„Neutralność” Litwy podczas Bitwy Warszawskiej

After the First World War, three concepts clashed in Eastern Europe: the model of the nation state, the expansion of the Bolshevik revolution implemented by Russia and the union of nation-states (Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia) according to Piłsudski resulting from the threat. Russia in the years 1920-1921 signed five peace treaties, but only the treaty with Lithuania contained secret arrangements regarding the neutrality of Lithuania in the Bolshevik-Polish war. The analysis of the source material shows that Russia used the secret provisions of the peace treaty in its plans for the expansion of bolshevism, and after the defeat of the Polish army, it was to carry out a Bolshevik coup in Lithuania. Despite the proclaimed neutrality, Lithuania turned out to be on the side of Russia in this conflict, causing additional difficulties for Polish troops in the Battle of Warsaw. The Polish victory over the Vistula impeded the expansion of Bolshevism to Europe.

Nowe oblicze muzeum. Jak przekształciło się Muzeum Zwycięstwa – Centralne Muzeum Wielkiej Wojny Ojczyźnianej 1941–1945 – w Moskwie do czasu świętowania 75-lecia zwycięstwa

The attitude to history in any country depends on its current challenges and those that people will have to face in the future. In this regard, the vision of the past and the collective memory change with each new generation. The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) is the main historical event in contemporary Russia. Having rejected the old vision of the twentieth-century events which have been previously considered the most significant, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, contemporary Russia has retained a vision of its place and role in World War II. This is evidenced by the celebrations of the 75th anniversary of its victory in the war. The Museum of the Great Patriotic War (Victory Museum) in Moscow plays a significant role in celebrating this anniversary and creating the overall image of the war. The Victory Museum deals with preserving the memory of the war and educating young generations about this historical period. The museum has done a lot to reconstruct and update most of the exhibitions and change the nature of its activities. This article analyses this reconstruction process, new exhibitions in the museum and its new forms of work with visitors, particularly the young generation of Russian people. The author analyses how the exhibits have been transformed from traditional to multimedia ones and pays special attention to their interactive and communicative aspects, which have changed the role of visitors and the museum.

Challenges in Heritage Language Documentations: BraPoRus, Spoken Corpus of Heritage Russian in Brazil

The Bolshevik revolution in 1917, followed by the Civil War, induced a big wave of emigration from the ex-Russian Empire. These emigrants created their “Russia Abroad”. Many Russians stayed in Europe or China, but, in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them went to the USA, Latin America and other destinations. The importance of preserving the memories and documents of the old waves of the Russian emigration is crucial. Our group is collecting a corpus of heritage Russian in Brazil, the BRAzilian POrtuguese RUSsian Corpus (BraPoRus). While the history of Russian immigration in Brazil is to some extent studied, their remarkably preserved Russian has not been described. Our current aim is to describe the BraPoRus, a corpus that consists of multiple speech samples of older Russian heritage speakers in Brazil, and to discuss the best ways to make these data available in the forms that satisfy the requirements both for the linguistic and sociological research.

International Research-to-Practice Conference “Legal Forms of Experiencing History: Practices and Limits” (St. Petersburg, September 11–12, 2020)

International Research-to-Practice Conference “Legal Forms of Experiencing History: Practices and Limits” was dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the victory over the Nazi Germany and its allies. The conference provided a forum for identifying the ability of legal science and practice to respond to the current challenges of the global appeal to the past, as seen in the 21st century, and to the “wars of memory” caused by the need for self-identification of people due to the break-up of certain states and the formation of new international integrated units, the change of generations, when the majority of people living nowadays have not been witnesses of the WWII, therefore reviewing its outcome, the emergence of the concept of “official memory policy” (“collective memory”, “memory policy”, “historical memory”, “memorial policy”, “historical policy”), and the new recognition of historical events, recently celebrating the 100th anniversary (2014 – the beginning of WWI, 2017 – the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, 2018 – the end of WWI, etc.).

Reading Between the Institutions, Reading Between the Genres, Reading Between the Lines: Jeffrey Brooks’ The Firebird and the Fox

Jeffrey Brooks’ new book, The Firebird and the Fox, draws on an unsurpassed knowledge of Russian literature and culture of all levels, from the folk and popular to the canonical and avant-garde. It divides the “age of genius” (1855–1953) into three periods: the emancipation of the arts (1850–1889), politics and the arts (1890–1916), the Bolshevik Revolution and the arts (1917–1950), each with its own configurations of popular and high culture and construction of creative artists, media, and readers. But three core themes overarch the periods and the exceptionally broad range of phenomena the book discusses: freedom and order, boundaries, art and reality. Throughout Brooks analyzes crossovers and intersections between cultural institutions, between genres and media, and – especially for the Soviet period – between the lines. His categories are at times sociological, historical, and literary. The book implies a theory of cultural production that gives unusual weight to the agency of creative artists. In conclusion readings of three works Brooks does not analyze (Dostoevsky’s Demons, Bely’s Petersburg, and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky) illustrate the productivity of Brooks’ broad and humane approach to Russian artistic culture.

Vâlâ Nureddin’s Comic Materialism and the Sexual Revolution: Writing across Turkey and the Soviet Union

Focusing on the life and work of the Turkish novelist and translator Vâlâ Nureddin (1901–67), this article provides a historical overview of Turkish and Soviet literary entanglement in the early twentieth century. A collaborator of the globally acclaimed Turkish communist poet Nâzım Hikmet, Vâlâ was educated at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East from 1922 to 1924. Returning to Turkey in 1925, he launched his career in the daily Akşam (Evening), bringing Soviet and Turkish literature into conversation in his serialized translations and literary adaptations of Soviet erotic fiction. In reading Vâlâ’s neglected 1928 erotic historical comedy Baltacı ile Katerina (Baltacı and Catherine), unique among Vâlâ’s writings in its direct and explicit imagination and specification of an entangled revolution, this article suggests, by way of specific attention to this work’s comedic elements, that Vâlâ imagined the collapse of both Russian and Ottoman imperial sovereignty in terms of sexual revolution. It argues that a study of this unjustifiably neglected erotic comedy not only deepens our knowledge of early republican Turkish literature and culture, but provides a more nuanced understanding of the Moscow-centered transnational literary space produced in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, or what scholars in Slavic studies have called the “Soviet republic of letters.”

Review of “ Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War” by Elena Aronova

Book Review of “ Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War” by Elena Aronova

Letters of S.P. Timoshenko to V.I. Vernadsky recently discovered at Columbia University’s library, with analysis of his attitudes

This paper reproduces the translation of letters sent by Stephen P. Timoshenko—well known specialist in elasticity, vibrations, stability, and structures, in the 20th century—to his colleague Vladimir I. Vernadsky. Letters originated from the USA where Timoshenko resided at the time, and were directed to France, where Vernadsky was working while also looking to come to the USA having left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. By a twist of fate, these letters turned out to be housed at the Library of Columbia University, in New York City. This happened since the first five letters were acquired by Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University where Boris Bakhmeteff, formerly the Ambassador of the Russian Provisional Government to the USA, was employed as a professor of civil engineering during the years 1931–1951. Timoshenko could not have imagined that these private and candid letters would be available for public viewing at the library, and especially, in the country that he criticized harshly. Each letter is accompanied with a discussion. It appears that these letters shed some light on Timoshenko’s personality in addition to what can be inferred by reading his autobiography As I Remember. The motivation of this study is two-fold: (a) to bring to the attention of readers the translations of letters of S.P. Timoshenko, addressed to V.I. Vernadsky, and to provide (b) discussion on his attitudes, on the one hand, to the Jews, and anti-Semitism in the USA as compared with Ukraine, and on the other, to the USA.

Moscow

According to the 2010 census, Moscow’s 11.5 million inhabitants make it the largest city in Europe. The city has the distinction of having gained capital status in the 16th century, losing it in the early 18th century, and regaining it after the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th century. In the 10th century, Eastern Slavs colonized the area; Moscow first appeared in written chronicles in 1147, when Prince Iurii Dolgorukii established the city on a forested bluff overlooking the confluence of the Moscow and Neglinnaia rivers. Although Mongols destroyed Moscow in 1237, during the period of Mongol hegemony known as the “Tatar Yoke” (1237–1480), Moscow flourished and the city replaced Kiev as the capital of East Slavdom, the state of Muscovy born in 1547. The cluster of cupolas in the Kremlin attest to Moscow’s role as a seat of ecclesiastical power: after the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, Moscow gained new cultural significance as the self-proclaimed center of “true Christianity.” In 1712, Peter the Great transferred power to St. Petersburg and Moscow was demoted to a regional capital. During the imperial period, Moscow became an important industrial center that attracted migrants who would continually overwhelm city resources. The destruction resulting from Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 led to reconstruction. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the city emerged as the capital of the USSR and the global communist movement and, after the Second World War, as the capital of the socialist “second world.” One finds ample scholarship about Moscow during the Soviet period, as it served as an example for the rest of this “second world.” Publications have focused on attempts to alleviate housing shortages and sanitation problems; on the development of public transportation, most notably the Moscow metropolitan—the subway, which remains an architectural monument; on migration; and, considering the Soviet experience, on labor history and social movements—especially as Soviet planners aimed to create new and innovative solutions for the “new Soviet man and woman.” The scholarship reflects the fact that problems that challenged planners in the past continue into the present. One should be aware of the ideological nature of Soviet books, especially those published during the Stalin period when scholars were required to approach their work from a Marxist perspective in line with Soviet ideology. Additionally, sources about contemporary Moscow published two decades ago will be more out of date than a similarly-aged source on a city that did not experience a cataclysmic event such as the 1991 dissolution of the USSR.