State and Revolution has long seemed to be the most puzzling of Lenin's written works. The traditional view among western scholars has regarded State and Revolution as a Utopian fantasy that is completely out of character with the rest of Lenin's thought. The most prominent exponent of that viewpoint is Robert V. Daniels, who, in an influential article published in 1953, asserted that the ideas of State and Revolution were “permeated with an idealistic, almost Utopian spirit“ and who in a later work described State and Revolution as an “argument for Utopian anarchism” and a treatise in “revolutionary utopianism.“ Similar comments have been offered by a number of other authors. Alfred Meyer, though not dealing in detail with State and Revolution in his brilliant review of Lenin's thought, regards the essay as a reflection of the “dream of the ‘commune state'“ expressed in Lenin's statements from early 1917 through the first few months of 1918.

Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a “surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal.” Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.

In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.

Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.

Russian formalism has been of interest in the west for at least three decades since the publication of Victor Erlich's authoritative study of the school in 1954. Almost every year significant new contributions are made to the analysis of the formalists’ scholarship; their multiplex theory, with all of its different, and at times seemingly contradictory, aspects, is elucidated, and many of these aspects are successfully incorporated in modern criticism and literary theory in the west. I will not dwell upon the better known “internalist” aspects of the formalists' work, nor will I try to summarize their theory. Several leading members of the school systematically attempted to create a coherent theoretical framework for the sociology of literature. In this article I will look at the sociology of the Russian formalists from the point of view of a sociologist, analyze it, and suggest that the formalist sociology of literature makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of literature, but also to the understanding of social reality and to the discipline of sociology.

In 1940, there were only 400 television sets in the Soviet Union. By 1950, there were 10,000; a decade later, some 4.8 million. Then in the five years between 1965 and 1970, the availability of television sets more than doubled, and by 1976, Soviet industry was producing 7 million sets annually. In 1960, only 5 percent of the Soviet population could watch television, but by 1986 that figure had risen to 93 percent, and television signals could be received in more than 86 percent of the territory of the U.S.S.R. Nearly all the households that are unable to receive television are in sparsely settled rural areas, mainly Siberia.

Although television is a relative newcomer to the Soviet media system, it has exerted an enormous effect on leisure time use. It has also reoriented patterns of information acquisition. Of the events in the world abroad covered by the Soviet media 86 percent are known to people through television, 77 percent through the newspaper, and 62 percent from radio.

The first months of Soviet power raise important questions about the ideology of the transition to socialism and about the nature of Bolshevik power. The destruction of the old state apparatus was accompanied by vigorous institution building; the “red guard attack against capital” was balanced by the emergence of potentially powerful Soviet economic apparatus. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed in March 1918 was followed by a period of state capitalism in which a strong socialist state was to supervise elements of capitalism in the economy. All stages were accompanied by vigorous debate within the party and, from March 1918, by the political alienation of a section of the working class. By the onset of full-scale civil war and the transition to war communism in late spring 1918 the Bolshevik party and the institutions of the new Soviet state dominated the political life of the country. Was there something in Marxist ideology that, when interpreted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, encouraged centralized and dirigiste forms of government regardless of actual conditions? A large body of literature now exists that examines this issue from various perspectives. This literature has recently been enriched by a number of studies that look at events from the perspective of lower-level participants and area case studies.

On 23 April 1873, the peasant Kuz'ma Rudchenko was found near the village of Brusovka. His head was completely crushed, his hands had been chopped off, and the plank that had been used to beat him had been thrust through his anus, piercing the full length of his body and extruding from his gaping mouth. In 1881, in the village of Mukhovitsie, Kiev province, peasants apprehended a thief and sliced the tendons in his right leg and left hand. In the same year and province, in the village of Iazvinkie, the peasants carved a special toothed stake, so that it resembled a series of arrowheads on one shaft. They then shoved it up the rectum of a suspected thief, with the arrows positioned so that he could not remove it.

A general strike spearheaded by those controlling the railroads forced tsarist autocracy to its knees in 1905. This tactic, unprecedented in Russian history, was born in Saratov early that year. Saratov's pioneering role derived from an operative principle of solidarity across class, caste, professional, and political lines. However much the crowds filling Saratov's streets resembled those elsewhere, protesters in the middle Volga city came away from the strike after Bloody Sunday with something unique—they had wrung major concessions from local administrators. The economic victory belonged to the men and women of the Riazan'-Urals Railroad who, significantly, had acted together. Their mutually reinforcing interactions, their wedding of economic and political demands framed an effective mechanism for conducting a general strike.

“If one were to write a Russian Tarzan and place him entirely within present-day Russian conditions,” Viktor Shklovskii asserted in the midst of the veritable Tarzan “craze” that swept across the Soviet Union during the early 1920s, “he would probably not prove to be successful.” Long before Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular series of Tarzan novels was ever published, however, a nineteenth century Russian tale had already treated this same theme of the child who, having been raised among apes in the jungle, returns to civilization to face the dilemma of choosing between two vastly different cultures: the comfortable but corrupt society of men or the company of primitive but noble and loving beasts.

Recent monographs on Russian social development have raised a number of hypotheses regarding our general understanding of processes of political and social change. In his volume on the early history of Russian workers Reginald Zelnik, for instance, proposes that moderate labor unrest reinforced traditional repressive patterns, while extreme conflicts motivated innovative reform. In the work of Robert E. Johnson and of Victoria Bonnell we find the suggestion that workers in small-scale enterprises and artisan shops were often more radical and organized than those in larger industrial enterprises. The fragmented and antagonistic nature of Russian society, with multiple splits of both an intergroup and intragroup nature, has been noted in the work of both Roberta Manning and Allan Wildman. Diane Koenker, focusing her research on the period of the 1917 revolutions, has brought out the moderating and integrating effect of the urban setting on Russian workers. These are only a few of the many thought-provoking hypotheses that have been raised.

But the impervious geode
Was entered, and its inner crust
Of crystals with a ray cathode
At every point and facet glowed
In answer to the mental thrust.
Robert Frost, “All Revelation”

A crucial year for Osip Mandel'shtam was 1930: it was in October of that year, in Tiflis, on the way back from Armenia, that poetry returned to him, after five years during which he wrote almost no verse. The Armenia poems (numbers 203-218) are among the first of the “new verse,” and, with their theme of penance for unproductivity and attempt to transform the factors of disturbance—the sense of limitation, confinement, deprivation—into sources of new energy, they testify to Mandel'shtam's current concern with the operations of his work. Moreover, at this juncture Mandel'shtam gives programmatic attention to the principles of his writing.

“Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu” is the last of the three poems that Osip Mandel'shtam addressed to Marina Tsvetaeva. The poets had met briefly in Koktebel' in the summer of 1915; they were reintroduced that December in Petrograd, and soon after Mandel'shtam made the first of several visits to Tsvetaeva in Moscow. He responded to her gift of the city, “Iz ruk moikh — nerukotvornyi grad/ Primi, moi strannyi, moi prekrasnyi brat” and to the affection of her “Otkuda takaia nezhnost'” with “V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora,” a celebration of his companion against the wondrously integrated Russo-Italian backdrop of the old capital. But in his next poem to her, “Na rozval'niakh ulozhennykh solomoi,” a sinister note is heard that relates their friendship to a darker side of Moscow's past, to Tsvetaeva's identification with Marina Mnishek and to his own confused identity at her side.

Writing from Italy in the summer of 1904, the noted jurist V. D. Spasowicz lamented the assassination of the minister of interior V. K. Pleve: “The news of the catastrophe with Pleve has reached us … I regard it … as a pity because at least under him the Polish question could be raised.“

Spasowicz spoke with authority on the Polish question. Himself a Pole, he had closely observed the painful evolution of the issue for fifty years. It was not only a difficult issue to raise, but defenders of Poland in Russian society were rare. The same was true of the Russian press where few publications were willing to support the Poles. The prominent liberal journal Vestnik Evropy, for which Spasowicz himself wrote, was an exception. After 1871 it emerged as a critic of the government's program of Russification in the Congress Kingdom.

Vodka was big business in nineteenth century Russia, was it is in the Soviet Union today. In the 1850s, the total turnover of the trade was at least 200 million rubles, or more than 20 percent of the value of all internal trade. In 1859, the government's share of this huge turnover exceeded 120 million rubles, which accounted for more than 40 percent of all ordinary revenues. As Nikolai Ogarev pointed out, this huge sum was enough to cover most of the peacetime expenses of the army on which Russia's status as a great power depended. Figures for 1859 were certainly unusual; nevertheless, liquor revenues averaged 32 percent of ordinary revenues throughout the period from 1805 to 1862. Vodka was the single most important source of government revenues in this period, and the government had, therefore, a huge stake in the success and expansion of the trade.