bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Modernization of Party Propaganda in the USSR
Authors: Mickiewicz Ellen
Published: April 2006

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.
The Crisis in Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View
Authors: Simms James Y.
Published: April 2006

One of the most important and most generally espoused interpretations in Russian history is the existence of a crisis in Russian agriculture toward the close of the nineteenth century. A discussion of this crisis or agrarian problem is found in contemporary, in Soviet, and in the Western scholarly works. Statements such as “the economic condition of the peasantry kept deteriorating,” or “famine conditions, epidemics, increased mortality, decrease in the number of livestock, … this is the spectacle of the growing destitution of a faminestricken Russian village,” are commonplace. In fact, “to numerous observers of Russian rural conditions, the growing destitution of the village seemed so evident that it required no special demonstration.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the indexes used to support the crisis interpretation, and to show that this interpretation is not only arguable, but probably fallacious.
The Making of a Right Communist—A. I. Rykov to 1917
Authors: Oppenheim Samuel A.
Published: April 2006

Anyone familiar with Soviet history can identify A. I. Rykov: Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a major leader of Right Communism, a victim of Stalin’s purges. But this tells us very little. Because of Rykov’s predilection for practical as opposed to ideological-literary work, his relative colorlessness in comparison with the other Bolshevik luminaries, and a lack of material, he has not been attractive to scholars. Yet Rykov looms large within the Bolshevik movement; he was prominent long before the revolution as well as after 1917. Furthermore, the seeds of Rykov’s positions of the 1920s—which clearly had an impact on the policies and politics of those years—were definitely sown before 1917.
Bilingualism and Maintenance of the Mother Tongue in Soviet Central Asia
Authors: Silver Brian
Published: April 2006

The linguistic behavior of the titular nationalities of the five Central Asian union republics of the Soviet Union illustrates that when groups with distinctive languages and cultural traditions come into contact with one another, very complex linguistic adjustments can occur. This essay examines the relationship between the continued use of the non-Russian languages as mother tongues and the spread of Russian as a second language among Central Asians. Central Asians display an interesting response to the conflicting pressures to learn Russian as an aid to upward social mobility and to maintain traditional languages as a sign of identity with the ethnic group. While remaining strongly attached to their national languages, they are simultaneously moderately attracted to Russian as a second language.
Neo-Serfdom: Its Origin and Nature in East Central Europe
Authors: Makkai László
Published: April 2006

The freeing of the serfs occurred in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Although it ended the personal subjection of the peasantry and abolished the feudal obligations of deliveries in kind and services, bringing to a close the feudal and clearing the way for the capitalist form of landholding, this transformation allowed the ex-feudal lords to retain those lands that they had administered themselves in the past by converting into peasant holdings only the so-called rustical lands that had previously been cultivated on their own account by the serfs. The demesne lands, which the feudal owners had managed themselves, were for the greater part cultivated by robot (corvée) labor, and to a lesser extent by those who worked for wages, although some parts were worked by landless peasants to whom they were rented out in exchange for a great variety of obligations. These people received no land when the serfs were freed. The most serious socioeconomic problem of the capitalist century in Eastern Europe was the misery of the masses of landless .peasants as well as of the small and dwarf holders who lived in the shadow of the large estates whose origin was feudal and on which they worked as wage laborers. For this reason it is quite understandable that the origin of the land-tenure system that followed the freeing of the serfs had to become, sooner or later, one of the focal points of historical research.
Old and New Perspectives on Iosif Volotsky's Monastic Rules
Authors: Goldfrank David
Published: April 2006

Scholarly debate in the West, and to a large extent also in the Soviet Union, concerning the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Russian monk losif (né Sanin) Volotsky (Joseph Volotsky), 1439-1515, has generally centered on his political ideas and the interpretation of his Prosvetitel' (Enlightener, or Illuminator) . The monastic side of his activities is often played down or neglected, even though the most important aspect of his daily life for fifty-five years was his serious pursuit of the monastic and (for thirty-eight years) abbatial vocation. In the provincial Volokolamsk Monastery, which he founded, he not only entered into ecclesiastical politics and composed the didactic apologetics and inquisitional invectives that comprise his sixteen-discourse (originally eleven) Enlightener but also wrote two monastic Rules, which are very important sources for his life and for the religious and intellectual history of his time.
The Ruthenian Decision to Unite with Czechoslovakia
Authors: Magocsi Paul R.
Published: April 2006

During the last months of 1918 profound political and social changes took place throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the dissolution of Habsburg administrative authority in late October, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Rumanians organized national councils that eventually were to determine the political future of these former subject peoples. Ruthenians living in the northeastern counties of Hungary also participated in this process, and from November 1918 to May 1919 they formed many councils which proposed various political alternatives: autonomy within Hungary, complete independence, or union with Russia, the Ukraine, or the new state of Czechoslovakia. Although these choices reflected the political and cultural allegiances that were traditionally attractive to Ruthenian leaders, the particular international situation in 1919 proved favorable to only one—union with Czechoslovakia.
The First International and the Russian Obshchina
Authors: Kimball Alan
Published: April 2006

Russian revolutionists in the 1870s had a long history of opposition to build on—from the massive Pugachev peasant rebellion during the reign of Catherine the Great to an aristocratic conspiracy (Decembrist Revolt) at the end of the reign of Alexander II. They also drew on a rich indigenous fund of social criticism and programs, the latest and most important of which were the writings of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, the proclamations of the Land and Liberty group, and the radical economic articles of Chernyshevsky.
Hungary and the “Third Europe” in 1938
Authors: Winchester Betty Jo
Published: April 2006

The period of the 1930s has been called the time of the “Diplomatic War.“ During these years Nazi Germany seized the initiative in international affairs and tried to impose its will on the other states of Europe. The reaction of Britain and France to the threat of German expansion was appeasement until March 1939, when, with Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear that the Führer’s aims were not limited to the German-inhabited areas. Thus the states of East Central Europe found themselves in a highly vulnerable position: in the West they faced increasing political and economic pressure from the Reich; in the East there was the Soviet Union with its very exportable Communist ideology which would have undermined the political and social order of all these states. In this situation the East Central European states all sought some way of being independent from their two powerful neighbors.
The Statistics on the Russian Land Commune, 1905-1917
Authors: Atkinson Dorothy
Published: April 2006

Western and Soviet scholars have generally maintained different interpretations of the period between 1905 and 1917 in Russia, describing it respectively as a time of amelioration or of immiseration for the masses. Both groups, however, have stressed the progress of capitalism in prerevolutionary Russia. Despite standard references to the agrarian problem, most of the attention given to socioeconomic development in this period has focused on industrialization and the urban sector. Yet 87 percent of the population was rural when revolution broke out in 1905, and 85 percent still rural when it erupted again in 1917.

During the interrevolutionary period the imperial government adopted a program that was intended to provide a take-off base for agriculture. Prime Minister Stolypin’s policy was aimed at the replacement of the archaic communal structure by a new order of individualized peasant landholdings that would give scope to personal initiative and technological innovation.
Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Johnson Robert Eugene
Published: April 2006

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?
Soviet Theater Audiences
Authors: Deza Mikhail , Matthews Mervyn
Published: April 2006

Soviet authorities have always maintained that their national theater is a truly popular form of art, enjoyed by broad masses of the people. This view has been expressed or implied in every official statement on the medium for many years. “Soviet theatrical art,” according to a 1958 Central Committee statement, “has become a truly popular art, close and comprehensible to the broad masses of the toilers…. Our theater, by carrying the most progressive ideas of socialism, peace, and democracy to the masses, has rightly earned widespread recognition, and become an important factor in the development of all progressive art… “
The Prospects for Change in Eastern Europe
Authors: Korbonski Andrzej
Published: April 2006

Writing some ten years ago about the changing political situation in the Soviet Union, Allen Kassof made the astute observation, “Although liberalization tells something about where the Soviet system has come from, it does not say very much about where it is going. To say that the system is being liberalized is like walking away backward from a receding reference point, a procedure that gives too little information about what lies on the road ahead.” It is clear that this statement applies with even greater force to Eastern Europe—even if we were to substitute “change” for “liberalization.” Anyone reckless enough to write about the prospects for change in Eastern Europe is faced with an almost impossible task, certainly a more difficult one than for the Soviet Union, or for that matter China, where at least there is, or was, a single reference point—be it Stalinism or Maoism, totalitarianism or the “administered society.”
Viktor Shklovsky and the Device of Ostensible Surrender
Authors: Sheldon Richard
Published: April 2006

One frequently discussed problem in Western approaches to postrevolutionary Russian literature has been the temptation to identify “rebels against the system” and to praise their work out of proportion to its merits. Writers attacked in the Soviet Union for their heretical views have a good chance of being lionized in the West. A strange and notable exception to this pattern is Viktor Shklovsky, one of the earliest and most outspoken defenders of creative freedom in the Soviet Union. Though his books and articles were viciously attacked by the Marxist critics throughout the twenties, Western critics, viewing those same books and articles from the distance imposed by time and place, have seen them as a series of surrenders which hastened or even precipitated the collapse of the Formalist movement.
Dependency Theory and the Soviet-East European Hierarchical Regional System: Initial Tests
Authors: Zimmerman William
Published: April 2006

Throughout the post-World War II period, the prevailing paradigm of international politics among Western scholars has assumed that the major task confronting the decisionmakers of all states is achieving security in an anarchic state system. It follows from this assumption that relations between relatively equal superpowers constitute, in Arnold Wolfers's phrase, “the relationship of major tension” in the postwar world. In the 1970s, however, there has been a revival among Western scholars of an alternative perspective on world politics: the theory of economic imperialism, or, as it is usually labeled in the 1970s, “dependency theory.” It is a perspective which focuses on unequal relations between states. In that perspective, “the basic model of international politics [is] the imperialist system that was centered upon states of unequal economic development,“ where “the relationship of major tension was between the developed and underdeveloped economies.“
Three Protoexempla and Their Place in a Thirteenth-Century Pilgrim Book
Authors: Lenhoff Gail
Published: April 2006

Archbishop Antonii’s Kniga Palomnik (circa 1201-4) is the earliest extant account of a Novgorodian pilgrimage to Constantinople. The work has long been valued by historians as a document of the Byzantine capital's treasures on the eve of the Latin invasion and by philologists as a model for the literary genre known as the khozhdenie. Recent scholarship suggests that Kniga Palomnik’s readership was far wider than previously supposed and that Archbishop Antonii’s literary skills should not be underrated. But when it comes to analyzing the appeal of the work, the critical consensus ends. Some view Kniga Palomnik as an exemplary account with a few insignificant breaches of etiquette. Others contend that the author’s talents are most apparent in rhetorical exhortations, where he lapses from the genre’s decorum. There are grounds for both positions. Kniga Palomnik is indeed typical, in that it consists of a series of descriptive essays framed between exordial and concluding topoi. At the same time, Antonii’s fondness for rhetoric undeniably signals a break with tradition. My own findings indicate a third alternative, namely, that the rhetorical “lapses” and the “normative” passages conform to a system of etiquette compatible with but distinct from that of the account of the journey per se.
Androgyny as an Exemplary Feature of Marina Tsvetaeva's Dichotomous Poetic Vision
Authors: Kroth Anya M.
Published: April 2006

The peculiar treatment of sex in Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry has been noted by a number of literary critics. Simon Karlinsky, for example, points out the “reversal of sex roles” of the main characters in the fairy taleTsar'-Devitsa (The Tsar-Maiden)and comments on the “interesting and significant” nature of this phenomenon “when viewed within the whole of Tsvetaeva's work and in terms of her personal biography.“
The Status of Women in a Socialist Order: Czechoslovakia, 1948-1978
Authors: Wolchik Sharon L.
Published: April 2006

All citizens shall have equal rights and equal duties. Men and women shall have equal status in the family, at work and in public activity. The society of the working people shall ensure the equality of all citizens by creating equal possibilities and equal opportunities in all fields of public life.

ČSSR Constitution, Article 20

When we Communist women protested against the disbanding of the women's organization, we were informed that we had equality. That we were equal, happy, joyful, and content, and that, therefore, our problem was solved.

Woman Delegate to the Prague Conferenceof District Party Officials, May 1968

When Communist elites came to power in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, they attempted to create a new social and political order. As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.
The Supervisory Function in Russian and Soviet History
Authors: Christian David
Published: April 2006

Even a brief survey of the institutional history of Russia and the Soviet Union will show the existence of a remarkable number of institutions and officials whose main function is best described as supervisory. They do not usually legislate or make policy decisions. For the most part they do not execute policy directly or pass legal judgments. Their task is to check that other government officials and institutions are acting in conformity to the law and the commands of their superiors. Yet for all their evident importance during two and a half centuries (and in spite of the fact that Russian statesmen were always aware of their importance), the general nature and significance of these institutions have not been fully clarified. Of the several important works on individual supervisory institutions, none that I know of attempts to explain the role played in Russian institutional history by supervisory institutions as a whole.
Bureaucracy as Culture: A Comment
Authors: Yaney George
Published: April 2006

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.
The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union
Authors: Cohen Stephen F.
Published: April 2006

The combination of conservative institutions with revolutionary ideas meant that the Republic was the first successful attempt to reconcile the conservative and revolutionary traditions in France. But it also meant that in the twentieth century the forces of change were resisted and obstructed to the point of frustration.

David Thomson, Democracy in France

The theme of the meeting, “Tradition and Innovation,” offers an occasion to talk about serious things.

Mikhail Romm (1962)

Change in the Stalinist system, and stubborn resistance to change, have been the central features of Soviet political life since Stalin's death in 1953. The rival forces of “innovation and tradition,” to use the language of the official press, have become “two poles” in Soviet politics and society, which are expressed through “sharp clashes between people standing on both sides of the psychological barrier.“
The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular Music and its Critics
Authors: Rothstein Robert A.
Published: April 2006

A recent collection of Soviet song texts differs from its many predecessors in one interesting respect. It contains Pavel German’s “Pesnia o kirpichnom zavode,“ better known as “Kirpichiki,” one of the most popular songs of the late 1920s, and a song that for decades symbolized the survival of petit-bourgeois tastes andposhlosfafter the Revolution. This quiet rehabilitation can serve as the occasion to examine an aspect of Soviet cultural history that is rarely discussed outside the USSR, namely, the beginnings of Soviet popular music.
Productivity in Soviet Agriculture
Authors: Clayton Elizabeth
Published: April 2006

The slowdown of growth in the Soviet economy has renewed interest in the agricultural productivity of the Soviet Union. The failure of agriculture to grow at the pace of industry has hampered overall expansion, and domestic crop failure has induced grain purchases abroad. The bottlenecks to Soviet agricultural growth and development are diverse. On the one hand, they may be inevitable, for the resource endowment of the Soviet Union, where the range of temperature is great and the level of precipitation is unpredictable, does not favor agriculture. On the other hand, they may be systemic, for Soviet agriculture has been criticized for weak labor incentives, stifling bureaucratic controls, and overly large farms.
Some Observations on R. G. Skrynnikov’s Views Concerning the Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha
Authors: Keenan Edward L.
Published: April 2006

Professor Ruslan Skrynnikov has now provided readers of Slavic Review with a brief summary of his views concerning the relationship of the first letter to Ivan IV, attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii, and the writings of the Ukrainian monk Isaiah. Since his article seems to have been long in press, it does not mention Skrynnikov’s own rather more extensive (although in places identical verbatim) article in a recent number of Russkaia literatura, nor does it take account of certain other recent contributions to the discussion of the Kurbskii-Groznyi apocrypha. Moreover, Professor Skrynnikov makes several statements that might lead those unfamiliar with the matter to premature and, in my view, erroneous conclusions.
Was There a Soviet Policy for Evacuating the Jews?: The Case of the Annexed Territories
Authors: Pinchuk Ben-Cion
Published: April 2006

As a result of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union was left with the largest Jewish population in Europe. Given this large population, the fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused the interest of researchers and drawn attention to the role of Soviet policy in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Some of the reasons for the survival of Jews in Soviet-annexed territories seem obvious. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupiéd by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. This simple and generally sufficient explanation is not the only one which has been offered, however. Some Western scholars have argued that the Soviet government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. Soviet propaganda, particularly that aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust.
The “Latin Gerundive” as Autobiographical Imperative: A Reading of Mandel'shtam's Journey to Armenia
Authors: Harris Jane Gary
Published: April 2006

Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandel'shtam's most autobiographically engaged masterpiece of the 1930s is no ordinary journey.2 Written in Moscow during the summer of 1931, a year after his six-month sojourn in Armenia and Georgia, this contemplative journey adheres to an “itinerary” shaped by the path Mandel'shtam followed both in his quest for truth—“that truth which helps us to form a better sense of ourselves in tradition”—and in his search for a method to articulate that truth—a “method of creative cognition, a suitable means of gaining a sense of life.” His “method of creative cognition” mediates between the poet's contemplation of contemporary reality and his meditation on the mystery of creation, or the creative impulse, whose origins he seeks in the deepest structures of language and legend, whose eternal principles he ponders in the organic phenomena of nature, and whose multiplicity of expression he experiences in the art, architecture, and archaeology of Armenia.
Ephebes and Precursors in Chekhov's The Seagull
Authors: Curtis James M.
Published: April 2006

Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence takes the Freudian concept of an oedipal relationship between father and son as a model for the relationship that exists when one artist, the father figure (or precursor, as Bloom calls him), influences another artist (the ephebe, in Bloom's terminology). Bloom's work provides a desirable redefinition of standard treatments of influence and stylistic change in that it offers a dynamic, rather than a static, paradigm, and denies any simplistic dissociation of the artist as historical figure from the poet as poet. Furthermore, it denies that literary influences can occur as purely verbal processes, and it affirms that the creative process is emotionally charged, like so many other important human experiences.

In Anxiety of Influence Bloom states, in typically absolute terms, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets,—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.“
The Commune State in Moscow in 1918
Authors: Sakwa Richard
Published: April 2006

The first months of Soviet power raise important questions about the ideology of the transition to socialism and about the nature of Bolshevik power. The destruction of the old state apparatus was accompanied by vigorous institution building; the “red guard attack against capital” was balanced by the emergence of potentially powerful Soviet economic apparatus. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed in March 1918 was followed by a period of state capitalism in which a strong socialist state was to supervise elements of capitalism in the economy. All stages were accompanied by vigorous debate within the party and, from March 1918, by the political alienation of a section of the working class. By the onset of full-scale civil war and the transition to war communism in late spring 1918 the Bolshevik party and the institutions of the new Soviet state dominated the political life of the country. Was there something in Marxist ideology that, when interpreted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, encouraged centralized anddirigisteforms of government regardless of actual conditions? A large body of literature now exists that examines this issue from various perspectives. This literature has recently been enriched by a number of studies that look at events from the perspective of lower-level participants and area case studies.
Provincial Party Leaders' Demand Articulation and the Nature of Center-Periphery Relations in the USSR
Authors: Breslauer George W.
Published: April 2006

In the January 1984 issue of Soviet Studies, I published an article, “Is There a Generation Gap in the Soviet Political Establishment?: Demand Articulation by RSFSR Provincial Party First Secretaries,“ based on examination of 466 articles signed by twenty-four obkom and kraikom first secretaries and published between January 1976 and March 1981. I was interested in seeing whether differences in the content of published articles correlated strongly with generational differences within this sample of regional party leaders. The claim has frequently been made that the post-Stalin generation of Soviet officials is more demanding and impatient than the Stalin generation. My research was geared toward seeing whether the articles attributed to these secretaries reflected such differences.
The Cultural Revolution in Cinema
Authors: Kenez Peter
Published: April 2006

The NEP was an inherently unstable social and political system: It contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The Bolsheviks carried out policies in which they did not fully believe and with implications that worried them. Although the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 forbade factions within the party, the struggle for power during Lenin's final illness and after his death inevitably created factions. The struggle for power and the conflict between contrasting views concerning the future of society came to be intertwined. For the sake of economic reconstruction the party allowed private enterprise to reemerge. As time went on, many Bolshevik leaders came to be convinced supporters of the mixed economic system; others, on the basis of their reading of Marxist ideology, found such policies distasteful.
Local Industry in Upheaval: The Ivanovo-Kineshma Textile Strike of 1917
Authors: Husband William B.
Published: April 2006

At the beginning of the day shift on 21 October 1917 more than 300,000 textile workers from 114 enterprises in Vladimir and Kostroma provinces defiantly refused to report to their shops. Instead, these predominantly semiskilled and unskilled workers of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region responded to an agenda prearranged by workeractivists among them to hear final instructions from newly elected strike committees, sing the “Marseillaise,” and post pickets. By the time this strike ended on 17 November, circumstances in Russia had changed significantly: A new revolutionary government was in office; the national economic crisis had further deepened; the struggle for authority in the factories was intensifying.
The Evolution of Local Soviets in Petrograd, November 1917-June 1918: The Case of the First City District Soviet
Authors: Rabinowitch Alexander
Published: April 2006

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.
Public and Private Values in the Soviet Press, 1921-1928
Authors: Brooks Jeffrey
Published: April 2006

The Bolsheviks created a new system for the production and distribution of the printed word to replace the prerevolutionary print media. This innovation was in many respects the most remarkable of the early revolutionary years, since it led to the radical dichotomy between public and private codes of behavior that has plagued Soviet society ever since.

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.
The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai
Authors: Ingemanson Birgitta
Published: April 2006

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titlesLiubov’ pchel trudovykhandZhenshchina na perelome.They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.
Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905-1914
Authors: Kelly Aileen
Published: April 2006

How long ago was it that, terrified from childhood, we ceased to kill in ourselves the most innocent desires? How long ago did we cease to shudder when finding in our souls passionate impulses unrecorded in the tariff of romanticism?

Aleksandr Herzen, From The Other Shore

In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:

They have established their own radical inquisition, their poll tax on ideas: ideas and thoughts which satisfy their demands have the rights of citizenship … the others are … the proletariat of the moral world: they have to be silent or win their place by a head-on attack. Against rebellious ideas there has appeared a democratic censorship, incomparably more dangerous than any other, because it has neither police, nor packed juries … nor prisons, nor fines. When the reactionary censorship takes a book from your hands, the book receives universal respect: they persecute the author, close a printing house, smash the machinery, and the persecuted word acquires the status of a belief. Democratic censorship achieves the moral destruction of its object: its accusations are promulgated not … from a procurator's mouth, but from the distance of exile, the darkness of prisons. A verdict written by a hand which bears the marks of chains leaves a deep impression on the heart, which does not prevent it from being unjust.
Ritual and Social Drama at the Muscovite Court
Authors: Kollmann Nancy Shields
Published: April 2006

Some of the few moments of comic relief to be found in Muscovite historical texts are provided in Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin's description of the Muscovite government. Kotoshikhin was an undersecretary (pod'iachii) of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Posol'skii prikaz) who defected to Sweden and in 1666-1667 wrote an account of Muscovy's court and administration. He is the source of the dubious assertion that the tsar's daughters (tsarevny) were not married outside the country because they were stupid and illiterate and would bring shame on the tsar's family. Kotoshikhin also relates a comical episode in which a leading boyar refused to sit at a banquet next to a man he considered his social inferior. The protesting boyar was forcibly held at his assigned place while he kicked and screamed and finally wriggled out of the grasp of the tsar's attendants and slid under the table, rather than sit by a demeaning dinner partner.
Temptress or Virgin? The Precarious Sexual Position of Women in Postemancipation Ukrainian Peasant Society
Authors: Worobec Christine D.
Published: April 2006

Ukrainian peasant women of the postemancipation Russian Empire, like their Russian counterparts, faced an oppressive patriarchal system in both family and village. Over the ages peasants strictly delineated tasks and functions according to gender and age in order to meet the demands of a predominantly agricultural economy. The precariousness of subsistence agriculture and the peasantry's burdensome obligations to family, community, and state reinforced inflexible and oppressive power relations in the village. Ukrainian peasants feared that any departure from the subordination of woman to man, child to parent, young to old, and weak to strong would threaten the existence of their society and culture.
Soviet Public Opinion and the Gorbachev Reforms
Authors: Grey Robert D. , Jennisch Lauri A. , Tyler Alanna S.
Published: April 2006

How deep and how long-lasting Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms will be remains an open question. Obstacles to the realization of some of his goals may be built into Soviet life. Soviet resources may limit economic development; industrial managers (however willing they may be) may lack the knowledge and skills necessary to operate in a market environment and continuing state orders may absorb the productive capacity of the factories and may limit the extent to which they can respond to market forces.
Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920
Authors: Abramson Henry
Published: April 2006

The experience of Ukrainian Jewry from 1917 to 1920 is a paradox in modern Jewish history. At the same moment that the leaders of the Ukrainian revolutionary movement extended unprecedented civil rights to Ukrainian Jews, pogromists operating in the name of that same movement brutally terrorized hundreds of Jewish communities with violence and robbery. This strange incongruity has not been satisfactorily addressed; studies of the period have either concentrated on the pogroms or focused on Jewish socialists in Ukrainian politics. Linguistic barriers and subsequent developments, notably the 1926 assassination of Symon Petliura, have further polarized an already dichotomous history. This article attempts to synthesize these two trends.
From Susanna to Sarra: Chekhov in 1886-1887
Authors: Tolstoy Helena
Published: April 2006

"Ivanov," a drama with a tendency, devoid of the "immediate and carefree objectivity" of the earlier works of Anton Chekhov, has seemed to at least one critic a turning point in the author's production. VI. Korolenko has suggested that "this first drama … might provide valuable material for the thoughtful biographer who will trace the history of a crisis of the soul, which had led Chekhov away from Novoe Vremia to Russkie Zapiski. Zhizri and Russkaia My si'."
Russkaia Druzhba: Russian Friendship in American and Israeli Contexts
Authors: Markowitz Fran
Published: April 2006

Conversations with recent immigrants from the Soviet Union' often revolve around the theme of druzhba. In Israel and America alike, Russian-Jewish newcomers wistfully and passionately describe their old circles of friends as involved in absorbing conversations about literature, cinema, and news from abroad. As they reminisce, Soviet Jewish immigrants break into smiles and relate the political jokes and critical anecdotes they heard and told in these circles. They tell too of friends pooling scarce resources to help each other purchase a car, an apartment or summer home, a once-in-a-lifetime find on the black market, or, simply, food. Happily they remember birthday and New Year's parties that just seemed to have happened; they describe festive singing and dancing in joyful gatherings that were never formal or prearranged.
The Soviet-German Syphilis Expedition to Buriat Mongolia, 1928: Scientific Research on National Minorities
Authors: Solomon Susan Gross
Published: April 2006

In April 1928 a team of eight Soviet and eight German medical researchers set out for the remote area of Kul'skoe in the Buriat—Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the USSR to examine endemic syphilis and the impact of the anti—syphilis drug, Salvarsan, on the course of the disease. This three—month expedition was negotiated by some of the leading political and scientific figures on both sides and was launched with considerable fanfare, although it was not—nor was it intended to be—a scientific milestone in the field of venereology.
Tatiana's Garden: Noble Sensibilities and Estate Park Design in the Romantic Era
Authors: Roosevelt Priscilla R.
Published: April 2006

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.
Workers‘ Unrest and the Bolsheviks‘ Response in 1919
Authors: Brovkin Vladimir
Published: April 2006

At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks appeared to enjoy considerable social support. They were perceived as the proponents of soviet power; support for the Bolshevik party meant support for soviet power. The majority of workers (especially those in large industrial centers) identified with the Bolsheviks because they promoted greater workers’ control at the workplace. The Bolsheviks were perceived as uncompromising defenders of workers’ interests. For the peasants, the Bolsheviks represented a party of black repartition, that is a party that encouraged peasant land seizures. For the soldiers, the Bolsheviks were a party that promised to stop the war. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks exemplified direct rule from below, the rule of Soviets. All of these diverse constituencies converged in their support for the Bolshevik party at the end of 1917, each for a different reason.
The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Youth Theater TRAM
Authors: Mally Lynn
Published: April 2006

“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”
The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel
Authors: Clements Barbara Evans
Published: April 2006

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?
Defining and Ignoring Labor Discipline in the Early Soviet Period: The Comrades-Disciplinary Courts, 1918-1922
Authors: Sieglebaum Lewis H.
Published: April 2006

As social and cultural historians have known for some time now, court records can yield rich rewards. Judicial proceedings, particularly those involving defendants with a good story to tell, can illuminate issues and mentalities—indeed whole cosmologies—that otherwise are beyond the purview of later generations. The more irreconcilable the narratives of prosecution and defense, the better, for their very irreconcilability is what provides historians with the opportunity for intervention and partial, albeit posthumous, vindication of the accused. But while the Soviet juridical system has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, almost all of it has been animated by political- or legal-historical questions. Little use has been made of trial proceedings and related materials to explore what they might reveal about other dimensions of Soviet life.
Speaking the Sorrow of Women: Turgenev's “Neschastnaia” and Evgeniia Tur's “Antonina”
Authors: Costlow Jane T.
Published: April 2006

In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of "Neschastnaia," the story that he had just finished writing, as "moia posledniaia dochka."' Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter.

Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. "Neschastnaia" is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in which Turgenev himself takes part. This second story concerns the legitimacy of Turgenev himself as much as that of his heroine; it touches on the genesis of Turgenev's own art and his relationship to women writers of the 184Qs. It is a story suggested by the thematics of paternity and legitimacy and also by the very structure of Turgenev's narrative.
Ol'ga Freidenberg on Myth, Folklore, and Literature
Authors: Perlina Nina
Published: April 2006

Ol'ga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890-1955) has recently emerged from oblivion in the Soviet Union and in the west. In the Soviet Union, she has gained renown for the extraordinary diversity of her scholarly interests, from classical philology to a broad range of topics in theoretical poetics. In the west she is now known for her correspondence with her cousin, Boris Pasternak, and as the author of voluminous memoir notes, Probeg zhizni. The epistolary part of Freidenberg's archive was published in Russian and in English by Elliott Mossman in The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg: 1910-1954.