Preliminary results from the 1979 Soviet census reveal that non-Slavic minorities make up over a quarter of the populace. Ethnic diversity has been and will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, an important consideration in Soviet policy making. Analysis of nationality trends is thus a key aspect of Western study of Soviet domestic politics. Assessment of Soviet labor force prospects, for example, depends in part on the occupational skills, Russian fluency, and geographical mobility of the Soviets of Muslim heritage in the fast-growing southern tier of the USSR. Soviet military capabilities will be increasingly affected by a rising proportion of Muslims of draft age. In addition, long-term population projections hinge on an evaluation of how rapidly these same groups will exhibit the low fertility associated with demographic modernization.

Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union developed sophisticated and diversified criminological research. Well-trained lawyers, doctors, and social scientists obtained access to criminal statistics, research facilities, and funding and were unhampered by ideological limitations. The varieties of descriptive, statistical, and experimental research on crime conducted in criminological institutes by government agencies and independent researchers throughout the Soviet Union did much to advance criminologists’ understanding of the personality of the offender and the relationship between crime and social change.

According to scholars of resource dependency, foreign funding can weaken rather than strengthen civil society abroad, ultimately impeding its effectiveness. Yet the spate of recent “democratic revolutions” in semiauthoritarian, postcommunist states suggests that pumping foreign money into the nongovernmental sphere can be an effective strategy. In this paper Brian Grodsky argues that a critical factor in assessing the likelihood that a given organizational movement will succumb to the ills of resource dependency is the type of politicization within that movement. Those organizations composed of members primarily motivated by ideology are logically less likely to succumb to resource dependency than those organizations dominated by political aspirants intent on converting democratization into their own political power. Two case studies, communist-era Poland and contemporary Uzbekistan, provide support for this theory.

In March 1922 (in the very heat of the campaign to confiscate Church valuables), L.D. Trotskii sent a memorandum to the Politburo, arguing that the “proletarian revolution had finally reached the Church.” Indeed it had: over the next few years the Russian Orthodox Church would undergo tremendous convulsions and intense internal conflict. In May 1922, amidst a violent confrontation with the bolshevik state over the seizure of Church valuables, a small group of radical priests took control of the Church and engineered a temporary but controversial withdrawal of Patriarch Tikhon from active leadership. Their aim was not only to end the conflict with Soviet authorities (by recognizing its legitimacy and endorsing its confiscation of church valuables), but also to implement fundamental reforms in Russian Orthodoxy.

Based on a detailed analysis of published and unpublished sources, Matthias Schwartz reconstructs the making of Soviet science fiction in the cultural context of Soviet literary politics. Beginning in the 1920s, nauchnaia fantastika (scientific fantasy) became one of the most popular forms of light fiction, though literary critics and activists tended to dismiss it because of its origins in popular adventure, its ties to the so-called Pinkerton literature, and its ambiguous relationship to scientific inventions and social progress. Schwartz's analysis shows that even during high Stalinism, socialist realism's norms were far from being firmly established, but in the case of nauchnaia fantastika had to be constantly negotiated and reconstituted as fragile compromises involving different interest groups (literary politicians, writers, publishers, readers). A cultural history of Soviet science fiction also contributes to a better understanding of what people actually wanted to read and sheds new light on the question of how popular literature adapts to political changes and social destabilizations.

An acutely significant episode in the history of Soviet Russia, rendered no less important by the perspective of recent events, is the development of the organizational machinery of the Communist Party in the years immediately following the civil war. It was this period which witnessed the true realization of Lenin's prerevolutionary ideal of the monolithic party, despite the paradox that the model of conspiratorial discipline was designed for the accomplishment of the revolution, not the organization of the post-revolutionary society.

A new approach to the study of national character is being developed out of principles and research methods drawn from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This approach differs from its predecessors in that it seeks the key to an understanding of cultural and historical processes in the influences of early childhood upbringing upon the formation of adult personality. The work of Geoffrey Gorer illustrates, although in an extreme form, the principal lines of thought of this school. Thus, he has tried to explain some of the main features of American culture and history in terms of the child's rejection of the father. From severe toilet training he derives major clues to Japanese culture and history.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin has long been regarded as both a leader and archetype of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism. It is not clear, however, what “liberal” and “liberalism” mean with reference to nineteenth-century Russia. Russian liberals of the early twentieth century, seeking to create a tradition for their movement, put the most diverse figures from the past in the liberal pantheon. Soviet historians, with somewhat more justice but the same kind of zeal, have sharply demarcated mid-century radicals, with, whom they sympathize, from the liberals. American historians of Russia tend to characterize as “liberal” almost anyone who tried to achieve social and political improvements by nonrevolutionary means. And almost all historians have resorted to the tautology whereby “liberalism” denotes the activities and doctrines of those public figures whom we know to be “liberals.”

The USSR has entered a new, qualitatively higher stage in constructing a Communist society—“mature” or “developed” socialism. Theorists envision progressively higher developments to occur in this stage and commonly regard the scientific technological revolution as one of its defining traits. Reflecting objective changes that have occurred in society’s production forces, the scientific-technological revolution poses an unprecedented challenge to political leaders: they must now “integrate complexity and manage change through advances in organization and technology.“ This challenge cannot be successfully met without the support and active participation of specialists in administrative policy. While theorists and politicians alike remain convinced that only socialism provides the optimal framework for organizing societal development, they begrudgingly acknowledge that the reputed advantages of the Socialist economy—national planning, public property, class solidarity—do not manifest themselves automatically, but must be brought to life through the creative application of scientific knowledge and organizational skill.

Throughout the nineteenth century a major international issue facing the Great Powers of Europe was the volatile “Eastern Question.” As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, the question of the future disposition of its extensive territories (some 238,000 square miles in Europe alone in 1800) provoked an intense and prolonged rivalry among those European states with vested political and economic interests in the Near East. With its military power in decline and its frontiers menaced by powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the nineteenth century despite its imposing imperial edifice.

Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, almost three decades after consensual sodomy was declared a crime in the USSR, voices began to speak out in favor of its decriminalization. This article traces the history of the ensuing debate on this issue, conducted between Soviet criminologists and legal academics in the period from 1965–75. Through a close reading of the related texts, I explore the evolution of the different positions put forward. These fall into two camps: on the one hand, legal scholars who, together with their graduate students, made the case for decriminalization, and on the other, criminologists affiliated with the Interior Ministry, who opposed their views. The article provides the first detailed historical account of this extraordinary discussion and contributes to expanding our scant knowledge on the history of homosexuality in the Soviet Union.

When in 1918 the Soviet government established the first complete State monopoly of foreign trade, whereby that government should become the purchaser of all goods imported into the vast territories of former Tsarist Russia, and the distributor of all materials and products grown or manufactured within those territories, the outside world hesitated for several years to reopen trade dealings with the new State. It feared and distrusted this new commercial colossus, which on the one hand could become, in theory at least, the largest single buyer in the world of the goods it needed, and on the other, a seller that could, again in theory, break any competitor in the world market, by the mere process of offering at any price the materials it could produce in such abundance.

Perhaps the most mysterious and elusive figure in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is Afranius, a man who has been in Judea for fifteen years working in the Roman imperial service as chief of the procurator of Judea's secret police. He is present in all four Judean chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26) as one of the myriad connecting links, though we really do not know who he is for certain until near the end of the third of these chapters, “How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth.” We first meet him in chapter 2 (which is related by Woland and entitled “Pontius Pilate”) simply as “some man” (kakoi-to chelovek), face half-covered by a hood, in a darkened room in the palace of Herod the Great, having a brief whispered conversation with Pilate, who has just finished his fateful talk with Caiaphas (E, p. 39; R, pp. 50-51). Fourteen chapters later, in the chapter dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyi and entitled “The Execution” (chapter 16), we meet him for the second time, now bringing up the rear of the convoy escorting the prisoners to Golgotha and identified only as “that same hooded man with whom Pilate had briefly conferred in a darkened room of the palace” (E, p. 170; R, p. 218). “The hooded man” attends the entire execution sitting in calm immobility on a three-legged stool, “occasionally out of boredom poking the sand with a stick” (E, p. 172; R, p. 220). When the Tribune of the Cohort arrives, presumably bearing Pilate's orders to terminate the execution, he (the Tribune) speaks first to Krysoboi (Muribellum), who goes to pass on the orders to the executioners, and then to “the man on the three-legged stool,” according to whose gestures the executioners arouse Yeshua from his stupor, offer him a drink which he avidly accepts, and then kill him by piercing him “gently” (tikhon'ko) through his heart with a spear.

In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

The demographic development of the serf population in imperial Russia, particularly its rate of natural growth during the thirty years preceding the emancipation in 1861, has been the subject of considerable controversy. On the basis of data from the tax censuses (revizii), abolitionists sontended that the serf population was dying out, implying that the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Many Soviet historians and demographers have subsequently advanced this view, seeing a demographic crisis as one dimension of the collapse of the feudal serf system. A Western scholar, Professor Daniel Field, has recently lent his support to this interpretation. But was serfdom so socially oppressive or economically stifling as to affect natural population growth adversely? Other contemporary statisticians and later historians—either less opposed to serfdom or more skeptical about the accuracy of population data—have avoided the issue.

Between 1987 and 1990, simultaneous with "glasnost' and perestroika" and the rehabilitation of the victims of Stalin's crimes, execution sites were discovered, particularly in the European regions of the former USSR. One such discovery at Kuropaty (formerly Brod) about twelve kilometers north of Minsk, elicited widespread publicity, and was a serious embarrassment to the communist authorities.