Constantinople—“the Imperial City” (Tsargrad), as the Russians used to call it—with its riches and splendor, its churches and palaces, fired the imagination of many a “Barbaric people of the North,” and following in the wake of the Huns, the Avars, and the Bulgars, the Russians in their turn were eventually attracted by her. Out of their wars and commerce with the Byzantines there gradually developed a deeper cultural intercourse between the two nations, and it is the Byzantine form of Christianity which became the foundation of the Russian Church.

The first Russian attack on Constantinople took place in 860. Both the fact itself and the date are firmly established by evidence available in which Patriarch Photius's two homilies occupy a prominent place.

From even before the time of Peter the Great, and down to the present day, Russia has had a tradition of active state participation in manufacturing and extractive industry. However, both the nature and extent of governmental activity has varied greatly in different periods. The purpose of this essay is to determine what place government policy during the twenty-one-year term of Count Egor Kankrin as minister of finance (1823-44) has in this long-standing “mercantilist” tradition. Both Kankrin and Nicholas I, who usually followed Kankrin's advice on economic policy, were unquestionably conservative in matters of political and social policy, but there is no necessary connection between the political views of Russian rulers and their attitude toward industrial development. Men as different in political outlook as Peter the Great, Witte, and Stalin all favored vigorous state action of one sort or another to promote industrial development, but none of them were political liberals.

The recent successes achieved by Khrushchev in concentrating in his hands the instruments of power over the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union point once more to the decisive role played by the Party apparatus in the process of consolidation. While the attention of students of Soviet affairs had been focused on the basic component of the Party machine, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, headed by Khrushchev, it is, nevertheless, of interest to recall the existence of a rather obscure but important unit of the Party bureaucracy, namely, the Party Control Committee.

After a long period of considerable discrimination and abuse neutrality has now regained a semblance of legitimacy as a valid principle of international law and international relations. This recent transfiguration of a concept, which only fourteen years ago was being reviled as morally reprehensible, can be credited to a wide variety of diplomatic developments, such as, for example, Cold War tensions, the newly won independence of former colonial possessions, and others. In great part, too, it can be explained by the strenuous sponsorship lately exerted on its behalf in world affairs by the leaders of the Soviet regime. In effect, the latter now take the initiative, at every possible opportunity, in generously lavishing praise and support on the neutrality of the so-called “bourgeois” nations in all its various manifestations.

There can be little doubt that the name Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) would be near the top of any list of important twentieth-century Russian writers neglected both in and outside their homeland. Even though he was regarded as an original and major poet by writers as diverse as Briusov, Blok, Gumilev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, Kuzmin still awaits rehabilitation in the Soviet Union and rediscovery in the West. There are some signs of a partial rehabilitation in Soviet Russia today, but the chances for a full rehabilitation—a major publication of his works—are slight. Obstacles to a Western rediscovery exist as well. Clichés die hard and perhaps no harder than in literary history. Kuzmin himself must share part of the blame for the major one. By writing the article “On Beautiful Clarity” he unwittingly gave critics and literary historians the tag for comments on his verse. That the article is about prose and that Kuzmin chose not to republish it in his one volume of collected essays is ignored.

Despite some early critical reservations, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has become one of the icons of postrevolutionary Russian literature. The bibliography of scholarly commentary on the work—mostly adulatory, and in some cases even hagiographical—is vast. Bulgakov has become, especially for western critics, the epitome of the artistmartyr. Persecuted by the Soviet writing establishment, he was able, through his long suppressed satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (published for the first time in 1966-67), to survive and turn the tables—aesthetically and morally speaking—on his former oppressors. Life is short, art is long; or as Woland expressed it, manuscripts do not burn.

Indeed, there is ample justification for such a hagiographical approach. By 1928, when Bulgakov was drafting the first plans for The Master and Margarita, his literary prospects were already growing dim. In the 1930s, no longer able to publish original fiction, he survived by adapting works for the theater and by translating.

In this article Barbara Walker examines the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie in the Moscow human rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some participants in that movement have expressed emotional satisfaction in the belief that they were motivated by the desire for self-giving; but that belief has sometimes been received with doubt. Walker uncovers the social phenomenon of a charity movement for the benefit of political prisoners that, she argues, lies near the social and emotional heart of the human rights movement. An important theme of the charity movement, whether real or constructed, is emotional purification of a sense of personal and social contamination stemming from participation in what some experienced as corruption in Soviet state and society. This article draws on ideas of spiritual atonement and salvation through altruism as explanatory cultural factors in this phenomenon.

Richard Pipes's contribution to our understanding of Russian history has been substantial and my own interest in Russian history dates from taking his course on imperial Russia in college some thirty years ago. It is thus only with great reluctance that I would disagree with him. Nevertheless, I respectfully submit that his response to my article suffers not only from insufficient evidence but also from serious conceptual flaws.

According to my definitions, any society must combine “science,” “technology,” and “design” whenever it creates useful material objects. Science establishes principles which technology (with some admixture of common sense, and guidance from economics) embodies in physical components through manufacture. Design attends to the composition and arrangement of these components, as well as to the appearance and balance of qualities of the assembled product, with a view to satisfying consumers and other users. Given a conception of three essentially distinct elements, imports of advanced equipment by the USSR do not necessarily signify an inability to create original designs. The intention might rather be to put certain designs into production, using processes not offered by indigenous technology.

In this article, Anna Wexler Katsnelson focuses on Grigorii Aleksandrov's musical comedy, 'Svetlyi put' (The Radiant Path, 1940) as a way of investigating the modes of screening laughter in the USSR in the 1930s and exploring the reasons for the film's gradual disavowal of laughter. The key questions posed by the article are why does laughter disappear from the nominally comedic, purposefully merry Svetlyi put'? Where is its affective energy redirected? And, finally, is laughter on film at all possible under the conditions of high Stalinism?

On 6 July 1874, the government of Alexander II published an edict announcing the formation of a mounted Bashkir squadron in the Orenburg guberniia. The modest scale of the endeavor—a squadron-sized element added little to Russian military strength—belied its historic importance. The Bashkirs, in 1874, stood at a watershed in their long history of military service to Russia marking the divide between decades of irregular frontier duty and inclusion in the ranks of the regular army. The evolution of Bashkir military formations, paralleling the course of social change, offers a most instructive case in little-studied aspects of imperial policy towards subject national minorities and their employment in the armed forces in particular. A virtually forgotten component in Russia's rich military tradition, the contribution of “native” units organized among the inorodtsy of the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Asia was indeed significant.

This article compares Tomáš Bata's development of Zlín as a company town with the architectural theory of Karel Teige. Despite political differences— Bat’a was a champion of “American” capitalism, Teige a leader of the leftist avant-garde—they had unexpectedly similar ideas about architectural design and city planning. The article uses James C. Scott's definition of high modernism as a starting point to explain these commonalities, historically contextualizing the two men's thinking as a specific iteration of this ideology. Both, for instance, paradoxically sought to incorporate liberal, democratic values (typical of the rhetoric of state building in interwar Czechoslovakia) into their authoritarian plans. This analysis helps explain subsequent, socialist architectural developments, in which Teige's theory and Bat’a's practices were combined. In this, the article contributes to an understanding of Czechoslovakia's post-1948 cultural history not in terms of impositions from Moscow, but as building on native institutions.

Literary history has to some extent spoiled our apprehension of the work we know as Mertvye dushi. Thanks to the author's letters, his friends' memoirs, and the carefully assembled fragments of his projected sequel, we cannot escape the awareness that Nikolai Gogol' left the novel incomplete, unachieved.1 In fact, however, when viewed in the context of other works by Gogol', this "unfinished" novel is marked by a special type of closure and formal unity. The text is modeled on the riddle, particularly the type of riddle known as parable, and the illusion of open-endedness is designed to mock the thirst for an answer awakened by the enigma.

The social conditions for scientific work in the Stalin era are often assumed to have been patterned more or less after Lysenkoism and Soviet genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Much less is known about other areas of Soviet science in the same period. Were Lysenkoism and the fate of genetics typical or atypical of what was happening in other areas of Soviet science under Stalin? The case of Vladimir I. Vernadskii, an earth scientist, and his scientific school in the years between 1928 and 1945 documents the survival and development of an important tradition very different from that of Lysenkoism and suggests something about the mentality of one segment of the scientific intelligentsia with strong ties to prerevolutionary Russian science. The fate of the Vernadskii school suggests something of the diversity and complexity of Soviet science, even during the worst years of the Stalinist regime and illuminates some of the ways Soviet scientists like Vernadskii were able to protect their scientific enterprises and continue a critical tradition in Russian science despite political interference.

As a cornerstone of early Bolshevik propaganda, nationality policy allowed the revolutionary regime to cast the Soviet “experiment” as emancipatory in both ethnic and class terms. Paradoxically, much of the attention paid to the national question vanished from the party canon in 1938, for reasons that have never been fully explained. In this article we investigate this dramatic turnabout by examining how party historians and Iosif Stalin himself drafted what was to be the official narrative on nationality policy in the infamous Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). In so doing, we not only supply a new answer to the national question but also highlight a key new source for other investigations of the Stalin period.

The peculiar treatment of sex in Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry has been noted by a number of literary critics. Simon Karlinsky, for example, points out the “reversal of sex roles” of the main characters in the fairy tale Tsar'-Devitsa (The Tsar-Maiden) and comments on the “interesting and significant” nature of this phenomenon “when viewed within the whole of Tsvetaeva's work and in terms of her personal biography.“