Change in the Stalinist system, and stubborn resistance to change, have been the central features of Soviet political life since Stalin's death in 1953. The rival forces of “innovation and tradition,” to use the language of the official press, have become “two poles” in Soviet politics and society, which are expressed through “sharp clashes between people standing on both sides of the psychological barrier.“

The career of Aleksandr Gavrilovich Shliapnikov dramatically illustrates the interrelationship of politics and historical writing in Soviet Russia from the early 1920s until 1931. During that formative period, the Bolshevik Party sought uniformity in its ranks by the general suppression of dissent and a corresponding requirement that its historians regard their craft chiefly as an extension of party policy. Although Bolshevik historians increasingly felt compelled to justify the party's past and present policies, Shliapnikov resisted. He continued to advocate many of the opinions he had held in the early 1920s as a leader of the Workers' Opposition. Although he was condemned for his behavior, he began an equally controversial career as a historian of the 1917 Revolution.

Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russian intelligenty possessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.

The ways in which members of a community think, act, or believe are always changing. Sometimes the pace of change is imperceptibly slow; at other times it is so rapid that it can distinguish an era from its recent past. The rural communities of Bulgaria have experienced rapid change over the last three decades. It began on September 9, 1944, when the Bulgarian monarchy was overthrown and the Bulgarian Communist Party emerged to lead Bulgaria on a path of socialist development. The seizure of power was a revolutionary act but, more important, from a sociological point of view, it was an act that made revolutionary change possible. My purpose is to illustrate several ways in which Bulgarian rural communities have participated in the revolutionary transformation of community and family life in the 1970s.

One of the most perplexing questions in The Brothers Karamazov is the manner in which Father Zosima serves as Dostoevsky's spokesman on matters of spiritual faith. Zosima's teachings emphasize humility, a mystical union of man and the world, and undifferentiated love; the key to faith for him is the individual's own emotion, the wisdom of the heart. In keeping with the deeply personal quality of Zosima's message, he teaches in the form of short homilies and stories from his own past. These often lack logical connectives, relying instead on repetition of certain images of nature and mystical community. Malcolm Jones has aptly remarked that Dostoevsky withholds specific guidelines from his seekers of faith, giving only the personal experience of individual characters, which is bound up with the symbolism of their own interpretations.