Historians of the Russian peasantry hold almost unanimously that serfowners routinely intervened in serf marriage: that they generally forbade serf women to leave the estate through marriage or marry at all without permission, commanded serfs to marry young, made compulsory matches when their serfs failed to marry on schedule, and otherwise prevented serfs from exercising free choice in marriage. Equally common is the assumption that the nobles’ interest in serf marriage was the multiplication of human property and the number of duespaying labor units, i.e., married couples. The one exception is Steven Hoch, who found that on the Gagarin estate of Petrovskoe, Tambov province, managers never intervened, at least in first marriages. They never had to, Hoch argues, because the heads of peasant households shared the owners’ interest in early and universal marriage. That was because estate managers allocated land, the only significant economic resource, to married couples on an egalitarian basis. Even Hoch accepts the standard view that, on other estates where different socioeconomic conditions held, estate authorities did have to intervene to ensure that serfs married early and universally.

In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs, increasing numbers of peasants left their native villages for cities and industrial centers, in response to a growing need for cash and declining opportunities to earn it at home. At least until World War I, the vast majority of these migrants were men; women were the more stable element in the village. In the words of one student of peasant life, women “cling to the family and the land, and need particularly unfavorable circumstances to compel them to move somewhere else.“ Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close the economic circumstances that prompted peasant men to leave villages increasingly caused women to leave as well. Like their husbands, fathers and brothers, migrant women often chose urban destinations. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 650 peasant women per 1,000 peasant men in Moscow, and 368 migrant peasant women for every 1,000 migrant peasant men in St. Petersburg; by 1910, the proportion in St. Petersburg had increased to 480 per 1,000.

The Communist Youth League (Komsomol) was founded in 1917-1918 in urban centers. Its leadership's perception of the peasantry and its quest to maintain a respectable proportion of workers in the membership impeded expansion in rural areas: in the name of “proletarian purity,” many leaders and activists opposed the blanket admission of all but the poorest peasants into their midst. But demographic realities made the Komsomol's outreach to young peasants imperative: peasants made up eighty percent of the Russian population; their children nineteen years of age or younger accounted for half of the rural population in the mid-1920s. More important, the state and the Party had reduced their rural personnel at the end of the civil war and the Komsomol found itself pressured to fill the gap.

Bakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative. For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live. Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin accounts of life found in philosophical tracts, they offer a rich and “thick” description of human thinking and action.

Rainer Maria Rilke's widely celebrated fiftieth birthday in December 1925 and his sudden death on 29 December 1926 framed his correspondence with members of Boris Pasternak's family and Marina Tsvetaeva- Efron, for which Leonid Pasternak's initial greetings to his old Moscow friend and Rilke's prompt reply had set the stage. It was agreed that Rilke's letters from Switzerland would be sent to Boris Pasternak in Moscow via Marina Tsvetaeva in Paris. Against all historical and political odds, the three poets decided to form a union, the last one, perhaps, of an era which still believed that the making of poetry equaled the making of life. Rilke's participation in this association reassured uprooted Russian writers of their continuing link with European culture and history.

Since the early days of perestroika, explanations for the Soviet opening to reform have emphasized the critical role of post-Stalin social transformation. Rising levels of education, changing patterns of social mobility and increasing urbanization seemed to create a new set of values and expectations by 1985 at odds with the Soviet system's traditional controls. If the initiative for restructuring came from the upper reaches of the political hierarchy, the pressures for change appeared to come from below. In contrast, assessments since the Soviet collapse have been more mixed. With the costs of reform mounting, calls for an “iron hand” and local resistance to market mechanisms suggest doubts about both capitalism and democracy: the results of Russia's April 1993 referendum seemed to be an endorsement of radical reform but only a minority of eligible voters actually approved Yeltsin's program; and survey data a few months earlier had indicated public support for a new coup in Moscow. Either the grand social and political transformation that unleashed perestroika was quickly reversed or its impact was exaggerated.