Recent interpretations of the first Five-Year Plan have taken two main approaches. One has emphasized the exploitation of workers and peasants by the party elite throughout the years of the first two Five-Year Plans. In explaining the evolution of labor policies and laws that bound the workers to jobs, Robert Conquest and Solomon Schwarz emphasize the personal responsibility of Stalin, who demanded rapid expansion of industrialization and brooked no questioning of his views. To obey him and to protect their political futures, his officials used tough policies designed to produce quick, visible results. Both authors describe a linear development of ever harsher proscriptions and penalties, and they attribute greater coherence to the process and greater effectiveness to the laws than actually existed. Both see the process from the viewpoint of the capital, disregard the competing ideas among the leaders, and neglect the local level where policies had to be executed and were often changed or ignored.

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's book The Beaten Track (1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying about turisty and turizm as components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared “crowds” of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.

Demons takes an infamous real-life Moscow event (the “Nechaev Affair“) and moves it to a nameless provincial city. What can this geographic shift tell us about both Fedor Dostoevskii's novel and the particular vision of Russian geographic space that informs it? Anne Lounsbery argues that Demons’ representation of the provinces responds to a certain imaginary geography of Russia, one that can locate meaning only in a center. The ideological implications of this geography are played out in Dostoevskii's representation of the railroad as a sinister and ever-widening network extending across a blank landscape. The interlocking rail lines “covering Russia like a spider web” reflect the provincial revolutionaries’ paranoid political vision as well as their inability to see themselves as anything but tiny points on this network, insignificant without the web's power to connect them to a hub of meaning. Lounsbery relates Dostoevskii's geographic vision to patterns that structure the representation of Russian space in works by many nineteenth-century writers, including Nikolai Gogol', Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Anton Chekhov.

This article uses the career of Theodor Kohn (1845-1915), archbishop of Olmütz/Olomouc between 1892 and 1904, to examine various trends in the last decades of the Habsburg empire: the burgeoning Czech-German conflict, the brewing social crisis within the Catholic Church, the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and the countervailing force of Jewish national pride. Drawing on a wide range of literary, publicist, and archival sources, Michael L. Miller shows how Archbishop Kohn's Jewish ancestry served as a lightening rod for various disenfranchised, disillusioned, and disheartened groups in the Bohemian Lands of the Habsburg empire. Even Jews latched onto this “Jewish archbishop,” first as a symbol of “racial aptitude,“ then as a cautionary tale about the futility of assimilation. Kohn himself endowed his quintessentially “Jewish” name with Christian significance, viewing it as the source of his suffering—albeit a suffering that he cherished as the cross he had to bear.

At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks appeared to enjoy considerable social support. They were perceived as the proponents of soviet power; support for the Bolshevik party meant support for soviet power. The majority of workers (especially those in large industrial centers) identified with the Bolsheviks because they promoted greater workers’ control at the workplace. The Bolsheviks were perceived as uncompromising defenders of workers’ interests. For the peasants, the Bolsheviks represented a party of black repartition, that is a party that encouraged peasant land seizures. For the soldiers, the Bolsheviks were a party that promised to stop the war. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks exemplified direct rule from below, the rule of Soviets. All of these diverse constituencies converged in their support for the Bolshevik party at the end of 1917, each for a different reason.

A single witty remark delivered by Roman Jakobson at the expense of Maiakovskii's last, civic-minded poems may still be cited as a measure of prevailing Western attitudes toward the postrevolutionary bard of Russian Bolshevism: “Very good, but not as good as Mayakovsky.” Certainly, many Western appreciators of Russia's most Soviet, major poet have tuned out large portions of Maiakovskii's music. In that long oscillation between lyric and civic impulses that characterized Maiakovskii's poetic career, Western monitors have shown remarkably little interest in or patience with the extensive stretches of public poetry and narrative verse. This bias of the Western ear has not gone unnoticed. One Soviet commentator has responded with a witticism of his own: “It's a hopeless business — this attempt to tear apart his lyrics into two portions, into what is 'soul' and what is 'Soviet.'” Still, selective listening is not the monopoly of Western criticism alone. Soviet scholarship on Maiakovskii is as embarrassed by the irrepressible singer of a larger-than-life self as Western exegesis is by the propagandist who so proudly declaims Soviet hero-songs. Given Maiakovskii's extravagant temperament and his odd combinations of poetical and political revolutionism, it is probably inevitable that different portions of his work will be discriminated against by different readers for being “not as good as Mayakovsky.” But literary criticism has the task of overcoming tone-deafness to both the political resonances of his lyric verse and the poetic reverberations of his most partisan songs.

Steven Rosefielde’s article has two objectives: first, to display the major features and the “revolutionary implications” for Soviet economic history of evidence provided in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; second, to devise “a coherent and consistent countertheory to the prevailing interpretation of Soviet industrialization.” In pursuit of these objectives, he initiates “a complete reconsideration of the causes and consequences of the First Five-Year Plan.”

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that “the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes.” It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal “wagon-tongue” during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.

Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the "Revolution from Above." Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.' The history of the massive automotive complex at Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in microcosm the many problems that often bedeviled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed up in Moscow.

The Soviet military appears to be losing its privileged position within the Soviet national security apparatus. As long as Gorbachev continues to have the upper hand in Moscow, the Kremlin's generals will be in for hard times. Assuming this trend continues, it could have the unexpected effect of enhancing the role of the German Democratic Republic's military contribution to the Warsaw Pact. In turn the East German political leadership's long-term goal of using the military factor to influence Soviet behavior has advanced. The more reliable and more modern its armed forces, the greater the likelihood the East Germans will be able to translate this advantage into leverage—even if it is very limited—in dealing with the Soviets in other areas.

This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin depicted Black subjects. Through a combination of close formal readings and broader analyses of the specific contexts in which these images were produced, the article probes a number of complex and interconnected topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan pictorial sensibilities. The article likewise pays close attention to the conceptual and material continuities and discontinuities between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century and considers how these paintings might have contributed to the evolving Russian discourses on race, nationality, and empire in the “long” nineteenth century.

The article examines the aversive emotion of disgust and its deployment in the visual arts and in the premier Russian modernist novel, Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, which has not been considered in regard to its affective poetics before. Based on recent studies of the emotions in cultural history and theory, it explores the philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of disgust as a response to something viscerally and/or morally repugnant. The emotion, induced by the experience seen or imagined close up, provokes the observer's recoil as defined by cultural norms. As such, disgust is performative in spatial terms. Olga Matich argues that movement away from the loathsome image or idea affords the possibility of making the experience cognitively readable or legible, that disgust creates a space in which the individual negotiates her emotional as well as moral response. Yet she claims that aesthetically—and in certain instances ethically—disgust, which is always about the boundaries of the permissible, is also liberating: it offers society, its artists, and their consumers the opportunity to transgress established norms. Through extensive close readings of Petersburg, Matich shows that Belyi's experimental novel does precisely that, challenging the reader not to avert her readerly gaze from that which is unsettling and to appreciate, even to delight in, his shocking metamorphic image-making. She calls Petersburg a modernist exemplar of baroque aesthetics, characterized by excessive affect and grotesque representation, especially of the corpse, invoking the transience of life and dissolution of form.