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In May 2016 a medieval Russian “knight” lanced a drone out of the skies above Lipetsk. The assailant was part of the Rusborg Historical Festival, one of hundreds of medieval re‐enactment events that have sprung up across Russia since 2000 and have gained widespread popularity in recent years. This article considers these festivals as part of a larger trend in neo-medievalism that has come to occupy a surprisingly prominent place in contemporary Russian culture. Examining this trend in historical reconstruction, this article demonstrates how it is motivated by contemporary concerns about globalization and modernity and Russia’s place in the modern world. Though these issues are not explicitly discussed at medieval festivals, this article suggests that such events build towards an “affective public sphere,” that is, a space of public experience centered on aesthetics and affect rather than rational discourse. The immersive imaginary environments provided at these festivals encourage participants to explore the anxieties, nostalgias, and hopes evoked by contemporary life through emotional, affective experience, rather than rational political debate. Keywords: neomedievalism, affect studies, public sphere, festivals, Times and Epochs

The State Program for Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots Abroad was launched in 2006/2007 as a strategy to attract new citizens who were already fluent in Russian and accustomed to Russian culture, in a situation of gloomy demographic prospects. During its first years of existence the program proved quite inefficient, but in 2012–13 it was revised to become more attractive and extended to include more Federal Subjects (now 58). Whereas in September 2012 RIA Novosti reported that there had been 80,000 repatriates since the start of the program, the FMS (the Federal Migration Service) stated in 2014 that more than 200,000 compatriots had been resettled. The paper focuses on this period of revival and investigates what the discussions and representations of the State Program in Russian public discourse reveal about ideals of citizenship, membership, and statehood in Russia. Discourse analysis is combined with references to theoretical debates on states’ policies of inclusion and exclusion. Researchers have already pointed to the concept of “compatriots” as ambiguous, because it only vaguely defines who the program is open for. Even though the initial aim of the program was to secure economic development in the regions and improve the demographic situation in the country, it clearly intervenes in other discourses that relate to the image of the Russian nation and the boundaries of the imagined “we.” One is the idea of Russia as the historical homeland of “compatriots,” and connected to this the idea that “compatriots” are discriminated against in other countries and therefore implicitly want to return to Russia. The debates also bear witness to an explicit dichotomy between “compatriots” and “migrants,” where “migrants” are construed as unqualified, unwanted and not rightfully belonging in the country, whereas “compatriots” are skilled and desired labor, easy to include into the Russian “community of value.” From spring 2014 onwards, the State Program became an issue also in relation to refugees from Ukraine who fled to Russia during the escalating conflict and war. This study shows how at that point the State Program suddenly turned into a means of effective integration of Ukrainian refugees–“compatriots.” I argue that although in the media representations the program acquires several other functions, the pragmatic aspect–Russia wanting to attract skilled labor–is present throughout and stands out as the most important.

This article brings to light the professional life of Dmitrii Vasil'evich Mileev (1878–1914), one of the leading Russian architects and architectural restorationists of the twentieth century. For various reasons, Mileev's work has not received much attention in Russian scholarly literature, and this article seeks to fill this gap by delving into the archives and publications of the Imperial Architectural Commission, as well as using other documents from the early 1900s. The focus is on the restoration of wooden architectural monuments of the Russian North, since Mileev was the first Russian architect to work out a systematic method of preservation that he followed while working on over fifty such buildings. The article continues its exploration into the Soviet period, taking note in particular of the theoretical and practical work of A. V. Opolovnikov, who continued Mileev's work. Together, their contribution to Russian culture was priceless, and their legacy helped to set the course for future Soviet restorationist efforts.

This article critically examines the intervention of a collection of geological specimens into local politics in Irkutsk in imperial Russia's constitutional period. Gathered for research on the Circumbaikal (Krugobaikal'skaia) Railroad in 1904, these rocks were donated to the museum of the East Siberian Section of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society in Irkutsk; but were subsequently removed from the storage tower, taken to European Russia by train, and pulverized in a laboratory in order to test their weight-bearing potential and open them up to chemical examination under a microscope. The ensuing conflict in Irkutsk over their removal divided local men of science into factions, both of which called on the rocks to “talk” for them in different ways. The culmination of the conflict was the publication in a local newspaper of a traditionally formatted “grievance” voiced by those rocks that remained in storage in the museum. This grievance played on assumptions by Siberian elites about the superior moral authenticity of the local over abstract central authority. I argue, however, that while this was a savvy political move by the defenders of the rocks as museum property, this conflict was not actually a case of resistance to central crushing of local agency, nor should it be understood as a linear ascendency of professionals over amateurs. Rather, it was a conflict between overlapping and competing scientific networks, both of which had ties to the region around Irkutsk as well as to agencies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and both of which depended on the circulation of things, people, and values to make the local meaningful. Both sides depended on the possession of objects for the legitimacy of their science, and appealed to the concreteness of rocks to make a case for the objective correctness of their points of view. Thinking about rocks as participants in an assemblage of human actors; tectonic (and political) instability; indigenous markers of place; museum storage rooms; railroads; newspapers; and laboratory instruments enables us to conceive of late Imperial Russian culture and politics as embodied, vibrant, and in constant motion.

Although much has been written about the loss and rediscovery of various notions of Russian national identity since the collapse of communism, no scholarly works have hitherto attempted explicitly to link the three concepts of gender, citizenship, and empire in post-Soviet Russia. The aim of this article is therefore to attempt an initial approach to a new subject in relation to post-Soviet Russian culture. The first part will define my use of the terms “gender,” “citizenship,” and “empire,” in order to explain my underlying assumptions. It will then discuss some of the theoretical and methodological problems they engender in relation to contemporary Russian society and culture. The second part will present a brief analysis of how these issues have been treated in post-Soviet literature by both men and women, particularly in writings of the twenty-first century. The main focus will be on prose fiction and publitsistika (social and political journalism) by Russian writers, but reference will also be made to particularly important films, television series, and discussions in the media where they are relevant to the argument. The article will attempt to demonstrate that whereas the dominant discourses in contemporary Russian culture and the media are patriarchal and nationalistic, a few women writers in post-Soviet Russia have had some success in challenging the traditional “symbolic order” in their culture in relation to women, gender and nation.

When Liudmila Ulitskaia published The Funeral Party in 1997 the novella received the critical scrutiny warranted by the latest work of an already prominent figure in postSoviet letters. The plot, set in New York in the humid summer of 1991, revolves around the dying artist Alik and the crowd of friends, former and present lovers, and chance acquaintances gathering in his Chelsea loft. Booker Prize laureate Ol'ga Slavnikova misdiagnoses this narrative as an engaging failure: it attempts to achieve the impossible by trying to fill the void left by the deceased.1 Not surprisingly, Ulitskaia’s own description of the novella provides an alternate view: “This is a book about a person who has done everything possible so that after his departure there will not be a black hole of despair, but an atmosphere of reconciliation and love.”2 The author’s assessment is more than a commonplace designed to snare sensitive readers— it is a key to her prose and plays, shaping The Funeral Party and culminating in Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006), a structurally heterogeneous novel about healing the rift between Jews and gentiles.3 These two works powerfully depict the results of misunderstanding and, more significantly in the context of Russian culture, stress the need for reconciliation. Both narratives foreground Ulitskaia’s longstanding fascination with hybrid characters: those individuals who combine different (and usually divisive) ethnicities and belief systems. Such characters and their roles in these two novels suggest the main concern of her oeuvre— tolerance as the practice of acknowledging and engaging the conflicting viewpoints that, as Isaiah Berlin reminds us, form everyday experience.4

Since the nineteenth century, foreigners have been fascinated by the geography of Russia, sprawled across the world's great landmass, naturally both Asia and Europe. Some have looked back to make the core of Russian culture a Mongolian inheritance. Others have projected forward to predict either Moscow's dominance in Asia or an Asiatic conquest of Europe under Russian auspices. In short, for non-Russians this duality has largely inspired fear. For Russians, on the other hand, the Eurasian fact has been more ambivalent. For some it was creative schizophrenia, an inability for Russia and Russians to find their place either here or there. For others, it was the ultimate opportunity for the Third Rome to rule from sea to shining sea or, to add Zhirinovskii to the heady mix of metaphors, to wash its boots in the Indian Ocean. The Russo-Japanese War put an end to these fine speculations, revealing no grand perspectives, but only that it was human blood that would be washed from both Eastern and Western boots, when they met at close quarters. The gap between visionary affinities and the brutal reality of international contact suggests that the role of social and cultural factors in explaining war needs to be carefully circumscribed. In times of war, images of the other are mainly propaganda, telling more about what the state wants its people to think than about what they actually think. The study of popular images antebellum will not tell us why war occurred, although conflict and attendant propaganda may well create views of the other that are available as memories for generations to come. How long will you remember the name and nationality of the enemy who killed your son, husband, or father? In the realm of memory, the cultural historian's sensitivities are essential to track the interplay of event remembered and changing social context over the course of decades.