Some time ago a leading biographer of Joseph Stalin observed with a touch of irony that de-stalinization was a process “not only made possible but actually initiated by the death of Stalin.” Accordingly, some have turned to events in the final months of the dictator's life for evidence that, to the last, Stalin retained a firm grip on the levers of power; others have pointed to the new era of moderation in agriculture, literature and criminal justice which appears to have set in following Stalin's death. It was, so it seems, only with the conclusion of Stalin's reign that the hopes for stability and liberalization first raised at the end of World War II could finally be met. Only the dictator's death, it has been argued, could have put an end to absolute autocracy and opened the way for a new era of oligarchical rule.

Lenin's views on law, like so many other aspects of his intellectual life, appear in scholarly and political literature primarily as weapons—a striking quotation from State and Revolution here, an insistent instruction to the commissar of justice there—arms wielded in the service of particular aims and, often, interpretations of the Soviet project. A collection of these citations would yield a most disparate arsenal—jabs, slings, barbs and bombs, and sometimes the most precise button-pressings (especially when Lenin was head of state)—an arsenal drawn, it would seem, from different wars and different epochs of combat technology. It might also seem from such a survey that, where law was concerned, Lenin's various missiles were hurled at each other.

Several young Russian and Ukrainian writers responded to the era of Great Reforms by taking up a new enterprise: literary ethnography. Their ethnographic expeditions and reports of 1856 to 1862 manifested new political, cultural and social scientific movements within the empire. They not only investigated obstacles to forging a diverse, multinational population into a common empire, they also called the attention of educated Russians and the Russian state to cultural legacies of the countryside. Some were deemed worthy of preservation; others seemed inconsistent with modern ways. They sought a new socio-political path for the public. In these ways they began to link the various peoples in the empire, the imperial state and educated Russia at a time of social and political disclocation.

Our view of the cultural situation in late imperial Russia is changing. Long set aside as a distinct period in literary and cultural history, the decades embracing the turn of the twentieth century have customarily been described according to two master narratives. The first has tied developments in cultural life to the political struggle between revolution and reaction, and to the history of Russian revolutionary ideology. The second focuses on the evolution of style, recounting the transformation of realism and the concurrent emergence of decadence and modernism. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to reveal the limits of these paradigms by directing attention to fundamental changes in the institutions of Russian literature. Jeffrey Brooks has shown how the Russian reading public expanded and diversified in the wake of the Great Reforms, thus preparing the way for a broadly based popular literature governed by market forces. As technology improved in the areas of printing, transportation and communications, the potential of this new market was increasingly exploited so that by the turn of the century popular literature had risen from its origins as a virtual cottage enterprise to the status of a major industry.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia and the other successor states lost much of their collective strategic significance for the international community. Russia's role as a new member of the nuclear club is potentially destabilizing but does not present the overriding nuclear threat once posed by the USSR. Although Russia is attempting to reestablish its traditional roles in Eurasia, the Balkans and eastern Europe, its political importance has generally decreased commensurate with the collapse of the Soviet military machine; Russia is important economically only insofar as it is a powerful magnet for western aid and investment. While this perception of gradual marginalization, apparently shared by western diplomats, academics and journalists, may be largely accurate, it is incomplete. It overlooks Russia's potential role as a source of natural resources.

The collapse of state socialism in eastern Europe has led to a proliferation of studies analyzing aspects of democratization throughout the region. Central to many of these studies (particularly those by nonspecialists) is an assumption that postcommunism is but a variation on a larger theme, that is, recent transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule.