The insurrection on February 27, 1917, totally annihilated the tsarist police system in Petrograd, the most important link tying the citizens to the government, thus throwing the capital into a state of anarchy. Quickly lawlessness crept into the streets, as drunken soldiers looted wine cellars to get even more drunk and criminals released from prisons easily acquired weapons. To the sober-minded, it was apparent that this intolerable disorder had to be stopped as quickly as possible. Yet, for the more committed revolutionaries, the insurrection was not yet finished; even on February 28 machine-gun shots were fired from rooftops and upper-floor windows of tall buildings—actions, people firmly believed, taken by the remnants of Protopopov's police or the counter-revolutionary officers. Whether for the restoration of law and order or for the defense of the revolution, Petrograd urgently needed an organized police force. Indeed, the future course of the revolution to a large extent depended on how the new police force would be organized. If a group which regarded the restoration of law and order as the most urgent task established an efficient police power in the streets, it would mean that the revolutionary process that had been set in motion would be halted. On the other hand, if the revolutionaries succeeded in arming the masses of insurgents for the defense of the revolution, that would surely mean the further intensification of the revolutionary process. An analysis of the formation of the militias in the February Revolution is, therefore, integrally related to the problem of power.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).

With the rise of ultranationalist organizations throughout Europe, the issue of attitudes and orientations held toward designated "out-groups" has become a critical concern of anxious observers. In Russia the strength registered by Vladimir Zhirinovskii's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party during the parliamentary elections of 1993 has been interpreted as a sign of intolerance among the Russian populace. In fact, the success of candidates associated with the Liberal Democratic Party was not only based upon appeals to strengthen the Russian nation against perceived enemies, but also upon promises of a return to price stability and upon Zhirinovskii's anti-establishment, populist program. Nonetheless, Zhirinovskii's success in the 1991 presidential elections (he attracted 7.8% of the electorate) does serve to reaffirm the importance of tracking how attitudes toward groups that have often been targeted as scapegoats in times of social or economic upheaval have evolved in the late Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period. Two major questions concern us here: first, how pervasive among Russians and Ukrainians are perceptions of significant "social distance" between themselves and designated out-groups, most notably the Jewish population; and second, to what extent do these perceptions of distance form part of a cohesive ideology of ultranationalism? Understanding the basis of sentiments toward Jewish populations is particularly important for interpreting the workings of the complex mosaic of the post-Soviet political culture.

The 1860s witnessed an important but somewhat neglected stage in the evolution of intelligentsia attitudes toward the peasantry and other lower strata of society. It is best represented by writers who devoted themselves to portrayals of the narod, urban and rural, and who were known collectively (although they were by no means a cohesive group) as the raznochintsy writers of the sixties. They included F. M. Reshetnikov, N. V. Uspensky, N. G. Pomialovsky, A. I. Levitov, N. A. Kushchevsky, and M. A. Voronov. The biographies of these men are remarkably similar. They were all from uneducated families of the lower classes. Caught up in the ferment of the sixties which penetrated even to the most backward and obscure areas of Russia (from which most of them came), they made their way to St. Petersburg, seeking to free themselves from the age-old restrictions which Russian society had imposed on people of their social origins.

The comic figure of the yokel has undergone a resurgence in the past decade, culminating in Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. The yokel, whose predictable humor is based on his aggressive backwardness and persistent malapropisms, draws attention to the “foreignness” with which multiculturalism is uncomfortable, while also highlighting the economic and cultural dislocation of globalization. Cohen builds on the longstanding stereotypes about Jews and Gypsies (Roma), creating a persona who resembles the “vermin” of Nazi propaganda and manages to elicit racist responses from his unwitting audience. Borat functions within a fictional framework of racism and ethnic hostility, bringing to light barely concealed discomforts about border-crossings, cosmopolitanism, and global cultures.

One of the dilemmas of revolutionary regimes is the difficulty they experience in creating new structures of rule out of resources inherited from the ancien regime. In Russia, the Bolsheviks came to power dedicated to building a socialist society and creating new institutions whose forms were predicated on an unfolding theory of how the transition to socialism would occur. Such a method of shaping institutions was deductive and synoptic, standing in sharp contrast to the evolutionary adaptation of old institutions to new functions. One may wonder how free revolutionary regimes in fact are to construct institutions a novo. The early Bolshevik attempt to establish “control” structures, that is, institutions and procedures for the external auditing and monitoring of economic and other public organizations, is a case in point. Of interest are the extent to which the Bolsheviks were successful in creating effective control bodies and the reasons behind their success or failure.

Winning elections is so vital for Russian leaders that competing viewpoints on national television news channels have been scotched, together with the channels that broadcast them. This study examines the other side of the screen: how participants in focus groups in four Russian cities process national channels' treatments of an important regional electoral campaign. The study was conducted during the last period in which viewpoint diversity was still available via TV-6. Unlike findings about other news stories, election stories appear to have little connection to viewers' experiences and values and deprive them of using familiar heuristics to make sense of the stories. For the public, the election story is a genre apart, framed by the same confusing template no matter what the office or region. Even TV-6, soon to be shuttered, broadcast its combative message using that template, thus extinguishing any opportunity for identifying genuine diversity and leaving the audience unable to distinguish between state and private channels, something they easily did for other types of stories. Election stories only cue other election stories. It is mainly younger, "post-Soviet" participants who bring an alternative frame to watching: norms, acquired through their education, by which election stories in a democracy ought to be constructed.

Nikita Khrushchev's proposal to give parents of non-Russian children the choice of whether to send their children to a school with education in their own tongue, or to a Russian school, was first advanced at the end of 1958. It immediately provoked a furious response from leaders of the non-Russian republics of the multi-national Soviet Union, and was an issue contributing to political purges in Azerbaijan and Latvia in 1959. In this article, Jeremy Smith uses documents from archives in four Soviet republics to analyze the responses from the republics. Smith shows that republic leaders were mostly agreed on an alternative solution to the question of language of instruction, and pursued different strategies both to oppose the introduction of the reform and to obstruct its implementation once it was passed. The episode also underlines the uncertainty involved in center-periphery relations in the USSR.

I would like to thank the Slavic Review, and its fair-minded editor, Sidney Monas, for allowing me to break the silence on certain taboo themes and respond to critics—civilities practiced mostly in the breach in the societies we study. Due to space limitations, I shall respond fully to Robert Hayden, who raises many issues, apart from the problem of definition, and trust that in the process I may encompass also Matt Oja's thoughtful remarks. Hayden's critique of my article on Yugoslav camp literature is based on two premises, which he fails to prove: that camp literature is not well defined and hence includes a good deal of official writings, or, alternatively, that it lacks internal consistency; and that the very concept of camp literature “misrepresents the political and intellectual currents in the country.” Much of his commentary is an ad hominem argument. Curiously, much of it, even if inadvertently, substantiates my central thesis: Yugoslav prison and camp literature represents a catalyst in the current processes of liberalization, democratization, and humanization in both politics and culture in post-Tito Yugoslavia.