Lenin's last writings have given rise to a surprising range of interpretations. Despite this diversity, consensus holds that in these articles Lenin was striking new ground, extending his critique of war communism, and deepening his conception of the New Economic Policy. Another widely held view is that Nikolai Bukharin, inspired by the last articles, went further down the path opened by Lenin. Few agree about the content of Lenin's new direction, although one may note the following coincidence: Lenin is always seen as rejecting whatever the author in question does not like about original Bolshevism.

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:

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

Soviet historians, roaming the wide range of speculation that glasnost has opened to them, are trying to exorcise the terrible memory of Stalinism by exploring the might-have-beens, the alternative policies and lines of development that the Soviet Union might have chosen at the critical turning point a decade after the revolution. Articles and conferences one after another on this period have been focusing on "alternatives" or "the Choice of Paths of Social Development."

Evgenii Alekseevich Preobrazhenskii has been one of the most important yet least known figures on the Bolshevik Olympus: a prominent party functionary, economist, journalist, and writer, a talented organizer of scholarly research, and educator. For political reasons, however, his activities have long been virtually ignored in Soviet writing. References to him in Soviet histories of the Communist party or economic histories have been one-sided and sketchy.

Preobrazhenskii was born on 15 February 1886 (old style) in Bolkhov in Ore guberniia. His father, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Preobrazhenskii, was an Orthodox priest and Bible teacher at the Bolkhov Parochial School. Evgenii Alekseevich studied at his father's private school and completed two years at the Bolkhov City School.

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.

The apparent preoccupation with nonliterary arts in Mirgorod suggests that Nikolai Gogol', an uncannily successful experimenter-in-words, sought "comic prose equivalents for the effects of other media and genres." One narrator laments: "Gde voz'mu ia kistei i krasok, chtob izobrazit' raznoobrazie s'ezda i velikolepnoe pirshestvo?" But paint obviously is not needed since the pen, misleadingly condemned as "vialo, mertvo," elicits an elaborate picture on its own.

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

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

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

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.

Since the beginning of Soviet power, national leaders have been concerned with controlling the diverse regions that make up the Soviet Union. They have used many means, including coercion, to extend their influence over the localities. Lower-level party officials, especially regional first secretaries, have been crucial links between the national regime and the periphery. These officials juggle a complex set of political and economic responsibilities and must safeguard a region's political stability, while applying national directives. They oversee the economic life of their bailiwick and attempt to enhance its productivity. Recruiting and elevating these lower-level officials is critical to maintaining national influence in the regions; the 1988-1990 political reforms have not changed this method.

Aleksei Kruchenykh's "Razboinik Van'ka-Kain i Son'ka-manikiurshchitsa" is the first in a cycle of four "crime novels" in verse published by the poet during the heyday of his involvement in postrevolutionary futurist politics. Unlike much of the ephemera he wrote during the 1910s, this particular poem was produced and promoted with unusual care. It first appeared in the sixth, penultimate, issue of Vladimir Maiakovskii's LEF.

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

The nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was more complex than has been indicated by many American interpretations. In the Soviet press of that period, many newspapers and periodicals carried articles that dealt with nationality issues. I will consider here the possibility that publication of these articles was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.

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.

Although his career as a Russian prose writer spanned more than twenty years, Boris Pil'niak is now remembered primarily for a single early novel and for two later short stories that gained him political notoriety with an increasingly hostile public. Much of the rest of Pil'niak's work, discounted even during his lifetime, has still not received the wide readership it deserves, a fact that is puzzling in light of his innovative talent and considerable influence on younger writers. Despite a number of scholarly studies devoted to rehabilitating Pil'niak's reputation, the notion persists that this neglect is justified by a body of work that is repetitive, fragmentary, and derivative. His formal innovations notwithstanding, Pil'niak is still frequently viewed as outside of the modernist aesthetic, which would otherwise provide a meaningful and useful context for his work.