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In the years immediately after, student leaders and pro-democracy politicians were arrested and imprisoned, and a new wave of protest in 2019 ended in the most draconian bill in post-handover Hong Kong: the National Security Law. Tracing the rise and fall of the movement, attending to its tensions and aspirations through interviews, theoretical engagement and cultural analysis, Pang argues that the Umbrella Movement was an instance of the politics of appearance—that is, the "swift" appearance of individuals as political actors and the "gradual" construction of political intersubjectivities (11–19). [...]the book explores the relationship between democratic politics and challenges to neoliberal capitalism. The protests were unprecedented in scale and intensity, and for half a year the world watched as Hong Kong citizens fought increasingly militarized police with Molotov cocktails, homemade bows and arrows, and as ever, umbrella shields. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the movement has largely come to a halt, and in 2020 Beijing passed a national security law that to many commentators served as the nail on the coffin for the city's democratic aspirations.

The article shows that in 1953–1956, Nikita Khrushchev and other members of the KPSU Central Committee tried to regulate ideological and aesthetic diversity in Soviet literature. During these years, horizontal connections began to resume between writers and critics who held different views, but shared hopes for the regeneration of literature. This process of spontaneous social organization became especially intense in the period between the Twentieth Congress of the KPSU and the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The article offers a contextualized interpretation of a previously unknown archival document – minutes of the meeting of the Bureau of the Section for the Literature of Children and Youth of the Soviet Writers’ Union (December 7, 1956). The minutes provide a telling snapshot of the expectations and hopes of both conservative and conformist groups of Soviet writers. They show that these were not only “liberals” but also their opponents in the section who in 1956 considered some form of institutionalization of the competition between those more conservative and those more critical toward the regime groups in Soviet literature. Yet, institutional diversification took another path. Aware of the revolutionary role of the Petőfi Circle organized by writers in Hungary, Khrushchev and other party leaders were determined to establish firm control over the literary sphere in the Soviet Union. Hence any independent initiative was immediately classified negatively as a subversive “group.” In the Soviet political rhetoric of the 1930s–1950s, this word stigmatized any spontaneous associations. The label was actively used during the 1957 discussion of the Literary Moscow almanac, and the following June 1957, the KPSU Central Committee’s plenum that exposed the “anti-party group” of Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov, and Shepilov. To be able to control the excessively “liberal” organization of Moscow writers in the situation of an intensified struggle for power among the Soviet leadership, in 1957–1958 Khrushchev initiated the creation of the Union of Russian Writers (RSFSR Writers’ Union) led by Russian ethnonationalists. This move forced them into strategic alliance with Stalinists of the old establishment, and thus turned the potentially dangerous collision between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists into a polemic between pro-imperial nationalists and “liberals.” With some modification, this conflict continued to the end of the Soviet period.

Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity has multiple meanings. For some, it demonstrates Ukrainians' ability to organize themselves, fight a corrupt police regime, and champion the rule of law, human rights, and freedom from imperial Russian rule. For others, the presence of the Far Right among its leaders symbolizes the return of the most aggressive, violent features of Ukrainian nationalism. The specter of extreme right-wing nationalism has haunted Ukraine's revolution since late November 2013, when students and young professionals began demonstrating on Kyiv's Independence Square, die Maidan, to protest President Viktor Yanukovych's decision on 21 November not to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union the following week. Yanukovych's government hinted that further aid from Russia, and possibly membership in its Eurasian Customs Union, would substitute for EU assistance. Thus it looked as if Ukraine was about to lose its sovereignty and become a satellite state of Russia or part of a resurrected Soviet Union. Such developments encouraged activists in right-wing organizations to take the lead. Already in the first days of protests, there appeared the black-and-red flags of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), first adopted by Stepan Bandera's wing of the organization during World War II. Far-right political chants such as "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!" "Ukraine above all!" and "Glory to the nation! Death to the enemies!" resounded on the Maidan. Students from the right-wing political party Svoboda (Freedom) were among those mobilizing protesters around these slogans. These nationalist-motivated calls for justice grew fiercer after Ukraine's Berkut security forces beat up demonstrators and drove out the Euromaidan on the early morning hours of 30 November. "Glory to Ukraine!" became a rallying call the next day, 1 December, as people in Kyiv in the tens and hundreds of thousands took to the streets and demanded not just closer relations with Europe but justice against the police, the resignation of Ukraine's government, and even the ouster and imprisonment of their own president. Over the next three months, symbols attributed to the Far Right appeared whenever violence flared up. After Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Rada, passed the so-called Dictatorship Laws on 16 January 2014, clashes broke out on Kyiv's Hrushevsky Street between protesters and security forces. A far-right organization connected with the Maidans self-defense units, Right Sector, took credit for sparking the scenes of flying Molotov cocktails, burned-out buses, and flaming tires that spread across the world's media. When a peaceful march to the Supreme Rada on 18 February turned into nearly three days of bloodshed, resulting in at least 100 dead, the chant, "Glory to the nation! Death to the enemies!" took on special meaning. It resounded in die makeshift morgue in the Hotel Ukraine, up the hill from the Maidan, after doctors and priests had given the dead their last rites. When President Yanukovych fled Ukraine on 21 February, it looked to some as though the forces of the Far Right had triumphed in Kyiv and were threatening the country's future. Right Sector took over the Hotel Dnipro and some shops on Kyiv's main street, Khreshchatyk. Members of parliament from Svoboda became government ministers. Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and uprisings orchestrated and managed by Russian military intelligence in the Donbas region prompted violence between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian forces that led to up to 40 pro-Russian activists being killed in a fire in the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May. Right Sector activists allegedly claimed credit for die act, diough the details remain murky. (1) When armed men, some of diem from Russian military intelligence, seized administrative buildings in die Donbas, volunteer battalions, some of them led by people of die Far Right, took up arms and helped die government wage its war against pro-Russian forces, known as the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO). …

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Midway through the 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into the "relaxing room" of her plantation home and turns off the television set that her daughter Skeeter and two members of the domestic staff have been watching. "Don't encourage them like that!" she yells at her daughter, as "the help" rush from the room. The futility of the outburst is matched only by its historical improbability. By the late spring or early summer of 1963 (when the scene takes place), turning off a news clip of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers urging black residents in Jackson to remain steadfast in their boycott of racist merchants would have done little, if anything, to discourage most black viewers, whose support of the protest had been operating below their employers' racial radar for months. Moreover, the offending clip probably never aired in Jackson (at least while Evers was alive). Evers had not been invisible on local TV screens in the spring of 1963, however. On May 20, he had delivered a 17-minute televised speech to Jackson and much of Mississippi that described the indignities and injustices experienced every day by black Mississippians, and had assured his audience that "the years of change are upon us." Granting local airtime to a black leader in Mississippi was unprecedented; that the time had been allocated by local NBC affiliate WLBT--a station that since its first broadcast in 1953 had censored, selectively edited, and often simply refused to broadcast programs that it deemed "integrationist"--defied white and black belief. The station, however, had little choice in the matter. For six years, Evers had petitioned the FCC and WLBT to provide airtime for opposing arguments to segregationist programming and news coverage. Under investigation by the FCC in 1963 for its role in instigating violence during James Meredith's desegregation of Ole Miss a year earlier, WLBT finally acceded to local and federal pressure and allowed Evers to respond on-camera to Mayor Allen Thompson's previously televised defense of Jackson's race relations. "It seems probable," Adam Nossiter has written, "that until his final month, Evers was an obscure figure to a majority of white Mississippians." Nossiter, who covered the retrial of Evers's killer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the 1990s, believes that at the moment Evers stepped in front of the WLBT camera on May 20, 1963, he "entered a new, ultimately fatal zone of notoriety." Nine days later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home; less than two weeks after that, he was murdered in his carport, shot in the back by Greenwood, Mississippi Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. The broadcast may or may not have prompted Beckwith to track down and silence Evers, but in the long-running debate about the effects of the speech one fact remains undisputed: for the first time in Mississippi, a black man had formally and directly addressed a white audience on local television. Some members of the intended audience--the "silent, responsible citizens of the white community," as Evers called them--no doubt found themselves compelled to follow the logic of the speech and, possibly, to question the moral and legal premises of segregation; others found the image of Evers standing behind a podium so provocative they demanded that the station stop the broadcast as soon as it began and even threatened, as one viewer did, "to come up there and take [Evers] off." Evers knew well that a public appeal to the sympathy and reason of white Mississippians could inflame die-hard segregationists--that it could, in fact, "encourage" all manner of white action. It was this encouragement--of white, not black, listeners--that appeared on Jackson television screens in May 1963. (1) Recordings of Evers's historic address have not surfaced (as of this writing), which may explain a reliance by The Help's co-writer and director Tate Taylor on a widely used archival excerpt of a different event. …

Ikh bylo tol'ko dvadtsat' vosem', A za spinoi byla Moskva! [There were only 28 of them, But they had their backs to Moscow!] -- Song of the 28 Panfilov Soldiers (1) Every Soviet citizen got to hear about the feat of the 28 men from the 316th Rifle Division commanded by General Ivan Panfilov. The first Soviet multi-volume academic history of the war presented their endeavor of 16 November 1941 in the following terms: A group of tank destroyers from the 1077th Rifle Regiment of the 316th Rifle Division accomplished an unprecedented feat at Dubosekovo Station: 28 heroes fought 50 enemy tanks. The enemy hoped to break through our defenses at this sector to the Volokolamsk Highway and [then] advance on Moscow.... The enemy employed 20 tanks.... At that moment, Company Commissar V. G. Klochkov came to the trenches of tank destroyers. "It is not that scary," he told the soldiers. "There is less than one tank per person." The courageous Panfilov men destroyed 14 tanks with hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and anti-tank rifles. The remaining tanks retreated. The soldiers barely had time to bandage their wounds before 30 more tanks attacked their position.... Commissar Klochkov told his soldiers the words that were later to become the slogan of all Moscow defenders: "Russia is vast, but there is nowhere to retreat--we have our backs to Moscow!" Severely wounded, the commissar threw himself under an enemy tank with several hand grenades and blew it up. This heroic battle lasted for four hours. The enemy lost 18 tanks and dozens of soldiers but failed to break through. (2) As a Russian author observed, "the news about the unprecedented feat at Dubosekovo Station spread all across the country; dozens of articles, brochures, songs, verses and poems were written about the courage and valor of the 28, and their famous story entered high-school and university textbooks." (3) Most of the information in this story is false. The described unit was regular infantry rather than tank destroyers. They belonged to the 1075th rather than the 1077th Rifle Regiment. The Germans did not consider the Volokolamsk Highway as a shortcut to Moscow; in fact they advanced across the highway because they planned no direct assault on Moscow. Instead they intended to envelop the Soviet capital from the north. There is no hard evidence that the famous 28 destroyed any German tanks. The units that opposed the German tank attack that day were far larger than a 28-man platoon: two companies of the 316th Rifle Division defended positions around Dubosekovo and Shiriaevo with about 120-40 soldiers each. It was a sergeant, rather than Commissar Klochkov, who commanded the majority of the 28 for most of the engagement. Klochkov never said the flamboyant phrases attributed to him, and it is unknown how and where he died during that day. Finally, 2 of the 28 had died two days before this action, and 1 did not participate in it. It is unknown how many of the 28 were killed or taken prisoner in this particular action, although it is clear that at least 6 of them survived the war, contrary to the Stalinist official version of this event, which claimed that all 28 died. These soldiers failed to stop the German offensive, and in the afternoon of 16 November, German units reached the positions they had intended when they compiled their schedule several days earlier. In 1948, the Military Prosecutor's Office conducted an investigation of the action at Dubosekovo and proved the falsity of the canonized account. The prosecutors summarized the outcome of their work: "The feat of the 28 Panfilov Guards described in the media is the invention of the reporter Koroteev, [and of] Ortenberg, editor of the Krasnaia zvezda newspaper, and especially of Krivitskii, literary secretary of the newspaper." (4) When the prosecutors passed this conclusion on to the Politburo, however, the Politburo chose to ignore it and kept the verdict classified, thus perpetuating the myth, which has survived until the present. …

Iren Andreeva, Chastnaia zhizn' pri sozializme: Otchet sovetskogo obyvatelia (Private Life under Socialism: The Account of an Ordinary Soviet Person). 344 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5867937386. Oleg Leibovich, V gorode M: Ocherki politicheskoi povsednevnosti sovetskoi provintsii v 40-50-khgg. (In the Town of M: Essays on Everyday Political Life in the Soviet Provinces in the 1940s and 1950s). 440 pp. Perm': Iiul'-media, 2009. ISBN-13 978-5881874087. The recent Soviet past is an attractive but also a difficult object of enquiry. On the one hand, it has clear historical boundaries and offers us plenty of material to work with. On the other hand, more than one living generation in Russia has a personal relationship to late Soviet history, which means that this period often becomes a function of collective memory and remains fluid and elusive. (1) Both of the works under review reflect this ambivalence of memory, even though at first glance they have little in common: one is a memoir of life in the capital, the other a scholarly monograph on the provinces. Nevertheless, even if their approaches and perspectives differ, both authors attempt to describe everyday life, its official and private niches, its behaviors and practices, the functioning of its political and economic institutions, and the world of the provincial and metropolitan nomenklatura. Oleg Leibovich's study of the late Stalin and early Thaw eras makes an important contribution to what has been called "one of the most significant historiographical achievements of recent years--the investigation of late Stalinism in its provincial dimension." (2) Iren Andreeva seeks to make a contribution to the wave of memoirs published in recent years on the Thaw and "stagnation" eras. (3) As a qualified art historian, a theoretician of Soviet fashion, and a former people's deputy of the USSR, Andreeva took up the pen, as she put it herself, to "protect [her]self from the onset of irrelevance" (15). She constructs her narrative around various cornerstones in the life of a Soviet person--car, apartment, dacha, clothes, and work--adding at the same time some dimensions of foreign travel and political career that were not typical for Soviet people. Her professional involvement in Soviet haute couture, which placed her at some remove from the ordinary consumer, as well as various aspects of her personal life, mean that she cannot really justify her claim to the status of "Soviet everyman." She spent time with her family in the zone of Soviet occupation in East Germany and consequently had unusual access to "trophy" items; she was related to a member of the Politburo and to the woman who founded the institute in which she began her career; and she traveled abroad regularly. Andreeva makes frequent and somehow over-emphatic references to her irreverent reaction to the "ignoramuses and boors" among the bosses and the "contempt for political blather" that she felt from early on (220), but she has evidently never been in open conflict with the system and enjoyed all the benefits it offered. Many episodes from the book, as well as its very style, allow us to classify Andreeva as one of the types of ex-Soviet "remembering subject" identified by Catriona Kelly and Il'ia Kalinin: as one of those people who "make fun of familiar details of the Soviet past in order to show that they are not a sovok." (4) After her vivid account of the paradoxes of the Soviet fashion world and of (female) strategies of obtaining goods under conditions of chronic shortage, Andreeva's recollections of her time as a people's deputy seem rather schematic. Leibovich's subject is Molotov (previously and subsequently Perm') oblast, which existed on the map of the USSR for a mere 19 years (1938-57). Put together hastily from a variety of territories, it was seen by officials in Moscow as a "place to collect undesirable elements, a kind of large camp without barbed wire" (31). …

Let's start with the numbers. On May 28, an estimated twenty thousand people flooded into downtown Santiago and marched on the presidential palace to protest the HidroAysen project, a plan to build a series of hydroelectric dams on two of Chilean Patagonia's most iconic rivers. The peaceful protest was a welcome relief to organizers after a fortythousand- person march in Santiago a week earlier led to fifty-three arrests and outbreaks of violence. The images of demonstrators launching Molotov cocktails and destroying private property had been broadcast alongside footage of riot police confronting marchers. Since May, protesters and police have clashed in at least twenty-seven cities. At this writing in early summer, there are few signs that the nationwide movement is waning, as protests continue to attract thousands of Chileans to the streets. Meanwhile, the administration of President Sebastian Pinera has voiced support for the estimated $10 billion project, a private venture headed by two private-sector partners, a European conglomerate and a Chilean electricity giant. Though HidroAysen was temporarily stalled by a Court of Appeals ruling, the Chilean Supreme Court recently found in favor of HidroAysen, and the project continues to move forward. Perhaps the most telling and relevant statistics of all: 74 percent of Chilean citizens oppose HidroAysen, yet 72 percent believe that the project will be completed anyway, according to a May 2011 survey.

When Nazi Germany invaded the expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that the Soviet media would report in a substantial way the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, known today as the Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that "antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism," and added that "brotherly feelings for the Jewish people" would "define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur." The Soviet press also covered the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a "massacre of a defenseless Jewish population." That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, the first Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany. (1) But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in the people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the war with Germany, what mattered to him were the Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented the exploitation of the occupied regions. (2) Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of "treason," for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in the public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit the sites of the murder of the Jews of Kharkiv in December 1943. "Those killed were the less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, the part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity," he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: "Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with the Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, kept his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor." (3) When to the suspicion one adds Stalin's personal, if usually hidden antipathy to Jews, (4) the likelihood that readers of the main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that the Nazis were targeting Jews in particular seems slim indeed. Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews, this never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about the three meetings in Moscow of "representatives of the Jewish people" and various articles by II'ia Grigor'evich Ehrenburg mentioned the Jews as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as the present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1.7 million Jews had been gassed to death at Birkenau. All investigations of the presentation of Nazi mass murder by the Soviet media during the war with Nazi Germany focus on the campaign known today as the Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet lift, emphasized a total or near-total silence about the mass murder of the Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that "the very fact of the wholesale extermination of Jews" was "shrouded in silence" and "kept out of the Soviet newspapers." (5) Gennadii Vasil'evich Kostyrchenko wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin's Secret Policy, 2003) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about the "Hitlerite genocide of the [Soviet] Jews. …

“WE ARE living in an age in which all roads lead to communism,” Molotov proclaimed confidently in 1947. Kaganovich re-echoed him in 1955 by maintaining that “if the nineteenth century was a century of capitalism, the twentieth century is a century of the triumph of socialism and communism.” This serenely optimistic viewpoint sees the victory of communism as all-inclusive, leaving no room for any mutual adjustment between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, the First Secretary of the CPSU, Nikita S. Khrushchev, has repeatedly made it clear that the concept of coexistence relates simply to a transitory phase prior to the final assertion of the Communist mode of life over the entire globe. It would be idle to dismiss these claims as mere expressions of blind fanaticism, for whatever the element of fanaticism in the thinking of Soviet leaders may be, such proclamations of faith in final victory are also supported by observation of recent trends in world affairs.