Published census data on Jews have been very scarce, but these data and other sources leave no doubt that in comparison with other groups Soviet Jews were very distinctive in terms of such characteristics as their urban concentration and their educational and professional achievement. This level of achievement occurred despite popular and official anti-Semitism of varying intensity. With the recent release of new data from the 1989 census, a more precise understanding of the opportunities available to Jews in Soviet Russia is now possible. These data show the number of men and women by major ethnic groups (including Jews) in 257 job categories. Surprisingly, this new information is not referred to even in the most recent Russian scholarship on Jews, and it receives no mention in western sources. In this article, I use the new occupational data to evaluate differences between Russians and Jews and to explore the way in which employment disparities may have shaped interaction between the two groups.

The second disintegration of the empire this century has reopened the debate over Russian state and nation building with direct implications both for Russia's reform process and for its relations with other newly independent states. In December 1991, the Russian Federation was transformed into an independent state as a historically formed regional entity, not as a nation state. Scholars argue that the Russian empire was built “at the cost of Russia's own sense of nationhood.” In the past, the efforts spent conquering and ruling vast territories and diverse populations diverted the Russian people and their leaders from the task of consolidation and nation building. This was true not only in the prerevolutionary but also in the Soviet period, during which the majority of Russians saw the entire USSR rather than the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) as their homeland. Now, after the disintegration of the USSR, the questions arise whether the majority of Russians can accept the borders of the Russian Federation as final, and, if not, what the alternative myths of Russia's national homeland are? The answers to these questions determine whether Russians will ever be able to define themselves other than as an imperial people.

Among the scores of unpublished manuscripts in fond 89 (“Bolotovykh”) of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg is a partially filled album spanning a forty-year period from the early 1780s to the early 1820s. One of the many long-term projects of the multitalented memoirist, landscape designer, and agronomist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov (1738-1833), the album was initiated at Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797, and continued to garner new contributions for several decades after he retired to Dvorianinovo, his estate and birthplace in northern Tula province. It has been summarized by one of the few scholars who has studied it as “an extremely interesting mirror of provincial byt.” The pretty and seemingly mimetic reflection of rural life that it provides is deceptive on a number of levels, however: for on the Russian estate during this period— and, as it turns Out, on the pages of the album itself—there is a good deal more going on than first meets the eye.

The Bolsheviks made civil war inevitable by forcing a showdown with the Kerenskii government in October 1917—and concomitantly with the moderate socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks. The resulting conflict accelerated complex processes underway since February that exacerbated social polarization and fostered political and economic localism. Following the local Soviet's siege of the city duma in the provincial capital of Saratov in October, opposition forces began to contest Soviet power, which before long was reduced to Bolshevik and Left SR rule. As a result, the Saratov Soviet spent all of 1918-19 battling a variety of manifestations of discontent with the new political order. The calculus of civil war in the province involved the sustained threat to strategically located Saratov of White armies, which succeeded in striking against and taking the uezd (district) towns of Khvalynsk, Vol'sk, Serdobsk, Tsaritsyn, Balashov, Kuznetsk, and Kamyshin. Opposition from within the province proved every bit as formidable. Anti-Bolshevik forces, inspired by both the socialist and nonsocialist resistance, mobilized uprisings in all of the towns of Saratov province during the civil war; moreover, not a single uezd escaped the throes of peasant violence and resistance before this turbulent chapter in Russian history drew to a close.

The history of the Soviet Yiddish State Theater (Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr, or Goset) provides an illuminating glimpse into the life of Jewish entertainers and the position of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. While Solomon Mikhoels, the theater's star actor and director from 1929 until 1949, is well known for his role in chairing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, and for becoming the first victim of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges with his 1948 execution, little research has been conducted on the theater to which he dedicated his life. Art and theater historians have evaluated the theater's aesthetic approach to selected productions, and Mikhoels's contemporaries have provided anecdotal glimpses into that artist's life by writing biographies of him, but there has not yet been an attempt to assess the theater's relationship to the state during its heyday or to place the theater within the context of Soviet culture of the 1920s.

All performance involves some kind of communication between performer and spectator. After the socialist realist model was established in the mid-1980s, Soviet professional theaters typically relied on conventional input from patrons: attendance, emotional reactions during performances, and applause. Known for its exceptional interaction with audiences, the Taganka Theater decorated its lobby to correspond to a production and even asked spectators to cast ballots indicating whether they enjoyed the performance of Ten Days that Shook the World. But for professionals, such efforts to bridge the gulf between the stage and the house were unusual.