When Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, carrying out the decision of the military council Peter I had called at the time of the siege of Nienshants, placed an earthwork fortress on one of the islands of the Neva Delta, it is highly unlikely that anyone suspected what the consequences of this step would be. It was simply a timely move that made it possible to cut off the Neva’s channel by artillery fire, so that the Swedish fleet could not aid the beleaguered town by sea. The fortress proved useless in all respects: It never had occasion to beat back the enemy, whereas defending the Admiralty Wharf on the other side of the river was beyond its reach. It seemed appropriate to build another fortress around the wharf as quickly as possible. On all sides of both fortifications a small town began to spread out irregularly, and it bore the name of the tsar’s heavenly guardian, the apostle Peter.

The revival of Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the century coincided with a wave of anti- Semitism, and many Russian intellectuals of the time, following Vladimir Solov'ev, understood the defense of the Jews as their Christian duty. For Solov'ev, however, interest in the Jews went beyond ethical considerations and ran deeper through his philosophy than even his Utopian vision of a theocracy based on Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the expression of what may be Solov'ev's central concept–the Divine Sophia–achieved clarity through his selective reading of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The argument that follows does not seek to prove influence, for Solov'ev approached the study of Kabbalah with well-formed philosophical convictions. Rather, Solov'ev's fascination with Jewish mysticism arises from affinity and recognition, as the Russian theologian sought a vocabulary with which to explain his own mystical intuitions.

Russia's position between Europe and Asia is once again a timely subject. On the most official level, it figures regularly in Mikhail Gorbachev's pronouncements on foreign policy: somberly invoked either in western capitals in order to press his vision of a “common European home” from the Atlantic to the Urals or in the Far East to affirm the Soviet Union's natural identity as an Asian country. At the same time, dissident intellectual circles in the Soviet Union have been expostulating upon the Europe-Russia-Asia juxtaposition for some years and frequently enough arrive at conclusions very different from those of the general secretary.

One of the most important events of the summer of 1917 was the opening of the All–Russian Council of the Orthodox church on 15 August in Moscow. In a dramatic opening ceremony, solemn processions from all the churches of Moscow converged on Red Square for the service led by Metropolitan Tikhon. The council had been convened by a 5 July order of the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, V. N. L'vov, with the concurrence of the Provisional Government. The calling of a church council–the first since Peter's establishment of the collegial system of administration–was a substantive change in church governance and also had a symbolic meaning. In pre-Petrine Russia, the councils not merely had played an ecclesiastical role but had formed an integral part of national government. (For example, Ivan IV and the church council had worked together to implement changes in the secular code of law as well as in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters.)

Lenin's last writings have given rise to a surprising range of interpretations. Despite this diversity, consensus holds that in these articles Lenin was striking new ground, extending his critique of war communism, and deepening his conception of the New Economic Policy. Another widely held view is that Nikolai Bukharin, inspired by the last articles, went further down the path opened by Lenin. Few agree about the content of Lenin's new direction, although one may note the following coincidence: Lenin is always seen as rejecting whatever the author in question does not like about original Bolshevism.

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.

Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the “thoroughly democratic” elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death.

This paper focuses on four issues concerning Soviet economic prospects debated in the 1920s. The first had been posed by Lenin in the summer of 1917 in Gosudarstvo i revoliutsiia, where he explained confidently" … that expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in the enormous development of the productive forces of human society. But how rapidly this development will proceed … we do not and cannot know." In mid-September he added the well-known warning:

On the morning of 11 May 1876, a young seamstress pushed her stepdaughter out the window of their Petersburg apartment. The apparent reason for this attempted infanticide (miraculously, the child survived her four-story plunge) was Ekaterina Kornilova's anger at her husband and jealousy of his deceased first wife. The case would seem undistinguished in its sordidness were it not for Fedor Dostoevskii's adoption of the affair as a cause celebre. Although he originally attacked Kornilova's defenders, Dostoevskii later defended her as well when he learned that Kornilova had been pregnant at the time of the attempted murder.

The narrator of Vladimir Voinovich's Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina: roman-anekdot v piati chastiakh tells us on the first page that the events he is going to describe took place during the period from late May to early June 1941. For the knowledgeable reader, this information means something terrible is about to happen: On 22 June Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, starting what was to be one of the most devastating wars in human history. Yet Voinovich's novel is hilariously funny. How does Voinovich do it?

To answer this question adequately, a comprehensive theory of humor would have to be applied to both Chonkin and its sequel, Pretendent na prestol: novye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina. I will not attempt such a large task here, but I can undertake a more modest enterprise. I believe it is possible to explain why certain crucial passages in Voinovich's narratipn about the onset of the Great Fatherland War can actually provoke laughter. These passages concern the Father of Peoples himself, the Soviet dictator, Stalin.

Andrei Belyi, in Nachalo veka, recalls walks that he took with Aleksandr Blok through the back streets of Petersburg during the weeks that followed Bloody Sunday in January 1905. These walks reminded Belyi of the poems that Blok was writing at the same time and that he published in Nechaiannaia radosť in 1906.

Within Russian and Soviet studies psychohistory has had few practitioners and a negligible effect, with the notable exception of Robert C. Tucker, an eloquent theorist of Soviet politics and a preeminent biographer of Stalin. His strategy for uncovering the unknown early Stalin has involved borrowing from the methodologies of psychoanalysis with the aim of showing how the pathology of the adult Stalin was rooted in the child. Yet his approach has found few adherents.

Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian. Not particularly introspective, he left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life. Moreover, Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.

For the past few years, Soviet historians have fixed their attention on the problem of "alternatives," a shorthand for wide-ranging attempts to free historical thinking from the overly determinist schemes of Stalinist orthodoxy. The question is posed most often as the possibility of a more humane alternative to Stalin and the political order associated with his name. Some historians and publicists, however, have gone beyond the Stalin period to reflect on, for example, how even the 1917 revolutions might have been avoided. The leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev and reformist allies among the intelligentsia have singled out the New Economic Policy, or NEP, as the legitimate socialist forerunner to the present reformist programs. In so doing, they approach consensus with an influential group of western historians, including Stephen Cohen, Moshe Lewin, and Robert Tucker, who have kept alive the memory of Nikolai Bukharin in particular, but a non-Stalinist path to socialism as well.

Grigorii Soroka was a serf, one of millions in prereform Russia. He was not particularly set apart by his artistic talent, for many peasants revealed their individual expressive gifts in carved decoration, ceramics, toy making, and other crafts. Soroka was unusual, however, in that he received instruction from Aleksei Venetsianov, a retired bureaucrat, small-property owner, and renowned painter. Soroka, despite his refined talents, remained a serf, for his owner, N. P. Miliukov, unheeding of Venetsianov’s pleas, refused to manumit his “serf artist.” When the Emancipation came, then, Soroka led his villagers in drawing up a petition protesting the terms that Miliukov sought to impose. The petition, addressed to the tsar, was returned to the provincial office for peasant affairs and shown to Miliukov who, enraged, then drew up his own complaint against the peasants. Soroka was summoned to the volost offices, arrested, held for three days, and then sentenced to a flogging for “obstreperous behavior and for spreading false rumors.” On 10 April 1864 Grigorii Soroka was seen wandering distractedly about the village, and the next day his wife found his body hanging from the rafters in a cold storage building.

From 1918 to 1939, a diplomatic partnership between the Holy See and Poland appeared extremely likely. Since 1870 the Vatican had sought to restore the temporal status it had lost during Italian unification. The Lateran accords of 1929 resolved the Roman question and confirmed the disputed sovereignty of the papal enclave. This achievement, however, was only part of the Apostolic See's determined efforts to fortify its international standing in a continent dominated by Protestant, anticlerical, or atheist states. The Vatican seemed to be a natural match for revived Poland, a nation renowned for its fealty to Rome and menaced by Germany and Russia, traditional antagonists of the papacy and champions of totalitarian doctrines that the church regarded as inimical.

In investigations of the evolution of the corporation in Europe, North America, and the Far East, historians have illuminated variations in the structure of large enterprises in different times and places and investigated responses to legal environments. In tsarist Russia as well, the development of corporations on the national, regional, and sectoral levels was influenced by legal and economic institutions. Data on Russian corporations, however, have been inadequate for the complex statistical tests applied to the European and North American economies. This article offers a preliminary overview of trends in Russian corporate development from 1700 to 1914 in light of a new database and the recently articulated theory of organizational ecology. Although the theory provides stimulating approaches to the history of Russian corporations, it also appears unduly specific in some respects to the history of western Europe and the United States.

Two hundred years ago, the Polish government was preparing another biennial meeting of the sejm, their parliament, by organizing a confederation to raise troops to fight with Russia against the Turks. In a startling switch of political alignments, the opposition to King Stanistaw August Poniatowski seized control of the parliament, threw off the Russian alliance, and undertook a major governmental reform that culminated, after the reconciliation of the king with progressive members of the opposition, in the enactment of the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The major import of Polish reform was to increase the size of the ludicrously small Polish army and to regain full independence from supervision by the partition powers, particularly Russia.

Soviet historians, roaming the wide range of speculation that glasnost has opened to them, are trying to exorcise the terrible memory of Stalinism by exploring the might-have-beens, the alternative policies and lines of development that the Soviet Union might have chosen at the critical turning point a decade after the revolution. Articles and conferences one after another on this period have been focusing on "alternatives" or "the Choice of Paths of Social Development."

The publication of Anatolii Rybakov's Deti Arbata (1987) was heralded with much fanfare both in the Soviet Union and abroad. In the novel Rybakov seeks to capture the essence of Stalinism as it affected the day-to-day existence of Soviet citizens, a theme that commands intense interest in the Soviet Union today. Yet it seems unlikely that Deti Arbata would have attracted the attention it has were it not for its lengthy passages devoted to the actions and thoughts of Stalin. The novel's protagonist Sasha Pankratov remains curiously flat, too reminiscent of socialist realist paragons; it is instead Rybakov's Stalin who holds the reader's attention.

Few reliable Soviet histories of the Stalinist period or biographies of Stalin exist. Dmitrii Volkogonov and others are trying to rectify this situation, but literature has attempted to fill the gap and to respond to the national desire for some insight into the mysteries of Stalinism and its creator.