Aleksandr Pushkin's cult for simple, unadorned prose is a critical commonplace that needs no further documentation. Weaned on those masters of French classicism (Jean de La Bruyère, Montesquieu, and, above all, Voltaire) for whom brevity was the soul of wit and concision no crime, he practiced from the beginning, “Naden'ka,” to the end, “Kirdzhali“ and The Captain's Daughter, a narrative style conspicuous for its uncommon bareness. That the virtues which he valued most highly in prose, namely, tochnost', kratkost', and nagaia prostata are, with rare exceptions, at one with his practice has been noted many times.

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were “fathers” to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.

In recent decades, historians of prerevolutionary Russia have emphasized the diverse and complex nature of the group of educated Russians that has traditionally been referred to as the “intelligentsia.” In the existing historiography, there have been numerous investigations into various subgroups of the intelligentsia, including studies of noble intellectuals, students, women radicals, religious thinkers, ethnic elites, and members of political parties and of specific professions. The subgroup that contributed more to Russian professions and political movements than any other non-noble subgroup in both quantitative and qualitative terms is also the only prominent subgroup that has been neglected. The members of this neglected subgroup are Russian Orthodox clergymen's sons, referred to throughout this article by the Russian term popovichi?

In the 1880s and 1890s, Vladimir Solov'ev worked out a Christian approach to nations and nationality, and a moral critique of nationalism, while waging a polemical battle against the Russian conservative nationalists of his day. His ideas emerged primarily from his own social gospel theology, but they were marked by both the Slavophile romanticism of his early career and the western liberalism of his later years. Solov'ev is most often treated as a philosopher, a mystic, or a literary figure, and as a result, his journalistic writings on nationalism and other topics have often been overlooked by scholars, even though they constitute at least a third of his published output.

Historians of quite diverging orientations have interpreted the February revolution of 1917 in Russia as a “democratic” revolution. Several generations of Marxists of various stripes (tolk) have called it a “bourgeois-democratic revolution.” In the years of perestroika, the contrast between democratic February and Bolshevik October became an important part of the historical argument of the anticommunist movement. The February revolution was regarded as a dramatic, unsuccessful attempt at the modernization and westernization of Russia, as its democratization. Such a point of view was expressed even earlier in some historical works and in the memoirs of participants in the events—liberals and moderate socialists. For example, just such a description of the revolution is given by Aleksandr Kerenskii, whose last reminiscences are especially significant. Kerenskii thought that “the overwhelming majority of the Russian population…were wholeheartedly democratic in their beliefs.”

In their Dictatorship over Needs, Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus sought to analyze the nature of domination and subordination in Soviet-type societies in terms of the direct administration of production and distribution by a self-selecting corporate ruling group. This dictatorship, initially justified by the interests of the proletariat and the party's self-assigned role as its vanguard, was perpetuated not merely by coercion but also by various mechanisms of legitimation. Among these was the construction of a self-image of the state as a wise, stern, but also beneficent father. Thus, “everything that a subject may get (consumer goods, a flat, heating, clothes, theatre tickets, etc.) is ‘due to the state'; it is not granted as a right or given in exchange for something else, but provided as an amenity that can be revoked.” It follows that “Soviet subjects ask for favours, their right proper is ius supplicationis.”

This article will examine how the representation of gender in Soviet art during the second and third Five-Year Plans articulated relationships of domination in Stalinist society. Using female characters to stand for “the people” as a whole, painting and sculpture drew on conventional gender codes and hierarchy to naturalize the subordination of society to the Stalinist state and legitimate the sacrifice of women's needs to those of industrialization. The prevalence of female protagonists was closely connected with the promotion of the Stalin cult: women modeled the ideal attitude of “love, honor, and obedience.” As the triumph of conservative aesthetic hierarchies paralleled the restoration of traditional gender roles, I ask how women artists were to operate in these conditions.