The discussions surveyed here took place between June 1932 and March 1933, mainly in the columns of Za industrializatsiiu, the official newspaper of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom). A number of contributors, headed by M. I. Birbraer, a prominent member of the newspaper staff, advocated major changes in the economic mechanism. Dozens of officials, managers, economists, and journalists from industry, trade, and finance participated. The wide-ranging debate was brought to an end on April 5, 1933, when G. K. Ordzhonikidze, Politburo member and People's Commissar for Heavy Industry, dismissed V. S. Bogushevskii, the editor of the newspaper, for “political mistakes.”

An examination of these discussions in their political and economic context helps our understanding of several significant aspects of the Soviet economic system of the early 1930s.

The phenomenon called the “First Wave” of Russian emigre literature made its appearance in the West under unique circumstances. Disoriented and defensive, this distinguished group of cultural and literary figures had to start over, straight from the throes of the October Revolution. Émigré literature never became a “movement” in the way Symbolism was. It had too much variety, too many factions, and too few consistent platforms to fit into any “ism.” But what it did share, and what, in the absence of a viable Soviet literature, gave it a certain birthright and moral authority, was the political fact of exile. Reworked and refined in a multitude of literary permutations, the theme of exile was the émigré writer's idée fixe, always hovering at the edge of consciousness. This fact needs stressing from the outset because rarely in the course of world literature has there been so vivid an example of extraliterary causality on such a scale. And since the “birth” and “death” of the First Wave coincide neatly with events outside it, namely the Revolution and World War II, perhaps something like a biological metaphor for this phenomenon would be, in terms of literary history, not merely decorative or iconographic but bizarrely realized. The fate of Russian émigré literature between the wars suggests, in almost Spenglerian terms, that something as large and diverse as a national literature can have a life and death. One aim of this study is to show how the politics that gave the First Wave life were, mutatis mutandis, the politics that led to its eventual demise. After briefly establishing a context, I will turn to the years immediately following World War II and to the case of Ivan Bunin, a writer who was known, ironically, for his fastidious avoidance of politics. My central thesis is that the postwar years were marked by controversy and that a leading figure in this controversy was Bunin.

Chingiz Aitmatov's recent novel I dol'she veka dlitsia den’ provides an excellent case study of the way the socialist realist canon can generate new paradigms out of itself. At a time when it is widely assumed in the West that all reputable Soviet authors have gone “beyond” socialist realism, the appearance of this novel is particularly instructive.

Aitmatov's book has had greater impact in the Soviet Union than any other novel published there in recent years. It covers subjects that are both highly topical and sensitive politically. Yet it does so by using the conventions of socialist realism to a greater extent than has been seen in the major Soviet writing of the past fifteen years. Indeed, Aitmatov has somehow contrived to weave into the fabric of his text patterns reminiscent of every period in the development of socialist realism.

Since Viktor Shklovskii first made the distinction, critics of fictional forms who invoke the concepts of siuzhet and fabula have been prone to exalt the former at the expense of the latter. The preference is hardly surprising. The fabula is after all an abstraction. It designates the narrative in its raw or pre-aesthetic form from which the finished artistic product (siuzhet) is ultimately shaped. And it is a simple matter of definition that the literary critic must be primarily concerned with the literary artifact rather than its ingredients.

If the priority is legitimate, its implications should not be misunderstood. For fabula and siuzhet are not, after all, inimical or competing concepts. Our apprehension of the one stems directly from our experience of the other. True, a triumphantly ingenious manipulator of the stuff of fiction (a Sterne, a Joyce, a Nabokov) may create a nonlinear siuzhet of such kaleidescopic and multilayered complexity that our perception of the events as they are supposed “actually” to have occurred may become blurred.

Few official changes of course in the Soviet Union have been as dramatic as the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Supplanting what had come to be called War Communism (1918-1920)—a boiling mixture of revolutionary euphoria, bitter civil war, foreign intervention, economic collapse, and growing peasant unrest—NEP represented a new departure in many areas of Soviet life. First and foremost, eyewitnesses were struck by the legalization of a considerable amount of private economic activity, in contrast to the harsh measures adopted by the Bolsheviks against the private sector during War Communism.

While this change seemed an improvement to most foreigners on the scene (and undoubtedly to most Russians), revolutionaries of diverse hues regarded the legalization of private trade in 1921 as a clear signal that the Bolsheviks had jettisoned the ideals of the Revolution.

Speaking of the Russian institution known as the “thick journal” (tolstyi zhurnal), Trotskii once wrote, “Our journals were laboratories in which intellectual currents were being worked out.“ In certain ways the “thick journals” of the 1860s replaced the salons of the 1840s as forums for the exchange of ideas. And it was on the pages of one of these journals, Vremia (later replaced by Epokha), that Fedor Dostoevskii and his brother Mikhail, as editors—with great help from Nikolai Strakhov and Apollon Grigor'ev—worked out the ideology they dubbed the “concept of the soil” (pochvennichestvo)? The main ideas were to steer a course midway between Slavophilism and Westernism and to achieve a reconciliation between the educated segment of society and the narod.

In this article I propose to undertake a semiotic analysis of a novel by a contemporary Czech underground writer, Ludvík Vaculík's Morčata (The Guinea Pigs). A semiotic reading of the relation between the semantic and formal levels of the text is particularly rewarding because this novel combines features of several genres ranging from children's literature to the realistic novel and the surrealistic novel. This study is intended as a contribution to the analysis of the multileveled novel in general.

The Guinea Pigs is a unique modern blend reminiscent of the Latin American current of magic realism that we find in the works of Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Marquez. It is a highly experimental novel in which the author has reached the peak of his literary efforts thus far and includes himself in the tradition of the absurd, showing traces of dadaism and elements of surrealism and continuing the introspective existentialist line of Dostoevskii and Kafka, refreshed with a light touch of humor and an unpretentiously naive point of view reminiscent of Hašek's Good Soldier Švejk.

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.

The leading role of the state in nineteenth-century Russian industrialization is one of the most widely accepted notions in economic history. Thus state-sponsored industrialization, deeply rooted in the strength of the despotic state and the subservience of an undifferentiated peasantry and an insignificant middle class, began in earnest in the era of the Great Reforms, after the Crimean War had shocked the government out of its economic lethargy under Nicholas I and Finance Minister Kankrin. It continued unevenly thereafter until it crested in the burst of state-led growth in the 1890s. The “statist interpretation” of prerevolutionary Russian industrial development has been most notably expounded by Alexander Gerschenkron in a series of influential essays and by Theodore Von Laue in his biography of Sergei Witte. It thoroughly dominates non-Soviet scholarship and serves as the point of departure for almost all general investigations.

Over the last three years, the Polish United Workers’ Party has suffered a major crisis, the most substantial crisis of any Communist party in any Communist party state. The disintegration of the party was at least partly responsible for both the development of Solidarity in the summer of 1980 and the imposition of martial law in December 1981. The lack of trust in the party and its authoritarian and unrepresentative character led the workers to demand an institution more responsive to their own needs. But the growth of Solidarity during 1981 and the continuing disintegration and fragmentation of the party led the military to preempt the leading role of the party in 1982.

The collapse of the party in 1980 and 1981 was due to a number of factors. The party leadership had to bear the burden of the economic failures of the late 1970s and the consequent decline in the standard of living. The party itself had grown rapidly in size during that period, even though the influence of ordinary party members and local party organizations declined in the face of increasing tendencies toward centralization in the second half of the decade. This development led to problems of morale even within the party and to the growth of horizontal barriers between the membership and its leaders. The population at large was increasingly annoyed and disgusted with the failure of the party to improve the economic situation and to allow a more honest and open discussion of Poland's problems. The dissatisfaction was compounded by the widespread perception that the elite was increasingly looking after its own interests only and that benefits and privileges were accruing only to those in power.

Although historians have often noted the disadvantages of St. Petersburg's location for the development of a major city and seaport, they have paid relatively little attention to one of its most serious handicaps, its lack of direct and easy access to the products of the Russian interior. From the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 to the opening of the Mariinsk and Tikhvin canals in 1810–11, the difficulty of transporting goods from the provinces to St. Petersburg created serious problems for consumers, producers, and merchants as well as the imperial government. It affected important sectors of the national economy and influenced the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian government.

Part of the difficulty of supplying St. Petersburg stemmed from the seemingly insatiable demand for Russian goods that accompanied the development of that city.

The time has passed when it was automatically assumed that the Stolypin Land Reform represented an attempt on the part of the tsarist government to impose on an unwilling peasantry a predetermined plan for a change in land tenure. The revision of opinion has in large measure resulted from the work of George L. Yaney, who has shown that policy and the organization necessary for carrying it out evolved and changed during the course of the implementation of the Stolypin reform. Yaney argues that certain of the changes in the reform came about as a result of the government responding to pressure from the peasants. Inevitably, this pressure concerned those aspects of the land reform that affected the peasants most directly, for instance, the disposition of the land and the timing and sequence of withdrawal from the commune.

The Petrashevskii affair has usually been seen in the West as an insignificant and slightly comic episode. The Petrashevtsy have been regarded as a handful of unconditional admirers of French socialism, whose activities were not related in either a theoretical or a practical manner to the development of the Russian revolutionary movement. As a result they have, until recently, been largely ignored by scholars. Interest in them is now beginning to develop, but there is still very little written on the subject. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Petrashevtsy, but their ideas have suffered the ideological distortion with which all pre-Marxian socialist thought in Russia has been viewed. The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the Petrashevtsy and clear away some of the misconceptions that have crept into the analysis of their circles.

To the Memory of Arcadius Kahan, 1920–1982

Ever since the publication of V. L. Ianin's study of the Novgorodian mayors (posadniki) in 1962, the commonplace image of republican Novgorod with its political institutions grounded in the sovereignty of the veche—the “democratic” assembly of the city's free male population—has undergone considerable change. It is now generally conceded that Novgorod was essentially a boyar oligarchy, but controversy still surrounds Ianin's contention that the veche from its inception was primarily composed of boyars and other wealthy landowners, who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were known as the well-to-do (zhit'i liudi). Most scholars are willing to accept the view that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the veche was dominated by a boyar oligarchy, but some, including Knud Rasmussen, Henrik Birnbaum, and Jörg Leuschner, believe that the composition of the veche in the twelfth century was more complex and that Novgorodian “democracy” was more evident, at least until the late thirteenth century, when the boyars working through the Council of Lords (Sovet gospod—first recorded in 1291) usurped the “rights” of the populace. Following the work of Klaus Zernack, Leuschner believes the veche was composed of all the free males including those from the subordinate towns (prigorody) outside Novgorod. But in the last two centuries of the republic's existence, certainly following the reforms of 1416 and 1417, Novgorod changed, in Birnbaum's words, “from a quasi-democratic form of government based on the veche to a purely oligarchic rule determined exclusively by the feudal lords.“ Having admitted that representation in the veche became limited to some forty “feudal” clans, Birnbaum accepts the contention of Carsten Goehrke that Pskov, the political and legal institutions of which are thought to have approximated those of Novgorod, retained its genuinely democratic veche throughout the fifteenth century. Thus Pskov is brought to the front lines to debunk the “extreme views” of Ianin, characterized by Goehrke as increasingly dogmatic and speculative, and is now caught in the controversy surrounding Novgorod.

The final stage of Muscovy's subordination to the Tatars is a murky topic in Russian history. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Golden Horde fragmented and new political entities emerged: the Great Horde, the Nogai Horde, the Khanates of the Crimea, Kazan', and Astrakhan'. The Great Horde claimed the same supremacy as the Golden Horde, and the khans of the Great Horde demanded the tribute and the submission which Muscovy formerly had given the khan of the Golden Horde. As the power of the Great Horde in turn weakened, Muscovy was able to emerge from its submission to the Tatars and function as an independent state.

It is a generally accepted fact that the French Revolution took place in the realm of ideas before it started in the streets. The philosophes demolished the old regime prior to 1789 and prepared the public ideologically for a new political order. They also created new ideas about nationhood and redefined the meaning of the term for the French. Hungary experienced the transition from feudalism to civil equality approximately sixty years after France, and Hungarian men of letters played a role similar to that of their French counterparts in the period before the Revolution of 1848. Since Hungary was under Austrian domination, nationalist ideas became of much greater public concern there than they had been in France.

Many aspects of early nineteenth-century Magyar nationalism still need clarification. In this article I shall examine the ideas of Magyar writers and essayists on national identity in the 1820s and 1830s.

The national archives of Denmark and Sweden have engaged Soviet archives in extensive and probably unique exchanges of copied materials. These two archives consequently hold substantial quantities of Soviet archival records, records sometimes of extraordinary value, which in some cases are scarcely accessible in any other part of the world, including the Soviet Union. Approximately 40 percent of the holdings of Soviet documents in the Danish National Archive come from the Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii. The fact that it is very difficult to gain access to this institution considerably enhances their importance. The Swedish holdings are similar.

The Russian documents in both archives were acquired in two phases, and phase one was common to both. In 1928, archivists and historians from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden formed a joint Scandinavian committee for the exploration of the Russian state archives (Den Nordiske Faelleskomite for Udforskning af de russiske Statsarkiver).

This study analyzes the biographies of a number of Soviet communications officials in order to address some fundamental and increasingly important questions about the communications process and about prospects for responding to the dilemmas that recent information about the Soviet audience has revealed. Major efforts to examine audience opinion have been undertaken in the Soviet Union. To a considerable extent these efforts are a response to the perception, on the part of media officials, that foreign communications sources have made inroads into the communications system and have created, especially in this time of increased bipolar world tension, alternative channels of information. As the officials recognize, the internal media system has changed substantially, and new patterns of communications consumption have emerged. But as a result of the findings of audience surveys, basic elements of the political doctrine concerning communications have been undermined.

Historical studies of the Russian empire in upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century have tended to be animated by a narrow centralist bias or an equally narrow regional one. Although it is clear that the primary impulse for revolutionary situations in 1905 and 1917 resulted from events in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a Russocentric approach to a society that was less than 50 percent Russian is surely inadequate. At the same time, studies of individual minority nationalities, however thorough, tend to view these groups in isolation. A comparative perspective, which could identify broader uniformities as well as local peculiarities, is usually lacking. In this article I shall present a synthesizing and comparative overview of the Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. Although these areas constituted only 2 percent of the land area of the Russian empire and had less than 4 percent of its population in 1905,2 they were among the most modernized in the country, and their ethnic diversity and differing histories provide abundant material for a comparative case study.

Historians of imperial Russia have agreed unanimously and confidently that Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War (1853–1856) led directly to the emancipation of the serfs and to wide-ranging social, economic, political, and military changes of enormous historical significance. In addition, whether liberal interpreters were waxing eloquent about a so-called “epoch of great reforms” or Marxists were emphasizing pressures of a “revolutionary situation” in a country in transition from feudalism to capitalism, the reforms of the Russian army introduced by D. A. Miliutin, war minister throughout most of Alexander II's quarter-century long reign, have been acclaimed unanimously as one of the most successful and lasting attempts at modernization in this period of considerable change. Miliutin was appointed war minister only in November 1861, however, more than six and one half years after Alexander II acceded to the imperial throne, leaving an apparent gap at a time when preparations for reform were begun in most other spheres of government and society. Indeed, the period after the Crimean War is so well known as a time of change of enormous historical significance for the future of Russia that inactivity in the military seems remarkable, especially in the aftermath of military defeat.