National deviation or, in Soviet parlance, “bourgeois nationalism” has figured prominently in the party literature since the establishment of the Stalinist regime. It is a conveniently generic heresy and has been applied to national groups which had hardly any bourgeoisie worthy of the name prior to the Revolution. It is a label which is applied to real or imagined, to actual or potential non-Russian opponents of the regime within the country in an effort to discredit them by associating them with real or imagined external enemies. In the pre-war period, as well as to a certain extent since the war, “bourgeois nationalists” were linked with the revolutionary national non-Russian governments of the 1917–1920 period which unsuccessfully resisted the Bolshevik onslaught. Those who were charged with national deviation in the 1930's were accused of having aided foreign intelligence services in an attempt to facilitate the return of the old order and of wanting to turn the Soviet Union into a colony of the capitalist states.

The turn of the fifteenth century was a period of cultural and political crisis, not only in Western Europe, but in Russia as well. The nations of both East and West were confronted with choices which were to determine their cultural and political history for the next few generations.

In Russia, the reigns of Ivan III (1462-1505) and Basil III (1505-1533) were particularly remarkable for the number and variety of issues the country had to face. In the political domain, it was the end of the process of the gathering of Russian lands by Moscow; socially, it was the first act in the breaking down of the position of the old Moscow boyar class. It was also a time of great cultural fermentation marked by a struggle between rigid traditionalism and a serious effort to introduce an esprit critique, into the intellectual life of Russia. In Russia—a country where intellectual activity was limited almost exclusively to the religious sphere—this cultural fermentation had its most important repercussions in the ecclesiastical domain.

Conflicting accounts about the autobiographical writings of Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov have circulated for decades. Some of the confusion can be clarified by an examination of the correspondence of his British wife Ivy Low Litvinov. On 7 December 1941, when Litvinov arrived in Washington, D.C., as the new Soviet ambassador, he was accompanied by Ivy. The American Left, which had lionized him during his previous United States visit to negotiate recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, welcomed both Litvinovs with high enthusiasm in the 1940s. In the United States for the first time, she renewed acquaintance with various American intellectuals, whom she had met over the years in Moscow. Among them was the writer Joseph Freeman, one of the editors of the radical communist journal New Masses.

Ivy wrote frequently from her embassy quarters in Washington to Freeman, her closest confidant, who lived in New York. Those letters that have been preserved provide a sense of Maksim Litvinov's tenuous position as a diplomat, indispensable for negotiating with the west but also unmanageable within the Soviet leadership.

Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal relations at the workplace. The study argues that the workplace was a particular context in which a post-Stalinist reassessment of the government's ideology was acted out. To elaborate this more fully, both published texts and archival materials are analyzed in the framework of the governmentality thesis, as developed by Nikolas Rose. In this context, the concept of the “human factor” crystallized different but reconcilable interests between psychology experts and party politicians.

Today in several of the countries of Europe where the capitalist economic system still prevails and where Communist parties are not in control of the government, one of the principal means by which the Communists exert their influence is through trade unions. News analysts predict that when and if the Communists in France and Italy attempt to seize power, they will first paralyze these countries through general strikes conducted by the trade unions. In Czechoslovakia the rise to power of-the Communist Party was greatly facilitated by Communist control of the trade-union movement.

On the other hand, in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Germany, the non-Communist trade union movement has acted as one of the most important bulwarks against the growth of Communist parties.

A. A. Ždanov's reference to the Serapion Brothers in his famous 1946 speech recalls a lively chapter in the early history of Soviet literature. Mikhail Zoščenko, who bore the brunt of Ždanov's attack, and the poet Tikhonov, who got off with a scolding and the loss of his position as president of the Union of Soviet Writers, were both among the twelve young writers who formed the Serapion Brotherhood in 1921.

They were a remarkable group. When their first meeting was held on February 1, 1921, all but one of their number were under the age of thirty, and three were not yet out of their teens. One of the youngest was their unofficial leader, Lev Lunc, whose death in 1924, just one week after his twenty-third birthday, cut short the career of the man whom Gor'kij considered to be the most promising dramatist in Russia.

This study analyzes the biographies of a number of Soviet communications officials in order to address some fundamental and increasingly important questions about the communications process and about prospects for responding to the dilemmas that recent information about the Soviet audience has revealed. Major efforts to examine audience opinion have been undertaken in the Soviet Union. To a considerable extent these efforts are a response to the perception, on the part of media officials, that foreign communications sources have made inroads into the communications system and have created, especially in this time of increased bipolar world tension, alternative channels of information. As the officials recognize, the internal media system has changed substantially, and new patterns of communications consumption have emerged. But as a result of the findings of audience surveys, basic elements of the political doctrine concerning communications have been undermined.

In this article, Joanna Niżyńska explores the modes used by poets of the bruLion generation (whose debuts coincided with the end of communism) to import Frank O'Hara's poetics into Polish literature and the significance of their doing so. By employing Harold Bloom's concepts of the “anxiety of influence,” “kenosis,” and “daemonization,” Niżyńska analyzes the intergenerational impulses manifested in O'Harism in relation to the Romantic paradigm in Poland's poetic tradition. Niżyńska claims that in turning to O'Hara, such poets as Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Podsiadło, and Miłosz Biedrzycki engaged in dialectically related modes of revisionary reading of both domestic and foreign traditions. O'Harism is interpreted as a sign of a multifaceted cultural morphogenesis that was simultaneously an act of compensation for Romantic “Polish complexes,” a self-exploration of a new poetic generation in the face of a new political and cultural reality, and a misreading of a foreign source.