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The borders of Russian history, whether chronological, geographical, political or intellectual, have always been patrolled, have sometimes been evaded, but have never been invisible. This volume attempts to extend those borders in several ways. The articles stress continuity rather than ruptures and their organization emphasizes persistent factors over time, particularly across the 1917 divide. Geographical dimensions are explored not through conquest but through regional responses to the center: local variants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial policies in the Caucasus and Turkestan are complemented by Central Asian petitions for citizenship in the 1930s and Siberian healing in the 1990s. Ukrainian aspirations take a special focus, from Kyivan Rus’ to Ruthenian dreams.

Politically, of course, Marxist–Leninist ideology attempted to extend its own frontiers of Russian history. Several studies here attempt to assess the meaning of the Soviet period in terms of ideology, practices, processes and memory. It is fitting too that the now accepted boundaries of the Soviet era—the revolutionary decade and the first decade of transition—are subject to detailed attention and analysis. The intellectual borders of Russian and Soviet history, long policed from within and without, have been breached by the creative and wide-ranging use of newly accessible archival sources that form the basis for these articles. The sense of community exhibited by this collection, however, is not artificial nor is it wholly imagined. It derives from the honoree, whose scholarly life has exhibited the blurring of traditional boundaries, whether disciplinary, generational, or national, that is represented by the contributors to this volume. 

Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global.

The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.