There were six waves of regionalism in Western Europe and Russia: in the decades of the 1830s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1970s and the 1990s. Russian regions were not behind Western European ones but rather went through the same stages of development at the same time or sometimes even earlier, until after the Stalin era, when they did…[Read more]

The study focuses on the position of female deputies of non-Russian descent in parliamentary debates of the Perestroika period in the Soviet Union. The key issues the author examines concern the grievances which these female deputies were pointing out, and the potential solutions they were proposing to mitigate or eliminate them. The most…[Read more]

Abstract
There have been numerous and extensive discussions of the role of ‘слухи’ [gossip] in
nineteenth-century Russian literature; usually gossip was viewed as a formative force be-
hind plot dynamics, and as the launching point for grotesque narrative effects. This article
attempts to frame different perceptions of gossip, treating…[Read more]

The chapter focuses on two new institutions, the State Duma (Gosudarstvennaia duma) and Political Consultative Council (Zizhengyuan), which were introduced in the Russian and Qing Empires, when the two imperial formations joined the global constitutional transformations. The names of the two bodies pointed to the statist (etatist) rather than…[Read more]

Focusing on the term zemskii sobor, this study explored the historiographies of the early modern Russian assemblies, which the term denoted, as well as the autocratic and democratic mythologies connected to it. Historians have debated whether the individual assemblies in the sixteenth and seventeenth century could be seen as a coherent…[Read more]

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between…[Read more]

The political system of early socialist-era Mongolia, established by the first Constitution in 1924, can be interpreted as a vernacular version of the Soviet system, in which the formally supreme representative body, the State Great Khural (“assembly”), was sidelined by the standing Presidium of the Small Khural and the Cabinet and eclipsed by the…[Read more]

In the early part of the reign of Alexander I (1801-1825), the emperor sought to reform Russia through the creation of new European-style institutions. The aim was to ensure that Russia’s great-power status would be retained through updating its institutions, in line with a reform impulse dating back to Peter the Great and before. Among the new i…[Read more]

The chapter analyzed the debates on parliamentarism in the late Russian Empire and revolutionary Russia and explored how the idea of parliament helped intellectuals locate Russia globally. The establishment of the legislative State Duma and the adoption of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire during the Revolution of 1905–1907 seemed to m…[Read more]

Addressing the entangled histories of deliberative decision making, political representation, and constitutionalism in several geographic and temporal contexts, this Special Issue offers nuanced political and intellectual histories and anthropologies of parliamentarism in Eurasia. It explores parliaments and quasi-parliamentary formations and the…[Read more]

In early 1918, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Congress of Soviets declared the formation of a new composite polity—the Soviet Russian Republic. The congress’s resolutions, however, simultaneously proclaimed a federation of national republics and a federation of soviets. The latter seemed to recognize regionalism and localism as organizing pri…[Read more]

The article argues that the spread of scientific information is not always enough to ensure the success of the production of any particular country in a global market. In particular, there were significant barriers to the introduction of improved livestock raising in nineteenth century Russia. Although agricultural societies, which were voluntary…[Read more]

This article is an introduction to the New York Public Library’s pre-revolutionary Russian and Eastern European photographic albums. It also provides a checklist of these albums. The checklist is an especially rich source for Russian architecture, art, and science and provides documentation for a variety of places in the center and provinces of t…[Read more]

This article traces the attempts by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries to devolve economic powers to the regions and the ultimate failure of this project, which was a contributing factor to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Drawing from samizdat (self-published) and tamizdat (foreign-published) materials, this article traces the understandings of parliaments and parliamentarism in individual works by Soviet dissidents and reconstructs the authors’ underlying assumptions in the application of the two ideas. It focuses on the articulations and the implications of f…[Read more]

This is the convention program for the 49th Annual ASEEES Convention, held Nov 9-12, 2017 in Chicago, IL.

Opened in 2013, the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery near Moscow is Russia’s new national cemetery. Providing for the interment of political as well as military leaders, it is to supplant the Kremlin Wall as the country’s prime burial site. Initially modeled after the Arlington National Cemetery and designed as a landscaped park, the site was…[Read more]

This review essay focuses on the new monograph by S. A. Smith Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017). As a leading expert in the social history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Smith provides a comprehensive political, social, and cultural narrative of one of the central events in the…[Read more]