This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

The question of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's work in the period beginning 1824-25 has often been examined in critical works on Pushkin. This influence has generally been construed as one of the decisive factors in Pushkin's poetic and personal maturation away from his early naive Byronism. At the same time, Pushkin found in Shakespeare a release from the outworn conventions of French classical drama that had until then provided the precepts for writers for the Russian stage. For Pushkin, two specific features of Shakespearean drama were congenial: the abandonment of the three classical unities in favor of the primacy of character in dramatic action, and generic mixtures of comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose.

Although the complex role of language in structuring experience and behavior is now widely recognized as a central element of historical understanding, the multiple problems of “representation” as they relate to late imperial and early Soviet politics remain a source of confusion and controversy. In particular, the role of nonworkers in organizing and leading “workers’ parties” has raised appropriate doubts about the very integrity of labor politics in these years, as well as the ways both Soviet and western historians have conceived them. Impressive new efforts have consequently been made, stimulated as well by advances in European labor history, to locate “authentic” worker voices and movements, and to contrast this socially grounded authenticity either directly or by implication with the abstracted idealizations of putative worker leaderships.

Some years ago, in his biography of Nikolai Bukharin, Stephen Cohen postulated that there was a reservoir of latent support in the Party's rural and urban cadres for Bukharin's moderate alternative to Stalin's rapid industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture of the first five-year plan. Cohen did not suspect that potential support for Bukharin and his policies of gradual industrialization and retention of private farming also existed in the Red Army's company and battalion party cells, as well as among some regimental leadership of the political administration of the Red Army (PUR). At first glance, Cohen's seems to have been a natural omission; after all, the army, with its hierarchy of commissars and political officers (politruki) ostensibly dedicated to the general line of the Party, appeared obedient and loyal to the dictates of the party Central Committee. PUR showed apparently little interest in the struggle between Stalin and Bukharin over future industrial policy.

In 1993, the film Schindler's List provided what many commentators took to be simile and many others metaphor for the violence in Bosnia. The cinematic version of Thomas Keneally's 1982 book on the holocaust of the Jews of Cracow seemed to emblematize the horror of the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims from northern and eastern Bosnia in the summer of 1992 and thereafter, complete with wretched people in cattle cars and "concentration camps" with starving prisoners.

In his work as both philosopher and poet, Vladimir Solov'ev is motivated by seemingly contradictory desires: to apprehend in the world a higher, mystical "total–unity" that lends coherence and meaning to our lives, and to assert the validity of otherness, of the varieties of individual experience in this world. Throughout Solov'ev struggles with the possibilities inherent in available intellectual discourses–scientific, poetic, philosophical, and religious–to arrive at that combination of conceptualization and sensory experience that he called "thinking" total-unity. His historical revaluation of erotic love, The Meaning of Love (Smysl liubvi, 1892-1894), is a pivotal work in this quest. In addition to its well–known arguments in defense of erotic love, this essay focuses on the problem of discourse and its role in articulating and conceptualizing the mystical or revealed knowledge that eludes sense and reason.

The complex politics that convulsed Turkestan in 1917 remains one of the least understood aspects of the Russian revolution. A structure of dual power emerged along the familiar liberal-radical divide, but in Turkestan both sides represented the small European (largely Russian) settler population and both were united in an attempt to exclude the indigenous population from participation in the revolutionary process. Parallel political movements developed among the local population, but the axes of division were quite different than those among the settler population. The two political movements interacted in numerous ways throughout the year, producing a pattern of conflict that was in many ways unique in the Russian empire. Western scholarship, hamstrung by lack of access to primary materials, has generally paid little attention to the topic. The slim literature that does exist either attempts to find patterns common to the revolutionary process in the capitals (here visible only among the Russian settler population), and thus to affirm the universality of the revolutionary process; or to understand revolutionary Turkestan through analogy with other borderlands and, not finding patterns deemed normative for the borderlands (for example, a strong assertion of nationalism), is content to stress their absence, taking this as proof of the backwardness of Central Asia. Whether they be William Chamberlin's “primitive Asiatic tribesmen,” or Richard Pierce's “natives” who “stood apart from the revolutionary events,” Central Asians are usually written out of the story of 1917.

In 1953, just after Stalin's death, the Soviet state machine tool publishing house released A. A. Kanaev's From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine (Ot vodianoi mel'nitsy do atomnogo dvigateli). Like other books and articles published in the popular and scientific press in the USSR in this period, From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine explored the political, economic, and cultural significance of an incipient “atomic century” and touted the nearly limitless applications of the power of the atom in agriculture, medicine, and industry. Indeed, there was little doubt among scientists, engineers, economic planners, and party officials that the Soviet Union would soon enter the stage of “communist construction”: communism would be achieved within their lifetimes, owing to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party and on the basis of the achievements of science and technology. By the end of the decade, the average Soviet citizen, too, came to believe that the glorious future had arrived. Many people wrote letters to prominent physicists with suggestions on how to tame the power of the atom to improve the quality of life. For citizens, scientists, and officials alike, successes in atomic energy provided undeniable confirmation that at long last society had embarked on the final leg of the long journey to communism.

In his article, "Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers," Robert Hayden combines comparative history, political commentary, and amoral realism. In the process, he presents a number of arguments with which it is difficult to disagree, but also many that are provocative and, indeed, offensive. Because Hayden makes so many arguments in this piece (both primary, secondary, and parenthetical; explicit and implicit; open and disguised) my critique will not follow the organization of his paper. Rather, it will challenge Hayden's article on three counts: 1) its factual accuracy; 2) its lack of reference to existing literature on the topic; and 3) the logic, validity, and moral consequences of its arguments.

The Russian empire provided Islam a sheltered but precarious place within its borders. Sporadic efforts at forced conversion to Orthodoxy ended in 1773 with Catherine II's edict of religious tolerance, which officially acknowledged the existence of the Muslim community and allowed the free practice of its essential religious rites. Among these, pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) was one of the most sacred. But distrust of Islam and fear of Muslim revolt, fed by an almost paranoid apprehension of pan-Islamic solidarity, were deeply embedded in tsarist policies and attitudes toward pious Muslims.

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, “Face toward Production.” Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of “rightists” who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

Since the heady, early days of the Gorbachev reform period, the Russian people have become not only subjects of historical transformation but also, increasingly, objects of opinion surveys. Western researchers, new Russian commercial operations, and local academics recently freed from the restrictions of stagnation (zastoi) have been asking Russians much more probing questions than they were previously able to. Rather than provide a detailed description of how they spend their leisure time, Russian citizens have been asked to evaluate their political leaders, to project their nation's future, and to offer opinions on emerging democratic and market systems. Many Russians have responded to this barrage of questions with “I don't know.” For instance, in a 1992 survey headed by Richard Rose, when Russians were asked whether the words Marxism-Leninism evoked positive or negative feelings, 46 percent answered “I find it hard to say.” An identical percentage declined to evaluate the word capitalism.

Robert Hayden is not alone in wondering why the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia in 1991 and 1995 was labeled a population transfer and even justified by the logic of nation-states, while the expulsion of Muslims by Serbs in 1992-96 from an area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs claim for their state was labeled genocide and justified establishing an international war crimes tribunal. Hayden wants to protect the term genocide, and its legal standing internationally, for truly exceptional instances—to wit, the Holocaust, and nothing else until, God forbid, there should be another such instance. By contrast, he argues, population transfers, even on a massive scale and forced, are not pathological. "Ethnic cleansing" of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether of Croatia or of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is unexceptional, a normal part of the history of the twentieth century. Although final solutions are not inevitable—Hayden criticizes Croatian President Tudjman for writings that seem to have justified the Serb expulsion as such—"ethnic cleansing" is a part of the history even of states that now sit in moral condemnation of the Balkan horrors and the Bosnian Serbs.

Russia's peasants and their culture in postreform Russia have enjoyed the attention of an ever-increasing number of scholars over the past two decades. One central aspect of that culture, however, has remained virtually unexplored: Eastern Orthodox Christianity as it was practiced and understood by peasant believers, and especially by peasants who considered themselves members of the official Orthodox Church. At least two explanations may exist for such scholarly neglect. First, historians of Russia have traditionally viewed "official" Orthodoxy as somehow forcibly imposed on the people by secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

“Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers…If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians.” So wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, always a sharp-eyed anthropologist of Soviet everyday life. Historians who have encountered this treasure trove in Soviet archives newly opened over the past few years are likely to agree. The great volume of public letter-writing–the “mountains” of complaints, denunciations, statements of opinion, appeals, threats and confessional outpourings that ordinary Russians sent to Soviet political leaders, party and government agencies, public figures, and newspapers–constitutes one of the major discoveries associated with the opening of the archives.