Sasha Sokolov is the author of three remarkably different novels. The first, A School for Fools (1976), tells of a schizophrenic adolescent and his attempts to come to terms with the elemental experiences of sex and death in the small world of his special school, his family, and the dacha community where they summer. The second, Between Dog and Wolf (1980), is a complex tale of vengeance and violence. The hero, an elderly, one-legged, itinerant grinder named Il'ia, beats off a supposed wolf with his crutches. The dog, for such it is, belongs to Iakov, a game warden, who in revenge steals Il'ia's crutches. Their feud escalates. The grinder kills two of the gamekeeper's dogs and is eventually drowned by their owner who, unbeknownst to either, may be his son. Sokolov's newest novel, The Epic of Palisandr (1985), relates the adventures of its hero, Palisandr Dal'berg, “Son of the Kremlin.“

In the January 1984 issue of Soviet Studies, I published an article, “Is There a Generation Gap in the Soviet Political Establishment?: Demand Articulation by RSFSR Provincial Party First Secretaries,“ based on examination of 466 articles signed by twenty-four obkom and kraikom first secretaries and published between January 1976 and March 1981. I was interested in seeing whether differences in the content of published articles correlated strongly with generational differences within this sample of regional party leaders. The claim has frequently been made that the post-Stalin generation of Soviet officials is more demanding and impatient than the Stalin generation. My research was geared toward seeing whether the articles attributed to these secretaries reflected such differences.

Few would dispute the claim that the razverstka, the Bolshevik method of grain procurement, was a centerpiece of “war communism.” Yet there exists no adequate treatment of the razverstka in the scholarly literature, and indeed there is widespread confusion about the nature and purposes of the razverstka policy as well as about the circumstances of its introduction and its replacement in 1921 by a food-supply tax (prodnalog). A closer look at the actual razverstka reveals some surprising features and in the end casts doubt on the validity and usefulness of the war communism notion itself.

The razverstka was introduced in the second half of 1918 as a result of experience in trying to enforce a state grain monopoly by means of the foodsupply dictatorship decreed in spring 1918. To understand the razverstka method we must first look at the more ambitious aims of the previous policy of a fullfledged grain monopoly.

The events of the last years of NEP—the New Economic Policy—confront historians with two complex and still controversial issues: the effect of these “new” policies on the Russian economy, on society, and on methods of Communist rule in the country and the political conflict dividing the party leadership in the late 1920s. The first issue raises the question of the extent to which NEP was evolving in a direction compatible with the Communists' dream of a socialist society, with the short-term political needs of the Soviet state, and with the priorities of economic development. The second issue focuses on the political instability generated by the controversy over domestic policy and methods of rule, as well as by the personal antagonism between the two key political leaders, Nikolai Bukharin and Stalin. The debate on these questions, answers to which are crucial to our understanding of the origins of Stalinism, has for the most part relied on evidence drawn from central party and state activities, giving the discussion a panoramic view of the history of those years.

Since its first appearance in 1971, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo (henceforth to be referred to as August 1914) has been compared to, and measured by the standards of, Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace. One might say that both the subject of the novel and the scope of the historical events described in it, as well as its numerous references to Tolstoi, made such comparisons inevitable. Even though virtually all critics were unanimous that Tolstoi was a predominant presence in Solzhenitsyn's mind when he was writing the first “knot” of the multivolume novel cycle, they disagreed about the precise nature of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Tolstoi. While some critics have been more inclined to see Solzhenitsyn's novel as an emulation of Tolstoi's masterpiece, others have emphasized the antagonistic and polemic quality of Solzhenitsyn's attitudes toward his predecessor—whether Tolstoi the “historiosoph” of War and Peace (1865— 1869) or Tolstoi the moralist and aesthetician of the later period.