Dear Readers,

On behalf of the editorial board, I am happy to announce the fifteenth volume of the UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies. This year we present papers written by undergraduate students at institutions across the United States (University of Florida, University of Georgia, and Oberlin College), United Kingdom (University of St. Andrews), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Banja Luka)—as well as two papers from UCLA, our home here in Los Angeles.

The purpose of this publication is to showcase the achievements of those undergraduate students who use their secondary language skills (whether in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, or Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian) for scholarly inquiry. We believe that early career researchers like the writers featured in this issue will become leaders in the field in the near and distant future. This is one of many reasons why it has been a great pleasure to read and engage with the work of undergraduate writers in these fields while serving as managing editor of this journal for the past three years.

In those three years, I have noted an increasing interest in Russia’s legacy of colonialism in the papers submitted to the journal. This year is no exception; of the six papers included in this year’s journal, four address the relationship between “Russia” (whether the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, or post-Soviet Russian Federation) and the “other,” both near (the Caucasus and Central Asia) and far (Latin America).

Gemma Taylor (UCLA) examines the subtleties of Russian colonialism as developed and reinforced in Russian Romantic prose in “Foreign Foundations of Russian Nationhood: The Development of the Expansionist Nation in Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time.” The next paper, “Imperial Perspectives and the Ethnic Other: The Russian “Prisoner Myth” in Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) and Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s Checkpoint (1999)” by Elodie Phillips (University of St. Andrews) presents the reader with a post-Soviet parallel to Ms. Taylor’s article, addressing the reinterpretation of nineteenth-century colonial discourse during the First and Second Chechen Wars. The third article, “Soviet Russia’s Search for Its Soul: Andrei Platonov, Korenizatsiia, and the Legacy of Empire” by Jarrett Hill (University of Florida) takes us from the Caucasus Mountains to Central Asia. Hill teases out the contradictions of Russian and non-Russian identity as presented by another Russian writer, Andrei Platonov, in his little-studied novel Soul.

With our fourth article, we move from film and literature to political science. Natalie Navarette (University of Georgia), writing well before the Russian war on Ukraine that began in February 2022, presents a clear-eyed view of Russia’s global expansion of its soft power in “Russian Holistic Investment in Latin America: A Counter to the Security Interests of the United States.” Joseph Matveyenko (UCLA), who is published here for the second year running, contributed the next article, titled “Post-Soviet Armenian Elections: A Political History of Manipulation, Regime Change, and Democratization.” This concise article presents new research on Armenian election patterns, and is based on statistical material now removed from the Armenian government’s website.

The final article, “The Conflict between Law and Tradition: The Case of Irig’s Serbs during the 1795–1796 Plague,” gives us an eerie look at the persistence of human nature (particularly human resistance to change) during a devastating outbreak of disease—a lesson for our time indeed. This article was contributed by Danilo Bosnić, Vuk Mandić, and Djordje Milić of the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This year we also include, for the first time, a book review. Michael Plevin (Oberlin College), in his review of the 2010 monograph "Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Problem from Stalin to Khrushchev" by Mark B. Smith, deftly places the book in the critical conversation among the giants of post-Soviet social history. We are glad to showcase this work and hope to see more such reviews submitted to the journal.

We have many people to thank for making this journal possible. As always, we heartily congratulate the contributors on their work, and we continue to welcome paper submissions from undergraduate students interested in East/Central Europe and Eurasia. We remember Professor Olga Kagan, whose dedication to undergraduate research led to the creation of the California Undergraduate Conference on Slavic and East/Central European Studies and, subsequently, this journal, which originated as the conference proceedings from that event.

Additionally, we express our sincere thanks to: Yelena Furman, the undergraduate mentor at the UCLA Department of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Languages; Susan Bauckus, our online editor at the Center for World Languages and Ryan Fogle, webmaster at the UCLA International Institute); and our peer review board, particularly longtime peer reviewer Kevin Gatter, who has been a great contributor to the political science side of our publication for several years now. Thank you to all of them!!

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, whose financial contributions made this project a reality.

Lydia Roberts
Managing Editor