This article analyzes national loyalty and identification by examining the language exams administered to minority public officials in Romania in 1934 and 1935. The exams aimed at testing officials’ knowledge of the state language, but given the broader political context they were more than a survey of linguistic skills. Examinees were singled out as non-Romanian and subjected to an additional requirement not demanded from their ethnic Romanian colleagues, interpreting the use of the official language as a sign of loyalty. Drawing upon theories of loyalty as a historical concept, the paper analyzes how the particular situation of minority public officials was reflected in these texts and how they created a specific identification for themselves, composed of important elements of their minority ethnicity but also expressing their identification with the state and its modernizing goals as members of a unified, professional public body. The language exams signaled the emergence of a specific category of minority public servants who were part of both the minority group and the middle-class functionaries of the Romanian state. Nationalist public discourse on both sides—Romanian and minority—have denied and erased the history of these hybrid loyalties and identities, but the languages exams help us to recover them.

The overwhelming ascendancy of the Iskra group (before the Bolshevik-Menshevik split) at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903 has often been noted in the literature. Less attention has been given to Lenin's role in engineering this singular tour de force and to the tensions generated by the intrusion of his unique creed of action into the established patterns of the movement. No episode could be more revealing of the salient traits of Lenin's political personality.

There is no better introduction to the tale of agony which is the subject of this essay than the story of the interview of Bernard Pares and Samuel Harper with Count Witte, which took place sometime during the sitting of the Third Duma. All through the interview the Count treated his questioners rather curtly, but when they asked him for his views of the October Manifesto, he replied: "I have a constitution in my head, but as to my heart……" And he spat on the ground in front of the two astounded gentlemen.

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.

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of “urban beauty” and “urban spec-Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle” as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory as ruin, stage set, monument, and frame. This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.