It is commonly supposed that confessional adherence was the decisive element in the growth of Croat and Serb nationhood: “In the differentiation of Serbs from Croats and the rise of modern Serb and Croat national consciousness, religion played the essential role in the Serbo-Croatian linguistic area. Whereas the Catholics by rule became Croats, the Orthodox were Serbs.” This none too precise formulation assumes that, quite independently of preexisting South Slavic affinities, a homogeneous national “mass” became heterogeneous by reason of outside dispensational intervention. Without fully analyzing whether religion indeed separated the South Slavs into different nationalities or whether religious affiliation simply reflected the allogenic nature of the South Slavic settlement — such an analysis would be difficult to sustain on the basis of current ethnogenesic knowledge—I suggest that the confessional “rule” is hardly as firm as some scholars suppose and needs to be qualified.

Historians of imperial Russia have agreed unanimously and confidently that Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War (1853–1856) led directly to the emancipation of the serfs and to wide-ranging social, economic, political, and military changes of enormous historical significance. In addition, whether liberal interpreters were waxing eloquent about a so-called “epoch of great reforms” or Marxists were emphasizing pressures of a “revolutionary situation” in a country in transition from feudalism to capitalism, the reforms of the Russian army introduced by D. A. Miliutin, war minister throughout most of Alexander II's quarter-century long reign, have been acclaimed unanimously as one of the most successful and lasting attempts at modernization in this period of considerable change. Miliutin was appointed war minister only in November 1861, however, more than six and one half years after Alexander II acceded to the imperial throne, leaving an apparent gap at a time when preparations for reform were begun in most other spheres of government and society. Indeed, the period after the Crimean War is so well known as a time of change of enormous historical significance for the future of Russia that inactivity in the military seems remarkable, especially in the aftermath of military defeat.

The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.

On 26 November 1921, Lenin sent a note to Viacheslav M. Molotov, for transmission to the Politburo, requesting that it appoint Gregorii Iakovlevich Sokolnikov a member of the Board of the People's Commissariat of Finance (PCF). The next day the Politburo approved this suggestion. Nikolai Krestinskii, the Left Communist who had served as people's commissar of finance since July 1918 and who oversaw the virtual dismantling of that ministry, had become the Soviet diplomatic representative in Germany. Although he would formally hold the title of people's commissar of finance until December 1922, Krestinskii had ceased to play a role in the PCF a year earlier. Sokolnikov quickly took over the ministry, especially after he became deputy commissar in January, at which time Lenin wrote Sokolnikov saying that he was “actually in charge of the most important people's commissariat.” Thus, although Sokolnikov officially became people's commissar of finance only in December 1922, he was de facto, if not de jure, in control from the beginning of 1922.

This article examines the relationship between the semantics of ideology and political practice under the pressure of socio-economic change in Hungary of the early 1960s, especially 1962-63. The events of 1956 forced the Communist Party elite to recognize the imperative need for internal social change and for control over its dynamics. Manipulation of social forces and ideological currents became a day-to-day concern as soon as it was realized that the political system must rely to an increasing extent upon the introduction of policies which induced support for the system itself—a need undoubtedly arising out of the social transformation that accompanies a developing and modernizing industrial society.

The Land Captain Statute of 1889 is invariably regarded as the foremost legislative act of Alexander III’s reign, and with good reason. While Governor V. P. Golitsyn of Moscow probably exaggerated in calling it “no less significant and extensive than the peasant reform” of 1861,’ contemporary officials of diverse views agreed that it was the most controversial and important piece of domestic legislation in the 1880s. Yet for many years historians paid little attention to it or to Alexander III’s reign as a whole. Rather they dismissed the land captains (zemskie nachal'niki) as a reactionary institution intended to counter the revolutionary unrest of the late 1870s by increasing the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry. Soviet studies in the past two decades have filled in many details concerning the elaboration of the land captain legislation and have added a Marxist-Leninist slant in contending that gentry class interests influenced the autocracy to introduce the measure. Not surprisingly, they emphasize the role of A. D. Pazukhin, a wealthy gentry marshal and zemstvo board chairman from Alatyr' district (Simbirsk province), in drafting the counterreform during 1885-86 and persuading the infirm Minister of Internal Affairs D. A. Tolstoi (who died almost three months before the promulgation of the law on July 12, 1889) to support it. Yet in essence the Soviet interpretation of the land captains as part of a reactionary “new course” begun abruptly in the mid-1880s and designed to turn back the clock in the countryside adheres, as do most Western accounts on the topic, to the views of pre-Revolutionary “liberal” historians.

Since the establishment of socialist governments in Eastern Europe following World War II , Svetozar Marković has become the most celebrated figure of nineteenth-century Yugoslav history. Not only was Marković the first important socialist in the Balkans, but he received his education in Russian populism at its source in St. Petersburg, participated in the activities of the Russian Section of the First International in Switzerland, organized the first consumers' and workers' collectives in the Balkans, and edited Serbia's first socialist newspaper. An incisive critic of the Serbian bureaucracy, Marković hoped to avoid the pitfalls of modernization in Serbia by establishing a democratic system of local administration based on the traditional peasant commune. Even though he was not successful, his vigorous analyses of social problems, his faith in science, and his uncompromising idealism exerted a strong influence on his contemporaries, turning the politically inclined among them from liberalism to radicalism and the artistically inclined from romanticism to realism. Little wonder, therefore, that since World War II this unusual and brilliant man has become a cultural hero in Yugoslavia.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita is the complex and deeply significant system of parallels the author has set up between the Moscow and Jerusalem stories. These parallels have produced, in much scholarly analysis of the novel, a strong tendency toward what Andrew Barratt has called a “monistic” approach: An interpretation of the work as a double novel, or two variations of the same “master story,” acted out in different times and places by characters with clear, specific correlations—Woland-Pilate (or Latunskii-Pilate), the Master-Ieshua, Bezdomnyi-Matvei, and so forth. Although this approach has an obvious appeal, it also has several serious weaknesses. Not least among these is its failure to encompass the character of Margarita—that is, to identify a parallel to her in the Jerusalem story. In the following I will address this weakness by suggesting that Margarita's parallel character is Afranius, the chief of Pilate's secret service.