The discussions surveyed here took place between June 1932 and March 1933, mainly in the columns of Za industrializatsiiu, the official newspaper of the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom). A number of contributors, headed by M. I. Birbraer, a prominent member of the newspaper staff, advocated major changes in the economic mechanism. Dozens of officials, managers, economists, and journalists from industry, trade, and finance participated. The wide-ranging debate was brought to an end on April 5, 1933, when G. K. Ordzhonikidze, Politburo member and People's Commissar for Heavy Industry, dismissed V. S. Bogushevskii, the editor of the newspaper, for “political mistakes.”

An examination of these discussions in their political and economic context helps our understanding of several significant aspects of the Soviet economic system of the early 1930s.

In the years since the appearance of The Master and Margarita a large body of critical literature has been devoted to a search for unity, or rather a search for the key that unites the novel's three disparate realms, with their separate settings, casts of characters, levels of language, and characteristic narrative voices. One approach has been to search for formal unity using the novel's structural elements (narrative modes, setting, time-space coordinates). Another approach has been to search for thematic unity by tracing the moral and philosophical threads that run through the novel as well as the literary antecedents of each of the characters. Some critics have reached the conclusion that there is no unity—that the novel is in fact a faulty, fragmented piece of writing.

The time has passed when it was automatically assumed that the Stolypin Land Reform represented an attempt on the part of the tsarist government to impose on an unwilling peasantry a predetermined plan for a change in land tenure. The revision of opinion has in large measure resulted from the work of George L. Yaney, who has shown that policy and the organization necessary for carrying it out evolved and changed during the course of the implementation of the Stolypin reform. Yaney argues that certain of the changes in the reform came about as a result of the government responding to pressure from the peasants. Inevitably, this pressure concerned those aspects of the land reform that affected the peasants most directly, for instance, the disposition of the land and the timing and sequence of withdrawal from the commune.

The final stage of Muscovy's subordination to the Tatars is a murky topic in Russian history. In the first half of the fifteenth century, the Golden Horde fragmented and new political entities emerged: the Great Horde, the Nogai Horde, the Khanates of the Crimea, Kazan', and Astrakhan'. The Great Horde claimed the same supremacy as the Golden Horde, and the khans of the Great Horde demanded the tribute and the submission which Muscovy formerly had given the khan of the Golden Horde. As the power of the Great Horde in turn weakened, Muscovy was able to emerge from its submission to the Tatars and function as an independent state.

The national archives of Denmark and Sweden have engaged Soviet archives in extensive and probably unique exchanges of copied materials. These two archives consequently hold substantial quantities of Soviet archival records, records sometimes of extraordinary value, which in some cases are scarcely accessible in any other part of the world, including the Soviet Union. Approximately 40 percent of the holdings of Soviet documents in the Danish National Archive come from the Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossii. The fact that it is very difficult to gain access to this institution considerably enhances their importance. The Swedish holdings are similar.

The Russian documents in both archives were acquired in two phases, and phase one was common to both. In 1928, archivists and historians from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden formed a joint Scandinavian committee for the exploration of the Russian state archives (Den Nordiske Faelleskomite for Udforskning af de russiske Statsarkiver).

One expanding area of research in the well-established Soviet field of scholarship known as knigovedenie (book studies) is that of the history of readership. Its newness is indicated by the fact that not until 1974 was a separate section for materials on the history of reading established in the annual surveys of book studies that appear in the basic journal Kniga: issledovaniia i materialy. As far as the early nineteenth century is concerned, the Decembrists have perhaps attracted most attention, and the one monograph broad enough to be considered a general study (Al'tshuller and Martynov) follows that trend by discussing a panorama of readers who have in common their reading of Decembrist literature. But early in the book one encounters a keynote statement which sets the study in a wider context and expresses a view increasingly held by scholars irrespective of their geographic interests: “One very important aspect of … [Decembrist poetry] has escaped attention.

Petr Chaadaev's First Philosophic Letter (Pervoe filosoficheskoe pis'mo) was published in September (Old Style) 1836, in the fifteenth issue of Teleskop, the mediocre magazine owned and edited by Nikolai Nadezhdin. The Letter, probably the most celebrated article in the country's history, dispraised Russia in her past and present as an exception to the universal laws of humanity, despaired of her future, deplored her Orthodoxy, described her as a pariah among the nations of both East and West, and denied that she possessed a true civilization; the essay had a strong providentialist, chiliastic, and Catholic flavor.

Chaadaev thus defined the terrain, the terms, and even the tone for the public debate—the first of its kind in Russia—between Slavophiles and Westernizers in the 1830s and 1840s, and he can be said to have inaugurated that debate. Chaadaev opened the discussion of the destiny of Russia on a note of attack.