“Mentality” has become a fashionable term among historians, as a supposedly neutral way of pointing to a pattern of beliefs that are typical of a particular group. “Mentality” seems to avoid the metaphysical mystery of phrases like “the spirit of Russia,” or the Marxist anger in the term “ideology,” which carries a charge of grandiose delusion, of self-interest disguised as universal truth. In deference to fashion and to the goal of irenic discourse, let us use the word “mentality,” though we know that new words do not remove old difficulties.

A central difficulty is the facile assumption that ideology and practicality are elemental contraries, that the conflict between them shapes the evolving mentality of communist regimes. This essay on Soviet history rests on a different assumption: that practicality is itself an ideological concept which can be understood only by reference to particular historical contexts. It is an illusion to imagine that practicality can be defined by reference to technics, a supposedly autonomous force that pulls all societies into a single anthill system. That technological fantasy has subverted the grand ideological theories of previous centuries and increasingly undermines even academic theorizing about human beings. Ideologists become servile functionaries — “public relations experts,” as we say in the West — while academics are reduced to other forms of technical expertise and to purely decorative functions. Soviet history presents an extreme version of that characteristic triumph of “pragmatism” in the twentieth century. To a large extent, I shall try to show, such “pragmatism” is mythic self-delusion, a way of avoiding dangerous threeway conflicts of forthright political rule, openly avowed ideological prophecy, and relentlessly quizzical higher learning.

During the spring and summer months of 1825, Aleksandr Pushkin intensified his efforts to end his exile in Mikhailovskoe. Though his friends urged him to produce work that might influence imperial opinion in his favor, Pushkin doubted that his poems could win him freedom. His writings increasingly were concerned with what the function of poetry should be. Pushkin's “crisis” in 1825 turned not only on political issues (the Decembrist revolt at the end of the year upset him greatly) but also on literary decisions. Politics and poetry are intertwined in one of the most problematic poems of that year, “André Chénier.” A poem now virtually forgotten, “André Chénier” shows Pushkin working out a formula for asserting his independence as a poet which was to organize his poetics for years to come.

The French poet André Chénier (1762–1794) was seen in the 1820s as an impassioned champion of political liberty who had been martyred for his ideals during the French Revolution. His poetry has strong formal and thematic ties to the classical tradition. Critics then as now have wavered between calling Chénier a neoclassical poet and the first romantic poet. Pushkin and his contemporaries were struck by the fresh diction and large sweep of Chénier's poems. Because Chénier's poetry was suppressed after his death, the publication in 1819 of the first collection of his verse made him seem suddenly contemporary, all the more so since his ideas were consonant with those of free-thinking Russian aristocratic circles of the time.

Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.

In 1951, and again in 1955, Dr. Fernand Lamaze, a French obstetrician, traveled to the Soviet Union to study “psychoprophylaxis,” a method designed by Soviet psychologists, obstetricians, and neurologists to help women overcome pain and fear during childbirth. The method, which was rooted in the medical use of hypnosis and suggestion to alleviate pain, involved training women to take their minds off uterine contractions by concentrating instead on other bodily functions, such as breathing. Lamaze refined the method and brought it to the West.

Lamaze's account of his indebtedness to Soviet scientists suggests that it may be useful to learn more about Soviet women's experiences during pregnancy and childbirth. Perusal of the literature, however, indicates that, while general descriptions in English of Soviet obstetrical care are available, very little is known about Soviet women's perceptions of and attitudes toward pregnancy and delivery.

Judging by most indexes of modernization, Joseph Stalin's long cherished dream of the socialist East overtaking the capitalist West remains unfulfilled. Ironically, however, the states of Eastern Europe may be close to preeminence in one unwelcome area: environmental pollution. Atmospheric emissions of sulfur dioxide in Czechoslovakia and Poland reportedly approximate similar emissions in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. Many waterways in Yugoslavia are said to be “polluted beyond all domestic, European, and world standards,” and in East Germany and Romania less than 20 percent of the main water-courses are sufficiently pure to provide potable water. The Slovak capital of Bratislava allegedly possesses the “worst environment among our own and other European cities,” while Western experts consider air pollution levels in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia to be among the highest in the world.

As is well known, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was founded on December 1,1918, did not achieve the success envisaged for it. It is generally assumed that the state was the direct product of Yugoslavism, a Croatian concept formulated in the nineteenth century, which found adherents among the Serbs and Slovenes. Although there is no consensus among scholars concerning the precise definition of Yugoslavism, in its basic terms the concept called for the union of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in one state. The proponents of Yugoslavism argued that as long as the three nations remained separate they were subject to domination by their stronger neighbors, whereas united they would be in a better position to determine their own future. These proponents never agreed on the exact political organization of the union, whether it should be a centralized or federalized state, but they assumed that the kingdom would have one army and a single foreign and trade policy, and that each nation would retain considerable local autonomy, for example, in education, religious affairs, and police jurisdiction. Yet the ultimate success of Yugoslavism was dependent on the acceptance by Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of the basic premise that they were in essence one people, and that eventually they would no longer give primacy to their Serbianism, Croatianism, and Slovenianism but would offer their undivided loyalty to the larger Yugoslav concept.

Modern Russian literature created its image of Moscow by depicting a number of typical inhabitants of the city and by identifying specific locales in which they lived. These settings — buildings, streets, squares, small neighborhoods, and larger regions — lent the authenticity of recognizable landmarks to generalizations about personality and life style. Similarly, descriptions of “typical” if fictitious Muscovites provided actual Moscow locations with specific, characteristic qualities. As these literary images of Moscow evolved, so too did their settings: first one area and then another became the “typical” Moscow. Thus the city's cultural topography changed with the values symbolized by Moscow's landmarks and local populations.

In nineteenth-century Russian memoir literature no work succeeds better than “My Literary and Moral Wanderings” at vividly evoking the historical circumstances of a specific time and place. In this, his best known work, the critic and poet Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev (1822–1864) depicted the Moscow of his childhood in the late 1820s and early 1830s. However, writing in 1862 and 1864, Grigor'ev described a Moscow that had changed radically in the intervening thirty years. The city's image had been preeminently aristocratic for several decades following 1812, but by mid-century a new image of merchant Moscow began to appear. The “Wanderings” confirm this change with rich descriptive material illustrating the concomitant shift in the city's cultural topography.

Over a decade ago, Georges Duby wrote his account of the development of the European economy between the seventh and twelfth centuries. The essential change he described was the transition from a society ruled by an elite of warriors, accumulating wealth through conquest, booty, and hoarding, to a society ruled by an elite of landholders, accumulating wealth through economic investment in land and places of production and exchange — workshops, markets, and fairs. The social groupings became increasingly complex. The simple societal divisions — between warriors and peasants, and between the free and the slaves — were replaced by complex and fluid structures of lordship and service. The resulting social arrangements and their language varied in different parts of Europe. Poland completed the transition from an economy based on force and warfare to one based on intensive agriculture and craft specialization in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This essay describes the structure of rural services and tributes resulting from this transition in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The first part describes village settlements and division of labor; the second part examines the concept of lordship and in particular the origins of involuntary services rendered by the peasants to the lords — “serfdom” — in Poland during the first decades of the thirteenth century.

In Western economies, considerable short-run output instability derives from the individual actions of resource owners to employ and produce and from the actions of consumers to spend and save according to their own best interests. This economic freedom at the lowest level enables firms and individuals to vary their spending between resources, goods, time, and place, and hence to create opportunities for imbalances between the quantity of output which producers would like to sell and the quantity which consumers would like to buy. Thus, shortages and surpluses may be created in the current period which affect the level of production in subsequent periods.

The proponents of central planning argue that a system of state resource ownership and the authority of planners to establish a wages and incomes policy and to allocate productive resources stabilize the behavior of producers and buyers in the economy. It is said to assure a greater homogeneity of economic objectives, rewards, and standards of performance, and offers the opportunity directly to influence the use of resources. With the control of resources, planning has the potential of projecting sector needs and of coordinating the demand and supply in various industries so as to reduce the frequency and severity of short-run adjustments in output.

Both Western and, sometimes more grudgingly, Soviet historians have praised certain aspects of the Russian judicial reforms of 1864 and their effects. Judicial transformation of the law proved to be an important means both of adapting traditional law to the social and economic changes occurring in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and of fostering and facilitating further change. Moreover, the effects and implications of some of the reforms of civil law introduced by the new courts inevitably drew these institutions into many of the political controversies besetting Russia at this time. These issues surprisingly, however, have attracted little scholarly attention.

This paper seeks to assess the significance of the new courts’ reforming activities and to relate these activities to broader social and political issues by examining the development of property and inheritance law by the Civil Cassation Department of the Senate. As the highest court of appeal for civil actions in the new judicial structure, the Civil Cassation Department rendered definitive interpretations of civil law and exercised tremendous influence over the decisions of lower courts. An examination of its practice therefore would not only reveal the policy of the highest court in the land, but would also provide a fairly accurate picture of the way particular civil laws were interpreted and enforced throughout the empire. While the Civil Cassation Department affected all areas of civil law more or less extensively, a study of its development of property and inheritance law would be especially useful in assessing the extent, nature, and significance of its reformist activity both because of the crucial, multifarious functions of these branches of law in any society and because of particular controversies surrounding them in Russia.

To refer to Prince Andrei as a rational man seems to flout Tolstoian psychological theory. In a passage from the second (unpublished) part of Youth that Boris Eikhenbaum treats as autobiographical, Tolstoi explains that one of his earliest maxims arose from a refutation of Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.“

Tolstoi alters Descartes's maxim to make it consistent with the metaphysical underpinnings of science and psychology as he understands them. Life is self-propelled motion, while reason is the principle that defines it or, as he puts it in the second epilogue of War and Peace, gives it form. The essence of a living being, therefore, must be desire or impulse, not thought, which gives form to impulse but does not itself move. To live is to will, not to think.

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.

American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

Recent interpretations of the first Five-Year Plan have taken two main approaches. One has emphasized the exploitation of workers and peasants by the party elite throughout the years of the first two Five-Year Plans. In explaining the evolution of labor policies and laws that bound the workers to jobs, Robert Conquest and Solomon Schwarz emphasize the personal responsibility of Stalin, who demanded rapid expansion of industrialization and brooked no questioning of his views. To obey him and to protect their political futures, his officials used tough policies designed to produce quick, visible results. Both authors describe a linear development of ever harsher proscriptions and penalties, and they attribute greater coherence to the process and greater effectiveness to the laws than actually existed. Both see the process from the viewpoint of the capital, disregard the competing ideas among the leaders, and neglect the local level where policies had to be executed and were often changed or ignored.

Estonia's Communist movement has received little attention in the West. The chief exceptions are its role in an abortive putsch in 1924 and the Soviet occupation and annexation of Estonia in 1940. Existing Western sources — primarily general histories or surveys — that deal with the interwar period of 1918 to 1940 tend to dismiss the Estonian Communist Party as electorally insignificant and to view it as a mere branch of the Party in the neighboring Soviet Union. In contrast, Soviet sources see it mainly as a native movement of significant popularity, the activity of which was suppressed by a bourgeois nationalist regime. Since the Estonian Communist Party participated in all parliamentary and local elections through fronts, a more accurate interpretation of its popular appeal may be gained through an examination of national election statistics. Detailed results of parliamentary elections are available and have remained an untapped source of primary data.

Western discussion of Soviet nationality issues frequently centers on large national groups and their varying potential for dissent. The fate of smaller groups, particularly those within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, is less often explored and is sometimes obscured by assumptions of forced acculturation. Rather than viewing the dominant Soviet Russian culture as a shark eating small fish cultures like the Siberian Khanty, it is more appropriate to decipher a range of acculturation options and experiences. Sharks can get indigestion, and all the economic and political changes introduced in small Siberian societies do not eliminate questions of ethnicity. Sometimes they exacerbate them.

This article focuses on the cultural survival and ethnic consciousness of the Khanty, a Ugrian speaking group who live predominantly in the Northern Ob River area of sub-arctic Siberia and who numbered 20,934 in 1979. They are traditionally hunters, fishers, and semi-nomadic reindeer breeders whose locale and trade over centuries have led them into contact with several ethnic groups, including the Russians. Within the Soviet political framework, the Ob-Ugrian Khanty and Mansi share an Autonomous District (Okrug). This places them midway between Siberian groups without a formal administrative unit based on nationality (for example, some Amur River peoples) and the two largest Siberian groups, the Buriat and the Yakut, each numbering over 325,000, with their own Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs) within the RSFSR.

It is commonly supposed that confessional adherence was the decisive element in the growth of Croat and Serb nationhood: “In the differentiation of Serbs from Croats and the rise of modern Serb and Croat national consciousness, religion played the essential role in the Serbo-Croatian linguistic area. Whereas the Catholics by rule became Croats, the Orthodox were Serbs.” This none too precise formulation assumes that, quite independently of preexisting South Slavic affinities, a homogeneous national “mass” became heterogeneous by reason of outside dispensational intervention. Without fully analyzing whether religion indeed separated the South Slavs into different nationalities or whether religious affiliation simply reflected the allogenic nature of the South Slavic settlement — such an analysis would be difficult to sustain on the basis of current ethnogenesic knowledge—I suggest that the confessional “rule” is hardly as firm as some scholars suppose and needs to be qualified.