Language planning often aims to fix the statuses, roles, and functions of languages, and hence the choices among languages that speakers and writers make. This has been called “language status planning.” A second object of language policy, however, is the content and structure of languages themselves: vocabularies, sound systems, word structures, sentence structures, writing systems, and stylistic repertoires. Intervention of this kind is “language corpus planning.” The Soviet distinction between the “functional development“ of a language and its “internal development” or “enrichment” is parallel. Soviet language policies deal both with status problems (for example, how long and how widely should language X be used?) and with corpus problems (for example, how should language X be developed and regulated?). The Soviet Turkic languages exhibit these issues with particular complexity because of their number, their close interrelations, their similarity to a non-socialist country's language (Turkish), their dissimilarity to Russian, their pre-Soviet Arabic (if any) alphabets, and their traditions of borrowing from Arabic and Persian, associated culturally with Islam and perceived backwardness.

While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

This article examines the case against the Polish resistance fighter August Emil Fieldorf and his subsequent trial. Judicial officials within, or working intimately with, the Soviet secret police made decisions affecting many lives in Poland in 1944-1956. A consideration of the trial proceedings and the backgrounds of selected judicial officials provide a better understanding of the nature of Stalinist justice. Key issues underpinning the trial, related to political contexts, legal maneuverings, and broader considerations surrounding the defendant through the eyes of his persecutors, shed light on the hidden mechanism of Stalinist justice in operation and what constitutes a judicial crime. While its focus is Fieldorf, this article argues that the Polish case study can be instructive in analyzing the ways in which the law was used as a political weapon in other states and regions with similar experiences of totalitarian rule.

This article examines the imperial Russian army's attempt to formulate a comprehensive nationalities policy for its officer corps after 1905. The army sought to establish service quotas for each nationality according to its percentage of the empire's population. The professed goal of this policy was the preservation of the numerical, and thus cultural, predominance of Orthodox, ethnic Russian officers. Yet this attempt to fashion an officer corps both “imperial” and “Russian” exposed competing paradigms of service, loyalty, and identity among tsarist officers, raising broader questions about the relationship between army, state, and empire. Thus concerns of nationality and nationalism affected the officer corps more deeply than has been assumed. Gregory Vitarbo's work provides new insights into the intersection of military reform, nationality policy, and imperial ideology in the late Russian empire, while further illustrating suggestive linkages with contemporary pan-European trends concerning military practices, nationality politics, and cultural ferment.

The notion of electoral authoritarianism emerged in the post-cold war world to refer to authoritarian systems that used seemingly democratic electoral means to stabilize non-democratic systems. This was achieved through the production of massive electoral majorities for the ruling party. However an element of uncertainty remains with such elections in that the ruling party may be either defeated or suffer a significant electoral rebuff. Such events are usually seen in terms of the loss of voter support for the party, but as the Russian case shows, this may be better seen as evidence of a basic malfunction of the electoral authoritarian mechanism itself.

One of the most interesting and seminal figures in Soviet historiography is the historian M. N. Pokrovsky, whose influence has continued to be felt up to the present day. He was active in the 1917 Revolution in Russia, and in political and institutional developments during the first decade and a half of Soviet rule. He became what may be euphemistically called the "dean" of Marxist historians, yet after his death on April 10, 1932, he was ritually accused of being responsible for most of the "shortcomings" of Soviet historiography. Among the many accusations leveled against Pokrovsky the following have appeared with considerable regularity: (1) Because he was "dictator" of the historical front from 1928 to 1932, his interpretations of history were the "official" interpretations of that time and consequently had to be "reflected" by other Soviet historians.

“Mne nenadobno puteshestvovať. la puteshestvuiu v svoem voobrazhenii,” said Aleksandr Pushkin, not quite ingenuously, toward the end of his life. Pushkin’s chronic desire for travel had so often been frustrated or deflected that his loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s to the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia, and Odessa later came to represent, faute de mieux, the peripatetic freedom of his youth. When in 1829 Pushkin and Petr A. Viazemskii were refused permission to travel to Paris, Pushkin embarked instead on the illicit trip south that would become the basis for his literary “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” six years later. In 1836, with a rueful backward glance at the orientalist fashion that he himself had helped to launch in Russian poetry, Pushkin wrote, “Vinovat: ia by otdal vse, chto bylo pisano u nas v podrazhanie l.(ordu) Bai(ronu), za sleduiushchie nezadumchivye i ne-vostorzhennye stikhi, v kotorykh poet zastavliaet geroia svoego vosklitsať druz’iam: Druz’ia! Sestritsy! ia v Parizhe! Ia nachal zhit’, a nedyshať!” (12:93). Perhaps the exuberant first words of an unfinished drama, “Cherez nedeliu budy v Parizhe nepremenno” represent a vestige of that never-to-be-realized desire (7:251-253). In short, if the south served as an escape valve for dreams of uninhibited motion and adventure, it was also a surrogate, marking the boundaries rather than the fulfillment of that freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the theme of the seductive border crossing is central to the “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” (8:1, 463):

Much valuable information on the dynamics of Poland's political life between the world wars is still to be uncovered in the records of national elections. Of particular interest are the contests of 1919, 1922, and 1928, since in all of these elections political parties were still allowed to participate directly (as they were not in 1935 and 1938), and governmental restraint and manipulation were not yet so massive as to cast doubt on the entire result (as in 1930).

Hungary was a feudal monarchy at the beginning of 1848 and was part of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Although Hungarian publicists continually emphasized that the country could look back to nearly a thousand years of statehood and national existence, the foreign relations and the fiscal and military affairs of Hungary were directed almost exclusively from Vienna. Internally the country was governed by the native nobility, which constituted about 5 percent of a population of approximately fifteen million. The nobility exercised its power through the Diet and elective county assemblies. Nobles alone had the right to vote. Until 1844 they alone held public office, and most of them paid no taxes. The immense majority—the peasantry—lived in feudal bondage. The taxes of the serfs maintained the state, and their dues and labor services supported the nobility.

In the economic literature one finds a plethora of propositions about the macro-economic determinants of the distribution of labor incomes. One of the theories is that as the level of economic development rises, labor incomes are bound to become more equalized. Another view is that the larger the nation, the greater will be the separation of labor markets and the greater the inequality of labor income. Unfortunately there is relatively little speculation in the West about the impact of the economic system on the distribution of labor incomes, and those propositions that can be found are quite contradictory. Some have argued that labor incomes should become more equal under socialism because of the more equal distribution of education and because the government is able to reduce the power of noncompeting labor groups to raise their incomes far above those of the average workers. Others have suggested that the government's power to manipulate wages between industrial sectors and branches in order to attract workers to priority sectors could lead to greater inequalities in labor incomes. Since all of these arguments are based on what a socialist government “could” or “should” do, rather than what they actually are doing, their validity can be established only through empirical investigation.

During the quarter century from 1803 to 1828, the Russian imperial government followed an educational policy which ranged from practical to classical, democratic to class-oriented, progressive to conservative. The decrees, rescripts, and regulations may have been contradictory, but they are simply pieces of a puzzle which, in the end, provide the outline of a rather clear picture. This picture, as we shall see in more detail later, shows a movement, in the most elementary terms, from functional to classical, from open to restricted, from modern to traditional. In all respects, the law of 1828 opposed those of 1803 and 1804, but the line of march between the two points was straight and constant.

Another puzzle, however, is more difficult to solve: why did Russian educational policy follow this particular trend ? Among the possible solutions to this question, the activities of Count Joseph Marie de Maistre deserve more study. Maistre is remembered today as a theocratic political philosopher with an eloquent pen, but during his term in Russia (1803-17), as the diplomatic representative of the Sardinian king, he deeply involved himself in the internal questions facing the Russian government. Education particularly interested Maistre, and he turned his attention to this topic from June of 1810 until the end of the following year. During this eighteen-month period, he wrote four works dealing with the question of education in Russia, hoping to influence policy and bring about specific changes.

Personal consumption is usually viewed as the major factor determining the standard of living of a population. Furthermore, to borrow Janet Chapman's phrase, it is “one of the grand criteria on which the performance of [an] economy will be judged.” To facilitate such an evaluation of East European economies, which have been operating to the present on the principles of Soviet-type planning, we have assembled in this paper the results of a statistical investigation of personal consumption in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Following the principle that context and comparison alone bring out meaning, we have selected those aspects that lend themselves most naturally to international confrontation: rates of growth and absolute levels of per capita consumption, changes in the relative share of personal consumption in total output, and changes in the structure of consumption by major categories.