In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.

Ever since the early days of Bolshevik rule, Soviet leaders have promised to equalize socioeconomic development among the union republics. Their reasons, as I. S. Koropeckyj notes, have ranged from the ideological to the purely political. Equality is deemed an ideological necessity: every region must achieve a similarly advanced stage of development in order to pave the way for communism. Regional equality is also viewed as a way to defuse the nationality issue—in the short run by minimizing the socioeconomic disparities inherited from tsarist days and in the long run by creating a new climate in which local nationalism will disappear. The benefits of equalization should also spill over into the international arena, where the advances of traditionally underdeveloped Soviet regions highlight the “appeals of the Soviet development model for impatient revolutionary modernizes.”

The Land Captain Statute of 1889 is invariably regarded as the foremost legislative act of Alexander III’s reign, and with good reason. While Governor V. P. Golitsyn of Moscow probably exaggerated in calling it “no less significant and extensive than the peasant reform” of 1861,’ contemporary officials of diverse views agreed that it was the most controversial and important piece of domestic legislation in the 1880s. Yet for many years historians paid little attention to it or to Alexander III’s reign as a whole. Rather they dismissed the land captains (zemskie nachal'niki) as a reactionary institution intended to counter the revolutionary unrest of the late 1870s by increasing the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry. Soviet studies in the past two decades have filled in many details concerning the elaboration of the land captain legislation and have added a Marxist-Leninist slant in contending that gentry class interests influenced the autocracy to introduce the measure. Not surprisingly, they emphasize the role of A. D. Pazukhin, a wealthy gentry marshal and zemstvo board chairman from Alatyr' district (Simbirsk province), in drafting the counterreform during 1885-86 and persuading the infirm Minister of Internal Affairs D. A. Tolstoi (who died almost three months before the promulgation of the law on July 12, 1889) to support it. Yet in essence the Soviet interpretation of the land captains as part of a reactionary “new course” begun abruptly in the mid-1880s and designed to turn back the clock in the countryside adheres, as do most Western accounts on the topic, to the views of pre-Revolutionary “liberal” historians.

The USSR has entered a new, qualitatively higher stage in constructing a Communist society—“mature” or “developed” socialism. Theorists envision progressively higher developments to occur in this stage and commonly regard the scientific technological revolution as one of its defining traits. Reflecting objective changes that have occurred in society’s production forces, the scientific-technological revolution poses an unprecedented challenge to political leaders: they must now “integrate complexity and manage change through advances in organization and technology.“ This challenge cannot be successfully met without the support and active participation of specialists in administrative policy. While theorists and politicians alike remain convinced that only socialism provides the optimal framework for organizing societal development, they begrudgingly acknowledge that the reputed advantages of the Socialist economy—national planning, public property, class solidarity—do not manifest themselves automatically, but must be brought to life through the creative application of scientific knowledge and organizational skill.

In 1892, as Moscow prepared to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergei of Radonezh, an article appeared in the Moskovskiia vedomosti which suggested that one appropriate way to mark the occasion would be to erect a replica of the small wooden Church of the Holy Trinity built by Saint Sergei at the site of his famed monastery north of Moscow. The article further urged that the project be a cooperative effort and that the proposed church be constructed in one day (that is, a twenty-four-hour period), in the tradition of the obydennye khramy of old.’ The tradition which the civic-minded writer of the article tried to revive dated back to the late fourteenth century. The early Russian chronicles record nineteen one-day votive churches built between 1390 and 1552, all as a response to the pestilence then raging. Ten of these were constructed in Novgorod, nine in Pskov. In addition, four others, one each in Moscow, Iaroslavl', Vologda, and Viatka, can be documented from other sources. All were built of wood in a twenty-four-hour period by communal labor.

The foreign travels of Petr Il'ich Chaikovskii have never been a particular issue to scholars of his life and work. Even in such demonstrably important cases as his visits to the opening of the Bayreuth Festival and to Paris during which he heard Bizet’s Carmen for the first time, his tours—which brought him as far as New York City for the opening of Carnegie Hall—are treated perfunctorily, without objectivity, balance, or due regard for the impact his travel may have had on his music. This is not surprising, since Chaikovskii was not by profession a touring virtuoso; it is his musical composition which looms large in the biography as a whole. An experience which was called “the high point of earthly glory” the composer was destined to achieve, however, merits examination in detail. Chaikovskii himself claimed his visit to Prague in February 1888 constituted the “best and happiest days of [his] life” and brought him a “moment of absolute bliss.” An investigation of why Chaikovskii considered his stay there important is essential. Because the exploration of these questions depends on a scrutiny of Russian sources, this article will also be an investigation of how documents are used (or misused) to write history.

“If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen,” writes Solzhenitsyn toward the end of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago,“what is the good of them? Are they anything more than the barking of village dogs at night?” He adds parenthetically: “I should like to commend this thought to our modernists: this is how our people usually think of literature. They will not soon lose their habit. Should they, do you think?” The statement— with its flavor of the tag-end of a Russian proverb culled from Dal', even the bit about the village dogs—is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn. What clever critic safe in his armchair, however pricked by ornery oldfangledness, would care or dare to contend with it?

To comment on Sidney Monas’s “GULag and Points West” is not an easy task. The article as a whole lacks focus and consistency, and it is simply not clear what moved Monas to compose this often diffuse collection of misrepresentations and misconceptions. In the past I have been an admirer of the author and his scholarship, but it is difficult to extend my admiration to this essay.

One of Monas’s intentions may have been to provide an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s writings which have appeared since his expulsion from the USSR. If so, the effort is highly flawed. While he does discuss—often in rather pedestrian fashion—Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, Lenin in Zurich, From Under the Rubble, and certain of Solzhenitsyn’s recent publicistic writings, Monas omits all consideration of such significant works as the ninety-six-chapter version of The First Circle, published in 1978, or the important chapters from the “Red Wheel” historical cycle which Solzhenitsyn has been publishing in recent issues of the journal Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia. This omission necessarily skews any analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s thought.

My essay is basically a review of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, and the BBC interview of February 1979. Other works are mentioned in passing, but I tried to limit myself (as the title indicates, but without being too rigid about it) to works written since Solzhenitsyn’s passage West. In no way does the essay pretend to “sum up” or definitively evaluate the work of Solzhenitsyn. It is not even my own last word on the subject. As John Dunlop indicates, Western historians have tended to take an increasingly dim view of Solzhenitsyn without perhaps proper respect for his literary talent and rhetorical power, whereas those whom Dunlop calls “the best Western literary critics” have tended to roll over and play dead when confronted with his ideological illiberalism and incapacity to enter into dialogue. Though Dunlop professes to admire “centrism,” he seems to have missed my middle course.