In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. “I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, ‘Mayakovsky'.“

The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives (“Night,“ “Morning,” “The Street,” etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes (“I,” “Man,” “A Cloud in Trousers“), is total negation of the status quo.

The heliocentric allusions in Antiokh Kantemir's First Ode make it one of the earliest poetic statements in Russian literature to support the Copernican theory. As such it is often cited, and it is certainly the best known of the poet's four surviving odes. Yet neither the precise date of the poem's composition nor its origin is known, though attempts at solving both these problems have been made with a view to explaining the change in Kantemir's poetic style after he left Russia in January, 1732. Though he was then only twenty-three, some of his best satires had already been written, and his poetic output declined after that date.

The Soviet Union, as an administrative state par excellence, is a Parkinsonian nightmare. Although the leadership is armed with broad powers and unhampered by formal restraints in its control of the bureaucracy, it is nevertheless hard pressed to keep the huge administrative structures of the Soviet system efficient and responsive to central direction. The success or failure of a regime depends in large measure on how effectively it can get its policies translated into action by the bureaucracy.

Most schematic descriptions of the Soviet system by Western commentators, especially those written in the early 1950's, emphasized the division of the state into several highly centralized, vertically structured, and functionally specialized administrations—party, police, armed forces, and the economic bureaucracy. Within these broad categories there was frequently even further vertical-functional fractionization. For example, within the industrial bureaucracy there were various specialized ministries and a separation between planners and managers.

Agriculture continues to present the regimes of the Communist world with some of their most important economic and political problems even after the trials of collectivizing are past. There are constant pressures, on the one hand, to make the collective system much more productive by improving organizational efficiency and raising the level of technology. On the other hand, the official ideology commits these regimes to eventually abolishing the collective system itself by transforming the collective farms into institutions of state property. There are indications, moreover, that this commitment may not be postponed indefinitely. The issue of how to establish a viable, permanent, and uniform organization of agriculture with completely nationalized enterprises has recurrently arisen in the Soviet Union over the last decade: in Khrushchev's “agro-town” proposal of the early 1950's, for example, with its implicit aim of eliminating the private plots of collective farmers, and in the later fairly large-scale experiments with a system of fixed wages in collective farms and with direct conversions of collective into state farms.