bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Formalism” in Polish Literary Scholarship
Authors: Folejewski Zbigniew
Published: April 2006

In discussing the contribution of the Polish “Formal” or “Integral” School to the development of literary research, one of the difficulties is whether to view it mainly as an echo of Russian Formalism or as a scholarly movement in its own right. There is no doubt that the often strikingly suggestive theoretical slogans and undeniable practical achievements of the Russian Formalists—such as Shklovsky's insights on the theory of the novel, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, M. A. Petrovsky's Morphology of the Short Story, and the research of Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Roman Jakobson in the field of poetry—all greatly attracted those Polish scholars who were looking for a coherent, strictly literary set of criteria, discouraged as they were by the inflation of biographism and psychologism in literary research. Yet the impact of Russian Formalism was limited in scope and in many respects rather indirect. On the one hand, the reaction against the one-sidedness of the psychological school came in Poland independently, and in some ways even earlier than in Russia. For this the Polish scholars did not need to go to Russia—they had both ancient (Aristotle) and more modern sources (German, Italian, French, and others). On the other hand, many of the Polish scholars did not even know the Russian language, though they knew some Western languages very well. (The scholar who was to become the foremost promoter of Formalism, Manfred Kridl, knew very little Russian when he came to teach at the University of Wilno. It was under the influence and with the help of a group of students that he became familiar with the writings of the Formalists.)
Incentives in Communist Agriculture: The Hungarian Models
Authors: Dohrs Fred E.
Published: April 2006

One of the greatest failures of Communist systems everywhere has been in agricultural productivity. In the Soviet Union some thirty-five years of collectivized agriculture have brought but modest increases in yields and gross production of many crops and livestock; growth of agricultural output per capita since even before the Revolution has been even less impressive. Among the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, although collectivization is much more recent, the pattern has been much the same; yields remain low, and gross production as well as per capita increases has been small.

Although some areas of Eastern Europe and large parts of the USSR can be classified as physically marginal for agriculture, the low levels of agricultural productivity are primarily attributable to defective organization and operation. There have been years when crop failure in this or that area was the direct result of drought, flood, or other natural cause, but these catastrophes cannot be blamed for the low yields which characterize the longer run. The major obstacles to production gains lie within the collectivized system.
Pilsudski and the Slovak Autonomists
Authors: Gromada Thaddeus V.
Published: April 2006

On October 29, 1918, at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was fast approaching dissolution, a Slovak National Council met in Turčianský Svätý Martin to consider two possible alternatives for the Slovak people: autonomy within a Hungarian state or union with the Czechs in a Czechoslovak state. The Slovak leaders decided on the latter. The next day the so-called Turciansky Svätý Martin Declaration was issued, which not only accepted the principle of union with the Czechs but also supported the so-called Czechoslovak thesis. The declaration stated among other things that “the Slovak nation is part of the Czecho-Slovak nation united as much from the linguistic as the cultural and historical point of view.” On the surface everything appeared settled, since responsible Slovak leaders, including the highly respected and admired Slovak patriot Father Andrej Hlinka, were the principal architects of the October 30 declaration.
Changing Directions in Russian-American Economic Relations, 1912-1917
Authors: Tuve Jeanette E.
Published: April 2006

In the nineteenth century Russia and the United States emerged as nations on the periphery of the West European economic and political vortex. Their relations with each other had been, for the most part, prompted by or integrated with some larger issue involving the powers of Western Europe. Economic relations were no exception. Both nations were traditionally exporters of raw materials to industrialized, urbanized nations, which in turn were prepared and eager to exchange manufactured goods for raw materials. Russian and American products were therefore competitive rather than reciprocal, and profitable mutual exchange of goods had not developed. Both nations were debtor nations and had relied on the surplus capital of the small and large investors of Western Europe to provide the beginnings of internal transportation and industrialization.
Religious Dissent in the USSR in the 1960s
Authors: Fletcher William C.
Published: April 2006

With some justification, the 1960s may be called the decade of dissent. This is true even with regard to the Soviet Union, where broad sectors of the population have resorted to increasingly vociferous expressions of dissatisfaction with present conditions. If, when the decade began, overt alienation from the system was a relatively unusual phenomenon, the past ten years have given rise to an increasing stream of dissent in the Soviet populace. Among the intelligentsia, almost every rank and profession has been involved in oral, written, and organizational protest. Considerable attention has been devoted to this development by Western scholarship and journalism, and rightly so, for the voices of dissent provide an immediate insight into the tensions and conflicts within the rapidly changing society. One area of dissent, however, has received rather less attention in the West. This paper will attempt to survey the religious portion of the Soviet population, in an endeavor to illustrate the degree to which religious dissatisfaction during the past decade has been consonant with the general current of dissent within Soviet society.
Social Democracy in Tsarist Lithuania, 1893-1904
Authors: Sabaliūnas Leonas
Published: April 2006

From the demise of Poland-Lithuania in 1795 until their emergence as two independent states in 1918, Lithuania was an integral part of the Russian Empire. At the close of the nineteenth century the Lithuanian provinces of that empire had a total population of approximately 2.6 million. Ethnic Lithuanians, 63 percent of the total number of inhabitants, lived mainly in rural regions and were engaged in farming; the rest were members of other ethnic groups, mostly Jews and Poles, who resided in towns and depended for their livelihood on the urban economy. The dominant agricultural hinterland possessed a considerable degree of ethnic unity. The urban centers were multinational. The influx of Russian military and civilian personnel, if small in relation to the total population, contributed to this intermixture of nationalities.
The Theme of Fate in Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914
Authors: Windle Kevin
Published: April 2006

“Truth, Beauty, Good, Evil: ethical imperatives,” runs the line that Innokentii Volodin finds in his mother’s papers on the day of his arrest. As ever, these are the aims to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn aspires in his latest novel. His account of the events in East Prussia as World War I begins is more than an extensive compilation of historical facts, more than their transmutation into fictional form. It is an attempt to capture the truth about certain elusive laws governing the movement and development of human society, best observed in times of crisis. In War and Peace Tolstoy attempted to expound and test a philosophy of history. Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in August 1914 is substantially the same. Some comparison of the two works is inevitable.
Culture and Politics Under Stalin: A Reappraisal
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila
Published: April 2006

Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.
Ambiguity and Meaning in The Master and Margarita: The Role of Afranius
Authors: Pope Richard W. F.
Published: April 2006

Perhaps the most mysterious and elusive figure in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is Afranius, a man who has been in Judea for fifteen years working in the Roman imperial service as chief of the procurator of Judea's secret police. He is present in all four Judean chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26) as one of the myriad connecting links, though we really do not know who he is for certain until near the end of the third of these chapters, “How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth.” We first meet him in chapter 2 (which is related by Woland and entitled “Pontius Pilate”) simply as “some man” (kakoi-to chelovek), face half-covered by a hood, in a darkened room in the palace of Herod the Great, having a brief whispered conversation with Pilate, who has just finished his fateful talk with Caiaphas (E, p. 39; R, pp. 50-51). Fourteen chapters later, in the chapter dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyi and entitled “The Execution” (chapter 16), we meet him for the second time, now bringing up the rear of the convoy escorting the prisoners to Golgotha and identified only as “that same hooded man with whom Pilate had briefly conferred in a darkened room of the palace” (E, p. 170; R, p. 218). “The hooded man” attends the entire execution sitting in calm immobility on a three-legged stool, “occasionally out of boredom poking the sand with a stick” (E, p. 172; R, p. 220). When the Tribune of the Cohort arrives, presumably bearing Pilate's orders to terminate the execution, he (the Tribune) speaks first to Krysoboi (Muribellum), who goes to pass on the orders to the executioners, and then to “the man on the three-legged stool,” according to whose gestures the executioners arouse Yeshua from his stupor, offer him a drink which he avidly accepts, and then kill him by piercing him “gently” (tikhon'ko) through his heart with a spear.
Liberal Politics in Wartime Russia: An Analysis of the Progressive Bloc
Authors: Hamm Michael F.
Published: April 2006

My objective in this article is to examine the purpose and the performance of the Progressive Bloc, the wartime majority coalition of Russia’s Fourth State Duma. My analysis, in turn, should promote a more sophisticated understanding of the political behavior of Russia’s moderates, and in particular of Russia’s liberals, during the final years of crisis for the tsarist regime.
Marxists versus Non-Marxists: Soviet Historiography in the 1920s
Authors: Enteen George M.
Published: April 2006

The policy of “using non-communist hands in the building of communism,” almost as old as the Soviet government itself, came to an end at the outset of the First Five-Year Plan. In the early 1920s the Communist Party had come to accept the realities of a socialist regime confined to an underdeveloped country. Consequently, during the years of the New Economic Policy (1921- 28), the party sought to guide numerous institutions in which its members and supporters were a minority. To this end, the Communist Party created a network of scholarly institutions staffed by Marxist scholars which paralleled the traditional institutions staffed and led primarily by non-Marxist scholars. The purpose of this essay is to recount some of the conflicts between Marxist and non-Marxist historians and to make some suggestions about connections between these conflicts and ongoing political changes.
The Impact of the Great Purges on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
Authors: Uldricks Teddy J.
Published: April 2006

We must finally understand that of all precious capital in the world, the most precious capital, the most decisive capital is human beings, cadres. We must understand that in our present condition cadres decide everything. If we have good and plentiful cadres in industry, in agriculture, in transport, in the Army, our country will be invincible. If we have no such cadres we will limp with both legs.

Joseph Stalin

Descartes argued that the initial operation in the solution of any complex problem must be its subdivision into a series of smaller, less intricate, and therefore, hopefully, more tractable problems. Following that strategy, this study will examine one particular aspect of the purges—the destruction of the Soviet diplomatic corps—in an attempt to shed more light on the general nature of the purges and to assess the relationship, if any, between the purges and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s. The central tasks, then, are to describe the impact of the "Great Terror" on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and its embassies, and to evaluate the significance of these developments for both domestic politics and foreign relations of the USSR.
Solzhenitsyn's Portrait of Stalin
Authors: Kern Gary
Published: April 2006

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.
Habsburg School Reform Among the Orthodox Minorities, 1770-1780
Authors: Adler Philip J.
Published: April 2006

At the death of the Orthodox Metropolitan Pavel Nenadović in 1768, the educational level of the great majority of his Serbian and Rumanian coreligionists was still very low. In the seventy-year period since the regions in which they lived had again come under Habsburg rule, only feeble and shortlived initiatives had been made to improve their lot. Literacy rates were minuscule, printed matter rare, and schools of any sort so few and so scattered as to make formal education a distinct oddity. This was true even of the Serbs, whose settlements in southern Hungary included a relatively large number of well-off merchants and peasants, and whose statutory position as leaders of the Orthodox minorities was thereby reinforced. Still worse off were the Rumanians, many of whom were just emerging from a pastoral economy and extreme cultural backwardness. Even among the lower Orthodox clergy, the ability to read and write in any language was deemed extraordinary. The literacy problem was complicated by the fact that both Serbs and Rumanians used variants of Church Slavonic instead of their own vernaculars as their literary vehicles.
The Russian Émigré Debate of 1928 on Criticism
Authors: Hagglund Roger
Published: April 2006

Less than a year before his recent death, the distinguished émigré poet-critic Georgii Adamovich published one of his last essays in the New York Novyi Zhurnal. One section of it was particularly striking. Here was the “dean” of Russian émigré criticism and the author of hundreds of critiques and articles over the past fifty years questioning the purpose of literary criticism and whether there was a need for it at all: “In criticism … what is amazing is that behind all the innumerable articles and pieces of research, even the most penetrating of them, one never discerns the least perplexity about why, in fact, the article was written… Do Tolstoy, Dickens, and the others really require
explanation and commentary ? Wasn’t Tolstoy right …that ‘criticism is when
the foolish write about the wise’ ?”
Nechaevshchina: An Unknown Chapter
Authors: Mc Clellan Woodford
Published: April 2006

On the afternoon of August 14, 1872, Sergei Nechaev, for nearly three years the object of an intensive police search in several countries, went to a café on the outskirts of Zurich. The author of the famous “Catechism of a Revolutionary” had already broken one of his personal rules by spending several consecutive nights under the same roof; in showing himself in public during daylight hours he violated another.
Echoes of Pochvennichestvo in Solzhenitsyn's August 1914
Authors: Dowler Wayne
Published: April 2006

A notable characteristic of Solzhenitsyn's earlier works, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichto Cancer Ward, was their apparent philosophical and aesthetic eclecticism. Their author seemed neither to reveal the intellectual origins of his work nor to articulate in his novels a coherent philosophy of history or theory of art. One critic was forced to conclude that artistically Solzhenitsyn was an “eclectic with conservative leanings” whose main concern was with truth and honesty in literature. The publication of August 1914 tended at first to allay this feeling. Parallels of both form and content could be drawn between the new novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Further reflection, however, suggests that the comparison with Tolstoy raises as many difficulties as it resolves. But this does not mean that the riddle of the origins of Solzhenitsyn's thought remains insoluble. When examined in conjunction with the Nobel Prize lecture and the programmatic letter of September 5, 1973, to the Kremlin leaders, August 1914 does reveal the sources of Solzhenitsyn's philosophical and aesthetic views.
Soviet Design: A Comment and an Alternative View
Authors: Bailes Kendall E.
Published: April 2006

The study of Soviet design is an area where knowledge of science, technology, art, and history need to converge; a discussion of it, therefore, seems particularly appropriate for the pages of an interdisciplinary journal. The comments below are offered in the hopes of fostering further discussion across disciplines. In his article, Dr. Hutchings has gone beyond the conclusions of his book (Soviet Science, Technology, Design) to make some rather bold claims for the importance of studying Soviet design as a way of understanding major Soviet problems. He is to be commended for focusing attention on an area which has not received, at least until recently, much attention from Western scholars.
Important Points Missed
Authors: Dunlop John B.
Published: April 2006

To comment on Sidney Monas’s “GULag and Points West” is not an easy task. The article as a whole lacks focus and consistency, and it is simply not clear what moved Monas to compose this often diffuse collection of misrepresentations and misconceptions. In the past I have been an admirer of the author and his scholarship, but it is difficult to extend my admiration to this essay.

One of Monas’s intentions may have been to provide an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s writings which have appeared since his expulsion from the USSR. If so, the effort is highly flawed. While he does discuss—often in rather pedestrian fashion—Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, Lenin in Zurich, From Under the Rubble,and certain of Solzhenitsyn’s recent publicistic writings, Monas omits all consideration of such significant works as the ninety-six-chapter version ofThe First Circle,published in 1978, or the important chapters from the “Red Wheel” historical cycle which Solzhenitsyn has been publishing in recent issues of the journalVestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia.This omission necessarily skews any analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s thought.
Vladimir Odoevskii as Opera Critic
Authors: Lowe David
Published: April 2006

The range of topics that Vladimir Odoevski treated in his fiction and journalistic pieces is impressive. His interests embraced what we today think of as the more or less discrete categories of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. His acquaintances referred to him as “the Russian Faust.“ Included in his oeuvre is a substantial body of music criticism, and indeed, he may rightly be considered Russia's first music critic. Odoevskii's opera criticism, an admittedly narrow topic, is the subject of this article.

There is good reason for concentrating on Odoevskii's writings about opera. For the operaphile there is the vicarious pleasure (and occasional mortification) of sharing a musically literate listener's reactions to then contemporary or nearly contemporary masterpieces by Mozart, Gluck, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, and others. On a less visceral level, an acquaintance with Odoevskii's opera criticism enhances our overall appreciation of the broad patterns underlying Odoevskii's complete literary output as well as Russian cultural history in the nineteenth century.
Women in Soviet Rural Management
Authors: Stuart Robert C.
Published: April 2006

If one examines the role of women in rural areas in different countries of the world, varying styles or patterns of development can be observed. A particular style found in socialist countries has been described as the “feminization of agriculture.” This pattern, prevalent in East European countries and especially in the Soviet Union, is largely a function of rapid industrialization and the demographic changes necessary to support development. In the Soviet case, for example, the absolute size of the rural population has been declining mainly because of rural-urban migration. Furthermore, this migration has been dominated by youth, a trend which, in combination with losses of males from the war years, has resulted in a rural population whose average age and proportion of women is rising.
A Note on Russia's Merchandise Balance and Balance of Payments During the Industrialization Era
Authors: Gregory Paul R.
Published: April 2006

Russia's balance of trade (torgovyi balans) and balance of payments (raschetnyi balans) were matters of great concern to the tsarist government before and after the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. Tsarist officials feared that the gold reserves required to maintain (or to go on) the gold standard would be lost if payments abroad exceeded receipts. Moreover, there was concern over the potential loss of political and economic independence if the government had to borrow abroad regularly in order to cover international payments deficits. Russia's foreign policy toward France and Germany was affected significantly by this consideration. Thus, considerable importance rested on the reported estimates of these two balances.
Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928-1939
Authors: Fitzpatrick Sheila
Published: April 2006

“Cadres decide everything,” Stalin proclaimed in 1935. The slogan is familiar, as is the image of Stalin as a politician skilled in the selection and deployment of personnel. But who were his cadres? The literature on the prewar Stalin period tells us little even about his closest political associates, let alone those one step down the political hierarchy—Central Committee members, people's commissars and their deputies, obkom secretaries—or in key industrial posts. Only the Old Bolsheviks and the military leaders seem to emerge as individuals. The rest are relegated to that servile and faceless bureaucracy about which Trotsky wrote from afar. Their very anonymity (which might also be described as our —and Trotsky's—ignorance) has become part of a sociological generalization.
Dostoevsky's The Devils and the Antinihilist Novel
Authors: Gregory Serge V.
Published: April 2006

The majority of nineteenth-century literary critics identified The Devils as an antinihilist novel. The basic theme of Dostoevsky's work, the journal in which it was published, and the author's own journalistic commentary on his novel all seemed to link Dostoevsky to such conservative writers as Pisemskii, Leskov, and Krestovskii. Modern critics, both Soviet and Western, are aware that The Devils has qualities which make it vastly superior to the antinihilist works of the writers mentioned above. But in stressing Dostoevsky's artistic superiority, there is a danger of underestimating the powerful influence of badly written conservative novels upon his desire to write The Devils.
Revolutionary Politics in Provincial Russia: The Tsaritsyn “Republic” in 1917
Authors: Raleigh Donald J.
Published: April 2006

In a recent article inVoprosy istorii KPSSentitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.
The Political Thought of Vera Zasulich
Authors: Bergman Jay
Published: April 2006

Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russianintelligentypossessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.
Velimir Khlebnikov's “Razin: Two Trinities”: A Reconstruction
Authors: Vroon Ronald
Published: April 2006

During the six months prior to his death in 1922, Velimir Khlebnikov attempted to consolidate in writing the momentous experiences of his brief life. The major works of this period represent various types of summations. Zangesi is a mosaic of Khlebnikov's poetic experiences. Otryvki iz dosok sud'by (Fragments from the Boards of Destiny) contains the poet's final mathematical formulas for the laws of time. “Razin. Dve Troitsy” (“Razin: Two Trinities“) might well be regarded as his own Apologia pro Vita Sua. But despite its importance as a biographical testament, “Razin: Two Trinities,” like many other pieces, has been misrepresented in the Collected Works. The absence of any substantive commentary can lead one to suppose that it is a complete and polished composition. However, an examination of the manuscript reveals it to be an unfinished and untitled fragment—in fact, little more than a rough draft. The basic text, written in an unusually large and legible hand, is laced with corrections in Khlebnikov's more typical minuscule script. No fair copy is known to exist.
Soviet Labor Policy in the First Five-Year Plan: The Dneprostroi Experience
Authors: Rassweiler Anne D.
Published: April 2006

Recent interpretations of the first Five-Year Plan have taken two main approaches. One has emphasized the exploitation of workers and peasants by the party elite throughout the years of the first two Five-Year Plans. In explaining the evolution of labor policies and laws that bound the workers to jobs, Robert Conquest and Solomon Schwarz emphasize the personal responsibility of Stalin, who demanded rapid expansion of industrialization and brooked no questioning of his views. To obey him and to protect their political futures, his officials used tough policies designed to produce quick, visible results. Both authors describe a linear development of ever harsher proscriptions and penalties, and they attribute greater coherence to the process and greater effectiveness to the laws than actually existed. Both see the process from the viewpoint of the capital, disregard the competing ideas among the leaders, and neglect the local level where policies had to be executed and were often changed or ignored.
Rural Crime in Tsarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905-1914
Authors: Weissman Neil B.
Published: April 2006

The period of Russian history between 1905 and 1914 has been the subject of continuing controversy. Coming as it did before the traumatic shock of world war and revolution, the decade has been a battleground between those who see tsarist society as one that was undergoing a process of gradual but positive evolution in response to the revolutionary crisis of 1905 and those who insist that social tensions within the empire were moving it toward yet another revolutionary outbreak. Although initially concentrated on the urban sector of Russian society, attention in the debate has also been extended to rural areas of the empire. Here, as in the city, the question of the nature and direction of change is complex, and its resolution requires the investigation of a variety of phenomena, not the least of which is rural crime.
Hebraic Antecedents in The Master and Margarita: Woland and Company Revisited
Authors: Weeks Laura D.
Published: April 2006

In the years since the appearance of The Master and Margarita a large body of critical literature has been devoted to a search for unity, or rather a search for the key that unites the novel's three disparate realms, with their separate settings, casts of characters, levels of language, and characteristic narrative voices. One approach has been to search for formal unity using the novel's structural elements (narrative modes, setting, time-space coordinates). Another approach has been to search for thematic unity by tracing the moral and philosophical threads that run through the novel as well as the literary antecedents of each of the characters. Some critics have reached the conclusion that there is no unity—that the novel is in fact a faulty, fragmented piece of writing.
Soviet Criminal Justice and the Great Terror
Authors: Solomon Peter H.
Published: April 2006

Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a “surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal.” Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.
Paderewski, Polish Politics, and the Battle of Warsaw, 1920
Authors: Biskupski M. B.
Published: April 2006

In 1920 the Polish army defeated the Bolsheviks before the gates of Warsaw. The Polish victory preserved the independence of the reborn state, delayed Russian expansion for a generation, and left to historians a number of controversial issues. Certainly the most passionately debated aspect of the war is the authorship of the Polish victory. Gradually western scholarship has come to credit the laurels to Poland's Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but there are still those who emphasize the role of other Polish soldiers or of the Frenchman, General Maxime Weygand. From the midst of this historiographical controversy, we may discern the dim outlines of a simultaneous, yet obscured episode: the aborted political comeback of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. It is the purpose of this essay to reconstruct the latter against the background of the former.
The Revolution of 1905-1907 and the Crisis of Polish Catholicism
Authors: Blobaum Robert
Published: April 2006

The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russian-ruled Poland, with its dramatic manifestation of the transformation of the country’s political culture, marks a major, if not entirely appreciated, watershed in modern Polish history. Influenced, if not sparked by events in the central provinces of the Russian Empire, most notably Bloody Sunday, the revolution in Russian Poland quickly acquired a momentum of its own based on local conditions. In Poland the revolution was characterized by several nationwide general strikes and the sudden emergence of a viable labor movement; by a long, bitter, and partially successful boycott of the Russified school system; by unprecedented popular striving for the benefits of secular culture and education; by the gmina (communal) movement in the countryside that aroused a large part of the Polish peasantry from its traditional indifference to national issues; and by the rapid growth of political and social organizations that claimed to represent the interests of mass constituencies. Preceded by four decades of fundamental demographic, economic, and social change, the revolution propelled the largest and most significant part of Poland into a new era of broad, popular participation in the political, social, and cultural life of the country.
The Roles of Jovan Skerlić, Steven Mokranjac, and Paja Jovanović in Serbian Cultural History, 1900-1914
Authors: Milojković-Djurić Jelena
Published: April 2006

The beginning of the twentieth century brought new outlooks and aspirations into the cultural life of Serbia, but the mainstream of spiritual and creative development had already been marked by the affirmation of established national values. After 1903 important political changes, accompanying the return of constitutional government, stimulated a spiritual and national revival. In his History of the New Serbian Literature, Jovan Skerlić described the general improvement in social and political life. Skerlić, a contemporary who actively participated in the cultural and political events at the beginning of this century, pointed out that the consequences of these changes influenced the awakening of the national spirit and offered numerous solutions to questions of national importance. In 1904 Skerlić took part in the organization of the First Congress of Southern Slav Youth and of the First Yugoslav Fine Arts Exhibit marking the centennial of the first Serbian uprising. These events strengthened friendly cultural collaboration between Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgarians. Even the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 could not halt this growth. Further proof of national strength was furnished by the victories in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. After five hundred years the liberation of the Serbian people from Turkish occupation was finally accomplished.
Pushkin's Merry Undertaking and “The Coffinmaker”
Authors: Davydov Sergei
Published: April 2006

Tak!—ves' ia ne umru …'

Derzhavin, “Pamiatnik”

Ia skoro ves' umru …2

Pushkin, “Andre” Chénier”

The autumn of 1830, which Pushkin spent in Boldino, was the most fruitful season in his creative life. After his return to Moscow he reported to Pletnev, “In Boldino I wrote as I have not written for a long time,” and presented his friend with a lengthy catalogue of his newest accomplishments. It included the last two chapters of Evgenii Onegin, “The Little House in Kolomna,” the four ”Little Tragedies,” and some thirty poems. The list was followed by Pushkin's “secret confession”: “That is still not all…. I have written five prose tales which are making Baratynskii hee-haw and kick about (“ot kotorykh Baratynskii rzhet i b'etsia”)—and which we shall also publish Anonyme.”
The Smolensk Scandal and the End of NEP
Authors: Brower Daniel R.
Published: April 2006

The events of the last years of NEP—the New Economic Policy—confront historians with two complex and still controversial issues: the effect of these “new” policies on the Russian economy, on society, and on methods of Communist rule in the country and the political conflict dividing the party leadership in the late 1920s. The first issue raises the question of the extent to which NEP was evolving in a direction compatible with the Communists' dream of a socialist society, with the short-term political needs of the Soviet state, and with the priorities of economic development. The second issue focuses on the political instability generated by the controversy over domestic policy and methods of rule, as well as by the personal antagonism between the two key political leaders, Nikolai Bukharin and Stalin. The debate on these questions, answers to which are crucial to our understanding of the origins of Stalinism, has for the most part relied on evidence drawn from central party and state activities, giving the discussion a panoramic view of the history of those years.
Expedient Catastrophe: A Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Science
Authors: Levin Aleksey E.
Published: April 2006

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic “empire of knowledge.” It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.
Labor Violence and Regime Brutality in Tsarist Russia: The Iuzovka Cholera Riots of 1892
Authors: Friedgut Theodore H.
Published: April 2006

Recent monographs on Russian social development have raised a number of hypotheses regarding our general understanding of processes of political and social change. In his volume on the early history of Russian workers Reginald Zelnik, for instance, proposes that moderate labor unrest reinforced traditional repressive patterns, while extreme conflicts motivated innovative reform. In the work of Robert E. Johnson and of Victoria Bonnell we find the suggestion that workers in small-scale enterprises and artisan shops were often more radical and organized than those in larger industrial enterprises. The fragmented and antagonistic nature of Russian society, with multiple splits of both an intergroup and intragroup nature, has been noted in the work of both Roberta Manning and Allan Wildman. Diane Koenker, focusing her research on the period of the 1917 revolutions, has brought out the moderating and integrating effect of the urban setting on Russian workers. These are only a few of the many thought-provoking hypotheses that have been raised.
The Orthodox Church and Serfdom in Prereform Russia
Authors: Freeze Gregory L.
Published: April 2006

It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.
Irina Grekova's “Na Ispytaniiakh”: The History of One Story
Authors: Barker Adele
Published: April 2006

In 1967 Irina Grekova's story “Na ispytaniiakh” was published in Novyi mir. The story depicts a unit of the Red Army on maneuvers in the summer of 1952 in a backwoods area of Russia. Grekova refrained from using the usual gloss reserved for such institutions as the Red Army and within several months was forced to resign from her job as professor of mathematics at the Zhukovskii Military Academy. The story was attacked by the party and, on orders of General Aleksei Epishev, chief of the political administration of the army, banned from army libraries. Twenty years later, in 1986, “Na ispytaniiakh” reappeared in a collection of Grekova's works entitled Porogi. The recent version of the story has been subject to various editorial changes, most of which concern the Stalin years. These revisions illuminate the party's changing attitude towards the Stalin era and specifically show which facets of Stalinism the party was more open about during the late Chcrnenko–early Gorbachev era and which were still too sensitive to be discussed openly.
Varen'ka Dobroselova: An Experiment in the Desentimentalization of the Sentimental Heroine in Dostoevskii's Poor Folk
Authors: Rosenshield Gary
Published: April 2006

Ever since its publication the success of Fedor Dostoevskii's first novel Poor Folk has been ascribed primarily to the characterization of its “naturalistic” hero, Makar Devushkin, not to its sentimental heroine, Varen'ka Dobroselova. Although critics have continued to discover new merits in Poor Folk, in the end it is Devushkin who dominates the novel and on whom, in one way or another, most of its virtues depend. Not only is Devushkin the protagonist, he is also at the center of the novel's important innovations in style, theme, and characterization. Dostoevskii took the poor copying clerk, a type that for a decade had been used as a stock device—and most often the butt—of Russian comic fiction, and transformed him into the hero of a tragi-comic sentimental novel. This transformation was much abetted by Dostoevskii's use of the epistolary form— a form common to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, but long outdated in Russia by the 1840s—for it permitted the hero to tell his own story and, by so doing, to reveal the sensitive human being behind the comic mask.
Soviet Schools: Policy Pursues Practice, 1921–1928
Authors: Holmes Larry E.
Published: April 2006

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.
The Roots ofBesprizornost'in Soviet Russia's First Decade
Authors: Ball Alan
Published: April 2006

No spectacle in Soviet cities more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the 1920s than the millions of orphaned and abandoned children known asbesprizornye.Whether portrayed as pitiable victims or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding population, they haunted the works of journalists, travelers and Communist Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it first,” a foreigner noted, “and is so shocked by the sight that the most widely known Russian youth are the … homeless children flapping along the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks of animated scarecrows.” By 1922 the number of waifs reached the neighborhood of seven million, inundating cities and alarming officials that the country might soon amass enough inveterate delinquents to disrupt the socialist transformation of society.
Purge and Politics in the Periphery: Birobidzhan in 1937
Authors: Weinberg Robert
Published: April 2006

Recent scholarship on the purges and Great Terror has contributed immensely to our understanding of the Stalinist political system that emerged in the mid-1980s. Research by J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn, among others, has challenged the totalitarian perspective that views the Terror as part of a grand scheme designed by Stalin to silence his opponents in the Party and government, establish his personal dictatorship and coerce society into unquestioning submission.1 Instead, these historians emphasize the limits of power and control wielded by the national leadership which found itself at times frustrated in its efforts to impose its will on both society and regional party organizations. They conclude that the "cleansing" of the Party and government was the partial product of a conflict between national and subnational officials, with initiative from below sometimes playing as important a role as central directives in fueling the purges.