The natural inclination of most “area” scholars—not to mention others—is to become preoccupied with the personalities, institutions, and achievements of the dominant culture, through the nationally aggregated values and norms. The justification for this approach is a belief in the supposedly inexorable process of the “homogenization” of the national culture and the inevitability of greater centralized control as a result of the technology of mass communications and organization. But it is increasingly apparent that even in “developed” countries, such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—let alone Italy, Nigeria, or Pakistan—some of the more insistent and intractable “national” problems turn out to be basically regional in origin and character. At least as important in the long run as conflict of ethnic or religious origin is the increasingly familiar deepening of regional inequalities in the richer nations as a result of more perfect interregional competition, diffusion of information, and the high potential mobility of educated and affluent populations. At first glance the Soviet Union, with its traditional practice of centralized control over the bodies and souls of its citizens and the all-pervading pressure toward national coherence and uniformity, might appear more appropriate than most countries for study as a national system with national character and goals. Yet here, too, some of the more interesting and thorny problems facing the Soviet leaders and planners concerning the health and general viability of their country resolve themselves into essentially regional ones.

Historians of the Russian peasantry hold almost unanimously that serfowners routinely intervened in serf marriage: that they generally forbade serf women to leave the estate through marriage or marry at all without permission, commanded serfs to marry young, made compulsory matches when their serfs failed to marry on schedule, and otherwise prevented serfs from exercising free choice in marriage. Equally common is the assumption that the nobles’ interest in serf marriage was the multiplication of human property and the number of duespaying labor units, i.e., married couples. The one exception is Steven Hoch, who found that on the Gagarin estate of Petrovskoe, Tambov province, managers never intervened, at least in first marriages. They never had to, Hoch argues, because the heads of peasant households shared the owners’ interest in early and universal marriage. That was because estate managers allocated land, the only significant economic resource, to married couples on an egalitarian basis. Even Hoch accepts the standard view that, on other estates where different socioeconomic conditions held, estate authorities did have to intervene to ensure that serfs married early and universally.

The most vulnerable member of the peasant household was reported to be the soldatka, the soldier's wife. The quintessential outsider in a community based on married couples, the soldatka suffered from the general coldness of the village toward single women. Stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, she was seen as a loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children. We know little about her. Popular imagination has been informed largely by the soldatka's plaintive voice in folk "recruit" laments. Historians have paid scant attention to the marginal members of peasant society. Yet focusing on the weaker persons in the peasant household provides insight into little-known subjects: family antagonisms, interpersonal relationships, and the status of women.

Contemporary Soviet historians of biology have attempted to add historical prestige to Trofim Lysenko's controversial theory of evolution by reinterpreting past Russian social thought on evolution. One Soviet historian has not hesitated to go back as far as the eighteenth century to find Russian antecedents of various aspects of Lysenko's theory, although the relevance of this rewriting of history to the scientific merits of Lysenkoism remains at best obscure.

But the attempt does raise several significant questions: What were the major interpretations by pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers of evolution and particularly of Darwinism? What implicit assumptions about the process of evolution and the nature of man do these interpretations contain? What influence did they have on the development of a Russian Marxist interpretation of Darwinism?

It is obviously impossible to answer all these questions in a single article.

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.

In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.

The nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was more complex than has been indicated by many American interpretations. In the Soviet press of that period, many newspapers and periodicals carried articles that dealt with nationality issues. I will consider here the possibility that publication of these articles was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.

Russian formalism has been of interest in the west for at least three decades since the publication of Victor Erlich's authoritative study of the school in 1954. Almost every year significant new contributions are made to the analysis of the formalists’ scholarship; their multiplex theory, with all of its different, and at times seemingly contradictory, aspects, is elucidated, and many of these aspects are successfully incorporated in modern criticism and literary theory in the west. I will not dwell upon the better known “internalist” aspects of the formalists' work, nor will I try to summarize their theory. Several leading members of the school systematically attempted to create a coherent theoretical framework for the sociology of literature. In this article I will look at the sociology of the Russian formalists from the point of view of a sociologist, analyze it, and suggest that the formalist sociology of literature makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of literature, but also to the understanding of social reality and to the discipline of sociology.

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.

In recent years the history of early printing in Western Europe has received renewed attention from scholars with an interest not only in elucidating the internal evolution of printing, but also in demonstrating the relevance of this development for history in general. Indeed, some historians of printing now argue that the advent of movable type was a major landmark of the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. This proposition has given rise to the still bolder hypothesis that a “printing” or “typographical” revolution visibly altered European culture in the post-Gutenberg era.

While Western scholarship has directed considerable attention to printing in early modern Europe, the history of communications outside the West has gone relatively unnoticed. The failure to consider even those societies that stood on the periphery of European experience — Russia, Byzantium, the Balkans — is especially surprising since in many ways these societies were part of European culture. In the case of Russia, at least, the neglect of theoretical issues does not stem from a lack of published information, since the study of the Russian book has a long and rich past among Russian and Soviet bibliographers and literary historians.

The Yugoslavs are infected by what calls the disease of “historical optimism.” Shocks, emanating from the international economy over the last decade or so, were seen as a developmental problem or, at worst, a transitory difficulty. This argument seems to follow these lines: Contemporary capitalism, of course, is doomed to collapse sooner or later; contemporary etatism is also in a state of crisis and will evolve toward Yugoslav self-management socialism. The socialism of self-management, however, could not itself be in crisis, because, if it is in crisis, what is left?

In fact the word crisis was not used to describe the state of the Yugoslav economy until September 1982 when it was discovered that foreign debt could not be serviced and required rescheduling. By then the Yugoslav foreign debt was $20 billion, the unemployment rate stood at 10 percent to 16 percent (depending how you measure it), and inflation was at 40 percent. Only then did the policymakers realize that these problems were a consequence of prolonged economic mismanagement, excessive borrowing abroad, arbitrary decision making, and an autarchic economic policy in general.

This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

In this study, Yulia Mikhailova and David Prestel suggest that the political culture of pre-Mongolian Rus’ may be similar to that of post-Carolingian Europe, where public order still existed in the absence of a strong centralized authority. In Rus’ as also in the west, there was an order of norms rather than of institutions. Drawing on sources such as the Testament of Vladimir Monomakh and the Homily of Princes, Mikhailova and Prestel maintain that cross kissing was considered a sacred obligation for Rus’ rulers, a view given further support by the behavior of princes as recorded in the chronicles. They appear to trust oaths made on the cross and accept that there will be negative consequences for those who break them. Violations threaten one's salvation, and when chroniclers are favorably disposed to certain princes, they attempt to demonstrate that their violations are justified by an offence on the part of the prince with whom the agreement was enacted.

Using Poland as example, the article explores the operation of east European communist welfare states, with particular attention paid to benefits offered to working mothers. By exploring a number of diverse sources, I analyze the evolution and the meaning of institutional care and maternity leave in the life of professionally-active women. Studying a variety of factors that shaped the welfare policies of the time, including post-war industrialization, consumption, the demographic panic, and the struggling economy of the twilight years of communism, I attach particular importance to the early 1970s, when Poland saw a particular shift in gender-equality discourse. Welfare benefits played a key role in communists states, serving as a guarantee of equal opportunities or, in the case of mothers, as a tool for potentially facilitating employment. In time, however, they became chiefly tools designed to control the population and female fertility.

The massacre of the Russian Mission at Teheran in 1829 by an infuriated and fanatical mob cut short the career of one of Russia's finest dramatists and nearly plunged Persia into another war with her powerful neighbor. The circumstances of Griboedov's death, the events which led up to it, and its international repercussions are among the most strange and tragic episodes in the history of the Near East.

Aleksander Sergeevič Griboedov was born in 1795 of a prominent Moscow family. He distinguished himself at a phenomenally early age at Moscow University and took part in the 1812 campaign when only seventeen. In 1815 he retired from the army and began his career at St. Petersburg, where his first comedy, The Young Couple, was produced in the same year. Two years later he was given a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from that time he was regularly employed in diplomatic work in Persia and the Caucasus. Griboedov's first visit to Persia was in 1819. He rapidly mastered Persian and Arabic and acquired a high reputation as a shrewd and reliable diplomat. In 1822 he became diplomatic secretary to General Ermolov, the commander-in-chief at Tiflis.

The Stolypin Land Reform was a series of actions taken by the Russian Imperial government during the years 1905-17 to cope with the social and economic problems of the European Russian peasants. The basic part of any analysis of the Reform, therefore, should be a description of these actions as a coherent historical development in themselves. This essay presents such a description. The discussion is divided into four topics: general interpretation, the problems the Reform had to cope with, the general outline of its evolution, and the role of force in its execution. Related topics, such as the historical forces or events which produced the Reform, its results, or its significance in larger developments, are mentioned only incidentally.

This article examines literature in Russia, as opposed to Russian literature, through the window of Tat'iana's reading, especially two novels by Sophie Cottin, in Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. A quantitative, sociological approach to European markets for novels shows that Russians and Europeans were reading the same popular French, German, and English sentimental novels by August von Kotzebue; Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de Genlis; August Lafontaine; and Cottin. Pushkin, however, positioned himself in the Russian literary field with the canonical novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, and Madame de Stael, against the "mediocre" novels of Cottin. Nevertheless, in his ongoing efforts to write Russian novels, Pushkin covertly engaged with popular sentimental novels to integrate their conservative emphasis on duty, virtue, and love with Russian noble life. I argue that a likely intertext for the eponymous heroine of The Captain's Daughter was Cottin's European bestseller Élisabeth, ou Les exilés de Sibérie (1806).