Abstract This article examines the illustrations in the hunting publications Okhotnich’ia gazeta and Priroda i Okhota . These range from drawings and paintings of hunting scenes to photographs of dogs and images connected to natural history, many depicting hunters in a variety of landscapes. The illustrations reflect Russian imperial notions that included diverse peoples of the empire while maintaining assumptions of a normative European Russianness among the publications’ audience. In addition, depictions generally focus on representation of a masculine aesthetic associated more closely with a Russian imperial nationalist ideal than with a vision of imperial conquest.

Abstract While historians of homosexuality in the post-Stalin era have mainly focused on developments such as discussions about the decriminalization of homosexuality and the establishment of sexology, our understanding of conservative perspectives on homosexuality remains limited. This article introduces and analyses a previously classified medical doctoral thesis (habilitation) on homosexuality prepared and defended in the 1970s. This is currently the only accessible in-depth scholarly investigation of male homosexuality in this period. The article seeks to contribute to the thriving field of the history of homosexuality under late socialism by shedding some light on the rationale for continuing to criminalize consensual homosexual activity, from the perspective of a contemporary forensic expert. Secondly, the thesis, which was based on the criminal files of those convicted of consensual homosexuality in Leningrad (1961–1968) – a total of 107 men were convicted – provides additional data on the previously rather obscure realm of interaction between homosexuals and law enforcement agencies.

Abstract This piece argues that a greater understanding of the role of regions in Russian history could lead to different ways of writing Russian history that need not center the state. By including a wider range of intellectual and political actors from the regions, as well as tracing the long connections between them and Ukrainian thinkers, such a history would make regions subjects rather than simply objects. The original post and the significant number of responses provide an important snapshot of the thinking of the field of Russian history about questions related to the territorial integrity of Russia and Ukraine. The responses also deal with related topics concerning the role of indigenous peoples and the processes of colonization in the narrative of Russian history.

Abstract The 2020 constitutional amendments marked a turning point for Russian constitutionalism. The Constitution finally lost its limiting function and the Constitutional Court lost significant power. The long-serving Chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, however, remained in power and continues to guarantee authoritarian legality and approval for Putin through favorable rulings, his theory of state and law, and support for the constitutional amendments in 2020. Over the years, Zorkin has adapted to the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin regime. This is all the more remarkable given that Zorkin was a strong defender of legalism and opposed Boris Yeltsin’s power grab in 1993. The figure of Zorkin can help us explain the development of Russian constitutionalism during the last 30 years and the poses questions for comparative constitutional law.

Abstract Gorbachev’s 1997 television ad for Pizza Hut, which opened its first restaurants in the Soviet Union in 1990 through a joint venture between parent company PepsiCo, Inc. and the Moscow city soviet, is an important part of his popular image in the West, reflecting the role that capitalist consumerism is often presumed to have played in the Soviet system’s collapse. Yet, as this article shows, such joint ventures were supposed to increase the Soviet Union’s role not as a consumer, but as a producer, by showcasing the benefits of international economic cooperation with it. Joint ventures won Gorbachev powerful allies, including the CEO of Pepsi, Donald H. Kendall, who advocated for removing American trade restrictions that stood in the way of the Soviet Union assuming a larger function in world trade. As Gorbachev’s economic reforms began to fail, however, the long line in front of Pizza Hut also came to symbolize communism’s failure to deliver prosperity. Gorbachev used the difficulties of foreign companies like Pizza Hut as proof of why the Soviet Union should be given Western aid, to no avail. Ultimately, the policy of joint ventures was a failure and Pizza Hut’s presence in the post-Soviet Russian market was short lived: it left during the 1998 ruble crisis only to return under Putin in the early 2000s, only to leave once again after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Abstract This article attempts to analyze the role of the Moscow strel’tsy (musketeer) regiments in the dynastic crisis of 1689, which led Peter I to assume real power in Russia. Contrary to the stereotypical understanding of the strel’tsy as loyal supporters of Sophia, their position was, in fact, more complicated. Fully aware of their mutiny’s futility and having just returned from the unfortunate Crimean campaigns, the strel’tsy hardly sympathized with Sophia, the initiator and culprit of repressive “purges” of the strel’tsy after the uprising of 1682, and generally sought to remain loyal to the authorities while staying within the formal framework of the law. The low level of support for Sophia amidst the strel’tsy forced F. I. Shaklovity, their commanding officer, to resort to a palace conspiracy with plans for regicide based on only 4–5 regiments (out of 26), which, if disclosed, would have made Sophia’s position illegitimate and extremely vulnerable. During the “private” crisis of 1689, assessed by Russian society as a “family quarrel” where a compromise seemed quite achievable, Duma and Moscow officials preferred to remain neutral; as such, the struggle for the capital’s strel’tsy garrison was of key importance. On New Year’s Eve (September 1, 1689), Peter’s supporters reached a turning point, having managed to bring the leadership and delegates of almost all the hesitating strel’tsy regiments to the Troitse-Sergiyev monastery and making public the evidence of a conspiracy to kill the tsar and the patriarch: this gained Peter the backing of Patriarch Joachim’s religious authority. It was the position of the Moscow strel’tsy that changed during September 1–4. They ultimately sided with Peter, which ensured his victory and the end of the neutrality of officials. However, this emphasized, for the second time in a decade, the humiliating dependence of the authorities, striving for “absolutism”, on the capital’s strel’tsy garrison: this was probably one of the most powerful motivations for their subsequent liquidation.

Abstract This article discusses Jeffrey Brooks’ metaphor of an integrated ecosystem to describe Russian cultural history in the late imperial and early Soviet periods. Brooks’s Firebird and the Fox describes an interlocking cultural system marked by high-low interactions, as a rich Russian folkloric tradition based on fable and popular tales was reworked with remarkable creativity in what he calls an “age of genius.” In response, this article argues that this period of Russian cultural creativity can be seen as coinciding with the extended life-cycle of the Russian Revolution. The subversive, satirical humor and irony running through Brooks’s cultural “play-sphere” was complemented by another tradition: a didactic, instructional, enlightening “teach-sphere” that animated a wide range of intelligentsia and cultural forces shaping cultural evolution and cultural revolution. If the play-sphere highlights the rebellious distance between culture and power, the teach-sphere’s project of transforming the masses reveals their many commonalities. The essay reflects on how the intersections of culture and power shaped early Soviet culture, the avant-garde, and successive phases of Stalinist culture. While Socialist Realism promoted the theoretical declaration of a unified socialist culture, the persistence of differing elements of the cultural system raises the question of Soviet cultural syncretism.

Abstract The author of The Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge University Press, 2019) responds to comments of Michael David-Fox, Muireann Maguire, Kevin Platt, William Mills Todd, and Olga Velikanova. He expresses appreciation for the reflections provided and elaborates on several points raised by the commentators individually and collectively: the theoretical framing of the work and the importance of agency; continuity of culture over episodes of political disjuncture; the applicability of the term “cultural ecosystem;” an alternative treatment of the topic that would have accorded greater emphasis to political power and the life cycle of revolutions; and the relationship of the work to analysis of institutional history and cultural theory. He finds the five commentaries to be valuable companion pieces for readers of The Firebird and the Fox and stimulants to further scholarship.

Abstract Jeffrey Brooks’ book The Firebird and the Fox presents a synthetic account of Russian cultural history from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Brooks describes culture as an “ecosystem,” persistent across seeming moments of historical rupture such as the revolutions of 1917, animated by certain overarching thematic concerns, and uniting readers and writers across a broad spectrum of levels of social life, from the newly literate popular masses to the educated elites, and forms of media, from prestigious belles lettres to popular illustrated weeklies, satirical journals and children’s literature. Drawing on the theoretical description of historiographical writing offered by Hayden White, this essay examines Brooks’ book in terms of its formal patterning as a comedic narrative and its poetic basis in the trope of synecdoche, which undergird its analytical efforts to integrate material across seeming historical and social divides.