The development or lack of development of private property rights in Russia commands interest and significance far beyond the narrow confines of legal history. The institution of private property serves not only as a bulwark of stability but also as a limit to the state's authority. In the words of Richard Pipes, “Ownership of property creates a commitment to the political and legal order since the latter guarantees property rights: it makes the citizen into a co-sovereign, as it were.” Elsewhere Pipes notes that in the west private property “confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority.”

One hundred years ago, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii delivered the principal address to the Moscow Theological Academy. With his first tortuously long sentence the historian created an imaginary continuum, transcending time, between his audience and the saint. His words bear repeating:

In recent decades, the rediscovery of historical ethnography in western historiography has produced an extensive literature on "popular Christianity" in many European societies. Until recently, however, this historiographical current has exercised very limited influence on historical study in the former Soviet Union. In one sense, Russian historians had no need for such influence; the populist tradition in Russian historiography and its continuation in marxist-leninist attire meant that the study of popular attitudes and beliefs was hardly the novelty it was in other countries in recent decades.

The term Old Believers (or Old Ritualists) refers to a number of groups that arose as a result of Russian church reforms, 1654-1666, when Patriarch Nikon sought to make Russian practices conform to their contemporary Greek counterparts. Conscious of both a departure from tradition and an encroachment of central control over local autonomy, Old Believers endeavored to maintain the rites, symbols and prerogatives of traditional Russian Orthodoxy. With support of the tsar, Nikon began bloody persecutions that lasted, though in lesser degrees, until the decree of religious tolerance in 1905.

While several authorities have held that the shamanism of indigenous Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples influenced the Russians with whom they lived in close proximity, particularly via pagan Slavic volkhvy or sorcerers, little concrete evidence of that influence persisting in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries has been discovered. However, several early eighteenth century woodcuts (lubki) which refer to sorcery reveal concrete links to shamanic cosmology and practice in what are otherwise enigmatic textual references and visual symbols.

The legacy of ancient writers to western culture since the Renaissance has long been acknowledged as a cornerstone of contemporary humanism. Yet within the vast territory of studies of the classical tradition there remains a large piece of uncharted terrain, and that is Russia, the significance of whose participation in the reception of antiquity has been largely excluded from investigation by foreign scholars and has only recently energized Russian scholars, particularly in the field of medieval studies.

Ivan IV was the head of a theocratic state and an ardent participant in the spiritual culture of his church. He nevertheless seems to have deliberately flaunted the religious standards which were the basis of his legitimacy, especially during the Oprichnina (1564-1572). He reveled in blasphemy and his cruelties often manifested the ironic twist of what is termed "glumlenie": he denigrated his victims, ostentatiously violating their status by immersing them in inverted worlds of carnival. Although scholars have explored Ivan's motivations, no one has adequately explained the contradiction between his affirmation of his official status as model Christian and his blasphemous and immoral behavior.

When the State Committee on the State of Emergency (henceforth the Emergency Committee) seized power in the early morning of 19 August 1991, it took steps immediately to assert control over Central Television, radio and the press. At one o'clock in the morning on 19 August, Gennadii Shishkin, first deputy director of TASS, was awakened by a phone call from Leonid Kravchenko, the conservative director of Gosteleradio (the State Committee on Television and Radio) and asked to come to Central Committee headquarters.2 By 2 a.m., the chief editor of the nightly news program "Vremia" had been awakened. Then, at dawn, military vehicles and paratroopers surrounded the Gosteleradio building at Ostankino.