When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

Count M. M. Speranskij, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant statesmen tsarist Russia has ever produced, wrote in the Introduction to the Code of Laws of 1809, that the “Russian constitution will owe its existence not to the excitement of passions and the exigency of circumstances, but to the blessed inspiration of the Supreme Power…”. He was wrong. The “blessed” Supreme Power granted reforms to the Russian people only reluctantly and, with few exceptions, always under pressure of revolutionary impact.

The Romanov dynasty came to the throne in 1613 after fifteen years of pretenders, peasant revolts, and foreign interventions, but the establishment of Romanov legitimacy would require time. In this article, Russell E. Martin explores how the wedding ritual of Tsar Mikhail Romanov was carefully constructed on the basis of previous royal weddings so as to appear fully consistent with previous Muscovite tradition. But Martin also shows that many elements of the wedding ritual were choreographed anew to create the image of the Romanovs as the legitimate heirs of the old Riurikid dynasty that had died out in 1598. Viewed in light of other efforts to legitimate their rule, the evidence from the weddings of the first Romanov tsar suggests how tenuous the new dynasty's hold on power was in its first decades on the throne and the ways that symbol and ritual were exploited to help establish the new regime.

The relationship between Pushkin and his critics has been a subject of considerable interest and discussion since the poet's own time. Belinsky made it the focus of the introduction to his series of essays on Pushkin. The early biographers provided some further information, and scholarly attention dates from the 1889 monograph by S. S. Trubachev, Pushkin v russkoi kritike, 1820-1880, which appeared shortly after V. A. Zelinsky had published, between 1887 and 1889, his extremely useful anthology of Pushkin criticism. The monograph is little more than a pedestrian rehearsal of reviews, digressing only to promulgate such myths as Pushkin's “aristocratic” attitude toward critics, but it remains valuable as a catalogue of criticism. Thereafter, both before the Revolution and during the Soviet period, the relevant published material becomes too extensive to list here. Recent comprehensive treatments of the subject may be found in N. I. Mordovchenko's Russkaia kritika pervoi chetverti XIX veka (1959) and in the Academy publication Pushkin: Itogi i problemy izucheniia (1966).

The question “Did Peter the Great exert a beneficial or a harmful influence upon the development of Russian history and culture?” is one that has provoked debate ever since that monarch ruled Russia in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The varied answers to that question set up the general battle lines between Westernizers and Slavophiles during the first half of the nineteenth century. One of Russia's most critical intellectuals in that period, Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev, answered the question in several ways. His answers provide a key to a peculiar kind of ideological westernization in Russian intellectual history. The discovery of hitherto unpublished source materials that fill an important gap in the documentation of Chaadaev's views on Peter the Great led to the writing of this article.

Why the paradox of a revolt against the Communist regime in Russia in a place which had been a Bolshevik stronghold at the time of the October Revolution? Like many paradoxes, this one, when understood, leads to valuable insights. The effort to comprehend the causes and aims of the Kronstadt revolt sheds much additional light on the contemporary nature of the Soviet regime, the crisis which it was then experiencing, and the trend of its evolution. Conversely, the Kronstadt movement itself becomes much more intelligible when viewed in this broader context.

The revolt did not actually begin as such, but rather as a mass movement of protest, which was symptomatic of the general state of internal crisis in Soviet Russia. Military Communism had reached an impasse; violent intervention by the State into all aspects of economic life, particularly the requisitions from, the peasantry, together with the unemployment and shortages resulting from the general collapse of the nation's economy, had in many places brought large segments of the population to the verge of open revolt against the Soviet regime. In some instances, armed peasant uprisings had broken out, notably in Tambov gubernija.

Party leaders continue to be crucial players in politics. The theories of personalization and presidentialization of party politics reflect the centrality of leaders’ roles. Little attention has been paid to the effects of leaders on the formation and development of newly emerged parties. This article aims to fill that gap by analyzing the effect of leaders on the formation, intra-party cohesion, and membership organization of three newly emerged Romanian parties between 2015 and 2019. The qualitative analysis uses content from primary (party documents and elite discourses) and secondary sources (media reports). The findings indicate that the leaders’ approaches towards party formation and organization differ substantially across the examined parties and explain their cohesion and electoral appeal.

In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat appears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other, druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples) and mnogonatsional'nost’ (multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion of Absurdistan (2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.

If Old Russian literature had a typical hero, he was a superman. Whatever the field of his activity, he was able to surmount all obstacles with ease. Either he was described as predestined to success, or as so strong that his success was inevitable. This was as true of religious ascetics and martyrs, whose death was only a sign of their final triumph, as it was of princes or military leaders.

Examples of literary heroes who were not so victorious are rare, almost nonexistent until the seventeenth century. One thinks, however, of the hero of the Igor Tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve), or of the heroes of the chronicle tales which depict Russian resistance to the Tartar invaders. But, though defeated, these historical figures are still characterized as heroes in the grand style, unusual men whose tragic fate is in strange contrast to their superior strength.

While a central policy of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II called for the removal of “Serbs,” the majority of people who identified themselves (or were identified by the regime) as Serbs in Sarajevo—the second largest city in the state—remained “safe.” In order to understand why this was the case, Emily Greble Balic examines the interplay between local identity politics and state policies of genocide and nation-building. In so doing, she sheds light on such broad issues as the ambiguity of national identity at the local level; the limitations of traditional understandings of “resistance”; and the options open to members of the victim, or “foreign” group, as a result of the disjunction between national and local agendas.

The first book of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains an episode from the Allied War Council at Olmütz, on November 27, 1805, five days before the Battle of Austerlitz. With the Council over, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes Prince Boris Drubetskoy, a new aide-de-camp, to present him to Tsar Alexander. Coming out of the emperor's room as they approach is a tall man in civilian dress who has a striking face and sharply projecting jaw, which gives him a peculiar vivacity and keenness of expression. “Who was that ?” asks Drubetskoy. “He is one of the most remarkable but to me most unpleasant of men—the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski,” replies Bolkonsky.

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

In 1892, as Moscow prepared to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergei of Radonezh, an article appeared in the Moskovskiia vedomosti which suggested that one appropriate way to mark the occasion would be to erect a replica of the small wooden Church of the Holy Trinity built by Saint Sergei at the site of his famed monastery north of Moscow. The article further urged that the project be a cooperative effort and that the proposed church be constructed in one day (that is, a twenty-four-hour period), in the tradition of the obydennye khramy of old.’ The tradition which the civic-minded writer of the article tried to revive dated back to the late fourteenth century. The early Russian chronicles record nineteen one-day votive churches built between 1390 and 1552, all as a response to the pestilence then raging. Ten of these were constructed in Novgorod, nine in Pskov. In addition, four others, one each in Moscow, Iaroslavl', Vologda, and Viatka, can be documented from other sources. All were built of wood in a twenty-four-hour period by communal labor.

In a society whose leadership demands that all man's life and works be brought within the compass of a single Weltanschauung one would expect considerable attention to be devoted to the problem of art and its position in the social complex, for art, and in particular literature, is one of the most direct and effective means for influencing the political, social, and philosophical ideas and attitudes of the mass of individuals of which the society is composed. In post-revolutionary Russia the role art was to play in a society based on Marxian socialism at once became the subject of intense discussion, but fifteen years were to elapse before any final “official” solution of the problem was reached. It was not until 1932 that the formula of “socialist realism” received the endorsement of State and Party, whereupon its principles became incumbent upon the members of the various unions of writers, artists, and composers.

It is a settled principle of Soviet constitutional law that the USSR Supreme Soviet is the supreme representative organ, the supreme legislative body, and the supreme executor of the people's sovereignty. The 1936 Constitution subordinates all other organs of government to the Supreme Soviet, and it alone, on the national level, has the right to form governments, pass laws, and amend the Constitution. The Constitution also stipulates, however, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is “the vanguard of the workers in their struggle for the construction of a communist society and constitutes the guiding core of all workers’ organizations, public as well as governmental.”