Since Reconstruction there has always been an antipornography movement in the United States. From the heyday of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in the 1880s, to the debates over the Hays code in Hollywood in the 1930s, to the founding of Women Against Pornography in 1979, our society has consistently struggled to resolve two crucial and interrelated questions: First, does pornography incite people to behave in “antisocial” ways or to commit crimes against individuals and society? Second, should the state regulate or censor materials it regards as obscene or pornographic? These debates have always been compelling, drawing authorities from just about everywhere in our culture. Many participants in this running controversy have devoted their lives to its resolution. None has come even remotely close to settling the matter. Today the courts and legislatures continue to argue the pornography question much as they did in the 1860s, when jurists first established that the test of obscenity lay in whether a book has depraved and corrupted the minds of the vulnerable.

On 3 June 1977, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) denied an immigrant visa to a Filipino woman, Zenaida Porte Rebultan, when she acknowledged that she was a lesbian. Rebultan qualified as a second-preference alien for purposes of immigration because every other member of her immediate family had already moved permanently to the United States. The INS declared her excludable, however, under section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, according to which “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, or sexual deviation, or a mental defect” were “ineligible to receive visas and shall be excluded from admission into the United States.”

The broad objective of this study is to ask whether there have been basic continuities in Russian state industrial administration across the Revolutionary divide. The question takes as generally agreed that the state's role in the national economy after 1917 was larger than previously. Given the expanding state role in economic operations during World War I, the period of War Communism and the Five-Year-Plan (Stalin) era, the main question addressed by this study necessarily focuses on the state and its organizations as initiators and controllers of industrial development before 1917. Did the war, the Revolution of 1917, and the political programs that followed establish a new trajectory for the role of the state or were they characteristic of and predictable from the behavior of state organizations before 1917?