Russia's position between Europe and Asia is once again a timely subject. On the most official level, it figures regularly in Mikhail Gorbachev's pronouncements on foreign policy: somberly invoked either in western capitals in order to press his vision of a “common European home” from the Atlantic to the Urals or in the Far East to affirm the Soviet Union's natural identity as an Asian country. At the same time, dissident intellectual circles in the Soviet Union have been expostulating upon the Europe-Russia-Asia juxtaposition for some years and frequently enough arrive at conclusions very different from those of the general secretary.

Many who lauded Stalin's Soviet Union as the most democratic country on earth lived to regret their words. After all, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 was adopted on the eve of the Great Terror of the late 1930s; the “thoroughly democratic” elections to the first Supreme Soviet permitted only uncontested candidates and took place at the height of the savage violence in 1937. The civil rights, personal freedoms, and democratic forms promised in the Stalin constitution were trampled almost immediately and remained dead letters until long after Stalin's death.

The narrator of Vladimir Voinovich's Zhizn’ i neobychainye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina: roman-anekdot v piati chastiakh tells us on the first page that the events he is going to describe took place during the period from late May to early June 1941. For the knowledgeable reader, this information means something terrible is about to happen: On 22 June Adolf Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, starting what was to be one of the most devastating wars in human history. Yet Voinovich's novel is hilariously funny. How does Voinovich do it?

To answer this question adequately, a comprehensive theory of humor would have to be applied to both Chonkin and its sequel, Pretendent na prestol: novye prikliucheniia soldata Ivana Chonkina. I will not attempt such a large task here, but I can undertake a more modest enterprise. I believe it is possible to explain why certain crucial passages in Voinovich's narratipn about the onset of the Great Fatherland War can actually provoke laughter. These passages concern the Father of Peoples himself, the Soviet dictator, Stalin.

Within Russian and Soviet studies psychohistory has had few practitioners and a negligible effect, with the notable exception of Robert C. Tucker, an eloquent theorist of Soviet politics and a preeminent biographer of Stalin. His strategy for uncovering the unknown early Stalin has involved borrowing from the methodologies of psychoanalysis with the aim of showing how the pathology of the adult Stalin was rooted in the child. Yet his approach has found few adherents.

Stalin is without doubt one of the least hospitable subjects for the psychohistorian. Not particularly introspective, he left no intimate letters, no secret diary, and few witnesses to his inner life. Moreover, Bolshevik political culture was hostile to open personal expression and imposed on Stalin and other adherents an enforced modesty.

The publication of Anatolii Rybakov's Deti Arbata (1987) was heralded with much fanfare both in the Soviet Union and abroad. In the novel Rybakov seeks to capture the essence of Stalinism as it affected the day-to-day existence of Soviet citizens, a theme that commands intense interest in the Soviet Union today. Yet it seems unlikely that Deti Arbata would have attracted the attention it has were it not for its lengthy passages devoted to the actions and thoughts of Stalin. The novel's protagonist Sasha Pankratov remains curiously flat, too reminiscent of socialist realist paragons; it is instead Rybakov's Stalin who holds the reader's attention.

Few reliable Soviet histories of the Stalinist period or biographies of Stalin exist. Dmitrii Volkogonov and others are trying to rectify this situation, but literature has attempted to fill the gap and to respond to the national desire for some insight into the mysteries of Stalinism and its creator.

Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “man-made” or “artificial.” The Stalinist leadership is presented as having imposed harsh procurement quotas on Ukraine and regions inhabited by other groups, such as Kuban’ Cossacks and Volga Germans, in order to suppress nationalism and to overcome opposition to collectivization. Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population. Robert Conquest, for example, has referred to a Soviet study of drought to show that conditions were far better in 1932 than they were in 1936, a “non-famine year.” James Mace, the main author of a U.S. Congress investigation of the Ukraine famine, cites “post-Stalinist” statistics to show that this harvest was larger than those of 1931 or 1934 and refers to later Soviet historiography describing 1931 as a worse year than 1932 because of drought. On this basis he argues that the 1932 harvest would not have produced mass starvation.

The Soviet reappraisal of Stalin that began in 1986 was initially manifest only in the cultural sphere, although more recently it has spread to other domains. Anatolii Rybakov's novel Deti Arbata played a decisive role in preparing the way for a reassessment of Stalin's legacy. Its publication was immediately recognized as “an event of enormous significance,” reflecting the hunger for history and the wish to dethrone Stalin. In fact, the novel became the symbol of glasnost. It is the first novel to portray Stalin as a major character, to draw his psychological and historical portrait, and to demythologize his image. Furthermore, it does so for the first time without khitroglasie. Portraying the first generation of Soviet citizens, the children of the Arbat, it introduces the theme of exile into Soviet literature and sketches the social relations and the social psychology of the people in 1934.

More than two dozen Soviet astronomers were arrested between March 1936 and July 1937. Few astronomers or historians are aware of the extent to which Soviet astronomy was devastated. This article investigates the situation in astronomy during these two years. It begins with a brief discussion of Soviet astronomy between 1917 and 1935 and continues with a detailed examination of the events that served as the catalyst for the purge, the arrests themselves, and a discussion of what is known about the fates of the victims.

In the mid-1930s the Soviet Union had approximately two hundred professional astronomers and sixteen astronomical observatories, most of which were associated with universities and had staffs of only two or three people. The most important and best equipped astronomical institution was the Central Astronomical Observatory of the USSR at Pulkovo, just outside Leningrad, with its branch observatories at Nikolaev and Simeis in the Ukraine. In 1935 thirty-three astronomers worked at Pulkovo.

The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.

The Moscow Trials forced the international anti-Stalinist Left to reconsider its most fundamental truths. The old, rigid categories of capitalism and socialism were no longer certain; a new urgency accompanied the question of where the revolution had gone astray. Many of the most outspoken anti-Stalinists searching for new answers had been either adherents or sympathizers of Trotskii. For many of these former staunch supporters, Trotskii's theoretical middle ground—at the same time hostile to the Stalinist bureaucracy but defensive of the land of socialized production— was no longer tenable. One after another, they broke with Trotskii. Yet this entire movement of reevaluation in Trotskii's intellectual entourage either has not been fully explored in discussions centering on Trotskii's views or, in a certain Trotskyist tradition, has been dismissed as a simple move to the Right. One of the best ways to understand both the roots and the context of such an intellectual upheaval is to focus on the key individuals.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita is the complex and deeply significant system of parallels the author has set up between the Moscow and Jerusalem stories. These parallels have produced, in much scholarly analysis of the novel, a strong tendency toward what Andrew Barratt has called a “monistic” approach: An interpretation of the work as a double novel, or two variations of the same “master story,” acted out in different times and places by characters with clear, specific correlations—Woland-Pilate (or Latunskii-Pilate), the Master-Ieshua, Bezdomnyi-Matvei, and so forth. Although this approach has an obvious appeal, it also has several serious weaknesses. Not least among these is its failure to encompass the character of Margarita—that is, to identify a parallel to her in the Jerusalem story. In the following I will address this weakness by suggesting that Margarita's parallel character is Afranius, the chief of Pilate's secret service.