One does not have to accept the Marxist claim to a unity of theory and practice to see that, as far as modern Communism is concerned, there is a striking degree of correlation. This does not mean that Communist politics invariably follow Communist theory in all its aspects. Nor does it mean that many Communist theories have not obtained primarily as rationalizations of situations occurring outside, or even contrary to, any theoretical framework. It does mean, however, that generally speaking ideology provides a binding orientation for the direction of society, a view of both tactical and strategic goals and a guide to the thinking of at least the leadership.

Most historians consider the reign of Anna Ioannovna (1730-40) one of the saddest epochs in Russian history. It is the purpose of this article to examine the chief accusations levelled against Anna Ioannovna's government, with a view to determining to what extent they are justified.

The severe condemnation of Anna's era by two outstanding historians, Professors S. F. Platonov and V. O. Kljuchevskij, is typical for the views generally held of her reign.

The outstanding role of the intellectual in modern Russian history is beyond dispute. Among non-Communist historians there is a well-established consensus concerning the nature of the Russian intelligentsia and the distinctive part it played in bringing on the revolution. The nineteenth-century Russian intellectual was detached from practical affairs, committed to some abstract doctrine, and morally alienated by autocracy and class privilege. This reaction resulted from the cultural precociousness of Russia's westernized upper class, as contrasted with the frustrating backwardness of the government and the economy. Educated and sensitive Russians had nowhere to turn except to theory.

The cultural cleavage between this theorizing elite and the toiling masses has left traces even today—for example, in the official classification of the Soviet population into workers, peasants, and “toiling intelligentsia,” and in the remarkable prestige enjoyed by academic pursuits in Russia.

The American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 is often cited today as an example of providential intervention in behalf of America's national security. Commentators shudder at the thought of Soviet air bases in what was once Russian America and praise the near miraculous foresight of Secretary of State William Seward.

Comprising as it does the only real estate transaction ever completed by Russia and America, Seward's annexation of Alaska properly holds a rather unique place in the diplomatic annals of both countries. The tendency of textbook writers to over-dramatize the role of Providence and to imply that Seward alone saw the value of Russian America is, however, both mistaken and unfortunate.

Wages Provide the Soviet retail employee with the direct incentive to work. There are, however, many things which money alone cannot buy. Apart from his direct monetary earnings, the Soviet worker may find that what he is able to get out of life depends to an equally large extent upon where he works, how he works and what is thought of him as a citizen, as well as an employee, by the Party, the labor union, the management, and other active arms of official government policy.

Studies of Russian culture in the eighteenth century concentrate on the era of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, with some attention paid to the reign of Elizabeth. They deal only scantily with the reign of Anna Ioannovna, except to point out the dismal aspects of this period of German misrule. A closer examination, however, reveals that during Anna's reign, separated by five years from that of Peter the Great, the Westernization of Russian culture not only continued but in some areas assumed new forms and new directions.

In this article, I identify the Christian “hajj” to Jerusalem as an important Ottoman sociocultural phenomenon. I argue that by the nineteenth century the Balkan Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire had restructured and reinterpreted their Holy Land pilgrimages to mirror the Muslim hajj to Mecca. As a result, the ritual trip to Jerusalem was transformed into a mechanism for upward social mobility and communal empowerment. By exploring the structural and functional similarities between the Muslim and the Christian hajj, this article contributes to studies of Muslim-Christian interactions outside “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. It also reveals striking distinctions between the Balkan Christian hajjis and the Russian palomniki, calling into question the influential scholarly assumption of Eastern Orthodox practices' homogeneity, an assumption that stands largely uncontested in the field of Slavic studies.

The Russian Old Believer and sectarian movement, as it appears in history, can be thought of, in anthropological terms, as a nativistic movement: that is, a movement of resistance to outside (in this case Western) cultural influence, and a reaffirmation and renewal of the native culture. In this sense, the movement comprised Old Believers, with or without priests, and an assemblage of sects of indigenous origin—Dukhobors, Subbotniki, Molokans, Skoptsy, and others. During the first period of its existence, the Old Believer and sectarian movement, besides being a nativistic movement, was at the same time a focus of resistance to the regime, as any form of religious dissidence must be under an essentially theocratic state.

Departing from the familiar scholarly focus on the ideological content of works by intelligentsia forerunners, this article examines the record of everyday life in their private and public writing. Konstantine Klioutch kine argues that their obsessive focus on ordinary experience indicated that articulating mundane desires was as important to the two writers as expressing progressive views. As professional journalists, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov organized their experience primarily by way of writing. Accordingly, the article explores rhetorical procedures accommodating both ideology and desire in their influential account of themselves as prototypical new men.

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

During the K'ang-hsi (1662-1722) and Yung-cheng (1723-35) periods, Russia was the only foreign country with which China maintained treaty relations, the only “Western” state to which China sent diplomatic missions, and the only foreign power granted religious, commercial, and educational privileges in Peking. These were most unusual phenomena in Chinese foreign relations in view of China's claim to universal overlordship. As the Celestial Empire and the Middle Kingdom, China normally maintained no treaty relations with other states, sent no diplomatic missions abroad, and allowed no foreign country to keep permanent establishments in the capital city of Peking. It may therefore be asked, what differentiated Russia from the other foreign states in Chinese eyes and what prompted the Chinese to accord Russia preferential treatment?

Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are five in number, and four of them (“The Shot,” “The Blizzard,” “The Stationmaster,” and “The Lady-Peasant“) belong to the same literary species. The narrative features binding this quartet of stories together are, in the main, conventional. Each relates—among other things—the story of a young man who, having won the affections of a beautiful woman, overcomes some obstacle (or series of obstacles) which threatens their union, thereby paving the way to, or consolidating, a mariage d'amour at the end of the tale. All of which is to say that embedded in each is one of the oldest of all plots, the “successful courtship.“

In this close analysis of Aleksandr Sokurov's 2002 film Russkii kovcheg (Russian ark), Tim Harte explores the interplay between the medium of painting and cinema in this unprecedented ninety-minute single-shot film set in the grand halls and galleries of the Hermitage Museum. As Harte argues, the film's unique premise and setting allow Sokurov to convey how the museum, its art and history, and subsequently cinema can affirm a nation's culture, transporting die past ever so evocatively into the present in order to sustain culture's vitality. Throughout Sokurov's ninety-minute single-shot fusion of Western art and Russian history, a continual emphasis on the image of the frame prevails, with the frame constituting an important artistic and metaphysical threshold for the filmmaker. Constandy moving through the ubiquitous frames, Sokurov establishes his own cinematic rendering of culture's eternal essence.

Following the devastation of World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) called on all patriotic youth to join volunteer labor brigades and to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure. Party propaganda for the brigades emphasized not only their economic function but also their role in nurturing a generation of people with new values, beliefs and standards of behavior.

Sometime between 1533 and 1536, a certain Ivan laganov, writing from prison, addressed a petition to the child ruler Ivan IV in which he suggested that his release would be in the interests of state security. laganov apparently had enjoyed a successful career as a political informer under Ivan’s father, and after the death of Vasilii III had continued to serve his new sovereign in the same manner. On his last mission, he explained, he had reported to Ivan’s boyars as ordered, informing them of the “dangerous talk” he had overheard: “At that time, Sire, I could not plug my ears with pitch; what I heard, Sire, I reported, in the way in which I served and reported to thy father.” As a result, laganov now found himself in fetters, tortured “in the manner of evil traitors and brigands,” and deprived of food and drink.

In hope it began; in perplexity it ended. The twenty-three-year presence of the American Young Men’s Christian Association in Russia that began in 1900 and reached a peak between 1917 and 1920, when more than 440 YMCA staffers served in that country and the Association spent almost eight million dollars for its operation, was over in 1923. In fact, the Association was required to curtail certain of its activities between 1917 and 1920 by both the conservative Kolchak movement in Siberia and the radical Bolshevik government, and eventually, like other groups, it was forced out.

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

On March 27, 1941 a coup d'état in Belgrade overthrew the Yugoslav government which only two days previously had signed the Tripartite Pact in Vienna. In its place was installed a new government headed by General Simović, chief of the Air Staff, while the regent, Prince Paul, was replaced by the young King Peter II. It was widely expected that the Simović government would renounce the Pact and align itself firmly with Britain against Germany. Although this expectation was to be disappointed, the anti-German and pro-British intent of the coup was accepted by both Churchill and Hitler. Churchill declared that the Yugoslav nation had “found its soul,” and in his postwar memoirs described the coup as “one tangible result of our desperate efforts to form an Allied front in the Balkans and prevent all falling piecemeal into Hitler’s power.” Hitler, convinced that Britain had “pulled the strings,” ordered the Yugoslav invasion for April 6.

From recurring characters to the retelling of stories, repetition plays a central role in Varlam Shalamov's Kolymskie rasskazy (Kolyma Tales). Sarah J. Young examines how repetition functions in Shalamov's collections of short stories as an indicator of trauma, by foregrounding the tensions created by the erosion of identity in the labor camp and its connection to the gulag survivor/narrator's problematic relationship to memory. At the same time, repetition also becomes a means of drawing the uncomprehending reader into the text to act as witness to that trauma. Comparing Shalamov's mode of testimony to Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the nonsurvivor as the true witness to Auschwitz, drawn from Primo Levi's conception, Young argues that Shalamov's stories bear witness to the trauma of Kolyma and to those who did not survive it, not through a transformation of the writer, but through a reciprocity between writer and reader.

“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”