The artist Kazimir Malevich once called Vladimir Maiakovskii's lyric “Iz ulitsy v ulitsu” the best example of “versified cubism.“ Although Maiakovskii's early poetry has often been linked to developments in the pictorial arts, the precise nature of this connection requires more detailed examination. Investigation of the role of the visual arts in a literary interpretation appears exceptionally intriguing considering that Malevich, both a contemporary of Maiakovskii and a painter of high caliber, paid special tribute to this poem in painterly terms.

I am so completely in agreement with the main points of Victor Erlich's diagnosis—particularly with the lucidly formulated conclusions in the last few pages—that I shall confine myself to the one issue on which I dissent from his judgment—namely, his opinion of Solzhenitsyn.

A few words to begin with about the general approach of Western observers to Soviet literature. Professor Erlich rightly dwells on the question of the relationship between politics and literature, and I would like to reinforce his sagacious plea for the maintenance of a "viable balance between literary and political considerations."

One of the greatest failures of Communist systems everywhere has been in agricultural productivity. In the Soviet Union some thirty-five years of collectivized agriculture have brought but modest increases in yields and gross production of many crops and livestock; growth of agricultural output per capita since even before the Revolution has been even less impressive. Among the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, although collectivization is much more recent, the pattern has been much the same; yields remain low, and gross production as well as per capita increases has been small.

Although some areas of Eastern Europe and large parts of the USSR can be classified as physically marginal for agriculture, the low levels of agricultural productivity are primarily attributable to defective organization and operation. There have been years when crop failure in this or that area was the direct result of drought, flood, or other natural cause, but these catastrophes cannot be blamed for the low yields which characterize the longer run. The major obstacles to production gains lie within the collectivized system.

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians’ language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.

The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation in content. As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which “routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…” Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of “two interdependent but opposed codes,” one for “the ritualized world of public life” and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

Recent memoirs published in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and Podgorica offer glimpses into how the principals would like their roles in the events connected with the Yugoslav breakup and war to be remembered. The most indispensable of the ten memoirs under review are those by Janez Drnovšek and Janez Janša, who have differing perspectives on developments in Slovenia between 1988 and 1991; by Martin Špegelj, who outlines in detail his argument that Croatia should have laid siege to the Yugoslav Army barracks much earlier than was done; and by Raif Dizdarević, who provides interesting details on how Serbian leader Slobodan Milosević subverted the Yugoslav federation and put his protégés in charge of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Vojvodina. Sefer Halilović, Branko Mamula, and Špegelj challenge observers' usual conceptions of events, while Alija Izetbegović, Davorin Rudolf, and Zdravko Tomac offer more standard accounts. Hrvoje Šarinić provides details of his secret conversations with Milošević and other figures.

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.

Business trainings are not a post-Soviet phenomenon but developed within the Soviet Union beginning in the mid-1970s. The social-psychological training was an interactive method of cultivating communication skills that drew on western methodologies but adapted them to Soviet conditions. It is now considered one of the key sites for the birth of a new practical psychology that encompassed psychotherapy in the late socialist period. While often framed as a scientific intervention into individual communication skills, trainings acquired additional meanings in the Soviet context. For many trainers, transforming language became a way of transforming Soviet social relations without targeting the entire Soviet system. Trainings created a space for reforming the impersonal, distanced registers of “official” Soviet life and imbuing them with more “human” attention to people's emotions, intentions, and individuality.

In the eighteenth-century, European rulers embraced a common policy of enlightened centralism aimed at undermining the prerogatives of local self-government, a trend that even reached the decentralized Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this article, Curtis G. Murphy investigates an example of an Enlightenment centralist policy that failed. A new reformist king sought to convert the burghers' right to produce alcohol, known as propinacja, into a state-controlled monopoly, but the effort produced only chaos and the diminishment of self-government. Contrary to the center's complaint that insufficient force undermined a beneficial effort, Murphy argues that the law failed because the priorities of the locals did not align with the government's goals and the habits of selfgovernment clashed with the bureaucratic methods of enlightened centralism. Historians of Poland have often praised the centralizing reforms of the late-eighteenth century, but the case of the propinacja law questions whether such efforts justified the costs of destroying self-government in the towns.

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel'nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov's first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state's firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost’ to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen“ nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

The first half of the twentieth century in Russia has been characterized by a sharp decline in the influence of religion. At the same time there has been an exceptionally rapid growth of industrialization and urbanization. The concomitance of these two processes favors the conclusion that urbanization has been, if not the exclusive, at least the major cause of religious decline. Relative to the majority of countries showing the same concomitance of processes, no serious doubt arises. The relationship between urbanization and decline of religion may be well understood, and no other major factor working in the same direction seems to be present. But, relative to Russia, the situation is different. Since the days of the Communist revolution, there has been another major force working in the same direction as urbanization, that is the systematic antireligious activity of the Government. The decline of religion in Russia, consequently, may be imputed to two concomitant causes.

Works that deal with Russian social history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries use the word raznochinets, raznochintsy in several different meanings, which are seldom sharply defined. As a historiographic concept it was given wide circulation by Mikhailovsky and by the populist historians of the intelligentsia who followed his usage, and by Marxist social historians, notably by Lenin. Their usage, however, often obscured the precise meanings the term had had in earlier tsarist legal and educational usage.

From the Dawn of history all Slavic peoples and in general the peoples of Eastern Europe have suffered more than any others from aggressive imperialism. It was against them that the notorious Drang nach Osten of the Germans was directed, particularly dangerous when backed by one of the successive Reichs. It was Eastern Europe with its predominantly Slavic populations which always was the first and sometimes the only victim of a long series of Asiatic invasions through the open gate between the Urals and the Caucasus. And though the Ottoman Turks at the height of their power reached as far as German and even Italian borderlands, they conquered exclusively and threatened chiefly Slavic and East European countries. Finally, these same countries used to be the first affected when Venice or Sweden played the part of great powers.

When the economic reform (NEM) was introduced in Hungary in early 1968, it was announced that political reforms aiming at the "democratization of the socialist system" would also be made. The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) and the government stated that economic decentralization would be accompanied by the "strengthening of socialist democracy and the broadening of the participation of the masses in political activities." Several measures were taken to promote this objective through discussion and debate–but not through dissent or decision-making. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which seriously affected the entire East European bloc, Hungary's move toward democratization became less pronounced and the government's policy definitely more cautious both in words and deeds. In this study I attempt to analyze the meaning and scope of the political changes that took place in Hungary in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia, giving special attention to the concept of democracy, the organization of the party and government, the position of the mass organizations, and the meaning of the increasing group conflicts.

In this article, Dorothy Barenscott examines die dynamic interplay between modern urban development and world exhibition in the social imaginary of nation and empire, suggesting how Hungary's identity as imperial partner with Austria was increasingly tied to the multisensory experience of, and participation in, the growth of Budapest as the empire's second capital during preparations for Budapest's 1896 Millennial Exhibition. Whether a real or only perceived “world's fair,” this exhibition provided the perfect vehicle to further the goal of modern urban expansion and define what it would mean to be “Hungarian” to an international as well as a regional public. Guided by the Millennial Exhibition, a constellation of interconnected building projects arose within the urban fabric of Budapest: the construction and refinement of Andrássy Avenue, the Hungarian Parliament building, and Budapest's underground subway.

When Lev Tolstoi emerged as a religious teacher in the 1880s, taking a sharply polemical stance against the Orthodox faith, the leadership of the Russian church groped for ways and means to stem the spread of the pernicious new heresy among the Russian public. The most ambitious but also the most disastrous attempt was made in 1901 when the synod promulgated an official pronouncement (poslanie) against him. This document, which created a worldwide scandal, was undertaken by the church itself and not, as has been widely assumed, at the instigation of the state authorities. In its poslanie the synod declared that Tolstoi could not receive an Orthodox burial unless he repented. This strategy badly backfired, since Tolstoi under no circumstances wanted such a burial and therefore made no move toward repentance. At the same time many Russians, including fervent believers, felt that the church itself with its requiem ban had sinned against the Christian injunction of all-embracing love. When Tolstoi died in 1910 and the burial issue became acute, the synod strenuously, but unsuccessfully, searched for a way out of its predicament.

The student-led Russian working-class movement of the early 1870s, only lightly studied to date, is intimately connected with the beginnings of the famous “to the people” movement of 1874. The main purpose of this essay is to explore this connection. When radical students in the cities experienced unexpected limitations on their efforts to organize city workers, they reformulated their plan and eventually decided that direct contact with the peasantry was possible. Thus the populism of the movement “to the people,” generally considered a student phenomenon inspired by books alone, may in fact have been the result of practical work among city workers, characterized by much trial and error.

At the end of Dr. Zhivago, Zhivago's old friends sit overlooking Moscow and read together a collection of his writings, compiled through the efforts of his devoted and somewhat mysterious half-brother. For all the dark times depicted in the novel, it ends with a dual affirmation of the power of art and of the spirit to survive. Zhivago's writings endure not only by virtue of having been created and not only in the minds of those who know them, but on paper as well. In this respect Boris Pasternak's novel offers an intriguing contrast to one completed in a bleaker period, The Master and Margarita. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel the problem of preserving the protagonist's writing and conveying it to readers is neither as simple nor as successfully resolved, despite intervention of a more mysterious, even supernatural, sort.