The time has passed when it was automatically assumed that the Stolypin Land Reform represented an attempt on the part of the tsarist government to impose on an unwilling peasantry a predetermined plan for a change in land tenure. The revision of opinion has in large measure resulted from the work of George L. Yaney, who has shown that policy and the organization necessary for carrying it out evolved and changed during the course of the implementation of the Stolypin reform. Yaney argues that certain of the changes in the reform came about as a result of the government responding to pressure from the peasants. Inevitably, this pressure concerned those aspects of the land reform that affected the peasants most directly, for instance, the disposition of the land and the timing and sequence of withdrawal from the commune.

One of the “Great Debates” among Soviet specialists in the social sciences today concerns the applicability of interest group theory to the study of Soviet politics. Though a large number of specialists have accepted the notion that interest groups do indeed play a certain kind of role in the Soviet system, there are still those who hold to the opinion, once taken for granted but in recent years challenged, that interest group theory simply does not apply to the Soviet Union. The strength of the latter argument lies in the fact that in the USSR interest groups do not operate publicly and openly, as they do in the United States; therefore, interest group theory as developed to fit the American context cannot describe or explain the dynamic processes of policymaking in Russia.

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said's Orientalism. Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

In April 1928 a team of eight Soviet and eight German medical researchers set out for the remote area of Kul'skoe in the Buriat—Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the USSR to examine endemic syphilis and the impact of the anti—syphilis drug, Salvarsan, on the course of the disease. This three—month expedition was negotiated by some of the leading political and scientific figures on both sides and was launched with considerable fanfare, although it was not—nor was it intended to be—a scientific milestone in the field of venereology.

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.

This article is a critical analysis of the prevalent interpretation of “war communism” in Anglo-American literature that views the economic policies of that period as temporary expedients to meet wartime and inflationary conditions. Although there are scholars whose accounts are notable exceptions to this interpretation, it is the dominant one and is found in popular works, textbooks, and important scholarly contributions. For example, Nettl states that “war communism” “represented a series of ad hoc measures to combat emergency situations.” Sherman writes that “as a necessary military measure, by the end of 1918 all large-scale factories had been nationalized and put under central control,” and he explains the requisitioning and allocation in kind of supplies from farm and factory as the consequence of inflation having ended the usefulness of money. Anderson states that with the outbreak of the civil war in May 1918 “an emergency policy of War Communism was adopted.” Fainsod says that “the policy of War Communism was the rule of the besieged fortress.” This article will show by a study of Lenin's writings during the “war communism” period that this prevalent interpretation suffers from the neglect of the original aspirations of Marxian socialism and consequently misrepresents the motives behind the economic policies of “war communism.”

The Communist Youth League (Komsomol) was founded in 1917-1918 in urban centers. Its leadership's perception of the peasantry and its quest to maintain a respectable proportion of workers in the membership impeded expansion in rural areas: in the name of “proletarian purity,” many leaders and activists opposed the blanket admission of all but the poorest peasants into their midst. But demographic realities made the Komsomol's outreach to young peasants imperative: peasants made up eighty percent of the Russian population; their children nineteen years of age or younger accounted for half of the rural population in the mid-1920s. More important, the state and the Party had reduced their rural personnel at the end of the civil war and the Komsomol found itself pressured to fill the gap.

“Heresy” is developed here as an analytical term for the criminalization of speech questioning the basic tenets of a belief system, such as internal criticisms of state socialism or denial of the applicability of the term genocide to some mass crimes in a European Union that purports to make central the protection of human rights. European legislation to criminalize “genocide denial” is critiqued through a close analysis of international legal decisions dealing with whether “genocide” took place in the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Although granting both the facts as these courts found them and the serious criminality of the actions involved, Robert M. Hayden argues that calling them “genocide” broadens the definition of that term to the extent of losing the possibility of uniform application. Criminalizing “genocide denial” is thus not only contrary to principles of free speech and intellectual inquiry but manifests the same problem that Amnesty International identified in its reports in the 1980s on the vagueness of the “verbal crimes” provisions of the criminal laws of the formerly socialist countries. Hayden concludes that the punishment of heresy is a manifestation of power by a political elite that holds its values and assumptions to be immune from challenge.

Why did the campaign for “trust in cadres” (doverie k kadram) come to be so emblematic of the Brezhnev era? In this article, Yoram Gorlizki argues that following the failure of Nikita Khrushchev's institutional experiments, Leonid Brezhnev turned to “trust”—ties grounded in ongoing personal relationships—as a means of lowering the Soviet system's high transaction costs. Focusing on in-depth studies of three regions, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kirov, and Krasnodar, Gorlizki suggests that the leadership system in each shifted towards a pattern marked by modest but stable institutional constraints on regional leaders, a carefully calibrated system of seniority, and a set of order-enhancing norms that are referred to as ”hierarchical ethics.“ Mirroring the new leadership arrangements in Moscow, this combination of regional institutional constraints and political norms was the most compatible with a pattern of informal devices for cooperation that would come under the label of “trust” (doverie). Gorlizki contends that while Soviet officials had always resorted to personal relationships in order to attain their official goals, the campaign for “trust in cadres” gave cover to such practices by in effect elevating them into a component part of the regime's ideology. Gorlizki concludes by describing the variety of dangers these arrangements carried with them.

A sizable literature on the temporal and spatial dimensions of urbanization in Russia has appeared during the past decade, and it is probably fair to say that we now have a reasonable understanding of the process in general terms. What is needed is much closer scrutiny of the impact of the gathering of people into towns. Urbanization inevitably brought change to social organizations, institutions, behavior patterns, and perceptions; in short, to the social geography of the city. But prerequisite to understanding how quickly and with what consequences such social changes took place is an understanding of the dynamics of urban population growth itself.

In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.

The development-oriented work of Moscow's religious communities is examined in this article, with a focus on how a core group of faith organizations present themselves as offering an alternative vision of intervention and improvement that seeks to protect Russian citizens from what proponents suggest are the shortcomings of previous democratizing and civil society ventures. Staff and supporters within Moscow's faith-based assistance sphere contend that religiously affiliated assistance organizations are successful, not only because they parallel secular development programs in promoting values and practices of capitalism, democracy, and global human rights, but more importantly because they also claim to move beyond these approaches to tend to the well-being and transformation of the entire human being. Consequentiy, proponents argue that faith-based organizations are more attuned to values of humane treatment and civility, thereby making them better positioned to build a new Russian society that brings citizens and the state together in productive and caring relationships. Ultimately, this attention to the perspectives and ideals of religiously oriented development organizations provides a different vantage point for reconsidering the promises and consequences of Russia's neoliberal and democratizing transformations.

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).

The Mass Emigration of people from the various European states was not a haphazard chapter of history. Emigration represented a natural outcome of those social problems which beset many European countries for long periods. Grave social problems determined those ultimate motives which prompted large masses to leave behind the well-known boundaries of their native land to try their luck in a strange country. In the case of Hungary, too, the social and economic background makes emigration comprehensible. Such a background explains that strange turn of social history which suddenly transformed Hungary from a country of immigration into a country of emigration.

The literary reputation of Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) has fluctuated considerably over the years: she was praised in the 1830s, 1840s and early 1850s, reviled in the 1860s as unprogressive and consigned to oblivion from the 1870s until her death in 1893. At the turn of the century she was rediscovered by the Russian symbolists: Poliakov, Blok and Bely praised her, and Valerii Briusov edited a two-volume edition of her work (1915). Women poets of the time, such as Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Vasil'eva), Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Parnok, cited her and dedicated poems to her. After the revolution Pavlova was reconsigned to oblivion. Two scholarly editions of Pavlova's poetry appeared during the Soviet period (1937 and 1964) but accompanied by introductions deploring her unprogressive views on politics and art. At best they damned her with faint praise as “not first rate but all the same somewhat noteworthy.” The ambivalent attitude toward Pavlova may have reflected a conflict between the Soviet attempt to “claim the classics for the Soviet cause” while downplaying material that could not be construed retroactively to support the Soviet regime; Pavlova was identified with the politically conservative Slavophiles. Only after she had been rediscovered in the west did positive Soviet scholarship about her begin to appear.