Among the problematic works of great writers, Pushkin's Boris Godunov occupies a special place. This strange hybrid of history, drama, narrative poetry, and prose Pushkin called a “romantic tragedy,” and he considered it his masterpiece. Yet the play's publication in 1831 was met with surprise and dismay. By consensus of a baffled public, Boris Godunov was a failure—neither romantic, nor feasible on the tragic stage.

Since that time, generations of critics, playwrights, and producers have tried to come to terms with this troublesome text. Tolstoi's famous comment—that all great nineteenth-century Russian works defy clear generic classification1—has been invoked in defense of many irregular texts, but not this one. Boris remains stubbornly, inexplicably “undramatic.” Criticism has in fact tended to redefine the play rather than to investigate it. Boundaries are routinely blurred between the historical Tsar Boris, the historical period when his tale is retold, and the world of the fictional creation itself.

In 1928-29 the drive for rapid industrialization exacerbated economic hardships in the Soviet Union and forced the adoption of food rationing in the major cities.1 Social discontent and social tensions grew more acute. Workers pressed for a tougher line against the educated and privileged classes, and the Stalin leadership responded by promoting a "proletarianization" of the party, government, and educational institutions. In this way the leadership hoped to win working-class support for the revolutionary path on which it was preparing to embark. But the economic hardships provoked by the industrialization drive caused the Stalin leadership to doubt whether it could indeed rely on uniform support. It feared that certain strata of the proletariat would resist the accelerated drive for industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

Among the approaches one might adopt in studying church-state interaction is one that endeavors to treat both church and state as active subjects and which tries to be sensitive to factional divisions within both. This approach makes it clear that just as a regime may have a religious policy, the churches may also have policies toward the regime, and that the resulting relationship reflects the interplay of both policies. If there are factions in both state and church, the policies of both will be the subject and the product of continuing debate and struggle among the factions.

Sensitivity to factionalism is not a black-and-white issue but a matter of degree. Nevertheless, Western writings on church-state relations under communism may be grouped into four general categories. In the first category are works treating both church and state as unified (nonfactionalized) entities—either explicitly (by denying factionalism) or implicitly (by ignoring it as analytically unimportant).