Long before Moscow's annexation of Novgorod in 1478, relations between the two principalities had been troubled. Novgorod had repeatedly defied successive Moscow princes, disrupting trade, defaulting on tax and rent payments, and refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Muscovite legal authorities. By the middle of the fifteenth century, chronic disputes intensified into overt hostilities. Moscow conducted three military campaigns against Novgorod in 1456, 1471, and finally 1478. The last campaign was followed by the introduction of Muscovite governors into Novgorod, the wholesale eviction and resettlement of the local land-owning elite, as well as other measures undertaken to consolidate Muscovy's authority.

Nicholas I (1825-55) gained the reputation of being the most reactionary tsar the Russian Empire ever had. The eminent historian S. M. Solov'ëv called him “the new Nebuchadnezzar.”

The ugly features of a government which oppressed the people and systematically suppressed all enlightenment and free thought became particularly evident under the autocratic “stick” of this sovereign. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people were still tied to the land, either as State and Imperial Crown peasants, or as private serfs; the latter, especially, living under the most miserable economic conditions, deprived of personal liberty, were degraded almost to the level of chattels.

Against such a background of despotism and serfdom there could develop only a system of justice representing a monstrous abuse of equity; and indeed the courts and their members at the time of Nicholas were in complete harmony with the epoch.

The title of this paper might suggest that it is intended to describe Chaadayev's philosophy. This is not so. An attempt will be made, rather, to argue the following points: first, that Chaadayev is chronologically the first philosopher of Russia because earlier persons to whom that distinction has been attributed do not really deserve it; second, that, unlike these so-called predecessors, Chaadayev in his writings provides a body of material which qualifies as a philosophy and which is presented as such; and third, that his philosophy is distinctively Russian, even though Chaadayev combines many Western philosophical characteristics with his native Russian outlook.

The story of armed resistance to Soviet rule in postwar Lithuania is of interest both to historians and to political scientists. On the one hand, it unveils an important period of modern Lithuanian history and offers a glimpse into the dilemma of East European nationalism, caught between Nazis and Communists in World War II. On the other, it allows an insight into the nature of a movement that seeks to produce political changes by the use of violence. In an age when political practitioners use guerrilla warfare and paramilitary tactics as basic means of struggle for power, justification of a study of partisan movements seems hardly necessary. By showing academic interest, the social scientist merely recognizes their growing practical importance.

The Lithuanian partisan resistance to the Soviet regime now can be analyzed with the help of varied source material, including firsthand testimony of both nationalist and Communist origin.

Through the juxtaposition of early autobiographical fragments by Lev Tolstoi and Daniil Kharms, Sara Pankenier argues that both writers similarly push beyond the limits of memory to recover the infant self from the abyss of infantile amnesia. Their accounts of preternatural memory and precocious self-awareness counter the phenomenon, which psychologists now term infantile amnesia, whereby the onset of memory occurs only several years after birth. They thus flagrantly violate human experience, as well as the literary conventions that otherwise govern the representation of infancy. By endowing the infant self with adult memory—and narrative voice—these writers create a hybrid autobiographical self that unites the divided autobiographical subject posited by Philippe Lejeune. Despite the differences in their tragic and comic tone, both Tolstoi and Kharms employ the infant subject to explore issues of power and voice through narrative experimentation in an uncharted region of memory otherwise made inaccessible by infantile amnesia.

In this article, Dunning challenges traditional scholarship concerning the identity and character of Tsar Dmitrii (reigned 1605-06), better known as the “False Dmitrii“—the only tsar ever raised to the Russian throne by means of a military campaign and popular uprisings. Usually dismissed as a frivolous impostor who was despised by his subjects for being a tool of Polish intervention in Russia’s Time of Troubles, Tsar Dmitrii turns out to have been a charismatic, well-educated warrior-prince who was revered by many of his subjects. Furthermore, he truly believed that he was the youngest son of Ivan die Terrible. This article deconstructs the legends and scholarship identifying Tsar Dmitrii as the lascivious and bloodthirsty monk-sorcerer, Grishka Otrep’ev and demonstrates that the faulty image of Tsar Dmitrii has been shaped by historians’ overreliance on folklore and on the propaganda manufactured by Dmitrii’s enemies. Dunning calls for a new biography of this mysterious and controversial ruler.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the construction and naturalization of many unitary ethnolinguistic categories that would serve diverse ends within the Russian and Soviet states. This article combines disciplinary perspectives from linguistic anthropology and history to excavate the local history of one such category–the Buriat language. We trace the category's origin in the grammars, translations, and correspondence of its first Russian proponents, Russian Orthodox missionary linguists working in the area around Lake Baikal, and its subsequent uptake by Buriat nationalists and Soviet linguists. We show that the missionaries and their religious motivations played a significant role in the construction of ethnolinguistic categories and that these ethnolinguistic categories were not, as is often thought, predominantly imposed by the center onto distant peripheries. Attending to Orthodox missionaries’ linguistic work in the Baikal region reveals the more complex local workings of colonial power.

Karen Dawisha suggests that Cohen's argument is based on a minimalist definition of the requirements for the survival of the “Soviet Union” and that it ignores what she asserts is its most fundamental feature, the essential internalized and structural violence that was at the heart of the Soviet system. She therefore disagrees with Cohen, arguing that at the end of the day, Gorbachev's brilliance and capabilities were restricted by the fact that he was die leader of a country almost totally lacking in political, economic, or social capital.

This paper examines the rise of the “climate-kumys cure” in late imperial Russia and how it shaped perceptions of the steppes as a “curative place.” By positing that kumys (fermented mare's milk), a traditional food produced by steppe nomads, interacted with unique qualities of the steppe climate—including aromatic air, abundant sunshine, cool forest groves, rich feathergrasses, and brilliant wildflowers—to cure tuberculosis patients of their symptoms, the climate-kumys cure produced an imaginary of the steppes that contrasted with traditional Russian views of the steppes as barren, monotonous, and even dangerous. Knowledge about the steppe climate produced by proponents of the climate-kumys cure harmonized with Soviet medical professionals’ ideas about forging workers’ bodies and restoring their minds. An understanding of the steppes as healthy, however, did not stop the spread of disease, nor did it lead to preservation. Even as the climate-kumys cure rose in popularity, the steppes that had given rise to kumys were vanishing.

The pre-Soviet introduction of modern Turkestanian theater, long flatly denied by Communist officials, gave vigorous expression to social and political ideas current among local groups of enlightened private citizens in Western Turkestan just before the outbreak of the First World War. The innovation also strongly affected developments in the state-sponsored dramaturgy which appeared later. This new theater, differing radically from the old folk art, was inaugurated before a responsive audience at Samarkand early in 1914 with a performance of Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy's Padarkush (“The Parricide“).

Padarkush presents the spectacle of a father's willful refusal, despite repeated warnings, to meet specific religious and social obligations by giving his illiterate, adolescent son an education. This fatal error inevitably leads to the parent's violent death and the destruction of his family.

At the turn of the twentieth century, European critics who were distressed about contemporary developments in the fine arts tended to use medical, psychopathological terms to diagnose the existing state of the field. In 1892-1893, an Austrian physician and writer, Max Nordau, published Entartung (Degeneration). Drawing on positivist psychology and anthropometry, Nordau expressed his pessimistic views on the mental and physical health of the leading figures of European fin-de-siécle culture: Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, the impressionists, the symbolists, and many others. In Russia this book went into nine editions, in three different translations. The patriarch of Russian liberal-nationalist criticism, Vladimir Stasov applied Nordau's metaphors to Russian “decadent” artists in such reviews as “Podvorl'e prokazhennykh” (Lepers’ inn, 1899) or “Dve dekadentskie vystavki” (Two decadent exhibitions, 1903). He sarcastically remarked that, when viewing canvases by some contemporary painters, he felt as though he were “walking amidst a madhouse.”

In the new Czechoslovakia a Communist Party did not exist in the early days. Such a party was created only in the fall of 1921, fully three years after the independence of Czechoslovakia had been effected. At the moment of liberation it is not an exaggeration to say that communism had hardly even a foothold among Czech and Slovak workers. A substantial wave of sympathy for the Russian Bolsheviks had swept over the country following the Revolution in 1917, and a radical mood, favorable to socialism, had spread widely among the Czech masses. These circumstances had not, however, encouraged even the beginning of organizing a communist movement among Czechs and Slovaks, or among the German minority.

“Homme de toute sorte de savoir,” was how Alexander Turgenev was once described by Chateaubriand, while Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, in a letter to Sydney Smith, called him “a Russian gentleman accomplished in all liberal and orthodox sciences.” The word “orthodox” was underlined by Jeffrey, and Turgenev said that he did not understand the meaning of that underlining. It is possible, of course, that all Jeffrey had in mind was that Turgenev was of the Russian Orthodox faith and knew all about its tenets.

The range of topics that Vladimir Odoevski treated in his fiction and journalistic pieces is impressive. His interests embraced what we today think of as the more or less discrete categories of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. His acquaintances referred to him as “the Russian Faust.“ Included in his oeuvre is a substantial body of music criticism, and indeed, he may rightly be considered Russia's first music critic. Odoevskii's opera criticism, an admittedly narrow topic, is the subject of this article.

There is good reason for concentrating on Odoevskii's writings about opera. For the operaphile there is the vicarious pleasure (and occasional mortification) of sharing a musically literate listener's reactions to then contemporary or nearly contemporary masterpieces by Mozart, Gluck, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, and others. On a less visceral level, an acquaintance with Odoevskii's opera criticism enhances our overall appreciation of the broad patterns underlying Odoevskii's complete literary output as well as Russian cultural history in the nineteenth century.

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

In addition to examining the ideological and artistic origins of Fedor Dostoevskii's portrayal of the underworld in his short “cemetery story” “Bobok” (1873), Ilya Vinitsky probes the theosophical context of Dostoevskii's “fantastic realism.” Vinitsky considers this story a programmatic “theosophical menippea” that artistically “voices” and “tests” Emanuel Swedenborgs doctrine of posthumous self-exposure of the wicked souls who are no longer restrained by “fear of the law, of the loss of reputation, of honor, and of life” and laugh shamelessly “at honesty and justice.” Vinitsky argues that Dostoevskii was interested in Swedenborg's spiritual psychologism as an epistemological method and contends that Swedenborg's interpretation of devils as former humans, with their “earthly” consciousness, inner sufferings, and memories, perfectly corresponded to Dostoevskii's symbolic anthropology. Vinitsky also proposes that the comic narrator of “Bobok” can be seen as a literary mask of Dostoevskii himself, who employs philosophical irony as a means of conveying a metaphysical message in the age of positivism and disbelief.

In 1899 a number of young writers formed a literary circle to discuss and analyze their works in progress. They considered themselves to be realists interested in portraying the mood of the intelligentsia and of the lower classes. They called the circle Sreda (“The Wednesdays”) for the day of their weekly meeting in the home of Nikolai Teleshov. Soon after its formation Teleshov invited Maksim Gor'kii to join the circle. At the time Gor'kii was a controversial figure who violently attacked everything the Russian intelligentsia stood for. He insisted that intellectuals would never accomplish their major objective—the liberation of the Russian people from political and economic oppression—unless they first liberated themselves. They had to cease being ineffective and moralistic and had to become selfish and aggressive individualists. Only then could they provide the Russian people with the leadership it desperately needed. Young intellectuals seeking inspiration, excitement, and escape responded enthusiastically to Gor'kii's call for self-liberation and idolized him. Members of the older generation were not so uncritical; they feared him as a harbinger of barbarism, a champion of criminals and outcasts, and an enemy of the intelligentsia.