This paper analyzes the emergence of ethnicity and nationalism among the indigenous people of the Altai Mountains in the late imperial and the early Soviet period. It is argued that the emergence of ethnic self-awareness of Altai people and the growth of nationalism among them originated from the following sources. First, it was the activities of…[Read more]

Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen p…[Read more]

This paper explores the life of Joseph Grigulevich (1913–1988), a famous early Soviet illegal intelligence operative, who conducted various “special tasks” on behalf of Stalin’s foreign espionage network. These included the murder of dissident Spanish communist Andreas Nin (1938), a participation in the assassination of Leon Trotsky (1940),…[Read more]