It is commonly reported in the West that the representation of women in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is far below their representation in the population at large, and that although there are slightly increasing rates of admission, continuation of the large disparity seems to constitute a relatively permanent feature of central recruitment policy and procedures. In 1970, for example, women formed 53.9 percent of the general population and 22.2 percent of the CPSU. However, that aggregate figure masks a considerable degree of regional variation. Publication of data from several regional party archives provides the opportunity to examine more closely the process of female mobility within the party and to advance more precise notions about determinants of that process than had previously been possible.

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

Focusing on the funerals of two populist political prisoners, this article examines how Petersburg's radical youth expropriated an allegedly unchanging, sacred ritual to extend the parameters of public discussion and social critique in late imperial Russia. Drawing on their experiences of Russia's religious and revolutionary past, the youth who accompanied their peers to the grave used the special, “sacred” time and space effected by the performance of customary burial rituals to offer their fellow citizens revolutionary alternatives to the existing regime.

What were the meanings of blackness in the Soviet Union? Marxist ideology offered no clear guidance for conceptualizing blackness, and the Russian Empire provided few historical references. But discrimination against people racialized as black was a major problem of the twentieth century that the Soviet Union was unable to ignore. As Soviet institutions and black people from different parts of the African continent and diaspora cultivated political and cultural connections, those connections entailed collisions among multiple ways of conceptualizing difference. Blackness could not easily be translated into Soviet taxonomies, but, propelled by a series of conjunctures in global politics, people never stopped looking for linkages and analogies. Two primary challenges, recurring in different forms over several eras, were: How was the Soviet Union to conceptualize the relationship between the African continent and the diaspora? And how should it relate racial dynamics elsewhere to domestic conditions within its own borders? Drawing on two scholars’ original fieldwork and recent scholarship in an emerging field, this article proposes a novel, interactive approach to the historical construction of blackness and Africanness in the USSR.

Dostoevsky's characters made a deep impression on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nietzsche claimed that Dostoevsky was the only writer from whom he learned anything about psychology, Gide's view of the human personality was affected by Dostoevsky, and to enumerate all others who bear marks of the influence of Dostoevsky's psychology would mean listing a substantial portion of the outstanding authors of the last sixty or seventy years.

The importance of Dostoevsky's psychology to the generations which followed him causes great interest to be attached to the fact that he, in his turn, was so struck by a German psychological treatise that, together with his friend Baron Vrangel, he intended to translate it into Russian.

In the Soviet cultural geography of the early 1930s, the Kara-Kum desert of Turkmenistan–the setting of Andrei Platonov's novella Dzhan–represented an environmental challenge to Soviet technological utopianism, just as its nomadic inhabitants challenged Stalinist narratives of political development. In this article, I offer new contexts for reading Dzhan, locating it within Russian and Soviet discourses of natural and national development and within the context of Platonov's second profession as a meliorator (land reclamation engineer). I argue that Dzhan offers a vision of vernacular socialism, first, in its attention to the specific ecology of the desert and its inhabitants, and second, in its resistance to two totalizing Soviet master narratives forming in the early 1930s: in the political domain, new Stalinist doctrine on modes of production, and in the literary domain, the socialist realist plot.

Rudolf Slánský's arrest in November 1951 by Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovak secret police, his Kafkaesque trial a year later, and his execution caused a sensation during the early years of the Cold War. For a full week, the trial could be followed live on the radio in Prague. The transcript of the proceedings was published and widely distributed. Yet the affair remained a mystery. Slánský, until recently the general secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), and thirteen of his colleagues, all of them lifelong party members, confessed to crimes of high treason against the Prague government, espionage on behalf of the west, and sabotage of the socialist economy. In tired, monotonous voices, they described their lives as being motivated by their hatred of the CPC and loyalty to such sponsors as the Gestapo, Zionism, western intelligence services, and international capital. In their final speeches, all the defendants demanded that the court impose upon them the death penalty. The judge disappointed only three—they received life sentences. Slánský and ten others were executed in December 1952.

On a midwinter day in Moscow at the very end of 1927, a package containing two kilograms of a substance, similar in color to “lime-flower honey,”1 which had been christened “Diolefin” by its makers was deposited with the scientific and technical council for the chemical industry of VSNKh. Just over four and a half years later, on a summer day in 1932 in laroslavl’ five hundred kilograms of this same material were removed from an autoclave in a newly built factory. These two events are seen as marking the beginning and end of the development and innovation of synthetic rubber, one of the success stories of the First Five- Year Plan; for the laroslavl’ plant, SK-1 (Sinteticheskii Kanchuk-l), with a design capacity of ten thousand metric tons, was the first large-scale plant to be built anywhere in the world.

In this article, Muireann Maguire examines the cultural construction of the trope of the engineer-inventor in Russia during the 1920s and 1930s, focusing on the changing representation of this archetype in three science fiction novels by Aleksei Tolstoi: Aelita (1922-23), Soiuzpiati (The Gang of Five, 1925), and Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (Engineer Garin's Death Ray, 1925-26). Tolstoi's fiction portrays engineers as misguided and self-centred at best and as amoral, megalomaniacal, and irredeemably un-Soviet at worst. This increasingly negative portrayal of the engineers in these novels, and in their later redactions and cinema versions, helped to prepare the way for the alienation of engineer and technical specialist within Soviet society, providing cultural justification for Iosif Stalin's show trials and purges of both categories in the 1930s. Tolstoi's alienation of the engineer-inventor, the traditional hero of early Soviet nauchnaia fantastika (science fiction), prefigured the occlusion of science fiction as a mainstream literary genre. As a trained engineer, former aristocrat, and returned émigré whose own status in Soviet Russia was deeply compromised, Tolstoi's literary demonization of engineers effectively purchased his own acceptance within the Stalinist literary hierarchy.

The discussions surveyed here took place between June 1932 and March 1933, mainly in the columns of Za industrializatsiiu, the official newspaper of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom). A number of contributors, headed by M. I. Birbraer, a prominent member of the newspaper staff, advocated major changes in the economic mechanism. Dozens of officials, managers, economists, and journalists from industry, trade, and finance participated. The wide-ranging debate was brought to an end on April 5, 1933, when G. K. Ordzhonikidze, Politburo member and People's Commissar for Heavy Industry, dismissed V. S. Bogushevskii, the editor of the newspaper, for “political mistakes.”

An examination of these discussions in their political and economic context helps our understanding of several significant aspects of the Soviet economic system of the early 1930s.

Lev Tolstoi, in his dunking about life, death, freedom, and immortality, drew significandy on the German philosophical tradition from Leibniz and Moses Mendelssohn to Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as Lina Steiner argues in this article. Herder, who tried to salvage rationalism by getting away from the mechanistic metaphysics of the French Enlightenment and reintroducing the teleological explanation of nature, was a particularly important influence on Tolstoi. Herder's view of life, including both individual life and the life of community, as organic Bildung underlay the artistic conception of War and Peace, Tolstoi's first major fictional narrative. Tolstoi continued to develop this organicist paradigm in his later sociopolitical, religious, and aesthietic writings.

Let Peary seek his Arctic goal;
His countrymen prefer a Pole
Less brumal and uncertain;
And Roe and Howells the prolix
Must bow to Henry Sienkiewicz,
Democratized by Curtin.
Anonymous, "Columbus Sienkiewicz,"
The Outlook, New York,
March 12, 1898

The subject of Henryk Sienkiewicz and America is hardly exhausted with the acknowledgment of the enormous popularity of Quo Vadis in the United States. Sienkiewicz himself visited America in 1876, in fact traveled extensively through the country and recorded his impressions at some length in his Listy z Ameryki (Letters from America), a large part of which was translated into English and published in 1959. Sienkiewicz's relations with Helena Modrzejewska (Modjeska) and her debut in the American theater at the time of his visit add to the interest of his sojourn in the United States. Another phase of Sienkiewicz's relations with this country embraces the fascinating career of his American translator, Jeremiah Curtin, whose name remains as intimately linked with translations from Polish literature, particularly the works of Sienkiewicz, as Constance Garnett's has been with English renditions of the Russian masters of the nineteenth century.

An assumption common to many modern political theorists is that the nation-state is the natural goal of national movements. But for the submerged peoples of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the formulation of the goal of independent statehood required a leap in ideological development from essentially cultural and social to overtly political nationalism. In this article, I am interested in the ideological leap taken by the Ukrainians, particularly in the role played by the young intelligentsia in the formulation of the goal of a nation-state. My argument has three stages: a narrative account of events, designed to correct misconceptions in the existing historiography and to show that the goal of independence was put forward in the context of a generational conflict within the radical intelligentsia; an examination of the opposing ideas advanced by young and old radicals; and an explanation of why the young radicals could formulate the demand for Ukrainian statehood while their senior contemporaries could not.

Ezra Pound once remarked that “the history of English poetic glory is a history of successful steals from the French.“ To a certain degree, the same can be said of Russian poetry, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, when the process of literary development paid little attention to national boundaries. The Acmeists, for example, owe many of their aesthetic and stylistic principles to French poets of at least three chronological periods: the medieval troubadours, the Parnassians, and, most obviously, the Symbolists. French influence did not cease with Baudelaire and Verlaine, however. The impact of the next generation of French poets was also felt in Russia, and the parallels between French Post-symbolism and Russian Acmeism are significant. Whereas Symbolism has long been acknowledged as a world-wide artistic phenomenon, the international scope of the movement which succeeded it has received little attention. In fact, Post-symbolism was also a movement of international proportions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, British and Russian poets looked to their contemporary French counterparts as a source of innovation and manifested their influence in two parallel independent movements — Anglo-American Imagism and Russian Acmeism. In exploring the transmission of French influence to Russia in the early twentieth century and the French sources of Acmeism, I hope to establish a basis for a comprehensive study of Post-symbolist poetry and for a more complete understanding of Acmeism.

It is difficult to think of any writer of any century who has displayed such a wide range of verbal talent as Vladimir Nabokov. His flashing prose has earned him an important place both in American and in Russian literature. Original prose and poetry, translations of prose and poetry, meticulous scholarly criticism and commentary, devastating literary polemic—everything seems within his range. But Nabokov’s chameleonic transformations from Russian into English and English into Russian are particularly fascinating to watch. He has translated (or helped translate) his own Russian novels, including Priglashenie na kazn’, Zashchita Luzhina, and Dar, into English; he has translated English works including Pnin, Speak, Memory, and, most recently, Lolita into Russian. The metamorphosis of Otchaianie into Despair is a special case, because while translating the novel Nabokov made certain revisions.

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has been engaged over the past several years in a project to collect and analyze information on the Soviet and East European field. Some of the results of the work to date are presented in this report to the profession.

The field of Soviet and East European studies is a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. Not until World War II was there any considerable interest in the region in the United States. At that time, however, the federal government found itself acutely short of specialists on the area and had to scrape a shallow academic barrel. The lack of expertise led to the establishment of new military and civilian training programs; and the changed international situation in the postwar period gave further impetus to the extension of academic programs.

The subject of this article is the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, one of several sensational Jewish ritual murder cases to unfold in central and eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing on a region far removed from Tiszaeszlár, the article underscores the rapidity with which antisemitic violence traversed Hungary in the early 1880s. In examining the causes, function, and impact of this violence, Robert Nemes demonstrates the centrality of the provinces for understanding the depth and dynamism of political antisemitism in Hungary. Nemes also argues that Tiszaeszlár acted as a formative political experience for many people in the provinces and explores the wider consequences of this event, both in the near and in the long term.