“One of Our Own among Strangers and a Stranger among Our Own”: The Surprising Destiny of General of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army Fedor Makhin

This article is devoted to the remarkable fate of the Russian officer and Yugoslav general Fyodor Makhin. He was born in the family of an Orenburg Cossack exiled to penal servitude, later returned home, managed to get a brilliant education, including graduating from Nicholas military Academy, participated in the First World War, and in 1918 was embedded in the Red Army as a secret agent of the Socialist Revolutionary Party and became commander of the 2nd Soviet Army on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1918, while carrying out a secret mission, he surrendered Ufa to the anti-Bolshevik forces, went over to their side, and then became one of the military leaders of the People’s Army of the Committee of Members of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly. Later, without recognizing the military coup in Omsk, as a result of which Admiral Alexander Kolchak came to power in the anti-Bolshevik camp, Makhin at the end of 1918 took part in a conspiracy of Socialist Revolutionaries and adherents of the Bashkir national movement against Kolchak and his supporter Orenburg Cossack chieftain Alexander Dutov, but the conspiracy was revealedy. Makhin was sent abroad. After that, he continued his work as a Socialist-Revolutionary activist. In particular, he supported the rebellious sailors in Kronstadt in 1921. Later, he lived in Prague and Belgrade, focusing on working for Zemgor (United Committee of the Zemstvo and City Unions), which helped Russian emigrants. In the early 1930s, Makhin was recruited by Soviet intelligence as a secret agent. By the same period, he was actively supporting the USSR in the event of a possible war (despite the fact that many military emigrants, on the contrary, were waiting for a new war, as a result of which they hoped external enemies would eliminate the communist regime). Makhin later joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, he participated in the resistance. He joined the partisans of Iosip Broz Tito and became one of his close associates, receiving the rank of lieutenant General of the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. In 1944, a quarter of a century after he left his homeland, Makhin visited the USSR with the Yugoslav delegation. At the end of his military career in Yugoslavia, he served as a head of the Yugoslav Military Archives. Makhin passed away in June 1945, shortly after the victory of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War and was considered one of the Yugoslav heroes. However, due to political changes, his name was forgotten.

Truce Becomes Peace: Resolution of the International Status on Trieste

Trieste was the first flashpoint of the Cold War, yet it did not ignite a major interstate war involving the victorious great powers and their clients. Promised to Italy as a reward for joining the Entente in the First World War, the ethnically mixed city and immediate hinterland on the Adriatic Sea were the subject of an interbellum territorial dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia. The defeat of Italy and liberation of Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War saw the dispute flare up as British, American, and Yugoslav Partisan units occupied parts of the territory. Soviet, British, American, Yugoslav and Italian geostrategic calculations are analyzed from a Realist perspective together with insights drawn from Nir Eisikovits’s theory of truces to explain the resolution of the struggle that today leaves the city of Trieste as sovereign Italian territory and most of its hinterland as Slovene sovereign territory. Where decisions in Belgrade and Rome were motivated by nationalism and ideology, those in Moscow, London, and Washington reflected their global geostrategies. The period between the contested occupation in 1945 and the effective though not final resolution of its international status in 1953 allowed the five states involved to clarify their relationships with one another. Those years saw Italy join NATO, while Yugoslavia was alienated from the Soviet Union. Soviet willingness to sacrifice the Yugoslav claim for Trieste left the latter unwilling to initiate armed hostilities with the Western Allies. Italian nationalist anxiety over the threatened loss of Trieste also helped non-communist parties prevail in Italian elections. The Stalin-Tito split saw Yugoslavia carve out a new identity in the global politics separate from the Soviet Union. Crucial to resolving the dispute was the creation of the stillborn Free Territory of Trieste (FTT), a failed internationalization of a city and region, that nonetheless succeeded in preventing war. The FTT worked not as a compromise structure for urban governance, but instead as a truce, allowing the passage of time to dramatically weaken the bases for armed conflict. Thus, an imperfect peace in one region spared the peoples of a ravaged continent further war.

Revisiting Soviet Partisan Warfare: Historiographical Challenges and New Perspectives

This review article analyses the evolution of the historiography on Soviet partisan warfare, highlighting shifts in interpretive frameworks, methodological debates, and key controversies. It situates the partisan movement within broader discourses on totalitarianism, genocide, and collaboration. The tendency to portray Soviet partisans as provocateurs of Nazi terror is critically examined, particularly within revisionist scholarship. Special attention is given to the intersections of partisan warfare and Holocaust studies, including the ambivalent role of partisans in Jewish survival and instances of anti-Semitism in some units. The article also reassesses the impact of German counterinsurgency operations and the ideological foundations of the violence they employed. Ultimately, it argues that viewing civilians solely as victims of two totalitarian regimes, or partisans solely as instruments of Stalinism, is overly simplistic and fails to capture the complex realities of Soviet partisan warfare and its contested memory in Eastern Europe. By offering this nuanced perspective, the review moves beyond Cold War historiography and opens the floor to new comparative approaches and avenues of research in Eastern European history.

The Transformation of the Image of the WWII Enemy in the Czech Context Through the Agency of Military Reenactors 1

The symbolic production of historical meaning at the native level of actors, in relation to past wars and armed conflicts, is one of the areas where research in the fields of post-positivist oral history and reenactment studies overlap. A recent academic 11. The research included human participants, who all provided an appropriate informed consent in written form. The research respects the Code of Ethics of Charles University. oral history project 22. The project in question was the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) research project 22-07058S, “History and culture of contemporary Czech military re-enactment in an interdisciplinary perspective,” implemented (2022–2024) at Charles University, Faculty of Humanities. The author of the article was a principal investigator of the project. concentrated on analyzing the various strategies used by certain Czech military reenactors of WWII Axis-German forces to legitimize their reenactment brand within the reenactment community. This research note analyzes and interprets the specific and sustained efforts of many of these reenactors, whose reenactments aim to produce historical meaning and are designed to influence the interpretation of WWII history in Czech lands, primarily the war’s dramatic and extremely violent ending in May 1945, which still represents a contested past in Czech society. These reenactors have focused primarily on the elaborate semantic construction of their performances, targeted at gradually transforming the cultural content of the image of the WWII enemy by producing representations that portray Axis-German armed forces personnel and Third Reich citizens as victims of war – rather than perpetrators – primarily in the context of the large-scale revenge atrocities committed by the victors between May and August 1945. In parallel, these reenactors engaged in the construction of the increasingly negative image of WWII Soviet armed forces, the eastern Czechoslovak WWII army in exile, and Czechoslovak May 1945 revolutionary paramilitaries. This research note attempts to provide an interpretative understanding of the process of historical transformation of the cultural content involved, including the success of reenactors in establishing effective partnerships with various governmental and state bodies. It also points out the potential social consequences of this transformative process. The research included human participants, who all provided an appropriate informed consent in written form. The research respects the Code of Ethics of Charles University. The project in question was the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) research project 22-07058S, “History and culture of contemporary Czech military re-enactment in an interdisciplinary perspective,” implemented (2022–2024) at Charles University, Faculty of Humanities. The author of the article was a principal investigator of the project.

Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War Andrew Monaghan, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025, 324 pp. ISBN 978-1-5261-6451-3 (hardback); 978-1-5261-6452-0 (paperback).

Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War Andrew Monaghan, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025. Pp. 348; biblio., index. £14.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781526164520.

The UK Ministry of Defence, “Low-Carbon Warfare,” and the struggle to construct novel sociotechnical imaginaries of future war

Why do defence organizations take some imaginaries of future warfare more seriously than others? In this article, we use the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries” to chart the struggle of a vanguard group of officials within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) to articulate a new vision of “low-carbon warfare” as a response to looming climate transition risks. Our investigation draws on official government documents published since 2018, as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with MoD officials and armed forces between June and October 2023. We find that, despite some progress towards discursively, institutionally and materially embedding a new sociotechnical imaginary of low-carbon warfare within the MoD, significant barriers remain. Our findings emphasize the labor and the investment that is still required to embed new visions of low-carbon warfare in policy-impactful ways. More generally, our findings encourage greater attention to the sociotechnical politics that informs how we think about future war.

Infrastructural entanglement and cloud hyperscalers in contemporary warfare: Insights from Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

The new front lines of warfare are being built on private clouds. This article argues that state dependence on cloud hyperscalers is reshaping the foundations of military-industrial power. Drawing on theories of platform capitalism and asymmetrical interdependence, it develops the concept of infrastructural entanglement to capture how sovereign military and civilian operations have become embedded within privately governed digital systems. The argument unfolds through three wartime contexts: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022), the Israel–Hamas conflict (2023), and a potential cross-Strait crisis involving Taiwan. Ukraine’s rapid cloud migration, Israel’s use of hyperscaler analytics on the battlefield, and Taiwan’s anticipatory offshore data relocation each reveal how hyperscalers now mediate command, coordination, and resilience. Their infrastructures not only enable combat effectiveness but also extend commercial governance into the core of defense, redefining autonomy and sovereignty in ways that make control over war increasingly dependent on infrastructures the state does not own.

War economy vs European Silicon Valley? The EU's competing sociotechnical imaginaries of defence innovation and industry

The war in Ukraine and the US administration's growing disengagement from European security have led to a paradigm shift in European defence. While contestation and negotiation about strategic priorities are inevitable, some of this division emerges from competing visions about the future of European defence: one focusing on a industrialised, war economy-type of rearmament, and one focusing on new, disruptive technologies, embracing dual-use promises and dilemmas. What happens when different sociotechnical imaginaries compete while urgent decisions need to be taken to reshape the future? The article examines the contestation process to analyse the European defence industrial and technological developments since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. We argue that contestations about European defence's socio-technical future take place on three main dimensions: time, financing, and ontology—crystalizing two main different visions. These visions are not mutually exclusive but they lead to different public policy solutions, and therefore understanding what they rest upon is fundamental. Theoretically, we contribute to the sociotechnical imaginary literature by analysing how sociotechnical imaginaries retain analytical utility in moments of crisis.

Russian roulette revisited: Does a limited nuclear strike constitute a winning strategy?

Russia has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons repeatedly in its war on Ukraine to intimidate and break the cohesion of NATO. Does such a strike potentially constitute a winning strategy? This article addresses this question via four waves of vignette-based survey experiments, two prior and two post Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in Germany and the United States, two critical NATO members with diverse cultural sensibilities. Contrary to our expectation, we find that public attitudes in both countries are remarkably similar and favor in the case of a Russian tactical nuclear strike not a conciliatory but a retaliatory NATO response. Moreover, public attitudes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have grown even more hawkish.