I would like to begin this investigation of Pushkinian thematics with a fable, or better perhaps, a parable of my own making.

Once upon a time in the land of Rus’ there lived two brothers. And although they were sired by a noble father and reared as befits the sons of a nobleman, they differed from each other as the day differs from the night, for the elder brother was tall and fairhaired and born of a Russian princess, while the younger brother was swarthy, small, and the bastard son of a dark-skinned barbarian maiden.

As the boys grew up, to these bodily differences were added spiritual ones. For the elder brother was a dutiful son, who honored his parents and heeded his teachers and obeyed the laws of the land. After coming of age he traveled to the capital city and learned the ways of the imperial court and found favor in the eyes of the tsar.

In Langston Hughes's 1934 essay “Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” (published in Travel magazine), the author writes mournfully about the Soviet reforms that put an end to the practice of effeminized male dancers, bachi, performing in the teahouses of Central Asia for exclusively male audiences; in doing so, Hughes expresses an enthusiasm for the queer contours of the bachi tradition. This article connects that enthusiasm with Hughes's earlier involvement in cultural efforts aimed at increasing queer visibility within the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. By situating “Boy Dancers” in this context, the underexplored role of the Russian Revolution in fostering queer solidarity among global communities of color is highlighted.

This paper argues for greater integration of considerations of women and gender in the history of the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Two key issues have long been discussed by historians: the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, and the role of class in the revolution. Neither has been adequately analyzed in relation to gender. Women's suffrage has been largely neglected despite the fact that it was a significant issue throughout the year and represented a pioneering advance won by a countrywide coalition of women and men from the working class and intelligentsia, and from almost all political parties. In this centennial year, accounts of the Revolution remain one-dimensional; women remain the other.

Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russian intelligenty possessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.

In 1920 the Polish army defeated the Bolsheviks before the gates of Warsaw. The Polish victory preserved the independence of the reborn state, delayed Russian expansion for a generation, and left to historians a number of controversial issues. Certainly the most passionately debated aspect of the war is the authorship of the Polish victory. Gradually western scholarship has come to credit the laurels to Poland's Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but there are still those who emphasize the role of other Polish soldiers or of the Frenchman, General Maxime Weygand. From the midst of this historiographical controversy, we may discern the dim outlines of a simultaneous, yet obscured episode: the aborted political comeback of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. It is the purpose of this essay to reconstruct the latter against the background of the former.

The great interest in the study of the Russian language which has brought a wave of students to our universities is, in a large measure, due to the achievements of science and technology in the Soviet Union. It is these achievements that created an industry capable of supporting a highly mechanized warfare and successfully trained the personnel for it. It is the recognition now accorded to Russian scientists that is responsible for the fact that scientists all over the world are displaying much interest in the Russian scientific publications, which had been largely neglected previously, and are eager to read them.

Probably no other writer in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature ever suffered so much at the hands of politically-minded critics as Nikolaj Leskov. He once said that the role of the writer is to struggle against the prevailing current of his time, and his own career illustrates both the application of that principle and its consequences. His independent attitude toward all intellectual fashions, whether nihilism in the 1860's or conservatism in the 1880's, led single-minded Russians of various political colors to suspect him of hypocrisy and duplicity. Doctrinaire Russian critics of the right and the left, accustomed to classifying all writers in such tidy categories as “religious reactionary” or “atheistic liberal,” were even more bewildered by Leskov's own kind of non-conformity than by the Christian anarchism of his great associate Tolstoy. Tolstoy, after all, had the virtue of pushing his convictions to their logical extreme, in the best tradition of Russian maximalism; whereas Leskov, though he acknowledged himself to be a devoted follower of Tolstoy, refused to become doctrinaire even in his Tolstoyanism.

The formation of a Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was accomplished slowly, and as the result of the steady pressure and constant guidance of the Communist International between 1919 and 1921. When the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) was finally established in the latter year, this outcome represented a compromise between the extreme, doctrinaire policies of the Comintern and the more moderate Czechoslovak-oriented views of Bohumil Smeral, the party's first leader. Moreover the party was by no means the genuinely Bolshevik party anticipated by Lenin and the Comintern, and showed evidence of its deep roots in the social democratic movement and of its origin in a country of democratic traditions and intense national pride.

The late summer of 1914 demonstrated that for most European Social Democrats nationalism was far more powerful than Marxism in the event of a conflict between these ideologies. Some Social Democratic parties did not participate in this demonstration, however. Not until the late autumn of 1939 did it become apparent to all that Finnish Social Democrats, for example, were nationalists before they were Marxists. The fact that Finland was not a belligerent in World War I left this question open. Until the demands made by the Soviet Union in October-November, 1939, and the beginning of the Winter War (which included the abortive proclamation of a Soviet-sponsored Finnish Democratic Government), bourgeois Finns were uncertain about the response of Social Democrats to any serious Soviet challenge to continued Finnish independence. In view of the tragic Finnish Civil War of 1918, this uncertainty seemed grounded in historical fact. As the largest party in Finland (representing forty percent of the electorate in 1939), the Social Democrats' attitude would prove decisive in determining the strength of Finnish resistance to Soviet diplomatic and military pressure. Like other Finns, Social Democrats fought, sacrificed, and died to defend their nation. The visible symbol of the unity of this nation in the Winter War was the Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner. It was at this point that Tanner stepped into world politics. A Finnish scholar has concluded that in the Moscow negotiations of 1939 the two Finnish delegates, Tanner and J. K. Paasikivi, “ … held the fate of Finland in their hands.”

A government-drafted “Bill Concerning Regional Organs of Unified State Authority” was enacted into law by the Polish Parliament (Sejm Ustawodawczy—“Legislative Parliament“) on March 20, 1950. This legislation makes sweeping changes in Polish provincial and local government which have the effect of bringing the structure of government at those levels into nearly identical conformity with that of comparable levels in the Soviet Union. It also increases and consolidates the role of the Polish Council of State (Rada Państwa) as the dominant organ of the government of Poland.

A pioneer publication in the creation of a popular literature, the Intermediary had a large circulation in Russia in the early nineties. It was founded for the dissemination of Tolstoy's stories among the people and has left its mark on literary history as the one successful practical application of Tolstoy's ideological views. But the total execution of this brilliant and original enterprise has only been revealed since the appearance of the eighty-fifth and eighty-sixth volumes of the Tolstoy Jubilee Edition which consist of some 200 hitherto unpublished letters dealing primarily with Intermediary concerns which Tolstoy wrote to Vladimir Chertkov between 1883 and 1889.