bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Neo-Serfdom in Hungary
Authors: Király Béla K.
Published: April 2006

In the particular case of Hungary, neo-serfdom is to be seen as an economic, political, and social evolution in which the political power of the nobility, especially that of the gentry, grew considerably; the demesne lands of the lords disproportionately increased at the expense of the serfs' rustical lands; the lords' seigneurial jurisdiction over their peasants increased; and the lords' management of their economy shifted from receiving rents to producing for markets. It was a system of social stagnation in which the evolution of cities and an urban middle class, a potential counterbalance to the nobility, was made impossible, and the serfs had no way out of their degrading environment and status. These conditions developed rapidly after the suppression of the Dózsa revolt of 1514, the greatest peasant movement of discontent in Hungary. As a result, the peasants were bound to the soil. The national Diet of 1547, however, enacted the serfs' right of migration, a freedom which was re enacted several times more.
The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905
Authors: Rosenthal Bernice Glatzer
Published: April 2006

He [Chulkov] says to me, “mystical anarchism,” I say to him, “non-acceptance of the world, supra-individualism, mystical energism,” and we understand each other. . . .

Viacheslav Ivanov

The Revolution of 1905 challenged the symbolists’ belief that they could seclude themselves from the rest of society. Forced to reexamine their previous ideas, values, and attitudes, they developed new ideologies that took cognizance of the current crisis. Among the most prominent of the new ideologies was mystical anarchism, the doctrine of the symbolist writers Georgii Chulkov and Viacheslav Ivanov. Particularly attractive to the symbolists, mystical anarchism also influenced other artists and intellectuals; doctrines similar to it proliferated, and it engendered a polemic in which almost all the symbolists took part. Strikingly similar to the mystical anarchism of other periods of social upheaval, both in Russia and in the West, illuminating a facet of the little-known mystical and religious aspects of the Revolution of 1905, and providing an example of the response of apolitical writers and artists to revolutionary upheaval, Chulkov and Ivanov’s doctrine merits closer study than it has so far received.
The Enigma of the Gajda Affair in Czechoslovak Politics in 1926
Authors: Zorach Jonathan
Published: April 2006

While historians have studied Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland extensively, histories of interwar Eastern Europe either totally ignore or make only guarded references to an alleged attempted coup in Czechoslovakia in the same year under the aegis of the prominent general and former Russian legionary, Radola Gajda (1892-1948). In 1926, Gajda, the acting chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Army, was removed from his post to be tried and convicted for having committed several treasonable offenses against the Czechoslovak state. Historians agree that Gajda harbored Fascist political sympathies—as after his dismissal from the army, he became the leader of the “National Fascist Community” (Národnί obec fašistická or NOF), the small Czech Fascist movement—but no one has written in detail about Gajda’s career in the army before 1926. Two older accounts of Czechoslovak politics by Ferdinand Peroutka and Harry Klepetář briefly discuss the sensational scandal surrounding Gajda, and several Communist historians have asserted that Gajda reached an agreement with the Slovak leader Vojtech (Béla) Tuka to carry out a coup against the government during the 1926 Sokol gymnastic congress.
Reflections on Further Thoughts
Authors: Hunter Holland
Published: April 2006

Messrs. Davies and Wheatcroft add useful perspective to the discussion in the June 1973 issue of the Slavic Review. I am particularly impressed with their description of how initial enthusiasm among some staff technicians led after a year or two to overoptimism at higher levels that alarmed even the initial enthusiasts. The sorcerer’s apprentice in this case was not a junior underling but a determined major figure. Unfortunately, the sequential transmission of overoptimism upward in the political structure took place precisely during a period when the surrounding economic environment was becoming less, favorable. By the time the first plan was issued, its overoptimism embodied high-level desperation in the face of technically informed skepticism.
Zinoviev's Revolutionary Tactics in 1917
Authors: Hedlin Myron W.
Published: April 2006

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership succeeded in gaining control over the chaotic city of Petrograd. Undoubtedly it was a great triumph for what early in 1917 had been a small, isolated group whose leaders were in exile either abroad or in Siberia. In analyzing the October Revolution, both participants and historians have given major credit to Lenin's brilliant planning and the disciplined, centralized party he had insisted upon as early as 1902. Thus those who opposed Lenin in October 1917 have usually been •branded as weak and indecisive with no positive program and no understanding of the real condition of Russia in 1917. As is often the case with the defeated, the opposition's program has received much criticism but little study. One of the revolutionaries so treated is Grigorii Zinoviev.
Emancipation Through Communism: The Ideology of A. M. Kollontai
Authors: Clements Barbara Evans
Published: April 2006

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.
The Origins of Alexander III’s Land Captains: A Reinterpretation
Authors: Pearson Thomas S.
Published: April 2006

The Land Captain Statute of 1889 is invariably regarded as the foremost legislative act of Alexander III’s reign, and with good reason. While Governor V. P. Golitsyn of Moscow probably exaggerated in calling it “no less significant and extensive than the peasant reform” of 1861,’ contemporary officials of diverse views agreed that it was the most controversial and important piece of domestic legislation in the 1880s. Yet for many years historians paid little attention to it or to Alexander III’s reign as a whole. Rather they dismissed the land captains (zemskie nachal'niki) as a reactionary institution intended to counter the revolutionary unrest of the late 1870s by increasing the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry. Soviet studies in the past two decades have filled in many details concerning the elaboration of the land captain legislation and have added a Marxist-Leninist slant in contending that gentry class interests influenced the autocracy to introduce the measure. Not surprisingly, they emphasize the role of A. D. Pazukhin, a wealthy gentry marshal and zemstvo board chairman from Alatyr' district (Simbirsk province), in drafting the counterreform during 1885-86 and persuading the infirm Minister of Internal Affairs D. A. Tolstoi (who died almost three months before the promulgation of the law on July 12, 1889) to support it. Yet in essence the Soviet interpretation of the land captains as part of a reactionary “new course” begun abruptly in the mid-1880s and designed to turn back the clock in the countryside adheres, as do most Western accounts on the topic, to the views of pre-Revolutionary “liberal” historians.
The Restoration of Moscow After 1812
Authors: Schmidt Albert J.
Published: April 2006

The calamitous fire which destroyed Moscow in 1812 precipitated a momentous urban renewal, which took on special architectural significance because it made Moscow one of Europe's foremost classical cities. To a greater degree than London, Edinburgh, Berlin, or Vienna, Russia's old capital acquired a “neoclassical” look despite the reappearance in it of much that was traditional and wooden. The purpose of this article is to stress the significance of the fire as a watershed in the city's history, noting those planning and building antecedents that gave rise to the new city after 1812.
A Note on the Distribution of Earnings in the USSR Under Brezhnev
Authors: Ellman Michael
Published: April 2006

A characteristic feature of the 1970s is also the increase in the differentiation of wages
as one of the means of strengthening the principle of material incentives.

Problemy Raspredeleniia I Rost Narodnogo Blagosostoianiia
Autocratic Politics, Public Opinion, and Women's Medical Education During the Reign of Alexander II, 1855-1881
Authors: Johanson Christine
Published: April 2006

The reign of Alexander II witnessed an extraordinary expansion of women's medical education. The post-Crimean War regime saw the establishment of the first Russian medical courses which trained female physicians and the creation of a contingent of women doctors far outnumbering that of any contemporary European state. This remarkable advance of Russian women in the medical profession grew out of the experimental policies and the somewhat erratic nature of Alexander II's rule, which introduced sweeping, but often uncoordinated, domestic reforms and allowed favored statesmen to develop competing policies in their respective ministries. During the period 1855—81, the popular press, reveling in its recent release from Nicholas I's censorship, transformed the question of women's medical education into a major issue of public controversy.
Mythical Implications of Father Zosima's Religious Teachings
Authors: Anderson Roger B.
Published: April 2006

One of the most perplexing questions in The Brothers Karamazov is the manner in which Father Zosima serves as Dostoevsky's spokesman on matters of spiritual faith. Zosima's teachings emphasize humility, a mystical union of man and the world, and undifferentiated love; the key to faith for him is the individual's own emotion, the wisdom of the heart. In keeping with the deeply personal quality of Zosima's message, he teaches in the form of short homilies and stories from his own past. These often lack logical connectives, relying instead on repetition of certain images of nature and mystical community. Malcolm Jones has aptly remarked that Dostoevsky withholds specific guidelines from his seekers of faith, giving only the personal experience of individual characters, which is bound up with the symbolism of their own interpretations.
Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905-1910
Authors: Williams Robert C.
Published: April 2006

This pamphlet ivas written iviih an eye to the tsarist censorship. Hence, I was not only forced to confine myself strictly to an exclusively theoretical, particularly economic, analysis of facts, but to formulate the few necessary observations on politics with extreme caution, by hints, in allegorical language—in that accursed Aesopian language— to which tsarism compelled all revolutionaries to have recourse whenever they took up their pens to write a "legal" work.

V. I. Lenin

Collectivism was a Utopian dream that flourished in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and later became part of Soviet ideology. Eisenstein's early films, conductorless orchestras, and mass workers' choruses all aimed at inculcating the view that a collective—be it the party, the proletariat, or the masses—was to replace the individual as the determinant of social and political values. The popular "proletarian culture" movement that flourished during the civil war (1918-21) was one form of collectivism, but there were many others. Yet, as a body of ideas, collectivism in Russia preceded the 1917 Revolution by a decade or more and made a crucial contribution to bolshevism. Indeed, in the years after 1905, collectivism had as much a claim to bolshevism as did the party-centered authoritarianism of Lenin.
The Poetics of Authority in Pushkin's “André Chénier”
Authors: Sandler Stephanie
Published: April 2006

During the spring and summer months of 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin intensified his efforts to end his exile in Mikhailovskoe. Though his friends urged him to produce work that might influence imperial opinion in his favor, Pushkin doubted that his poems could win him freedom. His writings increasingly were concerned with what the function of poetry should be. Pushkin's “crisis” in 1825 turned not only on political issues (the Decembrist revolt at the end of the year upset him greatly) but also on literary decisions. Politics and poetry are intertwined in one of the most problematic poems of that year, “André Chénier.” A poem now virtually forgotten, “André Chénier” shows Pushkin working out a formula for asserting his independence as a poet which was to organize his poetics for years to come.

The French poet André Chénier (1762–1794) was seen in the 1820s as an impassioned champion of political liberty who had been martyred for his ideals during the French Revolution. His poetry has strong formal and thematic ties to the classical tradition. Critics then as now have wavered between calling Chénier a neoclassical poet and the first romantic poet. Pushkin and his contemporaries were struck by the fresh diction and large sweep of Chénier's poems. Because Chénier's poetry was suppressed after his death, the publication in 1819 of the first collection of his verse made him seem suddenly contemporary, all the more so since his ideas were consonant with those of free-thinking Russian aristocratic circles of the time.
Stalin's German Policy After Stalin
Authors: Baras Victor
Published: April 2006

Stalin's “last word” on German reunification was contained in the Soviet diplomatic note of March 10, 1952, which proposed a peace treaty with Germany. Until the middle of 1953, Stalin's heirs continued to press for reunification on the basis of the 1952 note. The East German uprising of June 17, 1953 (which is commemorated in West Germany, with unintended irony, as the “Day of German Unity“) marked the de facto termination of the Soviet reunification initiative. As a result of the uprising, the rulers of the Soviet Union and East Germany were forced to place greater emphasis on the consolidation of the Communist regime in the GDR—that is, the stability of East Germany required policies explicitly directed toward the development of a separate, socialist East German state. Thus, the uprising and the subsequent Soviet intervention further undermined the credibility of an already questionable Soviet reunification initiative.
Institutional Change in the 1970s: The Case of the USSR People's Control Committee
Authors: Adams Jan S.
Published: April 2006

In the continuing debate among Western students of Soviet affairs about the direction in which the Soviet political system is moving, all participants agree that accurate analysis is imperative. How one interprets the evidence of change determines one's view of current Soviet reality and one's perception of the opportunities and threats involved in U.S.-Soviet relations. This crucial issue is addressed in the following pages by examining the current situation of an important, evolving institution, the USSR People's Control Committee (Komitet narodnogo kontrolia, or KNK). To a remarkable degree this organization, in its twelfth year of existence, demonstrates the continuing process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet polity.
Factionalism in Church-State Interaction: The Croatian Catholic Church in the 1980s
Authors: Ramet Pedro
Published: April 2006

Among the approaches one might adopt in studying church-state interaction is one that endeavors to treat both church and state as active subjects and which tries to be sensitive to factional divisions within both. This approach makes it clear that just as a regime may have a religious policy, the churches may also have policies toward the regime, and that the resulting relationship reflects the interplay of both policies. If there are factions in both state and church, the policies of both will be the subject and the product of continuing debate and struggle among the factions.

Sensitivity to factionalism is not a black-and-white issue but a matter of degree. Nevertheless, Western writings on church-state relations under communism may be grouped into four general categories. In the first category are works treating both church and state as unified (nonfactionalized) entities—either explicitly (by denying factionalism) or implicitly (by ignoring it as analytically unimportant).
Madman or Criminal: Government Attitudes to Petr Chaadaev in 1836
Authors: Tempest Richard
Published: April 2006

Petr Chaadaev's First Philosophic Letter (Pervoe filosoficheskoe pis'mo) was published in September (Old Style) 1836, in the fifteenth issue of Teleskop, the mediocre magazine owned and edited by Nikolai Nadezhdin. The Letter, probably the most celebrated article in the country's history, dispraised Russia in her past and present as an exception to the universal laws of humanity, despaired of her future, deplored her Orthodoxy, described her as a pariah among the nations of both East and West, and denied that she possessed a true civilization; the essay had a strong providentialist, chiliastic, and Catholic flavor.

Chaadaev thus defined the terrain, the terms, and even the tone for the public debate—the first of its kind in Russia—between Slavophiles and Westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s, and he can be said to have inaugurated that debate. Chaadaev opened the discussion of the destiny of Russia on a note of attack.
Dar'ia's Secret; or What Happens in Moroz, Krasnyi Nos
Authors: Gregg Richard
Published: April 2006

“One of Nekrasov's very greatest works, the long poem Moroz, Krasnyi Nos, which by virtue of its profound penetration into the life of the peasant and its powerful pictorial and lyrical style transcends almost everything which has been written about the Russian countryside, has yet to be studied [izucheno] in our country.” So wrote Kornei Chukovskii a quarter of a century ago.

The critic's complaint was surely exaggerated. After all, one of the century's most eminent Nekrasov scholars, Vladislav E. Evgen'ev-Maksimov, had given the poem his serious and sustained attention, and lesser investigators have in the last fifty years significantly increased our understanding of its metrical, folkloric, and polemical aspects. These critical forays notwithstanding, in a sense Chukovskii's statement holds true to this day. For if it is agreed that what we expect most from criticism is an expanded understanding of what a literary work is about; if, in other words, it is the critic as exegete whom we value most highly (there are of course those who would dispute the premise), then Moroz, Krasnyi Nos has indeed been neglected. For, more than 120 years after its publication a serious hermaneutic study of this famous poem is still wanting.
Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation's Past-Present-Future
Authors: Gruenwald Oskar
Published: April 2006

They [prison and camp authorities] wanted to lower men to the animal level. And they succeeded. There, I realized that life should not be lived for its own sake. Life should be lived for the sake of a goal, faith, freedom, and truth.

Radoslav Kostić-Katunac, Look, Lord, To the Other Side: Yugoslavia's Gulag

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.
Bolshevik Razverstka and War Communism
Authors: Lih Lars T.
Published: April 2006

Few would dispute the claim that the razverstka, the Bolshevik method of grain procurement, was a centerpiece of “war communism.” Yet there exists no adequate treatment of the razverstka in the scholarly literature, and indeed there is widespread confusion about the nature and purposes of the razverstka policy as well as about the circumstances of its introduction and its replacement in 1921 by a food-supply tax (prodnalog). A closer look at the actual razverstka reveals some surprising features and in the end casts doubt on the validity and usefulness of the war communism notion itself.

The razverstka was introduced in the second half of 1918 as a result of experience in trying to enforce a state grain monopoly by means of the foodsupply dictatorship decreed in spring 1918. To understand the razverstka method we must first look at the more ambitious aims of the previous policy of a fullfledged grain monopoly.
Wrestling with Lev Tolstoi: War, Peace, and Revolution in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's NewAvgust Chetyrnadtsatogo
Authors: Krasnov Vladislav
Published: April 2006

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

Since its first appearance in 1971, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'sAvgust Chetyrnadtsatogo(henceforth to be referred to asAugust 1914)has been compared to, and measured by the standards of, Lev Tolstoi'sWar and Peace.One might say that both the subject of the novel and the scope of the historical events described in it, as well as its numerous references to Tolstoi, made such comparisons inevitable. Even though virtually all critics were unanimous that Tolstoi was a predominant presence in Solzhenitsyn's mind when he was writing the first “knot” of the multivolume novel cycle, they disagreed about the precise nature of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Tolstoi. While some critics have been more inclined to see Solzhenitsyn's novel as an emulation of Tolstoi's masterpiece, others have emphasized the antagonistic and polemic quality of Solzhenitsyn's attitudes toward his predecessor—whether Tolstoi the “historiosoph” ofWar and Peace(1865— 1869) or Tolstoi the moralist and aesthetician of the later period.
Soviet Immigrant Mothers' Perceptions Regarding the First Childbearing Year: The 1950s and the 1970s
Authors: Ispa Jean M.
Published: April 2006

From the 1950s to the 1970s the views of sex roles in general and of childbearing in particular that were held by women in the United States changed considerably. Some evidence also indicates modest changes in ideas about sex roles occurred in the Soviet Union over these decades, but there is less reason to expect that similar changes took place in attitudes specifically towards childbearing. This article explores areas of stability and change between these two decades in Soviet women's emotional responses to pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn care and their sources of advice and support during the transition to motherhood. Similarities and differences between two cohorts, one composed of women who gave birth in the 1950s and one composed of women who gave birth in the 1970s, are discussed in terms of the prevailing family ideologies and social and economic conditions of the two decades.
Four Demons of Valentin Kataev
Authors: Kiziria Dodona
Published: April 2006

“Revolution itself commanded men's lives in those days.”

Valentin Kataev, The Grass of Oblivion

The Grass of Oblivion, a novel by Valentin Kataev, is a tribute to the Russian writers who were forced to choose their path during the revolution and the civil war. The theme may seem outdated, but the approach to the theme and its literary treatment are amazingly original and modern. In all of Soviet literature it would be difficult to find tragic images comparable to the two poets in this narrative (Bunin and Maiakovskii) who are compelled, finally and irrevocably, either to accept or reject the role offered to them by the new social order. Yet these images are outlined with such grace and elegance, and so tempered with irony, that an ambivalence, an almost diabolic duality is etched into the characters and events. Even the character of the narrator appears split, further complicating the multileveled narrative structure of the novel in which reality is so densely interwoven with fantasy that a third, synthesizing plane of meaning emerges.
Igor, Ossian, and Kinbote: Nabokov's Nonfiction as Reference Library
Authors: Meyer Priscilla
Published: April 2006

“How ludicrous these efforts to translate Into one's private tongue a public fate!“

Pale Fire, lines 231-232

It is becoming apparent as research sets out the points of contact among Vladimir Nabokov's works that Nabokov deliberately designed his total oeuvre as a spiral that finds ever-widening patterns in the weave of the universe. We are beginning to see how Nabokov combines the passion of natural scientific investigation and the cool distance of literary creation in his art; from reading his commentaries to Pushkin's Eugene Oneginand The Song of Igor's Campaign,we understand how he interprets literary texts through the accumulation of precise detail anchored in fact. Just as the evolution of natural species involves tracing migration and patterns of mimicry, a literary work may be investigated through the evolution of its cultural history.
Lessons from the Periphery: Saratov, January 1905
Authors: Sanders Jonathan
Published: April 2006

A general strike spearheaded by those controlling the railroads forced tsarist autocracy to its knees in 1905. This tactic, unprecedented in Russian history, was born in Saratov early that year. Saratov's pioneering role derived from an operative principle of solidarity across class, caste, professional, and political lines. However much the crowds filling Saratov's streets resembled those elsewhere, protesters in the middle Volga city came away from the strike after Bloody Sunday with something unique—they had wrung major concessions from local administrators. The economic victory belonged to the men and women of the Riazan'-Urals Railroad who, significantly, had acted together. Their mutually reinforcing interactions, their wedding of economic and political demands framed an effective mechanism for conducting a general strike.
The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin: A New Look at the Evidence
Authors: Lyandres Semion
Published: April 2006

On Friday, 30 August 1918, the day M. S. Uritskii, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated, Lenin was scheduled to address the Corn Exchange in the Basmannyi district of Moscow at 6:00 P.M. and the Mikhelson Armaments Factory in the Serpukhovskii section later. The first speech passed without incident; at the Mikhelson factory he gave the same fifteen-to-twenty minute speech he had delivered at the Corn Exchange, an attack on the forces of counterrevolution. In both locations he concluded his speech with the words “there is only one issue, victory or death!” As Lenin returned to his car in the factory courtyard, three shots were fired and he fell to the ground with bullet wounds in his left shoulder and the left side of his neck; the third bullet hit a woman standing nearby. The workers accompanying him to his car ran off, crying, “they've killed him, they've killed him!” and the crowded courtyard emptied quickly.
Climate, Crops, and Natural Increase in Rural Russia, 1861–1913
Authors: Matossian Mary Kilbourne
Published: April 2006

A great many available statistics describe the population history of Russia, but explanations for these statistics are limited or nonexistent. The useful studies of fertility and migration that have appeared are primarily accurate reports of what happened. Studies of Russian mortality are wholly lacking, an understandable situation, since as late as 1913 only thirteen out of fifty provinces of European Russia had medical statistical bureaus. Despite all past efforts the history of Russia's health remains obscure.

While the health of the Russian people today is comparable to that of other Europeans, before the Revolution of 1917 it was extremely poor. In 1897, the year of the first national Russian census, the infant mortality rate for European Russia was 260 for each 1,000 births, compared to 222 for Germany, 164 for France, 156 for Italy, 156 for England and Wales, and 109 for Ireland.
A New Soviet Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories: A Major Contribution in Light of Recent Reference Aids
Authors: Grimsted Patricia Kennedy
Published: April 2006

A directory of all archives and manuscript repositories in the USSR with a comprehensive bibliography of finding aids has long been needed by researchers. Yet one of the most highly centralized, state-run archival systems in the world, with its subsidiary strong publication division under the world's first specialized research institute for archival affairs, has still not seen fit to provide researchers with such a basic reference aid. Now, significantly not from Moscow but from the western Ukrainian center of Lviv, comes the second edition of a research handbook of all-union scope that more closely approaches that optimal directory than any other single volume available. The expanded second edition still does not cover all repositories by any means, or even all of the largest and most important manuscript-holding institutions in some areas. Its bibliography remains far from comprehensive and is awkwardly presented.
Getting the Goods to St. Petersburg: Water Transport from the Interior 1703–1811
Authors: Jones Robert E.
Published: April 2006

Although historians have often noted the disadvantages of St. Petersburg's location for the development of a major city and seaport, they have paid relatively little attention to one of its most serious handicaps, its lack of direct and easy access to the products of the Russian interior. From the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 to the opening of the Mariinsk and Tikhvin canals in 1810–11, the difficulty of transporting goods from the provinces to St. Petersburg created serious problems for consumers, producers, and merchants as well as the imperial government. It affected important sectors of the national economy and influenced the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian government.

Part of the difficulty of supplying St. Petersburg stemmed from the seemingly insatiable demand for Russian goods that accompanied the development of that city.
What Faith the God-Contemporary? Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha
Authors: Olcott Anthony
Published: April 2006

Chingiz Aitmatov has long been a powerful figure in Soviet literature, but few critics in the west or the Soviet Union have treated him as a serious writer. Many of the reasons why Aitmatov's reputation is not commensurate with his achievement are clear enough; the few westerners who have bothered with Aitmatov tend to agree that he offers "a somewhat new mix from the old patterns of Soviet literature with an admixture of Central Asian lore, but the game he is playing is as old as socialist realism itself.
From the Other Shore: Aleksandr Herzen on James Buchanan
Authors: Shengold David
Published: April 2006

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.
Testing Early Soviet Economic Alternatives
Authors: Hunter Holland , Szyrmer Janusz M.
Published: April 2006

This paper focuses on four issues concerning Soviet economic prospects debated in the 1920s. The first had been posed by Lenin in the summer of 1917 in Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia, where he explained confidently" … that expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in the enormous development of the productive forces of human society. But how rapidly this development will proceed … we do not and cannot know." In mid-September he added the well-known warning:

The result of the revolution has been that the political system of Russia has in a few months caught up with that of the advanced countries. But that is not enough. The war is inexorable: it puts the alternative with ruthless severity: either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically as well.
Creating the Soviet Historical Profession, 1917-1934
Authors: Byrnes Robert F.
Published: April 2006

Despite the richness of primary sources covering the 1917-1921 period of Soviet history, the swirl of events and disagreements over policy among the Bolsheviks make the period confusing for the scholar. In this confusion and understandable disorder, the goals and policies of the Soviet leaders were remarkably consistent: They sought to acquire and retain full control. Lenin and his colleagues were fully aware of the importance of history and of those who wrote and taught it. In their new world, history was to provide the scientific explanation of the past and provide guidance for the future, but acquiring power and beginning construction of the new society occupied higher priorities for them than did the, historical profession.
Stepsons in the Motherland: The Architectonics of Vasilii Grossman's Zhizn' i Sud'ba
Authors: Garrard John
Published: April 2006

The question of freedom and slavery tormented Grossman all his life.

Semen Lipkin

Architectonics designates those compositional principles that define a novel's structural and thematic coherence. The Greek term arkhitektonike, as glossed by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, has the additional merit of offering a useful shorthand for my eclectic approach to Vasilii Grossman's novel: a pre-Saussurean concern for referent, parole, and authorial intent, combined with a structuralist focus on design and pattern–a search for the binary oppositions and governing motifs that make the work an integrated linguistic construct. I argue that Zhizn' i sud'ba requires such an approach and that only through coming to grips with the novel's architectonics shall we understand its meaning and appreciate its artistic energy.
Andrei Bitov's “Zhizn' v Vetrenuiu pogodu”: The Creative Process in Life and Literature
Authors: Chances Ellen
Published: April 2006

Henry David Thoreau, in "Walden," wrote about people leading "lives of quiet desperation." Russian literature is filled with examples of people who cannot break out of the paralysis of selfimprisonment and who are deadened to life by their addiction to habit. In "Zhizn' v vetrenuiu pogodu" ["Life in Windy Weather"] Andrei Bitov explores the process, in life and literature, of escape from those ossified forms of existence and art. He plots the path toward creative living and creative writing. For him, one cannot divide the creative process in life from the creative process in literature.
Chaos, Apocalypse, The Laws of Nature: Autonomy and “Unity” in Dostoevskii’s Idiot
Authors: Rosenshield Gary
Published: April 2006

Addressing what he sees as serious disjunctures in characterization and narrative technique, Joseph Frank has called Idiot “the most disorganized,” of Fedor Dostoevskii’s major works. The first part of the novel so differs from the last three parts, Frank holds, that it may “best be read as an independent novella.” Although, undoubtedly, many subtle structural, thematic, and rhetorical elements tie the novel together, Idiot does seem at times to generate as much centrifugal as centripetal force. Tackling this issue head on, Robin Feuer Miller, with judicious use of reader-response theory, succeeds in imposing some order on the narrational disjunctures of the text, setting up a hierarchy of narrators and narrative personae. More problematic, however, is the question of point of view in the larger sense. In the Bakhtinian sense, point of view manifests itself in the relation between the different narrators of the novel as the autonomous voices of the characters and the narrator enter into an unfinished dialogue. The broader use of the term concerns the novel’s worldviews, or master plots, which variously govern and structure the presentation of character, story, and metaphor.
Monologue of the Anti-Hero: Trifonov and the Prose of the Last Decade
Authors: Kustanovich Konstantin
Published: April 2006

The question of humanity’s moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a “clean sheet” whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a “living soul” endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as “the period of stagnation,” began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of thederevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.
Toward Understanding Stavrogin
Authors: Pope Richard , Turner Judy
Published: April 2006

… Freud … on the occasion of his seventieth birthday paid the extraordinary tribute to Dostoevsky acknowledging … that everything he had discovered was already to be found in Dostoevsky's works

Edward Wasiolek

Dostoevsky [was] the only psychologist … from whom I had anything to
learn: he belongs to the luckiest finds of my life, even more so than the discovery of Stendhal. This deep man …

Nietzsche

The whole second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the
habits accumulated in the first half.

Stavrogin

Stavrogin is an immense and bewildering character. In the opinion of Konstantin Mochulskii, he is "Dostoevsky's greatest artistic creation." He is complex and mysterious—and frightening because plausible. There is much more to him than the obvious Byronic dimension, and we are clearly confronted by more than just another Russian hero who is bored, passive, and las de vivre. He is strikingly handsome, powerful, and brilliant—exceptional in every way—but a miserable failure as a human being. In the excluded chapter "At Tikhon's," Tikhon tells Stavrogin, "I was horrified to see your great unused powers had been so deliberately turned toward filth" (434). How can a person of such intelligence and talent fail so abjectly in life and do so little good but so much evil? This question obviously fascinated Dostoevskii who probed Stavrogin deeply, looking for the answer, and ended up with a character whose complexity is rare even for Dostoevskii.
Dialogue as “Lyrical Hermaphroditism”: Mandel shtam's Challenge to Bakhtin
Authors: Boym Svetlana
Published: April 2006

Osip Mandel'shtam, “Fransua Villon”

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane”

The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.
Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva in Unpublished Letters to Her Son Ivan (1838-1844)
Authors: Rice James L.
Published: April 2006

—V. P. Turgeneva to Ivan Sergeevich, Spasskoe, 30 July 1838

On the eve of World War I the St. Petersburg Public Library acquired, from an anonymous donor, 124 letters from V. P. Turgeneva to her son, Ivan Sergeevich, written from 1838 to 1844. His side of the correspondence is not extant, but his youthful personality is often vividly evoked by his mother’s words, and his letters are reflected and occasionally quoted in hers. These letters from the hand of V. P. would comprise, an archivist once observed, a thick book.1 During the era they represent, I. S. (“Milyi drug i syn, Vanichka,” somewhat more frequently “Mon cher Jean”) entered Berlin University to study philosophy, traveled in Europe, published twenty short poems and the comic verse narrative Parasha, met Vissarion Belinskii and became his friend, began his lifelong friendship with the Viardots, was first stricken with gallstones and other complaints, published his first story (already mature and polished, “Andrei Kolosov“), and wrote part of a work of fiction now seen as a key to his creativity (“Perepiska,” published in 1856).
Roll Out the Barrels: Emptiness, Fullness, and the Picaresque-Idyllic Dynamic in Vasilii Aksenov’s “Zatovarennaia bochkotara”
Authors: Beraha Laura
Published: April 2006

Barrels roll. In a mythological, folk, or literary text, they set off a reciprocal dynamic of emptying out and filling in. Where Diogenes filled his barrel with his own cynical self, Francois Rabelais removed him, then poured back in the wine drained off to accommodate his asceticism. On the basis of this example, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates the need to re-embody the disembodied; in connection with the folk laughter that replenishes the hollow chill of mortality, he notes that Rabelais celebrated the “cheerful death” of the Duke of Clarence in a barrel full of malmsey. In Vladimir Propp’s analysis of myth, folktales, and initiation rites, barrels stand in for the bellies of great fish; these swallow and then regurgitate the hero, supplying in the interim “temporary death,” mystic instruction, and the makings of a leader or a savior of the people. It is in an ocean-going barrel that Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon, condemned to an infant death, grows “not by days, but by hours” (“Skazka o tsare Saltane” [Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831]), repeating the pattern of reversals in birth dreams, through exposure on the water and entombment in womb-like receptacles, studied by Otto Rank. Il'ia Erenburg’s apostle of absolute and universal negation had planned to start his mission by crossing the Atlantic in a beer barrel (Julio Jurenito, 1922). The dual or schizophrenic narrator of Sasha Sokolov’s Shkola dlia durakov (School for fools, 1976), though otherwise anonymous, is moved to fill his mentor’s barrel with his own singular name.
Genocide or Partition: Two Faces of the Same Coin?
Authors: Woodward Susan L.
Published: April 2006

Robert Hayden is not alone in wondering why the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995 was labeled a population transfer and even justified by the logic of nation-states, while the expulsion of Muslims by Serbs in 1992-96 from an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs claim for their state was labeled genocide and justified establishing an international war crimes tribunal. Hayden wants to protect the term genocide, and its legal standing internationally, for truly exceptional instances—to wit, the Holocaust, and nothing else until, God forbid, there should be another such instance. By contrast, he argues, population transfers, even on a massive scale and forced, are not pathological. "Ethnic cleansing" of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether of Croatia or of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is unexceptional, a normal part of the history of the twentieth century. Although final solutions are not inevitable—Hayden criticizes Croatian President Tudjman for writings that seem to have justified the Serb expulsion as such—"ethnic cleansing" is a part of the history even of states that now sit in moral condemnation of the Balkan horrors and the Bosnian Serbs.
Anti-Semitism in Moscow: A Re-examination
Authors: Brym Robert J.
Published: April 2006

My dispute with Gibson and Hesli et al. rests on fundamental methodological differences. They do not fully appreciate the historical and political context from which Russian survey data derive. As a result, they engage in a series of statistical misapplications which undermine the soundness of their critique of my article with Degtyarev and of their views concerning the nature and consequences of anti-Semitism in Russia.
Ownership of Oil and Gas Resources in the Caspian Sea
Authors: Mehdiyoun Kamyar
Published: April 2006

In the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the birth of new sovereign nations bordering the Caspian Sea, the legal status of the sea has emerged as one of the most contentious international problems facing the region. The discovery of large offshore oil and gas deposits in the area has added urgency to the need to resolve the twin issues of the legal status of the sea and the corresponding mining rights.

The Caspian, the largest inland body of water in the world, is approximately the size of Japan. The south Caspian is the deepest part and contains the most productive oil and gas fields. The oil-producing area of the south Caspian that holds the most promise extends along a narrow structural zone across the sea from the Apsheron Peninsula in Azerbaijan to the Peri-Balkhan region of western Turkmenistan.
Resolving Cross-Strait Relations Between China and Taiwan
Authors: Charney Jonathan I. , Prescott J. R. V.
Published: April 2006

Much has been written about the legal relationship between China and Taiwan. The discussion often focuses on whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or the Republic of China (ROC) is the government of China or what entity has territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.1 It is hard to find definitive answers to these questions. This article seeks to reexamine aspects of the issues in the light of the relevant historical facts and contemporary international law. Although no conclusive answers are possible, this study attempts to open new perspectives that could facilitate the development of a solution acceptable to all interested parties.