Concepts of division and unity and their practical implications have had special resonance and meaning in Russian culture for centuries. Russia under the Tsars and Soviets comprised many nationalities and social groupings, and by construction the country or empire was and is inclusive. Yet for much of its history political leaders have emphasized borders, boundaries, and divisions, and society has been embroiled in the related questions of inclusion and exclusion. Russia’s cultural leaders have assigned people, works, and even words into the categories of included and excluded: at times emphasizing the merits of uniqueness and separation and at others arguing for dismantling of barriers. Conservative polemicists of the nineteenth century urged the preservation of Russia’s special qualities and cautioned against the political risk and moral decay associated with modernity and exposure to the wider world. Others tended to favor inclusion, integration, and mobility rather than exclusion, separation, and stasis. Debates over inclusion and boundaries resonated throughout Russian cultural history into the Soviet period and continue to feature in new forms today.

The roundtable will review and discuss cultural manifestations of inclusion and exclusion and their changing contexts throughout the periods of Imperial, Soviet, and post- Soviet history. The participants will briefly position the concepts within their own work, after which the group will consider the topic more widely and across the perspectives presented in the opening statements. The five-minute initial presentations will be as follows:

• Yelizaveta Raykhlina will discuss long-ignored and often disdained commercial periodicals in early nineteen-century Russia and the insights they give into the values and identities of Russia's expanding middle classes.
• Jeffrey Brooks will develop the concept of an inclusive cultural ecosystem in which participants interacted to create an evolving and extraordinarily rich dynamic spanning a century roughly from 1850 to 1950.
• Michael David-Fox will explain how the concept of kul’turnost’, widely understood in the late Imperial and early Soviet decades as a condition of inclusion and acceptability defined through behavioral norms became deployed against German Kultur on the Eastern Front in WWII.
• Eleanora Gilburd will discuss the work of two Soviet lexicographers that resulted in the classification of previously accepted terms as substandard or antiquated speech, the concealment or excision of loanwords, and the resulting (by the 1950s) reduction in active vocabulary and narrowing of the range of metaphorical meanings.
• Dina Khapaeva will explore the concept of a “society of orders” (soslovnoe obshchestvo) in post-Soviet neo-Eurasian ideology developed by polemicists Alexander Dugun and Mikhail Iuriev and writers such as Sergei Luk’ianenko. The concept is exclusionary and one of Russian exceptionalism that argues the merits of a new Russian Middle Ages. She will consider the content of this ideology and why it appeals in Putin’s Russia.
• Richard Wortman will chair.