The merchant is a shadowy if not invisible figure in the accounts of the political and economic life of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. Apart from a few exceptional cases, very little is known of his commercial dealings. His political-administrative activities rarely appear in discussions of the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and his immediate successors. Because few sources survive that permit an investigation of the merchant's place in the Russian economy, some scholars have concluded that the part the merchant played was minor.

The work of Daniil Kharms was lost to the West for many years. A poet and black humorist, creator of Russia's short-lived literature of the absurd, Kharms shared the fate of many of his contemporaries. His work, which was passed from hand to hand after his disappearance in 1941, began to surface in print only in the late 1960s. But in spite of a number of recent publications, Kharms remains largely unknown and misunderstood. His eccentric, often grotesque stories are too easily dismissed as lacking depth. Part of this misunderstanding stems from an incomplete knowledge of Kharms's work: because Western readers are limited to published materials, they are unable to perceive the strong religious strain that underlies much of Kharms's writing.

According to my definitions, any society must combine “science,” “technology,” and “design” whenever it creates useful material objects. Science establishes principles which technology (with some admixture of common sense, and guidance from economics) embodies in physical components through manufacture. Design attends to the composition and arrangement of these components, as well as to the appearance and balance of qualities of the assembled product, with a view to satisfying consumers and other users. Given a conception of three essentially distinct elements, imports of advanced equipment by the USSR do not necessarily signify an inability to create original designs. The intention might rather be to put certain designs into production, using processes not offered by indigenous technology.

The secretaries of republic and regional party committees are the most important category of officials in the USSR after the supreme leadership. They formed 36 percent of the full members of the Central Committee chosen in 1976, while the next largest group, comprising members of the Council of Ministers, made up 24 percent. They are also the most important reserve from which members of the supreme leadership are co-opted. A study of the careers of Politburo members in 1971 showed that two-thirds of them had spent at least five years as regional or republic party first secretaries before being promoted to senior jobs at the center. The same applies to nine of the twelve present members of the Central Committee Secretariat.

This article focuses on the first secretaries of regional (oblast') and territorial (krai) party committees—the obkom and kraikom secretaries—of the Russian Republic (RSFSR). They make up almost two-thirds of all republic and regional party officials elected as full members of the present Central Committee, but their importance lies not only in their numerical weight within the political elite.

The most common Russian population records of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the revisii—were the product of the state's effort to keep track of the population primarily for tax purposes. The narrowness of this approach to documenting the size and distribution of the population—particularly the absence of socioeconomic data—gradually led to replacement of the revisii by more comprehensive statistics, including the census. Unlike the revisii, the census of 1897 was to be a statement of population size and characteristics on a specific date of record, a “single-day” census (odnodnevnaia perepis’). In addition, the census collected relatively broad data on the population, including items ranging from age, sex, and place of birth to items such as class, literacy and schooling, employment, and so forth. Finally, it was the aim of the census to collect and publish these data for the entire population of the empire regardless of social class, tax status, or place of residence.

I am fully in agreement with Mr. Hutchings as to the major importance of design in determining the quality of an economy’s products. Indeed, I would extend this view to a statement that design is equally important in determining the appropriateness of specific methods of production in the light of the economy’s physical and human resources. I think that we are all indebted to Hutchings for making the case and for distinguishing between design and technology. However, while Hutchings discusses the contribution of design to various Soviet industries, he fails to provide criteria for distinguishing between good and bad product design. It is to this elementary task that I wish primarily to direct my remarks.

All economic systems have ways in which they determine how much their total trade with the world will be, what commodities will make up that total, and the destinations and sources of those commodities (the geographic composition of exports and imports). In Western economies, which rely heavily on markets, the values of these variables summarize the outcome of a myriad of private decisions, with some influence of governments primarily through tariffs and quotas. In Eastern economies, which rely heavily on central planning, the government itself through its planners directly determines the value of those same variables.

The concept of Most-Favored Nation (MFN) treatment evolved as a mechanism by which governments in market economies could agree mutually to limit interference in private decisions on trade, with the expected consequence being an increase in trade and welfare. When two market economy governments agree to accord MFN treatment to each other's commodities, it means (in its simplest form) that tariffs applied in each country to commodities imported from the other country shall be no higher than the lowest tariffs charged on imports of those commodities from any destination.

The period of Russian history between 1905 and 1914 has been the subject of continuing controversy. Coming as it did before the traumatic shock of world war and revolution, the decade has been a battleground between those who see tsarist society as one that was undergoing a process of gradual but positive evolution in response to the revolutionary crisis of 1905 and those who insist that social tensions within the empire were moving it toward yet another revolutionary outbreak. Although initially concentrated on the urban sector of Russian society, attention in the debate has also been extended to rural areas of the empire. Here, as in the city, the question of the nature and direction of change is complex, and its resolution requires the investigation of a variety of phenomena, not the least of which is rural crime.

Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:

When two diametrically opposed revolutionary movements gain the support of the peasantry of a given population, it is logical to ask whether this support came from all peasant strata equally or from one in particular. This question is especially relevant to the eastern Polish województwo of Wołyń in the 1930s. Overwhelmingly populated by Ukrainian peasants, the rural areas of Wołyń województwo were strongly influenced by both Ukrainian Communists (represented by the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, Komunistychna Partita Zakhidnoi Ukrainy, or KPZU) and Ukrainian Nationalists (represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains'kykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN).

The study of Soviet design is an area where knowledge of science, technology, art, and history need to converge; a discussion of it, therefore, seems particularly appropriate for the pages of an interdisciplinary journal. The comments below are offered in the hopes of fostering further discussion across disciplines. In his article, Dr. Hutchings has gone beyond the conclusions of his book (Soviet Science, Technology, Design) to make some rather bold claims for the importance of studying Soviet design as a way of understanding major Soviet problems. He is to be commended for focusing attention on an area which has not received, at least until recently, much attention from Western scholars.

Throughout the nineteenth century a major international issue facing the Great Powers of Europe was the volatile “Eastern Question.” As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, the question of the future disposition of its extensive territories (some 238,000 square miles in Europe alone in 1800) provoked an intense and prolonged rivalry among those European states with vested political and economic interests in the Near East. With its military power in decline and its frontiers menaced by powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the nineteenth century despite its imposing imperial edifice.

On October 25-26, 1917 (O.S.), the nominal government of Russia, the third coalition of the Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, was pushed from power with ridiculous ease by the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks' plans were no secret; it had been common knowledge for some weeks that they were planning a move against the government. The Provisional Government, however, was incapable of taking any effective action. By October the government's power had drained away, leaving little more than an empty shell which could be pushed into the dust bin of history with a minimum of difficulty.

In 1770 Etienne Falconet notified Empress Catherine II that he preferred to carve only a brief inscription on the base of his monument to Peter the Great: Petro Primo/Catharina Secunda. The empress did not object, and when the statue was finally unveiled in 1782 it bore the sculptor's lapidary phrase on its gigantic granite foundation. Catherine is presumed to have relished the equation which the motto implied, that Peter had been Russia's first great modern ruler while she, although not descended from him, was the second. In the context of whatever it might mean to be an enlightened autocrat, it is often assumed that Catherine both represented and understood herself as Peter's only true heir, the continuer and completer of what he had begun.

But some of Catherine's friends, writing what they knew would please her, said differently. After observing, not altogether tongue in cheek, that brevity was a virtue which inscription writers should cultivate, Melchior Grimm suggested that the motto's appeal might be further enhanced by removing the numbers and leaving just two words, “Petro/Catharina,” a move which would also have dispensed with the pecking order which the numbers implied. And from the edge of Switzerland, Voltaire sent greetings in 1774 to his favorite Petersburg correspondent: “Meanwhile, Madam, allow me to kiss the statue of Peter the Great and the hem of the dress of Catherine the Greater.”

Russian liberals can easily be cast as weakhearted idealists, devoted to Western notions of fair play and moderation and naively optimistic of the chances of seeing those principles brought to life in their own country. As the opposing forces of the state and the revolution build toward their climax in 1917, the liberal Hamlets often appear incapable of seizing the moment. Yet consider the efforts of the “public organizations”—the War-Industry Committees, the Union of Zemstvos, and the Union of Towns, as well as the Progressive Bloc in the Duma—to take over the practical matter of running Russia's war effort during the First World War. Prince George Lvov, head of the Provisional Government until the July Days of 1917, seems to personify this stereotype of well-meaning yet tragically ineffective liberalism on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, but it was this same figure who energetically directed the Union of Zemstvos during the war.

Stalin's “last word” on German reunification was contained in the Soviet diplomatic note of March 10, 1952, which proposed a peace treaty with Germany. Until the middle of 1953, Stalin's heirs continued to press for reunification on the basis of the 1952 note. The East German uprising of June 17, 1953 (which is commemorated in West Germany, with unintended irony, as the “Day of German Unity“) marked the de facto termination of the Soviet reunification initiative. As a result of the uprising, the rulers of the Soviet Union and East Germany were forced to place greater emphasis on the consolidation of the Communist regime in the GDR—that is, the stability of East Germany required policies explicitly directed toward the development of a separate, socialist East German state. Thus, the uprising and the subsequent Soviet intervention further undermined the credibility of an already questionable Soviet reunification initiative.

When the Communist Party took power in Rumania in 1944, it inherited a poor, agrarian society. In 1950, before the advent of planning, three-fourths of Rumania's labor force was still in agriculture; only 12 percent of the labor force was in the industrial sector. Per capita income for the country as a whole was the equivalent of thirty dollars and in agriculture it was close to twenty dollars. The new regime did not have to search very far for a general development model. It adopted the Soviet strategy of rapid economic growth through the priority development of heavy industry. Women have played a key role in this process; indeed, it may be argued that they form the linchpin of Rumanian growth strategy.

It is a professionally valuable experience to debate with such eminent critics. Although the focus here will be on our disagreements (because of space limitations some criticisms must go unanswered), I regard as chiefly significant our agreement that Soviet design is important, and has attracted too little attention.

David Granick’s essay, complementary to mine and unlike the others from a strictly economic standpoint, calls for little rejoinder. I would merely add that if (as I concur) much Soviet design has been “surprisingly” good, this may be partly attributable to a certain autonomy of indigenous design principles, which leads back to one theme of my work.