personal relationships factor into their experiences of being people on the move. In examining post‐Soviet migrant women's relationships with Turkish men and the ways these are regulated in Turkey, in this article I consider how intimate practices of marriage and performances of ‘love’ have emerged as key aspects of transnational mobility. These intimate practices both enable long‐term transnational circuits between post‐Soviet homelands and Turkey, and attest to the way global capitalism is redefining personal lives.     

Totalitarianism in America? Robert Nisbet on the “Wilson War State” and Beyond

This article examines Robert Nisbet’s claim that the first totalitarian experiment of the twentieth century occurred not in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany, but in the United States during the First World War. Totalitarianism appeared in the form of mass propaganda, surveillance and repression. It was accompanied by a messianic desire of Woodrow Wilson and his team to transform America into a “national community.” By 1920, American totalitarianism was effectively at an end but, claimed Nisbet, it left a legacy of centralization that, over successive Democratic and Republican administrations, has stripped the Republic’s citizens of social authority and independence; the political trumped the social. Nisbet’s depiction of American totalitarianism is contrasted with Hannah Arendt’s argument that totalitarianism, thus far in history, is restricted to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin.     

Women in the Field: Women,Farming and Organizations

One striking feature of farming as an occupation is that there are few women who farm in their own right. The passing of land from father to son means that women rarely own land. Their typical entry to farming is through marriage. Women's route of entry to farming affects interpersonal relationships within the family, and also women's role in the public space of farming. Women are under‐represented in farming organizations, in training programmes, and in the politics of farming. This article focuses on the position of women within farming organizations and the interaction between (male) farming organizations and women's farming organizations. Farmers are an extremely well‐organized occupation and wield considerable political power because of this effective organization. However, farming organizations are almost entirely male. This article examines how women are treated within farming organizations, and also the interaction between (male) farming organizations and women's farming organizations. Drawing on the theory of organizations, I argue that the inclusion of women in farming organizations and the existence of women's farming organizations reinforce gender divisions within agriculture and do not in any way question the understanding of men as farmers, or the political power they hold.     

BIOGRAPHY AS PROMOTIONAL DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF MAUD GONNE

This article explores the cultural impact of critical and popular biographies about Maud Gonne. By focusing on Gonne as primarily an object of Yeats's desire, this biographical discourse, I argue, serves political and economic, rather than ‘purely’ literary, purposes: these biographies romanticize Gonne's considerable political contributions and capitalize on a flourishing Yeats industry that reinforces the representation of Gonne as an interesting but minor figure in twentieth-century Irish culture.     

The Malawi 1964 cabinet crisis and its legacy of ‘perpetual regression of trust’ amongst contemporary Malawian politicians

Malawi's cabinet crisis was one of the most critical incidents in Malawi's political history. The crisis emanated from a disagreement between the Prime Minister and his six cabinet ministers over domestic, as well as foreign policies. The end result was that the six cabinet ministers resigned or were fired from government. While this article acknowledges that the link between the cabinet crisis and Dr Banda's leadership style during the one party era is undisputed, it argues that a further link between the crisis and contemporary Malawian politics has remained unexplored. The central argument of this article is that the cabinet crisis did not only determine the nature of political relations during the Banda era, but also that of contemporary Malawian politics in what may be identified as the legacy of ‘perpetual regression of trust’ among politicians.     

Trust in K.E. Løgstrup's Lutheran Political Ethics

This article discusses the treatment of trust by Danish theologian and philosopher K.E. Løgstrup (1905-1981). In order to contextualize Løgstrup's position, I first present some significant analyses of trust in philosophy and the social sciences. I then outline the Lutheran character of Løgstrup's political ethics against the background of Luther's view on government. Whereas Luther regards the political order as God-given, Løgstrup sees basic trust as a given precondition for various kinds of socio-political trust. He thus represents a Lutheran line of thought that can contribute to contemporary political discourse.     

Gendering Terror

This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept hinders the goals of feminists.     

Symbolic Economies: Money,Neoliberal Law and National Politics in Argentina

In this article, I examine Argentina's neoliberal reforms throughout the 1990s from a Marxist theoretical perspective, analysing how money, monetary policy and law constitute a fundamental mode of ideological regulation in neoliberal capitalism. Situating this analysis in the context of the capitalist crisis of the mid-1970s, the article discusses the politics of effacement that in Argentina's case paved the way for the use of monetary policy as a form of social control intended to embed the nation-state into global capitalism. Examining economic legislation, macro-economic policies, political ideologies, consumer discourses and pension privatization, I analyse how the neoliberal monetary regime ideologically underpinned a whole state imaginary based on exchange rate parity with the US dollar. Further, I investigate the ideological function of money in symbolically reordering the relationships of workers and citizens to the state, capital and culture. The article concludes with an exploration of the political significance of the monetary collapse of the Argentine neoliberal reform in 2001–2002, comparing Argentina's crisis of hegemony with that of other states within global capitalism.