The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has been engaged over the past several years in a project to collect and analyze information on the Soviet and East European field. Some of the results of the work to date are presented in this report to the profession.

The field of Soviet and East European studies is a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. Not until World War II was there any considerable interest in the region in the United States. At that time, however, the federal government found itself acutely short of specialists on the area and had to scrape a shallow academic barrel. The lack of expertise led to the establishment of new military and civilian training programs; and the changed international situation in the postwar period gave further impetus to the extension of academic programs.

The NEP was an inherently unstable social and political system: It contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The Bolsheviks carried out policies in which they did not fully believe and with implications that worried them. Although the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 forbade factions within the party, the struggle for power during Lenin's final illness and after his death inevitably created factions. The struggle for power and the conflict between contrasting views concerning the future of society came to be intertwined. For the sake of economic reconstruction the party allowed private enterprise to reemerge. As time went on, many Bolshevik leaders came to be convinced supporters of the mixed economic system; others, on the basis of their reading of Marxist ideology, found such policies distasteful.

For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.

At the beginning of the day shift on 21 October 1917 more than 300,000 textile workers from 114 enterprises in Vladimir and Kostroma provinces defiantly refused to report to their shops. Instead, these predominantly semiskilled and unskilled workers of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region responded to an agenda prearranged by workeractivists among them to hear final instructions from newly elected strike committees, sing the “Marseillaise,” and post pickets. By the time this strike ended on 17 November, circumstances in Russia had changed significantly: A new revolutionary government was in office; the national economic crisis had further deepened; the struggle for authority in the factories was intensifying.

In 1874 a handful of men met in the Ukrainian town of Khar'kov to establish what eventually became the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. The organization's birth corresponded with that of the great Donbas coal and steel industry, and its story illuminates the exhilaration and the frustration of those who aspired to create an industrial Russia with a liberal face. The association grew prominent over the next forty years, guided by a unique group of men who advocated speedy economic modernization for their country and who embraced such imported liberal visions as private enterprise and individual liberty.

The subject of gastronomy—as it touches upon the significance of what, how, and why man eats—has begun to receive increasing attention in recent years, during which time quite a number of books on the history of food and drink have appeared. Scholars, moreover, have demonstrated a heightened interest lately in the anthropological aspects of this topic. Since eating is a human activity that by its very nature encompasses a social, a psychological, as well as a biological dimension, the depiction of fictional meals in literature allows this ritualistic event to be transformed into a narrative sign with vast semiotic possibilities—not only within the world of the literary work itself (intratextually) but also within a broader cultural context (extratextually).

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.