Since the 1960s much informed attention has been paid to the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), culminating in the recent appearance of John Milner's expert and sensitive study; with his centenary year one can only expect such interest, in east and west, has intensified. Though Tatlin's fields of activity were extraordinarily diverse (and by no means all conventionally “artistic“), attention has been concentrated both in his lifetime and since on what is, by common consent, the greatest (or most notorious) of his endeavors: the project, unrealized at full scale and probably unrealizable in his lifetime (though several maquettes have been produced) for his Monument to the Third International, popularly dubbed “Tatlin's Tower.“

Accounts of the Russian peasant movement of 1905-1907 have conventionally stressed its violent and spontaneous character. At least in the core provinces of the Central Agricultural Region, Volga, and parts of the Ukraine, where economic relations between peasants and gentry estates were highly exploitative, land hunger pressing, and the repartitional commune still viable, arson and destruction of estates were the most dramatic forms of agrarian activism. Peasant insurrection would crest in the weeks following promulgation of the tsar's October Manifesto, in some cases as the result of willful misinterpretation of that document, more often as a reaction to news of revolutionary occurrences in the cities and confusion among local authorities.

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.

Among the poets of the Third Emigration are a few who were officially recognized and published in the Soviet Union. The vast majority of them, though, hardly published anything in that country; sometimes because they were denied access and more often because they did not seek publication in the Soviet Union, preferring samizdat or publication abroad. Lev Loseff is a unique figure who falls into neither of these categories. He was a professional journalist and writer for children until he left the Soviet Union in 1976, but, although he was a popular figure in Leningrad's unofficial literary life, he was not known to be a poet. In fact, Loseff began as a serious poet in 1974 at an age—thirty-seven—that by any standards is very late and by Russian standards is something like the beginning of the afterlife: It is the age at which Pushkin was killed.

The Soviet military appears to be losing its privileged position within the Soviet national security apparatus. As long as Gorbachev continues to have the upper hand in Moscow, the Kremlin's generals will be in for hard times. Assuming this trend continues, it could have the unexpected effect of enhancing the role of the German Democratic Republic's military contribution to the Warsaw Pact. In turn the East German political leadership's long-term goal of using the military factor to influence Soviet behavior has advanced. The more reliable and more modern its armed forces, the greater the likelihood the East Germans will be able to translate this advantage into leverage—even if it is very limited—in dealing with the Soviets in other areas.