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.

Like other multinational states in Europe, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire found itself confronted, indeed threatened, by the growing strength of non-Russian national movements. Unlike other contemporary national “awakenings,” however, the Polish question in the Russian Empire had roots extending beyond the eighteenth century and posed, at least in the minds of Russian administrators, a serious and persistent threat to Russian national interests in the empire’s vulnerable western borderlands. From the 1830s an anti-Polish policy had been pursued in these areas, but only after the 1863 uprising did the Russian imperial state dedicate itself to a policy of radical elimination of Polish influence in the so-called “western provinces,” a fusion (sliianie) of these territories with the Russian interior in terms of administration, economy, culture and nationality.

Some years ago, Robert V. Daniels, in his analysis of the Communist theory of state, concluded that, according to Marxist theory, the oppressive function of the state is a secondary consideration and only explains the origin of the state, but not its continued existence; that although the state originates only in class struggle, in order to ensure its continued existence, the state creates order, modifies the class struggle, and serves the common interests of society; that when the class struggle is terminated by the proletarian revolution, the state as such does not wither away, but only its oppressive functions so wither.

Since Marx was strong on criticizing capitalism, not so strong on the practical mechanics of revolution, and rather wobbly on the communist future itself, we cannot blame his Soviet followers if their ultimate goal always remained a religious mystery, veiled by the pseudoscience of political dogma. The veil enhances the mystery; it obscures the fact that there is a mystery—that the real transformation of society into Utopia and the individual into unfettered homo laborans cannot be described in scientific language at all but can only be symbolized.

This becomes clear when we move from politics to art, to the sphere of culture dominated by symbolic language. Despite its debt to the explicit Utopian tradition of Chernyshevskii and the nineteenthcentury radicals, Soviet literature limits itself to an exclusively symbolic depiction of the flowering of communism. In Christianity, a transformation of analogous importance is symbolized by the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

The origins of modern Moscow can be traced to the early nineteenth century, when smokestacks began to supplement church cupolas on the city's skyline and the forsaken palaces of boyars were being converted into factories or homes of wealthy merchants. Pushkin observed this process with a mixture of romantic nostalgia and patriotic optimism as early as 1834. The old Orthodox and national shrine of Russia was starting its evolution as a major industrial center of the Empire. Along with this, however, came a later chapter of Russian religious history. Moscow during this same period also became a center of the Old Believers; Raskolniki, scattered for over a century on the frontiers of Russia, began to flock back to the ancient capital.

Having crushed the Solidarity movement’s unprecedented attempt to pluralize postwar Polish society, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) ordered a special commission of the party’s Central Committee to study the causes of the political crises that have repeatedly convulsed Poland during forty years of Communist rule and have resulted in the downfall of successive first secretaries and their principal associates. After several months of labor, the commission declared that one of the main causes was that the authorities ignored popular opinion and discouraged local initiatives for independent action and reforms. To show that it had learned its lesson, the PZPR adopted “socialist pluralism” as one of the principal points of its program for “normalization” and “renewal” soon after martial law was lifted in 1982.

Odessa has played a significant role in Russian and Yiddish folklore and popular culture. Although the city has changed with the times, the Odessa variant of the Russian language and the Russian and Yiddish songs created in and about Odessa are the lasting product of a unique brand of multiculturalism. The Russian of Odessa shows die influence of Yiddish and Ukrainian in grammar, lexicon, and phraseology, and Odessa folk humor reflects Jewish sensibilities. Odessa Yiddish is permeated with Russianisms. The repertoire of Russian and Yiddish songs about Odessa reveals the mixed character of die respective languages. The songs portray a unique city: one tfiat is more impressive than Vienna or Paris; one that embodies progress and the carefree life but is also dangerous. These songs deal with various aspects of the Jewish experience but also with the life of the underworld, employing the stylistic conventions of the so-called blatnaia pesnia.

It has long been accepted by historians that the conjuncture of grain crises of 1927-1929 marked a turning point during which the Soviet Union descended into the tumult of Stalin’s “revolution from above.“ There is, however, no agreement as to what caused this outcome. Was the country pushed down this road as a deliberate act of policy by Stalin to enhance his dictatorial power? Did bolshevik ideology, which favored rapid industrialization and bureaucratic centralized state control, predetermine the end result? Did the sequence of events in this period generate an uncontrollable dynamic of crises and conflict between strengthening state power and societal, particularly peasant, resistance? To reach a more definitive answer to these fundamental questions I have undertaken a case study of a pivotal policy development of this period, one which bridged the crucial transition from NEP to “dekulakization”: the so-called “Ural-Siberian method” or “social influence” method of grain collection.

In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.

In the last decade, state building and the problems of establishing state authority in the provinces in 1917 have begun to attract historians’ attention. Several works by Russian authors treat state building under the Provisional Government, with emphasis upon organizational activities “at the center.” Daniel T. Orlovsky and Howard J. White (with greater analytical rigor than their Russian counterparts) have studied the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the provinces. But none of these works has offered a sustained discussion of the revolution in a single city or province. Local studies have concentrated on popular institutions (for example, unions, Red Guards, and the Soviets) and the process of social polarization but have paid litde attention to the state. My aim is to bridge the gap between institutional studies and local studies by looking at local government and the contested nature of state authority in Smolensk from March to June 1917, tracing especially the conflict between class-based politics and state interests.

In 1928-29 the drive for rapid industrialization exacerbated economic hardships in the Soviet Union and forced the adoption of food rationing in the major cities.1 Social discontent and social tensions grew more acute. Workers pressed for a tougher line against the educated and privileged classes, and the Stalin leadership responded by promoting a "proletarianization" of the party, government, and educational institutions. In this way the leadership hoped to win working-class support for the revolutionary path on which it was preparing to embark. But the economic hardships provoked by the industrialization drive caused the Stalin leadership to doubt whether it could indeed rely on uniform support. It feared that certain strata of the proletariat would resist the accelerated drive for industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture.

When the Communist Party took power in Rumania in 1944, it inherited a poor, agrarian society. In 1950, before the advent of planning, three-fourths of Rumania's labor force was still in agriculture; only 12 percent of the labor force was in the industrial sector. Per capita income for the country as a whole was the equivalent of thirty dollars and in agriculture it was close to twenty dollars. The new regime did not have to search very far for a general development model. It adopted the Soviet strategy of rapid economic growth through the priority development of heavy industry. Women have played a key role in this process; indeed, it may be argued that they form the linchpin of Rumanian growth strategy.

This article analyzes Russian television news accounts of the December 2010 Manezhnaia riots that followed an ethnic Russian football fan's murder by a group of men from the North Caucasus. It focuses on the narrative struggle to reconcile official nation-building rhetoric with grassroots realities and broadcasters' own assumptions. Using the tools of media discourse analysis, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz demonstrate that national television's conceptual apparatus consists of a multifaceted amalgam in which interpretations of the Soviet period are modified through the influences of late imperial Russian intellectual traditions and western interpretations of societal diversity. Hutchings and Tolz show how the essentialization of ethnic boundaries within this apparatus leads both to the overinterpretation of interethnic aspects of the crisis, and to their occlusion. Rather than submitting to a univocal state machine, post-Manezhnaia broadcasting reveals fault lines whose partial convergence around a single narrative reflects the restricted logic of the conceptual apparatus and a perceived need to reflect the public mood.

The Army Specialized Training Program brought to the fore numerous problems connected with Russian instruction which, on the basis of the new experience gained, may now be profitably discussed, with some thought of formulating a standard or at least generally applicable procedure. Over the last fourteen years, I have taught beginner's Russian to some twenty-five classes, ranging from the conventional three hours per week schedule to intensive courses with one, two, or three class hours daily for periods of six to twelve weeks and, finally, to the nine months’ Army program with fifteen contact-hours per week. At first glance this might seem like a respectable body of practice on which to generalize. But while the subsequent professional performances of many of our students during this period have been encouraging, I do not wish the present article to be regarded as unduly dogmatic. Looking backward, I think we should have been more ingenious in innovation, and certainly more productive of useful textbooks and other teaching aids. But here, until very recently, lack of time, money, equipment, publisher's interest, and competent assistance may serve in some sense as a valid excuse for defects in performance.

According to the evidence found in historical records, the first influences of the Byzantine Christian mission had reached the Magyars prior to the conquest of present Hungary while they were still on the shores of the Black Sea. As I have proved in detail in an earlier treatise, we must surmise that, when they took possession of their present land, the Magyar people had brought with them a knowledge of Christianity.

However, the Byzantine mission was not the sole factor in preparing the Magyars for their acceptance of the new faith. This acceptance was influenced also by the earlier Christian traditions of the new land which ultimately became their country. From Roman times (ancient Christian relics of which are being excavated in increasing numbers) to the appearance of the Magyars, Christianity had existed without interruption in Hungarian territory.

In 1889 the head of the Railway Department of the Russian Ministry of Finance published a brochure entitled Concerning Nationalism: National Economy and Friedrich List, which is a brief exposition of List's book on The National System of Political Economy. The same man, who had arrived at his position the hard way, had written on economic subjects before. In 1883 he had published a technical volume on the structure of railway tariffs, in which he liberally included his comments on current economic theory and a special recommendation for a Russian type of socialism sponsored by the Orthodox Church.

In the early 1990s social scientists began to refer to migrants who retained familial and economic ties with their country of origin as transnational. The term eventually gained currency among historians who had found multiple examples of such ties in earlier decades and centuries. Although migrants traveling among former Soviet republics came to be understood as transnational, Soviet-era migrants never have been so characterized. We contend that this is due to a double blindness: that of migration scholars to the Soviet Union as a “state of nations,” and that of historians of the Soviet period to migration as a complicating element in the construction of nationality. By emphasizing the transnational dimension of “internal” Soviet migration, we seek to sharpen awareness of how nationality worked in the Soviet context, particularly in its last decades. We thus posit the maintenance of economic, familial and other affective ties across Soviet national boundaries as the Soviet version of transnationalism—transnationalism in one country. We also suggest the ways that despite its well-deserved reputation for limiting international migration and otherwise restricting its citizenry, the Soviet state facilitated transnationalism within its borders.