Very few books and studies on Dostoevsky appeared in the first two decades after his death. The year 1900 may be chosen as the turning point, for after that date the number of publications, first in Russian, then in other languages, increased steadily. By the middle of our century the canon of Dostoevsky scholarship was well established, so that hardly any new departures seemed to be possible. Today, whether our attention is focused on Dostoevsky's opinions or on the stylistic devices and structures of his novels, we note that practically every method of approach has already been tried by at least one of our predecessors. Thus Dostoevsky, not unlike Nietzsche, was discovered and appropriated by the first half of the twentieth century. It was then that he grew to the stature he now possesses, and it was then that he was recognized as a forerunner of new trends in European literature and philosophy.

Within Russian and Soviet studies psychohistory has had few practitioners and a negligible effect, with the notable exception of Robert C. Tucker, an eloquent theorist of Soviet politics and a preeminent biographer of Stalin. His strategy for uncovering the unknown early Stalin has involved borrowing from the methodologies of psychoanalysis with the aim of showing how the pathology of the adult Stalin was rooted in the child. Yet his approach has found few adherents.

Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian. Not particularly introspective, he left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life. Moreover, Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.

The punitive psychiatric hospitalization of Soviet dissidents and nonconformists spurred the writing and circulation of memoirs of detention, transcripts of conversations with psychiatrists, copies of psychiatric files, handbooks on legal and medical aspects of psychiatric examination, works of fiction, poems, and other related documents. Rebecca Reich draws on this major body of texts to determine how politically unorthodox citizens engaged with psychiatry in life and on the page. Close reading of texts by Vladimir Bukovskii, Semen Gluzman, Aleksandr Vol'pin, and others suggests that unsanctioned accounts of hospitalization did more than expose the abuse of psychiatry; they challenged Soviet psychiatric discourse and promoted inakomyslie, “thinking differently,” as the psychological norm. By depathologizing themselves and pathologizing the state during encounters with psychiatrists and in samizdat, dissidents and nonconformists engaged in self-definition and asserted their own diagnostic authority.

Although many Western scholars believe that 5 million Soviet peasants died as a result of forced collectivization, this inference is not firmly supported by official prewar census statistics. Official statistics suggest that there may have been as many as 9.2 million excess deaths between 1927 and 1939, a figure more than ample to cover hypothesized collectivization fatalities, but Frank Lorimer has argued that half of this discrepancy may be explained by a 27 percent underestimation of the mortality rate in the census of 1926. The possibility that standard Western estimates substantially exaggerate estimated collectivization fatalities therefore cannot be dismissed, even before allowance is made for victims of the famine of 1933-1934, Gulag forced labor, and the terror.

The plausibility of the hypothesis that collectivization claimed millions of lives is diminished further by Gosplan's estimate of the Soviet population in 1933, 165.7 million, a figure consistent with demographic trends of the late 1920s. Assuming that Gosplan had access to the relevant data when this estimate was made in 1937, it appears to follow that all excess deaths calculated from the census of 1939 occurred after rather than before 1933.

The Soviet Paradox of high mechanization and continuing intensive use of hand labor in agriculture has been commented upon many times. For its level of capital intensity, Soviet agriculture is easily the least productive in the world. The purpose of this paper is not to elaborate anew on these well-known oddities or their consequences for the current and prospective (short-run) supply of farm goods in the USSR. The problem here is: Given the collectivist ideology which found expression in the collective-farm and state-farm systems, what will mechanization ultimately do to the farm system? In countries with advanced farm mechanization and effective use of capital, such as the United States, the farm labor force tends to become rather small; a similar development is clearly under way also in western Europe.

The eleven-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of a Byzantine Mission in Moravia (863) revived the interest of Slavic historians and philologists in the history of SS. Cyril and Methodius and served to reopen discussions concerning the significance of their activity in Moravia for the development of the Slavs.

It was widely believed that their mission had a profoundly religious character—the conversion of the Moravian pagans to Christianity. This interpretation is not quite correct. The words which the author of Cyril’s biography lets the Moravian ruler Rastislav address to the Emperor Michael should make us cautious about the real character of the Byzantine mission in Moravia. Rastislav is supposed to have declared that his people had already rejected paganism and were observing Christian rules. Some saw in this declaration an exaggeration and attributed it to Rastislav or to the biographer. Recent archaeological discoveries made in Moravia, however, confirm the correctness of Rastislav’s declaration. Thus far the foundations of sixteen stone churches have been discovered, and at least five of them were erected before the arrival of the Byzantine mission.

In the decade between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, many of the Russian radical intelligentsia believed that Dostoevskii had anticipated their moral dilemmas. Critics, such as D. S. Merezhkovskii, argued that the experience of that turbulent period confirmed Dostoevskii's discovery about the nature of moral choice: Namely, there existed no single system of beliefs, no coherent ethical code, that could resolve all problems of ends and means and that this was so because, on some of the most fundamental issues of moral choice, the promptings of reason and feeling could not be reconciled. To be internally consistent, any ethical systems (and the religious and political creeds that embodied them) must therefore ignore or deny some of the moral imperatives rooted in man's nature. No system of belief, however compelling, could thus confer immunity from guilt, doubt, or self-contempt.

On July 11, 1867, an imperial decree established the governor-generalship of Turkestan, inaugurating a significant experiment in Russian administration of Central Asia. On July 14 General Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman (1818-82) was appointed Turkestan’s first governor general. During the next fourteen years he rooted Russian colonial rule so firmly that subsequent incompetent governors could not overturn it. He began Turkestan’s modernization, but his regime aroused intense controversy in Russia. Colleagues eulogized Kaufman as a talented organizer who won the loyalty and respect of both Russians and natives. Numerous critics, led by General M. G. Cherniaev, his successor (1882-84), castigated his administration. Kaufman’s work was misrepresented by Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat. Soviet historians either vilified him as an instrument of tsarist imperialism or relegated him to obscurity.

Shortly before Lenin's death in early 1924, the Thirteenth Party Conference undertook an ambitious program to recruit thousands of workers into the Communist party. Subsequently known as the Lenin Levy—in memory, ironically, of the party's main adversary of mass worker recruitments—this campaign, which was repeated in 1925 and 1927, marked a key stage in the social and organizational history of the Soviet Communist party, for it brought the party into close contact with the shop floor for the first time since 1917.

Western historians are divided over the significance to be attached to this episode. Many echo the views held by prominent party leftists that worker recruitments were a cosmetic response to the problem of bureaucratism and a convenient means to swamp the party with members obedient to the secretariat.

Over the last twenty years Russia has experienced significant fluctuations in sentiments regarding the prospects and urgency of relocating the Russian capital city. In this article, Vadim Rossman examines the public debates on this topic, which have involved important Russian politicians, intellectuals, and members of various expert communities. In these debates, one can recognize several distinct new visions of society that emerged in the post-Soviet period. This article provides an overview and a critique of these debates and suggests that they should be viewed in the context of nation building, the slow emergence of the nation that was historically suppressed under the weight of the imperial ambitions of Russian statehood. In the background of these debates, the concept of self-identity looms large. National capitals can serve as catalysts for nation building and an instrument of the nation as it constitutes and constructs itself.

This article examines the emergence of what I call “spectral performance” in Putin's Russia. Focusing on the Immortal Regiment initiative, I investigate the growing importance of practices that ask the living to act as surrogates for the dead. My analysis proceeds in three stages. First, applying a memory studies frame, I show how the Regiment helps preserve memory of WWII in a time of significant generational change. Second, drawing on theories of political theology and biopolitics, I show how the Regiment reaffirms the Kremlin's sovereign power to regulate the boundaries between life and death while symbolically displacing sovereignty from the “flesh” of the people to a growing ranks of “immortals.” Finally, focusing on the question of representation, I show how the Regiment helps construct an oppressive distribution of the sensible that privileges the dead over the living. I conclude by examining St. Petersburg artist Maksim Evstropov's necro-activist project Party of the Dead as a cultural critique of the Regiment.

Russians have long been preoccupied with surnames, particularly a distinction between so-called "good" and "bad" surnames, in ways that may be hard to understand by a nation of immigrants whose ancestral names were often mutilated by immigration authorities or anglicized by their bearers with a stroke of the pen. In the Russian Empire, such changes required the personal permission of the ruler and were exceedingly rare until the end of the nineteenth century.

Georgii V. Chicherin's conversion from Menshevism to Bolshevism exemplifies the intense political and ideological stress placed on Russian Social Democrats by World War I. The war split all of Europe's socialist parties, but none so deeply as the already faction-ridden Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Even after the initial shock had passed and most Russian Social Democrats found their way to one or another of the party's factions, not all members joined a recognizable group. For some the shock was too great, and much time and wandering were needed before they found their bearings. One of these wanderers was Lenin's future Foreign Commissar.

In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda’s founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin’s leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin’s literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies which predictably found that Stalin, Molotov, and certain other “conciliatory elements” within Pravda’s editorial board had hindered Lenin’s efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov's letter of December 24, 1828 O.S. (January 5, 1829 N.S.) to his wife Nina has hitherto been considered his last extant piece of correspondence. The Manuscript Division of the University of Nottingham Library, however, has in its archives a copy of an unpublished Griboedov letter which now replaces the letter to Nina as his last surviving letter. It belongs to the final weeks of Griboedov's life, early February 1829. I found the letter among that portion of the Portland Papers which comprises the correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, governor general of India from 1828 to 1835. It was lying in a packet containing three other documents: a letter from Lieutenant Colonel John Macdonald, British envoy to Persia, to Sir John Malcolm, his brother-in-law and governor of Bombay; a letter from Sir John Malcolm to Lord William Bentinck; and an “Extract of Private Letter from Lt. Col. Macdonald to Sir John Malcolm.”