My dispute with Gibson and Hesli et al. rests on fundamental methodological differences. They do not fully appreciate the historical and political context from which Russian survey data derive. As a result, they engage in a series of statistical misapplications which undermine the soundness of their critique of my article with Degtyarev and of their views concerning the nature and consequences of anti-Semitism in Russia.

Both Western and, sometimes more grudgingly, Soviet historians have praised certain aspects of the Russian judicial reforms of 1864 and their effects. Judicial transformation of the law proved to be an important means both of adapting traditional law to the social and economic changes occurring in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and of fostering and facilitating further change. Moreover, the effects and implications of some of the reforms of civil law introduced by the new courts inevitably drew these institutions into many of the political controversies besetting Russia at this time. These issues surprisingly, however, have attracted little scholarly attention.

This paper seeks to assess the significance of the new courts’ reforming activities and to relate these activities to broader social and political issues by examining the development of property and inheritance law by the Civil Cassation Department of the Senate. As the highest court of appeal for civil actions in the new judicial structure, the Civil Cassation Department rendered definitive interpretations of civil law and exercised tremendous influence over the decisions of lower courts. An examination of its practice therefore would not only reveal the policy of the highest court in the land, but would also provide a fairly accurate picture of the way particular civil laws were interpreted and enforced throughout the empire. While the Civil Cassation Department affected all areas of civil law more or less extensively, a study of its development of property and inheritance law would be especially useful in assessing the extent, nature, and significance of its reformist activity both because of the crucial, multifarious functions of these branches of law in any society and because of particular controversies surrounding them in Russia.

One of the most important events of the summer of 1917 was the opening of the All–Russian Council of the Orthodox church on 15 August in Moscow. In a dramatic opening ceremony, solemn processions from all the churches of Moscow converged on Red Square for the service led by Metropolitan Tikhon. The council had been convened by a 5 July order of the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, V. N. L'vov, with the concurrence of the Provisional Government. The calling of a church council–the first since Peter's establishment of the collegial system of administration–was a substantive change in church governance and also had a symbolic meaning. In pre-Petrine Russia, the councils not merely had played an ecclesiastical role but had formed an integral part of national government. (For example, Ivan IV and the church council had worked together to implement changes in the secular code of law as well as in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters.)

On March 21, 1919, the Provisional President of the Hungarian People's Republic, Count Michael Károlyi, resigned and "transferred the power to the proletariat of the Hungarian peoples." The following day the head of the new government, Béla Kun, (whose official title was Commissar of Foreign Affairs), addressed himself "to the workers of the world" with a request to take up arms and defend the young Hungarian Soviet Republic from "imperialist attacks" on four fronts—Rumanian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, and Italian. His appeal was welcomed by the Rumanian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, and Italian workers' representatives at Budapest proclaiming their devotion to the Hungarian Commune almost within sound of the guns of the invading armies marching to destroy it.

In this Article I shall examine the visual form or appearance (shape, size, and other visible qualities) of Soviet socially produced things (excluding any detailed consideration of trends in the fine arts or of individual craftsmanship) in relation to forces in Soviet ideology which seem to have influenced this form or appearance. (I do not attempt to describe all influences which bear on Soviet design, which would require a much more complex approach and a more extended treatment.) My definition of Soviet “ideology” would be the same as Professor Meyer's: the body of doctrine that is taught by the Communist Party to all Soviet citizens. Whether or not this doctrine is true, or thought to be true, as well as why it is propagated, or whether this would be a complete definition—these questions are considered to be irrelevant in the present context.

The term Old Believers (or Old Ritualists) refers to a number of groups that arose as a result of Russian church reforms, 1654-1666, when Patriarch Nikon sought to make Russian practices conform to their contemporary Greek counterparts. Conscious of both a departure from tradition and an encroachment of central control over local autonomy, Old Believers endeavored to maintain the rites, symbols and prerogatives of traditional Russian Orthodoxy. With support of the tsar, Nikon began bloody persecutions that lasted, though in lesser degrees, until the decree of religious tolerance in 1905.

A close look at Russian peasant art yields two divergent impressions. The profusion of styles and techniques is amazing, testimony to the ready creativity of peasant craftsmen. But throughout this wealth of invention, a constant tone prevails: the images portrayed are few and everywhere much the same.

Two images predominate: the sun, at times accompanied by flowers, birds, and animals; and a flowering tree (drevo zhizni) or a woman raising her arms, with two figures, often armed men on horseback, at either side. Most designs in peasant art involve one of these persistent images. The concern of the present paper is to explore what they may have meant.

Boris Eikhenbaum spent nearly a decade working within Opoiaz, the Petersburg branch of Russian formalism, to develop a work-centered poetics. Faced with the inadequacy of traditional mimetic, expressive, and pragmatic views of literature, he and his colleagues tried to address literary works without recourse to extraliterary facts. Any intrinsic poetics, however, encounters difficulties, for it must avoid even the most obvious cultural and historical explanations of any work taken as literary. In its struggle against crudely reductive interpretations of literature, Opoiaz had constantly to guard against sliding back into an external approach. This article will suggest that it was largely Eikhenbaum who played the role of guard dog, nudging the evolving Opoiaz view of literature back toward the literary work itself. How successful he was in this effort (and by extension, perhaps, the successes and shortcomings of workcentered literary theories in general) is the question to be examined here. Eikhenbaum's own shift, beginning in 1927, toward a study of literature that privileges the author, may tell us as much about the limitations of objective theories of literature as about the political inadmissibility of Russian formalism under Stalin.

Metaphors act as cues to social identities. Political discourse that communicates the distinctiveness of the rulers' identity sustains authoritarianism by cueing people to act as either oppressors or oppressed, while political discourse that cues identification by citizens with politicians promotes democracy by encouraging people to participate. In Politburo speeches from the era of Soviet authoritarianism, metaphors of size, superiority, distance, and subordination were abundant. These metaphors are suitable for emphasizing the separateness of politics from ordinary life and for communicating the inferiority of the populace. In Politburo speeches from the transition year 1989, these metaphors had already begun to decrease in frequency, while new metaphors, often borrowed from the discourse of international diplomacy, deconstructed the rulers' claims to continuing authority. In Russian political discourse from the first years of electoral politics, authoritarian metaphors decline even more sharply and are replaced by metaphors of choice and identification suitable for encouraging people to align themselves with electoral candidates.

This paper should begin with a series of disclaimers. It cannot pretend to be an analysis of all of Trotskii's ideas on economics and the economy, because this would call for a long book and because this author has not gone through the Trotskii archives or read all relevant published works. There is plenty of room for much more research on these matters, and I hope that Baruch Knei-Paz's admirable book on Trotskii's political ideas' will be followed by one that “reconstitutes” the great many fragments in which Trotskii's economic ideas are presented. Trotskii was not a professional economist, any more than Lenin was, but he did have much to say on economic affairs. What I shall do here is describe and analyze some of Trotskii's more important opinions and pronouncements.

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.

The changes of 1962 and 1963 in the Soviet economic system in the wake of the decisions of the March and November 1962 plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union constitute an important link in the chain of "permanent reforms" designed to cure the chronic malfunctioning of the Soviet planning and management system. These changes are especially interesting with respect to the perennial problem of economic regionalization.

Georgians have long found in the remote mountainous regions of Georgia, Pshavi and Khevsureti, a fragmentary ethnographic image of a romantic and exotic “once upon a time” version of Georgia. Georgians have been particularly tantalized by images of the strange sexual practices of these mountains (called ts‘ats’loba), which represent a kind of paradoxical “sex without sex,” a seeming inversion of normative Georgian sexuality, belonging at the same time to the most “Georgian” part of Georgia. Fragmentary images of this “Georgian ancestral sex” circulate in a complex, multigenred interdiscursive space of citationality, becoming, in this recirculation, a haunting absent presence, representations of a sexual alterity shot through with lacunae and absences, which become full of virtual potentiality as these gaps and absences are filled in with one's own imagination and desire. This article ethnographically traces the citational connections between these fragmentary images of sexuality.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Vladimir Solov'ev worked out a Christian approach to nations and nationality, and a moral critique of nationalism, while waging a polemical battle against the Russian conservative nationalists of his day. His ideas emerged primarily from his own social gospel theology, but they were marked by both the Slavophile romanticism of his early career and the western liberalism of his later years. Solov'ev is most often treated as a philosopher, a mystic, or a literary figure, and as a result, his journalistic writings on nationalism and other topics have often been overlooked by scholars, even though they constitute at least a third of his published output.

“Mentality” has become a fashionable term among historians, as a supposedly neutral way of pointing to a pattern of beliefs that are typical of a particular group. “Mentality” seems to avoid the metaphysical mystery of phrases like “the spirit of Russia,” or the Marxist anger in the term “ideology,” which carries a charge of grandiose delusion, of self-interest disguised as universal truth. In deference to fashion and to the goal of irenic discourse, let us use the word “mentality,” though we know that new words do not remove old difficulties.

A central difficulty is the facile assumption that ideology and practicality are elemental contraries, that the conflict between them shapes the evolving mentality of communist regimes. This essay on Soviet history rests on a different assumption: that practicality is itself an ideological concept which can be understood only by reference to particular historical contexts. It is an illusion to imagine that practicality can be defined by reference to technics, a supposedly autonomous force that pulls all societies into a single anthill system. That technological fantasy has subverted the grand ideological theories of previous centuries and increasingly undermines even academic theorizing about human beings. Ideologists become servile functionaries — “public relations experts,” as we say in the West — while academics are reduced to other forms of technical expertise and to purely decorative functions. Soviet history presents an extreme version of that characteristic triumph of “pragmatism” in the twentieth century. To a large extent, I shall try to show, such “pragmatism” is mythic self-delusion, a way of avoiding dangerous threeway conflicts of forthright political rule, openly avowed ideological prophecy, and relentlessly quizzical higher learning.

Shamil's activities in this period [1834-45] were directed not only against Tsarism, but against the local feudal lords, and were of a democratic, progressive character.

The mountain peoples' movement, led by Shamil, was not a national-liberation and democratic movement, but was a reactionary and nationalistic movement, which came into the service of British capitalism and the Turkish Sultan.

These quotations from two successive editions of one of the most popular Soviet history textbooks point up an issue that has engaged Soviet historians for the last decade. Numerous quotations might be added to show still further reversals of opinion reached by Soviet historians since the party called for a radical revision of the role of Shamil and his movement in 1950. Recent conferences have expressed dissatisfaction with the findings and have called for more thorough research to establish a “scientific Marxist” version of the subject.

There were no guarantees in the Russian absolute monarchy against arbitrary arrest, arbitrary search, or violation of the secrecy of mail (three main aspects of personal inviolability) before the reform of the judiciary in 1864. As there was no separation between the administrative and the judicial powers, no difference existed between an arrest or search decided upon as a judicial measure and an arrest or search ordered by the police, whether to prosecute an already committed offense or to prevent a violation of law and order. The statutes of 1864 organized justice as an independent power, and to assure this independence they established guarantees of due process of law.