Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women‐Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia

Over the course of the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945, over 800,000 Soviet women volunteered to the front and served in the field army. Among them were thousands of snipers, riflewomen, machine‐gunners and mortar women. Thousands of women were trained to serve as commanders and commissars of rifle, machine‐gun and mortar subdivisions. Women also mastered fighter planes, dive bombers and night bombers as well as light and heavy tanks. I pursue three questions in the article: how did this women's entitlement to fighting become thinkable in the first place, acceptable in the second, and thirdly, realisable in Soviet society? I argue that the conceivability of women's compatibility with combat, war and violence was a product of the radical undoing of traditional gender differences that Stalinist society underwent in the 1930s. By the late 1930s, combat duty in wartime became an acknowledged option for women in Stalinist political culture. The construction of alternative gender personalities enjoyed both public articulation in press and military expert approval. The alternative femininity encompassed and redefined the traditionally incompatible qualities: maternal love and military violence, feminine charm.     

Han China in Central Asia

A.F.P. Hulsewé. China in Central Asia, the Early Stage: 125 B.C.-A.D. 23. An annotated translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, with an Introduction by M.A.N. Loewe. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979, Pp. viii, 273, map. (70 guilders)     

中亚的地缘政治--历史和现实

一个多世纪以来 ,中亚的地缘政治格局和作用不断发生变化 ,并在不同时期以不同的方式影响着中国。“9·11”事件之后 ,中亚的地缘政治形势变得更加复杂 ,大国的、区域的、国际的利益交织在一起 ,成为全球关注的热点。阿富汗反恐战争的结束为中亚国家提供了国际合作的新通道 ,尽管中亚在国际地缘政治格局中的作用将越来越重要 ,但它不会成为新的地缘政治“核心地区”。     

Regionalism, Iran and Central Asia

A combination of revolutionary ideology, trouble with neighbours and location in the Middle East, where regionalism is moribund, make the Islamic Republic of Iran an unlikely enthusiast for regional coalition-building. The impetus towards regionalism derives first and foremost from geopolitical considerations–the need to counter the US government's efforts to isolate Iran–but also from domestic dynamics; the regionalist discourse has lent an acceptable ideological colouring to an increasingly pragmatic foreign policy.
Iran's neighbours, however, share neither its geopolitical predicament nor its ideological complexion, and the actual implementation of Tehran's regionalist agenda has been based on functional cooperation, rather than on geopolitics and ideology. Trade promotion and the development of transport infrastructure to link Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and the Persian Gulf have been the most appealing areas for northern neighbours, and dominate the agenda of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Iran's main vehicle for multilateral cooperaton with Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Tehran's 1992 proposal for a Caspian Sea Cooperation Organization has so far been stymied by the littoral states' well-publicized disagreements over the sea's legal status, though their numerous multilateral meetings and handful of agreements suggest that the idea has potential in the medium–term.
Notwithstanding the meagre tangible results to date, Iran's tilt towards regionalism has had a positive impact. It has helped to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of its neighbours, contributed to the evolution of policy debate at home and prepared the ground for future multilateral cooperation.