In early December 1994 in the Hungarian weekly Magyar Narancs, a new category appeared in the Page of Records–a sophisticated guide to the “best” places and services in Budapest: “The Most Unsighdy Square in Europe.” This award went to Budapest's Moszhva tér (Moscow Square). No other contender for this title has yet been found. On the last pages of his monograph on the current architectural transformation of Budapest, art and media critic Péter György reveals in parentheses how the book was inspired by the sight of this area: “I have been crossing the square every day for ten years, and in the last couple of years I would stop ever more frequendy–unable to move on–and fixedly stare at the decay.”

Aleksandr Pushkin's cult for simple, unadorned prose is a critical commonplace that needs no further documentation. Weaned on those masters of French classicism (Jean de La Bruyère, Montesquieu, and, above all, Voltaire) for whom brevity was the soul of wit and concision no crime, he practiced from the beginning, “Naden'ka,” to the end, “Kirdzhali“ and The Captain's Daughter, a narrative style conspicuous for its uncommon bareness. That the virtues which he valued most highly in prose, namely, tochnost', kratkost', and nagaia prostata are, with rare exceptions, at one with his practice has been noted many times.

Published census data on Jews have been very scarce, but these data and other sources leave no doubt that in comparison with other groups Soviet Jews were very distinctive in terms of such characteristics as their urban concentration and their educational and professional achievement. This level of achievement occurred despite popular and official anti-Semitism of varying intensity. With the recent release of new data from the 1989 census, a more precise understanding of the opportunities available to Jews in Soviet Russia is now possible. These data show the number of men and women by major ethnic groups (including Jews) in 257 job categories. Surprisingly, this new information is not referred to even in the most recent Russian scholarship on Jews, and it receives no mention in western sources. In this article, I use the new occupational data to evaluate differences between Russians and Jews and to explore the way in which employment disparities may have shaped interaction between the two groups.

It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were “fathers” to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.

One of the firmest popular conceptions of the Soviet Union in the United States is of a system diat categorically banned private enterprise. Embraced by specialists and the general public alike, this conception reflects the official Soviet stance diat the private sector was eradicated during losif Stalin's “great break” of 1929-30. Indeed, over the course of diose two years, individual peasants were compelled to collectivize, private stores forcibly shut, private manufactures socialized, and even doctors and dentists pressured to cooperate or to close shop. The concept of an interdiction against all private economic activity found support in the words of the dictator–Stalin's assertions that the Soviet Union was a society “without capitalists, small or big,” that socialist, not capitalist, property was the “foundation of revolutionary legality,” and many other statements of a similar ilk. Stalin proved his commitment to this model by his readiness to resort to coercion against its violators: at his instigation, repressive laws threatened entrepreneurs with five to ten years in prison camp for profitable private business. Such developments appeared as unequivocal as they proved lasting; when commentators discussed perestroika in the late 1980s, the only historical precedent they could identify was Lenin's New Economic Policy six decades before.

The second disintegration of the empire this century has reopened the debate over Russian state and nation building with direct implications both for Russia's reform process and for its relations with other newly independent states. In December 1991, the Russian Federation was transformed into an independent state as a historically formed regional entity, not as a nation state. Scholars argue that the Russian empire was built “at the cost of Russia's own sense of nationhood.” In the past, the efforts spent conquering and ruling vast territories and diverse populations diverted the Russian people and their leaders from the task of consolidation and nation building. This was true not only in the prerevolutionary but also in the Soviet period, during which the majority of Russians saw the entire USSR rather than the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) as their homeland. Now, after the disintegration of the USSR, the questions arise whether the majority of Russians can accept the borders of the Russian Federation as final, and, if not, what the alternative myths of Russia's national homeland are? The answers to these questions determine whether Russians will ever be able to define themselves other than as an imperial people.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).

Vladimir Gromov was thirty-six years old when he was sentenced to death in 1935 for pretending to be someone he was not. Asserting the identity of a skilled engineer and award-winning architect, this man with only a middle school education once convinced the commissar of supply, Anastas Mikoian, to give him one million rubles. Now, the Moscow prosecutor and people's court insisted that he was a pretender, an impostor, a master con artist. Yet in his own mind, Gromov was an artist of a different sort. While in solitary confinement awaiting execution in Moscow's Taganka prison, Gromov wrote a play, complete with elaborate drawings and stage directions, which he submitted to the deputy procuratorgeneral of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinskii.

In recent decades, historians of prerevolutionary Russia have emphasized the diverse and complex nature of the group of educated Russians that has traditionally been referred to as the “intelligentsia.” In the existing historiography, there have been numerous investigations into various subgroups of the intelligentsia, including studies of noble intellectuals, students, women radicals, religious thinkers, ethnic elites, and members of political parties and of specific professions. The subgroup that contributed more to Russian professions and political movements than any other non-noble subgroup in both quantitative and qualitative terms is also the only prominent subgroup that has been neglected. The members of this neglected subgroup are Russian Orthodox clergymen's sons, referred to throughout this article by the Russian term popovichi?

Among the scores of unpublished manuscripts in fond 89 (“Bolotovykh”) of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg is a partially filled album spanning a forty-year period from the early 1780s to the early 1820s. One of the many long-term projects of the multitalented memoirist, landscape designer, and agronomist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov (1738-1833), the album was initiated at Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797, and continued to garner new contributions for several decades after he retired to Dvorianinovo, his estate and birthplace in northern Tula province. It has been summarized by one of the few scholars who has studied it as “an extremely interesting mirror of provincial byt.” The pretty and seemingly mimetic reflection of rural life that it provides is deceptive on a number of levels, however: for on the Russian estate during this period— and, as it turns Out, on the pages of the album itself—there is a good deal more going on than first meets the eye.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Vladimir Solov'ev worked out a Christian approach to nations and nationality, and a moral critique of nationalism, while waging a polemical battle against the Russian conservative nationalists of his day. His ideas emerged primarily from his own social gospel theology, but they were marked by both the Slavophile romanticism of his early career and the western liberalism of his later years. Solov'ev is most often treated as a philosopher, a mystic, or a literary figure, and as a result, his journalistic writings on nationalism and other topics have often been overlooked by scholars, even though they constitute at least a third of his published output.

The Bolsheviks made civil war inevitable by forcing a showdown with the Kerenskii government in October 1917—and concomitantly with the moderate socialist parties, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks. The resulting conflict accelerated complex processes underway since February that exacerbated social polarization and fostered political and economic localism. Following the local Soviet's siege of the city duma in the provincial capital of Saratov in October, opposition forces began to contest Soviet power, which before long was reduced to Bolshevik and Left SR rule. As a result, the Saratov Soviet spent all of 1918-19 battling a variety of manifestations of discontent with the new political order. The calculus of civil war in the province involved the sustained threat to strategically located Saratov of White armies, which succeeded in striking against and taking the uezd (district) towns of Khvalynsk, Vol'sk, Serdobsk, Tsaritsyn, Balashov, Kuznetsk, and Kamyshin. Opposition from within the province proved every bit as formidable. Anti-Bolshevik forces, inspired by both the socialist and nonsocialist resistance, mobilized uprisings in all of the towns of Saratov province during the civil war; moreover, not a single uezd escaped the throes of peasant violence and resistance before this turbulent chapter in Russian history drew to a close.

Perhaps the most consistent biographical reference to the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) concerns his unusual guffaw: “When he laughed, his loud infectious laughter ‘with unexpected, outrageous, and hiccup-like high notes’ would drown out all other voices.” Scholars usually explain this laughter as a sign of Solov‘ev's otherworldly perception and his occasionally inappropriate descent into our mundane realm. Observing this “infectious laughter,” Evgenii Trubetskoi found an explanation in his friend's supposed ethereal character: “He was so nearsighted that he did not see what others saw. Squinting under his thick brows, he could make out items at close range only with difficulty. But when his glance searched into the distance, it seemed to penetrate beyond the surface accessible to our external senses and to see something otherworldly, hidden from all the rest. His eyes shone with some kind of internal light and gazed directly into the soul.” Aleksandr Blok, who claimed to have been greatly affected by a chance meeting with the strange philosopher, called him “pure spirit, as if an image instead of a living man–an outline, a symbol, a sketch.”

High above Nagaevo Bay, the city of Magadan affords an impressive panorama of rocky cliffs that fall precipitously into the Sea of Okhotsk. Beautiful and serene, the view typifies the natural scenery of this mountainous Pacific coasdine in the farthest reaches of northeastern Russia. But it also belies the tragic history of the region in the Stalin era, when the Soviet government sent upwards of one million prisoners to Magadan for servitude in the hard labor camps of the Kolyma and Chukodsa. In the national consciousness, the city has for many years held a unique and vexing significance, all the more intense because so many thed on the neighboring tundra. Standing as the most notorious center of the gulag, indeed as its "capital," Magadan became synonymous witii the Great Terror.