Beginning with Catherine II's Municipal Charter of April 21, 1785, Russia's statesmen made repeated efforts to improve the ineffective and antiquated manner in which urban affairs were administered in the Russian Empire. By the beginning of the 1840s, however, the problem of modernizing the administration of Russia's cities was no nearer to a practical solution than it had been a half-century earlier. The growing number of administrative duties which fell upon the shoulders of city authorities sometimes made urban officeholding nearly a full-time responsibility, and Russia's urban classes were understandably reluctant to serve in elective offices which took so much time away from their personal business affairs and offered so little prospect of reward.

The causes and effects of the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute of 1948 are too well known to need repeating here. Various historians, military strategists, economists, and specialists in Communist affairs have established the basic facts and correctly pointed out the importance of that first break in the Soviet-controlled bloc. Vladimir Dedijer even wrote (supposedly quoting Henry Wallace) that Tito could be compared, though in a different field, to Martin Luther. The independent brand of communism recently proclaimed by the Italian, French, and Spanish Communists (the so-called Euro-Communists) definitely has its precedent in the astounding and courageous example of the Yugoslavs.

I shall limit my analysis mostly to Yugoslav writers and describe how they reacted toward this discord in the “socialist” camp. They all basically defend the same point of view, but they differ in their approach and, above all, in literary quality. The older writers, for example, were intimately involved in the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute, and they display a passionate hostility toward Stalin. To varying degrees, they often combine an excessive reverence for Tito, the perennial Yugoslav leader, with boastful self-approval. Recent works, though duly emphasizing the tragedy for thousands of citizens, avoid cliches and journalistic reporting.

Literary mystification is not a new phenomenon. The very use of a pseudonym is, to a certain degree, equivalent to perpetrating a literary hoax. But if an invented biography is added to an imaginary name, a mythical person is created with a life of his own and with a style associated with it. Often, but not necessarily, this style and consequently the whole character of the newly created mythical author acquires a more or less pronounced touch of parody. The preromantic and romantic periods saw a particularly large number of such mystifications.

Because Ihor Kalynets’ is a contemporary poet, whose poetry was almost immediately censured, it is not at all surprising that no critical articles have been written about him in the Soviet Ukraine. The situation is not much better in the West. Apart from a few brief biographical sketches, only two short essays have appeared, and they are introductions to two collections of Kalynet”s poetry: one by Roman Semkovych, which introduces Vidchynennia vertepu,and the other by Larissa Onyshkevych, introducing Vohon kupala.Both of these are more concerned with the poetry found in the given collection, however, than with anoverall appraisal of the poet’s work. Nonetheless, the articles point to the folkloreinspired origins of Kalynets”s verse and refer to the poet’s predilection for steeping his poetry in the linguistic and mythic heritage of the Ukraine.

Since then, you absent, I have turned slow pages—
“Fire of Life,” “Windlands,” “Childbirth,” “Only Dreamscape,“
Down to the veined complexity of “Stray Leaves,“
Critics find baffling.
Rapt and plumed splendour of the risen spirit,
Staking its all on foreign revolution;
Blackest eclipse of promised land in exile,—
So run the rhythms.
White love and pangs of birth in ancient symbols,
Impulses, probings of the years of anguish,
Last, the terse wisdom, grateful for survival,
Knowing no conquest.
W. K. Matthews, “Candles.“

Comparisons of Russia with the “West” have been a staple of historians and of contemporary observers for a very long time, and no end is in sight. A recent appraisal of Soviet developments in the decade after the death of Stalin was devoted in part to a consideration of the prospects for “a gradual convergence of the social and/or political systems of the West and the Soviet Union.” The variety of the contributors’ responses—“ very likely,” “necessarily uncertain,” “unlikely any meaningful convergence,” “highly improbable,” “depends on what is meant by ‘gradual’ “—suggests an ample range of disagreement, both in expectations for the future and in the characterization of the contrasts underlying these expectations.

The major ideological challenge faced by Russian revolutionists in the half century prior to 1917 was to find a way to adapt the principal tenets of West European socialism to Russia. The difficulty of answering this challenge lay in Russia's unique historical development and the consequent differences between Russia and the West. The proper adaptation of socialism required an understanding of these differences and their significance.

None of the many riddles in the reign of Tsar Alexander I is so intriguing as that of the position of the heir apparent, the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. His secret renunciation of his right to the throne cast doubt on Nicholas I's succession and contributed to the opportunity of the Decembrist conspirators. Moreover, as commander of the armed forces in Poland he was the chief figure in its government. The uprising of November 1830 signified the failure of Alexander's Polish plans, but it was also a personal tragedy for Constantine, who had so thoroughly identified himself with the new kingdom. His role in history was important; by his own choice it had not become much greater, but neither his contemporaries nor historians have agreed as to his qualifications to rule an empire.

Accounts differ even as to his capacity to manage the Polish army, or indeed to govern himself. A British historian in the nineteenth century described him as “a savage prince whose conduct and character made him more like a brute than a man.” This opinion was an extreme version of a common view of Constantine in the last century; the attitude is reflected by some writers of our own age, although few have gone so far as one modern author who pictured the Tsesarevich as “that insane hyena.” Polish writers, to further their justification of the 1830 revolt, assigned much of the discontent in that country to Constantine's “despotic” conduct, but even Russian and other historians have agreed that his explosive temperament and dislike for the Polish Constitution contributed to the uprising.

“Prophetic” is a quality which few thoughtful readers would deny Zamiatin's We. For if its moral argument (the irreconcilability of “pure” communism and individual freedom) has, to a disturbing degree, been confirmed by the course of twentieth-century history, so have some of its boldest technological predictions (for example, stateenforced restrictions on human fertility, Communist-inaugurated space travel). Even its genre (an original blend of political satire and science fiction) has proven to be a prophecy of sorts, anticipating, as it does, the more celebrated satirical fantasies of Huxley and Orwell.

The 1920s remain one of the most debated periods of Soviet history. Central to these debates is the issue of continuity between leninism and Stalinism, and the role of ideology under their respective leaderships. Supporters of “continuity” have usually emphasized the role of ideology as an intellectual bridge from the 1920s to the 1930s; conversely, those who question the continuity thesis usually point to major differences between leninism and Stalinism. I shall address this issue in relation to the history of attempts to organize writers in the early post-revolutionary period. My central claim is that Soviet discourse on writers and literature, articulated shortly after the revolution and elaborated during NEP, set a pattern which led to the absorption of writers into a unitary organizational apparatus and which culminated in the formation of the Writer's Union in April 1932. From 1917 to 1928, a clearly-articulated and largely consensual strategy of absorption of Soviet writers into a state-directed stream was spelt out well before Stalin was installed as the privileged speaker of “marxism-leninism.”