bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sex Discrimination, Commuting, and the Role of Women in Rumanian Development
Authors: Moskoff William
Published: April 2006

When the Communist Party took power in Rumania in 1944, it inherited a poor, agrarian society. In 1950, before the advent of planning, three-fourths of Rumania's labor force was still in agriculture; only 12 percent of the labor force was in the industrial sector. Per capita income for the country as a whole was the equivalent of thirty dollars and in agriculture it was close to twenty dollars. The new regime did not have to search very far for a general development model. It adopted the Soviet strategy of rapid economic growth through the priority development of heavy industry. Women have played a key role in this process; indeed, it may be argued that they form the linchpin of Rumanian growth strategy.
Observations on the Value of Russia's Overseas Commerce with Great Britain during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Kaplan Herbert H.
Published: April 2006

In a previous publication I demonstrated the enormous value of Russia's overseas commodity exports to Great Britain's industrial development during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet when value is determined only by sheer volume of commodities, the determination, even when supported by impressive shipping data, might not be as convincing as a determination of value based on other factors, for example, on money value.

Scholars continue to argue over specific aspects of Anglo-Russian trade, over the accuracy of British commercial records, and over the degree of British involvement in Russian overseas commerce. This article addresses these issues and suggests that historians should not forget to look at the broad trends in the value of that trade when they debate specific aspects of the commercial relations between the two nations. Moreover, it seems to me that value comprehended in English pounds sterling or Russian rubles would further demonstrate the significance of Russia's overseas commodity trade to Great Britain, since such a demonstration would rest, as it were, on a surer foundation.
Politics and Professionalism in Soviet Journalism
Authors: Remington Thomas F.
Published: April 2006

The Western ideal of journalistic objectivity, influenced by liberal principles of the rulers' accountability to the ruled and the empirical skepticism of science, developed as an occupational response by journalists to marketplace competition among commercially or politically motivated suppliers of information and came to define the journalist's professional ethic of impartiality and independence. At the same time the term professionalism must be used advisedly. Journalism is a field with some but not all of the attributes of a profession. By the usual tests of the freedom of the practitioners to govern entry and exit from the field, to possess an exclusive right to carry on their trade, and to set the standards of performance, journalists are not as autonomous as, for example, physicians and attorneys. If they sought to close the shop to outsiders or to set standards of writing and reporting, they would be infringing upon the prerogatives of “management”—editors and publishers.
Vyshinskii, Krylenko, and the Shaping of the Soviet Legal Order
Authors: Huskey Eugene
Published: April 2006

Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.
Recent Hungarian Publications on Béla Kun
Authors: Pastor Peter
Published: April 2006

The nine years between 1979 and 1987 have been banner years for Hungarian publications on the history of the Hungarian Communist Revolution and its leader, Béla Kun. Occasioning the increased output were two anniversary dates: the sixtieth anniversary of the short-lived soviet republic in 1979 and the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of its leader, Béla Kun, in 1986.

Historical evaluations of Béla Kun's life started with a frenzy in 1979 when his political biography, written by György Borsányi, was published; they ended in a whimper with the publication of several Kun biographies in 1987. The controversial B61a Kun has been negatively judged not only by western historians and by Hungarian historians writing during the interwar years, but also by such prominent Russian revolutionaries as the Marxist Lev Trotskii and the anarchist Victor Serge. Both considered him an incompetent fool.
The Polish Party in Crisis, 1980–1982
Authors: Mason David S.
Published: April 2006

Over the last three years, the Polish United Workers’ Party has suffered a major crisis, the most substantial crisis of any Communist party in any Communist party state. The disintegration of the party was at least partly responsible for both the development of Solidarity in the summer of 1980 and the imposition of martial law in December 1981. The lack of trust in the party and its authoritarian and unrepresentative character led the workers to demand an institution more responsive to their own needs. But the growth of Solidarity during 1981 and the continuing disintegration and fragmentation of the party led the military to preempt the leading role of the party in 1982.

The collapse of the party in 1980 and 1981 was due to a number of factors. The party leadership had to bear the burden of the economic failures of the late 1970s and the consequent decline in the standard of living. The party itself had grown rapidly in size during that period, even though the influence of ordinary party members and local party organizations declined in the face of increasing tendencies toward centralization in the second half of the decade. This development led to problems of morale even within the party and to the growth of horizontal barriers between the membership and its leaders. The population at large was increasingly annoyed and disgusted with the failure of the party to improve the economic situation and to allow a more honest and open discussion of Poland's problems. The dissatisfaction was compounded by the widespread perception that the elite was increasingly looking after its own interests only and that benefits and privileges were accruing only to those in power.
Regionalism in a Systems Perspective: Explaining Elite Circulation in a Soviet Republic
Authors: Urban Michael E. , Reed Russell B.
Published: April 2006

In recent years two lines of research on USSR power and personnel have challenged some long-standing interpretations of the bases of Soviet political activity. In one line, historical studies dealing with the Stalin era have called into question the conventional emphasis, epitomized in the totalitarian model, of a single leader who commands an army of loyal apparatchiki and monopolizes the political agenda. A number of scholars have shown that chaos and confusion in personnel matters were the salient characteristics of this period, rather than a coordinated system for the recruitment, placement, and promotion of cadres—an image suggested by both the totalitarian model and Stalinist boasting of a “monolithic party,” a “unified state structure,” and so forth. In substantive policy, the actual results in implementing regime directives in the Stalin period regularly bore no better than the faintest resemblance to the announced policy. Absent the well-oiled machine highlighted in images of the “totalitarian party,” the regime's failure to control real policy results seems to have followed as a necessary consequence.
What is the Appearance of Divine Sophia?
Authors: Fiene Donald M.
Published: April 2006

Since the sixth century, the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodoxy has been Constantinople's Hagia Sophia Cathedral and, since the eleventh century, that of Russian Orthodoxy in two cathedrals dedicated to that same Holy Wisdom. Yet few Orthodox believers would recognize any icon of Sophia.

Vladimir Solov'ev, in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898), describes three visions of Sophia—each a somewhat indistinct image of feminine beauty, suffused in a “golden azure” light. Possibly, Solov′ev's perception of Sophia originated in an icon he saw as a child (his first vision having occurred when he was nine); the Orthodox church, however, found his almost fanatical obsession with the divine femininity of Sophia to be highly objectionable. In particular, the Sophiology based on Solov′ev's writings, and advanced after his death first by Pavel Florenskii and then by Sergei Bulgakov, was attacked by the church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bulgakov's idea of Sophia was seen by the church as “involving a fourth feminine hypostasis in the Holy Trinity” who acted as a “gnostic intermediary between God and the world”; it was condemned as heretical. The church's unyielding position in this controversy was (and is) that only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true Sophia—the Divine Wisdom of God—in accordance with 1 Cor. 1:23-31: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”
Building the "Soviet Detroit": The Construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927-1932
Authors: Schultz Kurt S.
Published: April 2006

Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the "Revolution from Above." Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.' The history of the massive automotive complex at Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in microcosm the many problems that often bedeviled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed up in Moscow.
Eros and Empire in Russian Literature about Georgia
Authors: Layton Susan
Published: April 2006

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said'sOrientalism.Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.
Sophia Parnok and the Writing of a Lesbian Poet's Life
Authors: Burgin Diana Lewis
Published: April 2006

In a footnote to her detailed commentary on the poems of Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) Sophia Poliakova states that the poet “did not make a secret of” her lesbianism and that “many of her poems are incomprehensible without knowledge of this […] extremely personal [fact].” Yet, in her otherwise excellent discussion of the poet's creative development, Poliakova does not treat the crucially important relationship between Parnok's affectional preference and her creativity which, in my opinion, played a central role in the refining of what the poet referred to as a “voice like mine.” Parnok's lesbian orientation was also partially responsible for the problems she encountered with Soviet censorship that effectively muffled her voice.
Society Transformed? Rethinking the Social Roots of Perestroika
Authors: Bahry Donna
Published: April 2006

Since the early days of perestroika, explanations for the Soviet opening to reform have emphasized the critical role of post-Stalin social transformation. Rising levels of education, changing patterns of social mobility and increasing urbanization seemed to create a new set of values and expectations by 1985 at odds with the Soviet system's traditional controls. If the initiative for restructuring came from the upper reaches of the political hierarchy, the pressures for change appeared to come from below. In contrast, assessments since the Soviet collapse have been more mixed. With the costs of reform mounting, calls for an “iron hand” and local resistance to market mechanisms suggest doubts about both capitalism and democracy: the results of Russia's April 1993 referendum seemed to be an endorsement of radical reform but only a minority of eligible voters actually approved Yeltsin's program; and survey data a few months earlier had indicated public support for a new coup in Moscow. Either the grand social and political transformation that unleashed perestroika was quickly reversed or its impact was exaggerated.
The Reinterpretation of History in German's Film My Friend Ivan Lapshin: Shifts in Center and Periphery
Authors: Rifkin Benjamin
Published: April 2006

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.
The Ideological Origins of “Stalinism” in Soviet Literature
Authors: Schull Joseph
Published: April 2006

More than anything else, ideology dominates in literature

Lunacharskii, 1923

Yes, we will stamp intellectuals, we will produce them, as in a factory.

Bukharin, 1925

The 1920s remain one of the most debated periods of Soviet history. Central to these debates is the issue of continuity between leninism and Stalinism, and the role of ideology under their respective leaderships. Supporters of “continuity” have usually emphasized the role of ideology as an intellectual bridge from the 1920s to the 1930s; conversely, those who question the continuity thesis usually point to major differences between leninism and Stalinism. I shall address this issue in relation to the history of attempts to organize writers in the early post-revolutionary period. My central claim is that Soviet discourse on writers and literature, articulated shortly after the revolution and elaborated during NEP, set a pattern which led to the absorption of writers into a unitary organizational apparatus and which culminated in the formation of the Writer's Union in April 1932. From 1917 to 1928, a clearly-articulated and largely consensual strategy of absorption of Soviet writers into a state-directed stream was spelt out well before Stalin was installed as the privileged speaker of “marxism-leninism.”
Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics
Authors: Hayden Robert M.
Published: April 2006

The results of the first free elections in Yugoslavia since World War II, held in 1990, set the stage for the civil war that broke out in summer and fall 1991. In those elections, strongly nationalist parties or coalitions won in each of the republics. In Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and to some extent in Macedonia, nationalists asserted anticommunism in order to bolster their appeal and their legitimacy internationally, while the new Socialist Party of Serbia (nee the League of Communists of Serbia) and the League of Communists in Montenegro effected Ceausescu-like transformations by turning nominally socialist parties into openly nationalist ones.
Russian Peasant Volunteers at the Beginning of the Crimean War
Authors: Moon David
Published: April 2006

In October 1853 war broke out between Russia and Turkey. The following March Britain and France joined the war on the side of the Turks. In the first seven months of the war, the Russian government announced three regular recruit levies, several appeals for volunteers and the formation of a temporary naval militia. News of these measures filtered down to seignorial peasants (pomeshchich'i krest'iane) through official channels and as rumors that went beyond the contents of the government measures and that contained various distortions, in particular that the government was offering privileges, including freedom from serfdom and the regular recruit obligation, to volunteers. In the spring and early summer of 1854, thousands of seignorial peasants left their villages to volunteer for military service. Many descended on Moscow. Seignorial peasants, however, had to have permission from their owners to volunteer, and the would-be volunteers were returned to their villages. Usually Russian peasants loathed military service in the regular army and did everything in their power to avoid being drafted. Why did so many peasants try to volunteer in the spring and early summer of 1854?
Life and Works of Evgenii Alekseevich Preobrazhenskii Translated by Konstantin Gurevich
Authors: Gorinov M. M. , Tsakunov S. V.
Published: April 2006

Evgenii Alekseevich Preobrazhenskii has been one of the most important yet least known figures
on the Bolshevik Olympus: a prominent party functionary, economist, journalist, and writer, a
talented organizer of scholarly research, and educator. For political reasons, however, his activities
have long been virtually ignored in Soviet writing. References to him in Soviet histories of
the Communist party or economic histories have been one-sided and sketchy.

Preobrazhenskii was born on 15 February 1886 (old style) in Bolkhov in Ore guberniia. His father, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Preobrazhenskii, was an Orthodox priest and Bible teacher at the Bolkhov Parochial School. Evgenii Alekseevich studied at his father's private school and completed two years at the Bolkhov City School.
Troubleshooters, Political Machines, and Moscow's Regional Control
Authors: Willerton John , Reisinger William
Published: April 2006

Since the beginning of Soviet power, national leaders have been concerned with controlling the diverse regions that make up the Soviet Union. They have used many means, including coercion, to extend their influence over the localities. Lower-level party officials, especially regional first secretaries, have been crucial links between the national regime and the periphery. These officials juggle a complex set of political and economic responsibilities and must safeguard a region's political stability, while applying national directives. They oversee the economic life of their bailiwick and attempt to enhance its productivity. Recruiting and elevating these lower-level officials is critical to maintaining national influence in the regions; the 1988-1990 political reforms have not changed this method.
Peasant or Proletarian? Militant Pskov Workers in St. Petersburg, 1913
Authors: Brym Robert J. , Economakis Evel
Published: April 2006

Like all working classes everywhere and at all times, the Russian working class on the eve of the revolution was internally differentiated. As Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg have recently emphasized, Russian workers were distinguished from one another by skill level, strength of ties to the land, gender, age and other factors. And those distinctions mattered: they affected the form and intensity of workers’ anti-regime actions which extended from reluctant submission to un-rehearsed rebellion, to organized political protest.
Fathers, Sons and Impostors: Pushkin’s Trace inThe Gift
Authors: Greenleaf Monika
Published: April 2006

(When a human being dies,

his portraits change.)

–Anna Akhmatova, 1940

Nabokov’sThe Giftopens with the mock specificity of a date: 1 April 192-, which immediately, we are informed, calls attention to the Russian novelistic practice of “honest fictionality.” The long metaliterary excursus draws attentionawayfrom the specificity of one particular date, which the author, as it were, refuses to complete: on 1 April 1922 Nabokov’s father, the respected statesman Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was buried in Berlin, three days after his heroic, though fortuitous death in a right-wing assassination attempt on a former Kadet ally, P.N. Miliukov.
Worlds in Conflict: Patriarchal Authority, Discipline and the Russian School, 1861–1914
Authors: Eklof Ben
Published: April 2006

Grigorii Soroka was a serf, one of millions in prereform Russia. He was not particularly set apart by his artistic talent, for many peasants revealed their individual expressive gifts in carved decoration, ceramics, toy making, and other crafts. Soroka was unusual, however, in that he received instruction from Aleksei Venetsianov, a retired bureaucrat, small-property owner, and renowned painter. Soroka, despite his refined talents, remained a serf, for his owner, N. P. Miliukov, unheeding of Venetsianov’s pleas, refused to manumit his “serf artist.” When the Emancipation came, then, Soroka led his villagers in drawing up a petition protesting the terms that Miliukov sought to impose. The petition, addressed to the tsar, was returned to the provincial office for peasant affairs and shown to Miliukov who, enraged, then drew up his own complaint against the peasants. Soroka was summoned to the volost offices, arrested, held for three days, and then sentenced to a flogging for “obstreperous behavior and for spreading false rumors.” On 10 April 1864 Grigorii Soroka was seen wandering distractedly about the village, and the next day his wife found his body hanging from the rafters in a cold storage building.
Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought: The Case of Boris N. Chicherin
Authors: Hamburg Gary M.
Published: April 2006

The problem of abolishing serfdom preoccupied Russian social thinkers long before the Emancipation in 1861. In spite of more than a century of scholarship devoted to analyzing the peasant question, however, historians have reached no consensus on such fundamental issues as the origins and political implications of abolitionist thought. Did advocacy of peasant emancipation by members of the landed nobility spring from liberal altruism or from a selfish desire to defend seigneurial interests against revolutionary peasants and the peasants’ spokesmen, the so-called “revolutionary democrats”? Can Slavophilism and westernism be classified simply as varieties of liberalism, which, whatever their minor differences, agreed on the necessity of avoiding peasant revolution and regarded Russian radicals as pernicious enemies? Before emancipation were Russian liberals sharply differentiated ideologically from more radical intellectuals, such as Aleksandr I. Herzen and Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii—a differentiation traceable to attitudes toward the peasant emancipation? Or did the definitive split between liberalism and radicalism come after the Emancipation? Scholars bring to these questions such disparate conceptions of Russian politics and of the nature of historical proof that achieving consensus may be impossible. Nevertheless, the Soviet historian Vera F. Zakharina has argued convincingly that certain facets of the larger questions can be illuminated by investigating the ideological assumptions in the letters and programmatic works of major social thinkers and especially by observing how these assumptions changed over time.
Dialogic Poetics:Doktor Zhivago
Authors: Danow David K.
Published: April 2006

The structure ofDoktor Zhivagois in many respects unique. Its concluding chapter is a collection of poems ostensibly composed by the novel’s central figure. The preceding sixteen prose chapters are themselves further divided into numerous individual scenes, focused on a predominant image, that may be likened to separate cinematic shots. In this respect, the novel lends itself to discussion of the relations between narrative and cinematic technique. It also seeks a certain reconciliation between specific incidents documented in prose and then later reformulated as poetry, affording a sense of “dialogue” between the two classic modes of expression. The purpose of this essay, however, will be to consider dialogue primarily in its concrete sense, rather than range across an entire figurative spectrum, to which the term or its derivatives seem, in recent usage, naturally to gravitate. Metaphoric interpretation, nevertheless, will also find its place here in response to the poetic qualities of the work itself. In broad outline, the intent of this study will be to concentrate upon a specific complex aspect of the novel, its dialogic structures, and attempt to demonstrate that, within this singular work, they are worthy of attention as principal features accounting for its singularity.
State and Society under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s
Authors: Getty J. Arch
Published: April 2006

It is clear that tested by the Constitution of the Soviet Union as revised and enacted in 1936, the USSR is the most inclusive and equalised democracy in the world.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1937

Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the “thoroughly democratic” elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death.
Ante Ciliga, Trotskii, and State Capitalism: Theory, Tactics, and Reevaluation during the Purge Era, 1935-1939
Authors: Fox Michael S.
Published: April 2006

The Moscow Trials forced the international anti-Stalinist Left to reconsider its most fundamental truths. The old, rigid categories of capitalism and socialism were no longer certain; a new urgency accompanied the question of where the revolution had gone astray. Many of the most outspoken anti-Stalinists searching for new answers had been either adherents or sympathizers of Trotskii. For many of these former staunch supporters, Trotskii's theoretical middle ground—at the same time hostile to the Stalinist bureaucracy but defensive of the land of socialized production— was no longer tenable. One after another, they broke with Trotskii. Yet this entire movement of reevaluation in Trotskii's intellectual entourage either has not been fully explored in discussions centering on Trotskii's views or, in a certain Trotskyist tradition, has been dismissed as a simple move to the Right. One of the best ways to understand both the roots and the context of such an intellectual upheaval is to focus on the key individuals.
“Alien” Personnel in the Soviet State: The People’s Commissariat of Agriculture under Proletarian Dictatorship, 1918-1929
Authors: Heinzen James W.
Published: April 2006

Land policy must be carried out by an apparatus that has not grasped the tasks and ideas of Soviet construction in the countryside and that is riddled with elements that are alien and even hostile to Soviet power.

—N. M. Shvernik, section chief, People’s Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, 1924

“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.
A Postwar Perestroika? Toward a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR
Authors: Hessler Julie
Published: April 2006

One of the firmest popular conceptions of the Soviet Union in the United States is of a system diat categorically banned private enterprise. Embraced by specialists and the general public alike, this conception reflects the official Soviet stance diat the private sector was eradicated during losif Stalin's “great break” of 1929-30. Indeed, over the course of diose two years, individual peasants were compelled to collectivize, private stores forcibly shut, private manufactures socialized, and even doctors and dentists pressured to cooperate or to close shop. The concept of an interdiction against all private economic activity found support in the words of the dictator–Stalin's assertions that the Soviet Union was a society “without capitalists, small or big,” that socialist, not capitalist, property was the “foundation of revolutionary legality,” and many other statements of a similar ilk. Stalin proved his commitment to this model by his readiness to resort to coercion against its violators: at his instigation, repressive laws threatened entrepreneurs with five to ten years in prison camp for profitable private business. Such developments appeared as unequivocal as they proved lasting; when commentators discussed perestroika in the late 1980s, the only historical precedent they could identify was Lenin's New Economic Policy six decades before.
Socialist Realism inPravda: Read All about It!
Authors: Brooks Jeffrey
Published: April 2006

The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-1 September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine'sInstructionto her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such asPravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of Stalinist policies.
Genre in Socialist Realism
Authors: Carleton Greg
Published: April 2006

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.
Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers
Authors: Hayden Robert M.
Published: April 2006

In 1993, the film Schindler's List provided what many commentators took to be simile and many others metaphor for the violence in Bosnia. The cinematic version of Thomas Keneally's 1982 book on the holocaust of the Jews of Cracow seemed to emblematize the horror of the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims from northern and eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and thereafter, complete with wretched people in cattle cars and "concentration camps" with starving prisoners.
N. la. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics
Authors: Slezkine Yuri
Published: April 2006

Whatever about the soundness of de Selby's theories, there is ample evidence that they were honestly held and that several attempts were made to put them into practice.

Flann O'Brian,The Third Policeman

The world consists of nations. Nations are communities united by a common name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type. Nations are defined by their origins. Yet the origins of the name, state, language, territory, culture, and physical type may have nothing to do with each other. Such was the Great Ethnological Predicament, discovered and sometimes discussed by eighteenth-century scholars as they pursued Jean Le Rond D'Alembert's “art of reducing, as far as possible, a great number of phenomena to a single one which can be regarded as the principle of them.”
Local Government and State Authority in the Provinces: Smolensk, February-June 1917
Authors: Hickey Michael C.
Published: April 2006

In the last decade, state building and the problems of establishing state authority in the provinces in 1917 have begun to attract historians’ attention. Several works by Russian authors treat state building under the Provisional Government, with emphasis upon organizational activities “at the center.” Daniel T. Orlovsky and Howard J. White (with greater analytical rigor than their Russian counterparts) have studied the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the provinces. But none of these works has offered a sustained discussion of the revolution in a single city or province. Local studies have concentrated on popular institutions (for example, unions, Red Guards, and the Soviets) and the process of social polarization but have paid litde attention to the state. My aim is to bridge the gap between institutional studies and local studies by looking at local government and the contested nature of state authority in Smolensk from March to June 1917, tracing especially the conflict between class-based politics and state interests.
Social Distance from Jews in Russia and Ukraine
Authors: Hesli Vicki L. , Miller Arthur H. , Reisinger William M. , Morgan Kevin L.
Published: April 2006

With the rise of ultranationalist organizations throughout Europe, the issue of attitudes and orientations held toward designated "out-groups" has become a critical concern of anxious observers. In Russia the strength registered by Vladimir Zhirinovskii's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party during the parliamentary elections of 1993 has been interpreted as a sign of intolerance among the Russian populace. In fact, the success of candidates associated with the Liberal Democratic Party was not only based upon appeals to strengthen the Russian nation against perceived enemies, but also upon promises of a return to price stability and upon Zhirinovskii's anti-establishment, populist program. Nonetheless, Zhirinovskii's success in the 1991 presidential elections (he attracted 7.8% of the electorate) does serve to reaffirm the importance of tracking how attitudes toward groups that have often been targeted as scapegoats in times of social or economic upheaval have evolved in the late Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period. Two major questions concern us here: first, how pervasive among Russians and Ukrainians are perceptions of significant "social distance" between themselves and designated out-groups, most notably the Jewish population; and second, to what extent do these perceptions of distance form part of a cohesive ideology of ultranationalism? Understanding the basis of sentiments toward Jewish populations is particularly important for interpreting the workings of the complex mosaic of the post-Soviet political culture.
Comment on Brym and Degtyarev's Discussion of Anti-Semitism in Moscow
Authors: Hesli Vicki L. , Miller Arthur H. , Reisinger William M.
Published: April 2006

Brym and Degtyarev argue that in the "volatile" post-Soviet context, the potential for anti-Semitism is high. On the basis of responses drawn from 988 interviews conducted in Moscow in 1992 they conclude that the number of anti-Semites in Moscow is much higher than in the United States or Canada, and they also conclude that anti-Semitic orientations are part of a broader authoritarian, xenophobic and illiberal set of attitudes.
The Saints of the Revolution: Political Activists in 1890s Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the Path of Most Resistance
Authors: Pretty Dave
Published: April 2006

Much of what we know about the prerevolutionary Russian working class comes to us through the prism of its more politically active and committed element, or through the historical record of events resulting from the interaction of "conscious" and less "conscious" workers. The tensions between intelligent^ and activist workers and, to a lesser extent, between activist and nonactivist workers have been ably portrayed in various monographs; of these, however, those studies that focus on the making, so to speak, of worker activists have tended to depict their subjects either on very broad canvases or in finely drawn miniatures.
Atomic-Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR
Authors: Josephson Paul R.
Published: April 2006

In 1953, just after Stalin's death, the Soviet state machine tool publishing house released A. A. Kanaev's From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine (Ot vodianoi mel'nitsy do atomnogo dvigateli). Like other books and articles published in the popular and scientific press in the USSR in this period, From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine explored the political, economic, and cultural significance of an incipient “atomic century” and touted the nearly limitless applications of the power of the atom in agriculture, medicine, and industry. Indeed, there was little doubt among scientists, engineers, economic planners, and party officials that the Soviet Union would soon enter the stage of “communist construction”: communism would be achieved within their lifetimes, owing to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party and on the basis of the achievements of science and technology. By the end of the decade, the average Soviet citizen, too, came to believe that the glorious future had arrived. Many people wrote letters to prominent physicists with suggestions on how to tame the power of the atom to improve the quality of life. For citizens, scientists, and officials alike, successes in atomic energy provided undeniable confirmation that at long last society had embarked on the final leg of the long journey to communism.
The Limits of Discourse: Solov'ev's Language of Syzygy and the Project of Thinking Total-Unity
Authors: Clowes Edith W.
Published: April 2006

In his work as both philosopher and poet, Vladimir Solov'ev is motivated by seemingly contradictory desires: to apprehend in the world a higher, mystical "total–unity" that lends coherence and meaning to our lives, and to assert the validity of otherness, of the varieties of individual experience in this world. Throughout Solov'ev struggles with the possibilities inherent in available intellectual discourses–scientific, poetic, philosophical, and religious–to arrive at that combination of conceptualization and sensory experience that he called "thinking" total-unity. His historical revaluation of erotic love,The Meaning of Love(Smysl liubvi, 1892-1894), is a pivotal work in this quest. In addition to its well–known arguments in defense of erotic love, this essay focuses on the problem of discourse and its role in articulating and conceptualizing the mystical or revealed knowledge that eludes sense and reason.
Cinema for the “Soviet East”: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film
Authors: Smith Michael G.
Published: April 2006

Before the eyes of the vast, ignorant masses of the eastern nationalities, the fast-moving frames of cinema will reproduce the many achievements of human knowledge. For the illiterate audience, the electric beam of the magic motion-picture lamp will define new concepts and images, will make the wealth of knowledge more easily accessible to the backward mind.

Bakinskii rabochii, 18 September 1923

Pictures, so the first Bolsheviks believed, speak louder than words. Visual propaganda was essential in their campaign to reach the illiterate and poorly literate masses, to engage them in a new Soviet style of life. By the end of the civil war, every leading member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party valued the political uses of film. As commissar of nationalities, Iosef Stalin recognized its potential; in his simple expression, film was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” Like cinema, the Bolsheviks appeared at the confluence of two worlds, the traditional and the modern. For them, film was the perfect medium by which to critique the old and celebrate the new. Film viewed the world as they did, with one measure of hard realism, another of soft utopianism.
Collapse and Reconstruction of Ajudicial System: The United Nations Missions in Kosovo and East Timor
Authors: Strohmeyer Hansjörg
Published: April 2006

Within the span of only a few months in 1999, the United Nations was faced with one of the greatest challenges in its recent history: to serve as an interim government in Kosovo and East Timor.

In Kosovo, in response to massive attacks on the Kosovar Albanian population, including orchestrated and wide-scale “ethnic cleansing,” the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conducted an eleven-week air campaign against Yugoslav and Serbian security forces and paramilitary groups. The campaign resulted in the agreement of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to withdraw all Yugoslav and Serbian security forces from the territory. On June 10,1999, one day after the suspension of NATO’s air strikes, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1244 (1999), establishing the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (UNMIK).
Peace Building: The Private Sector’s Role
Authors: Gerson Allan
Published: April 2006

Intrastate war is now the predominant form of armed conflict. The civil wars of the last decade have scarred the world’s poorest countries, leaving a legacy of more than five million dead, many more driven from their homes, billions of dollars in resources destroyed, and wasted economic opportunity. Meeting the challenge of curbing such civil wars—and preventing their re-ignition—requires a radical readjustment. Restructuring must reach beyond traditional institutional mandates and methodologies. New players—particularly the private sector, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—must be enlisted in a new approach to economic peace building.
Isozyme variability among cryptic species ofBotrychiumsubgenusBotrychium(Ophioglossaceae)
Authors: Hauk Warren D. , Haufler Christopher H.
Published: April 2006

The systematics ofBotrychiumsubgenusBotrychiumhas been controversial, primarily because reduction in frond size and complexity has limited the number of characters available for discrimination of species. The recognition of many polyploid species has magnified the difficulty of classification because allopolyploids are often morphologically intermediate between their progenitor diploids. In order to evaluate species limits and sectional boundaries, we surveyed and compared 16 of the 24 currently recognized species for isozymic variation. Little or no intrapopulational variation was detected, but the variation present was consistent with the hypothesis thatBotrychiumspecies are primarily inbreeding. Interspecific comparisons distinguished six diploid species and provided evidence of molecular differentiation between the cryptic sister speciesB. lunariaandB. crenulatum.Evidence of possible progenitor/descendant relationships was found for certain diploid/polyploid relationships. Using enzyme bands shared between species, realignment of the sectional assignment of several species is proposed. Anomalous banding patterns in certain individuals suggested that gene silencing or homoeologous chromosome pairing might be operating inB. minganense, B. hesperium,andB. matricariifolium.Isozyme data also showed that some populations of species presumed to be uniformly diploid possessed isozyme patterns typical of polyploids. All available molecular data indicate that members ofBotrychiumsubgenusBotrychiumare actively evolving at diploid and polyploid levels.
Changes in the factor of safety within the superstructure of a dicot tree
Authors: Niklas Karl J.
Published: April 2006

The objective of this study was to determine whether the factor of safety for mechanical stability varied among stems differing in size and age within the superstructure of a large dicot tree. Two factors of safety were selected for study: the quotient of the critical buckling height and the actual length of stems, Hcrit/L, and the quotient of the modulus of rupture (the force per unit area required to break a stem) and the working stress (the force per unit area resulting from the biomass measured distal to a stem), MR/σw. These two dimensionless safety factors were determined for a total of 420 shoot segments comprising much of the aboveground biomass of a Robinia pseudoacacia (Fabaceae) tree measuring 18.7 m in height and 1347 kg in mass, and 0.46 m in diameter (40 yr old) at 1.2 m from the ground.

An S‐shaped trend was observed when each of the two factors of safety was plotted as a function of stem age. Each factor decreased from a local maximum for the most distal (peripheral) stems in the canopy to a local minimum value for stems ∼10 yr old; each factor increased again to another local maximum for stems 11–18 yr old, and then decreased steadily toward the base of the trunk. This trend was the result of the allometric relationships among stem diameter, length, biomass, and material properties (stiffness and strength) with respect to stem age. Although they were disproportionately more slender than their older counterparts, peripheral stems were sufficiently stiff and strong to sustain the stresses resulting from their weight and that of foliage without deflecting under these loads, yet they were sufficiently flexible to easily bend and thereby presumably provide a mechanism to reduce the drag forces acting on the entire tree. In contrast, the internally imposed mechanical forces acting on progressively older stems increased at a greater rate than the observed rate of increase in stem stiffness, strength, or diameter. The probability of mechanical failure, which must be considered from a demographic perspective (i.e., an age‐dependent phenomenon), thus increased from older branches to the base of the trunk. Reports of similar allometric trends based on interspecific comparisons among diverse dicot species comply with the allometry observed for the R. pseudoacacia tree and suggest that the S‐shaped trend for the factor of safety holds for stems differing in age drawn from individual trees and for the trunks of conspecifics differing in age drawn from a dense population.