To understand Stalin as a political thinker, we must see him as a man whose thinking was strongly influenced by perceived parallels between present and past. Unlike other Bolsheviks, he found a parallel between Russia’s internal situation in relatively tranquil 1925 and on the eve of the October upheaval of 1917. He thrice stated in party forums during 1925 that the present international situation resembled the prelude of the World War’s outbreak in 1914. And having come to think in Russian historical terms, he discerned a parallel between Muscovite Russia’s situation in earlier centuries and Soviet Russia’s now. In a party speech of 1928, for example, he found a cue for present policy in Peter the Great’s attempted revolutionary leap out of Russian backwardness; and in the often quoted speech to managers in 1931 he spoke of the beatings that Russia had suffered in history as punishment for her backwardness and declared that Soviet survival now depended on conquering that backwardness in ten years.

The Revolution of 1905 challenged the symbolists’ belief that they could seclude themselves from the rest of society. Forced to reexamine their previous ideas, values, and attitudes, they developed new ideologies that took cognizance of the current crisis. Among the most prominent of the new ideologies was mystical anarchism, the doctrine of the symbolist writers Georgii Chulkov and Viacheslav Ivanov. Particularly attractive to the symbolists, mystical anarchism also influenced other artists and intellectuals; doctrines similar to it proliferated, and it engendered a polemic in which almost all the symbolists took part. Strikingly similar to the mystical anarchism of other periods of social upheaval, both in Russia and in the West, illuminating a facet of the little-known mystical and religious aspects of the Revolution of 1905, and providing an example of the response of apolitical writers and artists to revolutionary upheaval, Chulkov and Ivanov’s doctrine merits closer study than it has so far received.

Little attention has been paid in Yugoslav historiography to the relationship between social structure and the character of the national movements of the various Yugoslav peoples. Enough data are available, however, to compile a list of the problems that should be studied in any systematic comparison of these national movements. The purpose of this paper is to examine some aspects of the interaction of social structures and national movements among the Yugoslav peoples for the twenty-year period before the First World War. The paper is primarily focused on urban society, which took the leading role in national movements

In Tsvetaeva’s work, earth is essentially a place of exile where her persona stands “with only one foot.” From its confines she time and again seeks to return to her original home in the sky by escaping into the worlds of dreams, poetry, and, for a while, an impassioned correspondence. Perhaps nowhere is Tsvetaeva’s otherworldly orientation more strongly evident than in the imagery of her numerous flights, evocations of azure skies, and artistic simulations of the air and space of dreams. These pervade the poemy written at the time of the civil war and the correspondence-related works of the mid-twenties. In the late twenties and thirties, by contrast, there is a conscious turning away from aerial imagery to the immediate world, and finally at turning away from poetry itself to death.