At the beginning of the twentieth century St. Petersburg fell victim to a wave of petty crimes and violence. Starting around 1900 the press began to report an increasing number of cases of annoying public rowdiness, drunkenness, rock throwing, shouting of obscenities, and the like. Soon more serious crimes were added to this list: armed assault, robbery, and brawling. None of these crimes was new and they seem to have had little in common with one another, yet they were all lumped together and collectively portrayed as a new urban blight.

This disparate assortment of offenses was dubbed hooliganism, and the word—imported from England where it recently had been coined—was quickly absorbed into Russian usage. Between 1900 and 1905 hooliganism received a substantial amount of attention in the popular press, where by 1905, it had been transformed from a vaguely defined and relatively isolated phenomenon—one crime among many—into a social problem of serious proportions. Hooliganism had become a sign of urban social disintegration and a symbol of the “degeneracy” and “danger” of the urban lower classes.

The Yugoslavs are infected by what calls the disease of “historical optimism.” Shocks, emanating from the international economy over the last decade or so, were seen as a developmental problem or, at worst, a transitory difficulty. This argument seems to follow these lines: Contemporary capitalism, of course, is doomed to collapse sooner or later; contemporary etatism is also in a state of crisis and will evolve toward Yugoslav self-management socialism. The socialism of self-management, however, could not itself be in crisis, because, if it is in crisis, what is left?

In fact the word crisis was not used to describe the state of the Yugoslav economy until September 1982 when it was discovered that foreign debt could not be serviced and required rescheduling. By then the Yugoslav foreign debt was $20 billion, the unemployment rate stood at 10 percent to 16 percent (depending how you measure it), and inflation was at 40 percent. Only then did the policymakers realize that these problems were a consequence of prolonged economic mismanagement, excessive borrowing abroad, arbitrary decision making, and an autarchic economic policy in general.

Geography and history textbooks used in Serbia contributed to the origins of World War I in probably the first instance in which one country used the contents of textbooks as one of its justifications for declaring war on another. Much has been published about Austro-Hungarian reactions to provocative statements by prominent individuals in Serbian newspapers and journals; however, no study has been made of the textbooks to which reference is made in the Habsburg ultimatum of 23 July 1914. The ultimatum listed ten specific demands, including one for the suppression of publications that incited “hatred and contempt” of the monarchy and threatened its “territorial integrity.” Point three, which is the focus of this study, called for the elimination “without delay from public instruction in Serbia both as regards the teaching body and the methods of instruction, all that serves or might serve to foment propaganda against Austria-Hungary.“

Alexander Musulin, the counselor in the foreign ministry who drafted the ultimatum, characterized the Serbian reply as “the most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill that I know.” It stated in essence that Serbia was ready to satisfy Austria-Hungary's demand upon receiving proof of the charges. Concerning textbooks, the reply noted that Austria “made no representation except one concerning a schoolbook, and that on that occasion the Imperial and Royal Government received an entirely satisfactory explanation.”

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.

When Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha first appeared in Novyi mir in 1986 many readers here were astounded at the uncanny ability of this established author to ride the wave of the future. This sensational novel, with its stark portrayal of the drug trade, exploitation of the environment, and social alienation in the Soviet Union, was seen by many as the ultimate expression of newfound creative freedoms under Mikhail Gorbachev. For all its seeming novelty, however, Aitmatov's venture into the area of exposé literature has not been an isolated incident. Plakha is only one of a number of recent Soviet novels that focus exclusively on the ills of contemporary Soviet society.

The appearance of exposé literature under glasnost could be viewed simply as a direct effect of the loosening of controls under Gorbachev. Its emergence at this time, however, is actually the result of a whole complex of factors, only one political. Soviet literature has already dealt with such issues as the environment, impending nuclear catastrophe, and a disappearing national memory. These issues, in fact, form the thematic core of the trend of fantastic literature that immediately preceded glasnost and ushered in fundamental changes in Soviet literary discourse. This article is an attempt to examine four Soviet novels that appeared before the era of glasnost. My purpose is to elucidate the nature of the changes occurring in Soviet literature in the mid-1970s and early 1980s and the contribution of this literature to glasnost.

In the summer of 1986, I spent a month working very successfully in the archives of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Istoriko-diplomaticheskoe upravlenie, Ministerstvo inostrannykh del), and both the relative rarity of the experience and the significance of the materials preserved there warrant a brief report. Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii (AVPR) is administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, unlike the records of all other prcrevolutionary ministries, which are held by state archives under Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie pri Sovctc ministrov SSSR.

I was doing research on the Greek project of Catherine II, the notorious scheme whereby she planned to share with Joseph II the partition of the Ottoman Empire and perhaps to reestablish the old Greek or East Roman Empire under her grandson Constantine. The materials I read consisted primarily of St. Petersburg's diplomatic correspondence with Paris, Vienna, and Constantinople during the 1780s. I had prepared for the research in Moscow by working in the analogous correspondence of the Archives du Ministére des Affaires étrangéres (Quai d'Orsay) in Paris and the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna during preceding summers. In Moscow, I was given a generous abundance of material to read, including twenty-nine volumes of the correspondence with Paris, thirty-three volumes of correspondence with Vienna, and eight volumes of correspondence with Constantinople. Much of the material was invaluable, and some of it was entirely new to historical research. The quality of the information, however, was far from uniformly distributed.

I would like to thank the Slavic Review, and its fair-minded editor, Sidney Monas, for allowing me to break the silence on certain taboo themes and respond to critics—civilities practiced mostly in the breach in the societies we study. Due to space limitations, I shall respond fully to Robert Hayden, who raises many issues, apart from the problem of definition, and trust that in the process I may encompass also Matt Oja's thoughtful remarks. Hayden's critique of my article on Yugoslav camp literature is based on two premises, which he fails to prove: that camp literature is not well defined and hence includes a good deal of official writings, or, alternatively, that it lacks internal consistency; and that the very concept of camp literature “misrepresents the political and intellectual currents in the country.” Much of his commentary is an ad hominem argument. Curiously, much of it, even if inadvertently, substantiates my central thesis: Yugoslav prison and camp literature represents a catalyst in the current processes of liberalization, democratization, and humanization in both politics and culture in post-Tito Yugoslavia.