Having crushed the Solidarity movement’s unprecedented attempt to pluralize postwar Polish society, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) ordered a special commission of the party’s Central Committee to study the causes of the political crises that have repeatedly convulsed Poland during forty years of Communist rule and have resulted in the downfall of successive first secretaries and their principal associates. After several months of labor, the commission declared that one of the main causes was that the authorities ignored popular opinion and discouraged local initiatives for independent action and reforms. To show that it had learned its lesson, the PZPR adopted “socialist pluralism” as one of the principal points of its program for “normalization” and “renewal” soon after martial law was lifted in 1982.

As the archetypal young prose writer of the 1960s, Vasilii Aksenov represented the hopes of the Khrushchev generation for the good life and for cultural and political liberalization. Rebelling against the ideological puritanism of socialist realism and the moral imperative of Russian literature, Aksenov’s writing reflected the pleasure principle, hedonism, unofficial popular culture, and the aesthetics of consumption. He perceived life as a multicolored, multinational carnival, which became the backdrop of his heroes’ adolescent identity crises and later problems of mid-life and aging. In response to Stalinism, war, and Soviet ideological bombast, Aksenov and his generation created a literature with a clearly western orientation; experimental, playful, and linguistically subversive, it was optimistic, but not in the socialist realist sense.

Early nineteenth century military drafts severely tested the cohesiveness of Russia’s peasant communities. Because a conscript served for twenty-five years, he rarely returned to his community. His household lost a family member, a worker, and often part of its land allotment. The threat of such losses heightened the potential for abuse of community rules determining the selection of conscripts. A serf owner observed this problem when visiting his new estate in 1837: “The draft duties were determined by some sort of calculation, that, in spite of all my desire and mental exercises, I could not master. I only knew that it worked to the profit of the village head and to the loss of the peasants”.

The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russian-ruled Poland, with its dramatic manifestation of the transformation of the country’s political culture, marks a major, if not entirely appreciated, watershed in modern Polish history. Influenced, if not sparked by events in the central provinces of the Russian Empire, most notably Bloody Sunday, the revolution in Russian Poland quickly acquired a momentum of its own based on local conditions. In Poland the revolution was characterized by several nationwide general strikes and the sudden emergence of a viable labor movement; by a long, bitter, and partially successful boycott of the Russified school system; by unprecedented popular striving for the benefits of secular culture and education; by the gmina (communal) movement in the countryside that aroused a large part of the Polish peasantry from its traditional indifference to national issues; and by the rapid growth of political and social organizations that claimed to represent the interests of mass constituencies. Preceded by four decades of fundamental demographic, economic, and social change, the revolution propelled the largest and most significant part of Poland into a new era of broad, popular participation in the political, social, and cultural life of the country.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought new outlooks and aspirations into the cultural life of Serbia, but the mainstream of spiritual and creative development had already been marked by the affirmation of established national values. After 1903 important political changes, accompanying the return of constitutional government, stimulated a spiritual and national revival. In his History of the New Serbian Literature, Jovan Skerlić described the general improvement in social and political life. Skerlić, a contemporary who actively participated in the cultural and political events at the beginning of this century, pointed out that the consequences of these changes influenced the awakening of the national spirit and offered numerous solutions to questions of national importance. In 1904 Skerlić took part in the organization of the First Congress of Southern Slav Youth and of the First Yugoslav Fine Arts Exhibit marking the centennial of the first Serbian uprising. These events strengthened friendly cultural collaboration between Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgarians. Even the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 could not halt this growth. Further proof of national strength was furnished by the victories in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. After five hundred years the liberation of the Serbian people from Turkish occupation was finally accomplished.