Dear Colleagues,

The latest issue of Ab Imperio (2/2024) is now available at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53193

The “Methodology and Theory” section features a transcript of the online conversation of a popular Ukrainian YouTube group of so-called Honey Badgers who promote a sustained debate about the future of Ukraine. Their conversation is extremely relevant for modern academia, in remarkable contrast to a general conservative turn in studies of the post-Soviet region.

The “History” section features three articles that transcend binary opposition between the holistic ideal of a moral community and the compartmentalization of reality by social engineering. Olga Linkiewicz tells the story of Polish social scientists during the interwar period, showing that they, not the Sanacja government, developed measures of rational social engineering and demanded their implementation. Arailym Musagalieva addresses the rise of forced labor camps in the USSR on the example of mostly agricultural Karlag in Central Kazakhstan and the displacement of the local population it brought about, revealing a fundamental gap between Soviet dreams of social engineering and the actual inability to implement it productively. Andy Bruno and Viktor Pál compare the environmental policies in socialist Hungary and the USSR (on the example of the Kola region) and speak of “socialist environmental holism” understood as an entangled and comprehensive treatment of all the natural resources, including human populations.

The “ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies” section continues the series “New Curricula for New Histories of Northern Eurasia” by publishing Zukhra Kasimova’s syllabus on Soviet history from a multiethnic perspective.

The “Archive” section commemorates a literary scholar and student of Russian culture, Alla Zeide (1941–2024), by publishing a fragment of her diary from January 1990 as a self-portrait and a snapshot of a generation and a social type.