In recent years, there has been a minor explosion of interest in Aleksandr Bogdanov and other radical Russian intellectuals of pre-Stalinist days. After being in limbo for half a century, their ideas seem almost fresh and vibrant: Set against subsequent Soviet history, their aborted visions of a socialist future seem to give a sense of what might have been. And who knows—in the Gorbachev period, as the Soviet Union sorts out its problems and policies, some of their ideas might enjoy a new lease on life. For these and other reasons, they have recently attracted special interest.

Of course, in Bogdanov's case, there is much to be interested in. Born Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii in 1873, Bogdanov trained as a physician in Moscow and Khar'kov, worked briefly as a psychiatrist, and published widely on philosophy, politics, social theory, social psychology, economics, and culture.

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

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.

In the current poststructuralist and reader-response era, interpretations, especially “correct” ones, are no longer fashionable. Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov have also lost some of their luster in the wake of the rediscovery of Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov, or, for that matter, the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, and the recent general revision of the postrevolutionary literary canon. When Il'f and Petrov do receive critical attention, the focus invariably turns on the ambiguity of their message, pro-Soviet yet provocative, their deliberate literariness, and intertextuality. These same qualities, however, that earn the “in” authors their literary laurels are, in the case of Il'f and Petrov, viewed as evidence of moral compromise and stylistic shallowness.

Although Prince Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii served as minister of the interior of Russia for only five months beginning on 25 August 1904, he nearly managed a volte-face in the government's relationship to society. The dimensions of his plans for reform during this crucial period have not been thoroughly explored. While his conciliatory attitude toward the zemstva is well known, less familiar is his intention to broaden civil liberties and anchor them firmly in the law, an intention expressed in a memorandum he submitted to Nicholas II on 23 November 1904. In that memorandum Mirskii recommended a whole range of measures designed to restore harmony between government and society— from the extension of basic civil liberties and the broadening of local zemstvo and municipal council authority to the curbing of the Okhrana regime and the restoration of proper legislative and administrative procedures within the government.

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

Stalin must have known better. A non-Russian and the author of Marxism and the National Question, he was surely aware that his slogan of “socialism in one country“ obscured the USSR's profoundly multinational character. To the degree that he really built socialism, Stalin clearly did so not in one country but in many simultaneously. Indeed, not only did the Soviet republics lend one another what Soviet propagandists like to call disinterested proletarian assistance, but some, such as Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, and the countries of Central Asia, may have served as the involuntary base for the “primitive accumulation of capital” as well.

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

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

In the United States we are saddled with three different systems for the transliteration of Russian, and none of the three is satisfactory enough to replace the other two. The so-called Popular System gives general readers a rough idea of how to pronounce Russian words within the sound system of English, but it does not accurately reflect the original Russian (for example, does voskresenie represent BOCKPeceHbe or BOCKPeceHИe?) The International Scholarly System is exact and simple: in its American variant (which uses x instead of the continental European ch to transliterate the Russian x) each Russian letter is represented by a single Latin letter. It is ideal and widely accepted for works in linguistics and for literary studies that are aimed at an international scholarly audience.

Having learned, quite accidentally, of the Springer Verlag archives, I arranged to spend two weeks in Heidelberg in May 1985 to look for material with a Russian or Soviet angle. My host, Heinz Sarkowski (a senior executive with the firm), was extremely interested and helpful. He is strongly committed to preserving and developing the firm's extraordinary archives and to making them available to scholars. He has prepared a preliminary edition of a finding aid, which I was able to use while there, and pamphlets (in German and English) presenting a brief description of the archives.