Explore the vast range of titles available.

Karen Petrone shatters the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union. Although never officially commemorated, the Great War was the subject of a lively discourse about religion, heroism, violence, and patriotism during the interwar period. Using memoirs, literature, films, military histories, and archival materials, Petrone reconstructs Soviet ideas regarding the motivations for fighting, the justification for killing, the nature of the enemy, and the qualities of a hero. She reveals how some of these ideas undermined Soviet notions of military honor and patriotism while others reinforced them. As the political culture changed and war with Germany loomed during the Stalinist 1930s, internationalist voices were silenced and a nationalist view of Russian military heroism and patriotism prevailed.

Scholars in this forum analyze how major nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America have reacted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why have China, South Africa, Turkey, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and even Saudi Arabia among others failed to condemn the brutal Russian invasion and have continued to trade with Russia? Are these initiatives simply a replay of the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War Era or do they mark a substantial new reorientation in world politics? This forum appears in a hybrid format; two essays by Thomas Loyd and Katherine Stoner appear here in print. In addition, there is an online forum at https://aseees.org/slavicreview/discussion/ukraine-war-global-south/ featuring short contributions from David Engerman and Sandeep Bhardwaj on India, Chia Yin Hsu on China, Mark Katz on the Middle East, and, Daniela Secches on Brazil.

In these original essays on long-term patterns of everyday life in prerevolutionary, Soviet, and contemporary Russia, distinguished scholars survey the cultural practices, power relations, and behaviors that characterized daily existence for Russians through the post-Soviet present. Microanalyses and transnational perspectives shed new light on the formation and elaboration of gender, ethnicity, class, nationalism, and subjectivity. Changes in consumption and communication patterns, the restructuring of familial and social relations, systems of cultural meanings, and evolving practices in the home, at the workplace, and at sites of leisure are among the topics explored.

In this essay Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone examine some of the paradigms of selfhood that western scholars have used to understand Soviet subjectivity. They start with an analysis of how racialized western discourses about the backward Russian national character were transformed into representations of the totalitarian Soviet self seen as a passive receptacle for the ideological excesses of the regime. Revisionist historians have argued against this model and have shown how the pragmatic Soviet subject both internalized and resisted the Soviet norms of selfhood. In the third wave, scholars have used the model of the normative self to plot the internal processes through which citizens attempted to align their souls with the demands of Stalinist ideology. Chatterjee and Petrone conclude with the scholars’ analysis of the banal self, or the situation of Soviet selfhood in intimate and private spheres of existence that necessitated multiple negotiations and compromises with the theoretical norms of statesponsored subjectivity.

On August 22, 1990,Komsomol’skaia pravdareported that Afghan veteran V. Shumkov “waited for an apartment, but one was not assigned to him.” Given the perennial shortage of housing in the Soviet Union, this situation was quite typical, but Shumkov’s reaction to his plight was not: “He poured gasoline on himself and lit himself on fire. He died in the emergency room.”¹ This simultaneous enactment of protest and suicidal violence brings together several currents in late Soviet life: material shortages, the pain and suffering of a generation of men trained to commit violence and traumatized by their war experience in