Some poets are astonishingly precocious: Arthur Rimbaud, for example, wrote everything he had to write by the time he was nineteen. Nikolai Morshen’s development as a poet offers an opposite example. Gradually maturing in a leisurely and deliberate manner over almost four decades, this poet’s work, when viewed in its totality, is a study in ever deepening philosophical thought and ever more finely honed verbal mastery. The stages of Morshen’s development and their chronology are obvious enough: the verse of 1936 to 1946 (written prior to Morshen’s first published collection and, for the most part, not included in it); the three published books of verse, Tiulen' (The Seal, 1959), Dvoetochie (Punctuation: Colon, 1967), and Ekho i zerkalo (The Echo and the Mirror, 1979); and a few poems that have appeared in émigré journals from his fourth, unpublished collection, “Umolkshii zhavoronok” (“The Now-Silent Lark”).

From 1906 to 1914 C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud exchanged 360 personal letters, most of them mailed between Zürich and Vienna. These years saw the consolidation of an international Freudian school by 1909 and multiple schisms within the movement, from the defection of Adler in 1911 to the final alienation of Jung himself. Given the era and the specific localities, it is not surprising to find that Russians and Russian political issues now and then figure, oddly and elliptically, among the welter of topics raised in the Freud-Jung Briefwechsel. Out of the fragmented data an incident of sorts emerges, with a Russian cast in the role of seductress (later heroine), Jung as victim (and unwitting villain), and Freud himself intervening “Sherlock Holmes-like” (as he put it) to help solve the case. Beyond its intrinsic and eccentric appeal, the material holds a three-fold historic significance for the Slavicist.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1898-1975) is currently one of the most respected thinkers in Soviet literary criticism of the twentieth century. His compendious knowledge of world literature, his sensitivity to difference and historical continuity in art, and his ability to formulate precisely the opaque relationships between the author, his text, and his reader indicate a genius that is enviable and perhaps inimitable.

Polish-Russian relations have from their very beginning been characterized by intense political rivalry and military confrontation. This is no surprise, since after the Polish-Lithuanian union (1386, 1569), Poland was drawn into the conflict between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the great Muscovite principality over hegemony in Eastern Europe. Struggles between Lithuania and Muscovy were thus transformed into wars between the Russian state and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the reigns of Polish kings Stefan Batory (1576–86), Zygmunt III (1587–1632), and Wladyslaw IV (1632–48), the commonwealth gained a military advantage over its eastern neighbor. This was especially evident during the Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia), when the Polish army occupied Moscow (1610–12) and when Wladyslaw IV defeated the Russians in the War of Smolensk (1632–34).

Even a brief survey of the institutional history of Russia and the Soviet Union will show the existence of a remarkable number of institutions and officials whose main function is best described as supervisory. They do not usually legislate or make policy decisions. For the most part they do not execute policy directly or pass legal judgments. Their task is to check that other government officials and institutions are acting in conformity to the law and the commands of their superiors. Yet for all their evident importance during two and a half centuries (and in spite of the fact that Russian statesmen were always aware of their importance), the general nature and significance of these institutions have not been fully clarified. Of the several important works on individual supervisory institutions, none that I know of attempts to explain the role played in Russian institutional history by supervisory institutions as a whole.

One of the dilemmas of revolutionary regimes is the difficulty they experience in creating new structures of rule out of resources inherited from the ancien regime. In Russia, the Bolsheviks came to power dedicated to building a socialist society and creating new institutions whose forms were predicated on an unfolding theory of how the transition to socialism would occur. Such a method of shaping institutions was deductive and synoptic, standing in sharp contrast to the evolutionary adaptation of old institutions to new functions. One may wonder how free revolutionary regimes in fact are to construct institutions a novo. The early Bolshevik attempt to establish “control” structures, that is, institutions and procedures for the external auditing and monitoring of economic and other public organizations, is a case in point. Of interest are the extent to which the Bolsheviks were successful in creating effective control bodies and the reasons behind their success or failure.

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.

Preliminary results from the 1979 Soviet census reveal that non-Slavic minorities make up over a quarter of the populace. Ethnic diversity has been and will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, an important consideration in Soviet policy making. Analysis of nationality trends is thus a key aspect of Western study of Soviet domestic politics. Assessment of Soviet labor force prospects, for example, depends in part on the occupational skills, Russian fluency, and geographical mobility of the Soviets of Muslim heritage in the fast-growing southern tier of the USSR. Soviet military capabilities will be increasingly affected by a rising proportion of Muslims of draft age. In addition, long-term population projections hinge on an evaluation of how rapidly these same groups will exhibit the low fertility associated with demographic modernization.