The period 1917-21 in Russia found the fledgling Bolshevik government engaged in desperate military struggles with imperial Germany, with several White Russian armies assisted in varying degrees by foreign troops and supplies, with national movements for independence, and with a newly restored Poland. Yet despite an ever-present military threat to the very existence of the new government, many Bolshevik leaders remained constantly aware that theirs was a revolutionary regime, with the goal of achieving a radical trans? formation of the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions they had inherited. Consequently this same period witnessed, in addition to the crucial military conflicts, several experimental efforts to achieve thoroughgoing institutional change.

Higher education was one such target of reform, and this paper will describe succeeding attempts undertaken during 1917-21 to implement three radically different blueprints for reform of the higher educational system.

If, in a nation where comprehensive statistics on social problems are rarely if ever published, legislative action and press attention to such problems may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they are regarded, then the Soviet Union's alcohol problem is serious indeed. On April 8, 1967, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved a decree, On Compulsory Treatment and Labor Re-education of Habitual Drunkards (Alcoholics). This decree, which went into effect on September 1 of the same year, provides for one to two-year terms in special “treatment-labor” medical institutions for excessive drinkers who violate “labor discipline, public order, and the rules of the socialist community.” The new institutions were subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the RSFSR Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order (MOOP, now renamed MVD). While it contained a number of significant departures from earlier legislation, the decree's most important point was its “preventive” emphasis. Previously an offending drunkard had to be on trial for a crime in a people's court before proceedings for compulsory treatment could be instituted.

N. A. Dobroliubov's critical essays on Goncharov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, and Dostoevsky, written in the brief period of two years preceding his death in 1861, established a reputation and influence second only to Belinsky's in the history of Russian literary criticism. Of these essays “What Is Oblomovism?” holds particular interest. Published in the May 1859 issue of Nekrasov's Sovremennik (The Contemporary), it was Dobroliubov's first major review and possibly his best. It is a central document in the history of the conflict between the liberals of the 1840s and the radicals of the 1860s, or, in the phrasing of Turgenev's title, between “fathers and sons.”

The first book of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains an episode from the Allied War Council at Olmütz, on November 27, 1805, five days before the Battle of Austerlitz. With the Council over, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes Prince Boris Drubetskoy, a new aide-de-camp, to present him to Tsar Alexander. Coming out of the emperor's room as they approach is a tall man in civilian dress who has a striking face and sharply projecting jaw, which gives him a peculiar vivacity and keenness of expression. “Who was that ?” asks Drubetskoy. “He is one of the most remarkable but to me most unpleasant of men—the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski,” replies Bolkonsky.

The literature of Muscovite Russia is vast and uneven in quality. In spite of the efforts of scholars, many literary works have not been sufficiently studied to permit one to assign them their proper place in Russian literature. One such work is the Laodicean Epistle (Laodikiiskoe poslanie). A number of articles have recently been written on it, and it has figured prominently in the books of two of the leading specialists in Muscovite history and literature. Discussion has centered on questions of the extent of the work, the original text, its interpretation, and possible sources. None of these points has been decided to the satisfaction of scholars concerned with the intellectual and literary developments of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This article is an attempt to provide other explanations for some of the questions raised by the text.

Vladimir Nabokov's acrobatic disclaimers may often be safely qualified, and his strenuous self-estrangement from Gogol is no exception. Indeed, these two very different writers are surprisingly alike in many ways, ranging from a fondness for depicting poshlust to a deep preoccupation with painting. Parallels and parodies are of course mostly unlabeled. But perhaps more important than the artistic purpose behind Gogolisms in Nabokov is that the mechanisms of many similar effects are nearly identical. And uniquely so. Both writers frequently contrive very similar “reversal effects” that conduce to a sudden, fresh view of “reality” and, somewhat paradoxically, a simultaneous and unsettling awareness of human perceptual limitations.

Since the first Russian publication of Count B. C. Münnich’s “Memoirs” in 1842 historians have employed them as a useful primary source on eighteenthcentury history. However, the Russian title, Zapiski, is misleading. Münnich was not writing his personal memoirs or even a state memorandum: instead he was offering a proposal for central government reform with an accompanying historical justification. Scholars have occasionally remarked on this aspect of the document. But it has gone unrecognized that Münnich’s writing also bore a strongly partisan political imprint. The political design only becomes clear in the context of the prolonged battle for position and influence waged between two powerful court parties in the first years of Catherine II’s reign. At a crucial stage in this struggle Münnich used his proposal in an apparent attempt to break the deadlock and facilitate Nikita Panin’s rise to power in late 1763.

When one thinks of Poland in the nineteenth century, the revolutions of 1830 and 1863 come immediately to mind. Yet not all Poles believed that the problem of the relations between Poland and Russia could be resolved only by revolution. There were many who preferred reconciliation. The number in the one camp as against the other at any particular time was a direct reflection of the political atmosphere in Russia. Whenever conditions gave rise to hopes for liberalization and reform among the Russians themselves, the policy of reconciliation would gain adherents among the Poles. This was the case under Alexander I, at the beginning of Alexander IPs reign, and following the revolution of 1905.

The word "intelligentsia," according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, entered the English vocabulary in 1920. Its source was undoubtedly Russian, where it first became current in the early 1860s and a decade later acquired the status of a household word. The Russian etymology of "intelligentsia" has long been a subject of controversy. The question recently acquired additional interest when a young American scholar, Mr. Alan Pollard, demonstrated that the novelist P. D. Boborykin, who liked to take credit for introducing the word into Russian, had no right to the claim. Without going into this complicated matter, I should like to call attention to evidence indicating that the German word Intelligenz was used as early as 1849 to describe the same phenomenon as "intelligentsia," namely, a group distinguished from the rest of society by its education and "progressive" attitude. The fact that this usage antedates the Russian by more than a decade suggests that die Intelligenz may have been the direct inspiration for the Russian concept.