In October 1853 war broke out between Russia and Turkey. The following March Britain and France joined the war on the side of the Turks. In the first seven months of the war, the Russian government announced three regular recruit levies, several appeals for volunteers and the formation of a temporary naval militia. News of these measures filtered down to seignorial peasants (pomeshchich'i krest'iane) through official channels and as rumors that went beyond the contents of the government measures and that contained various distortions, in particular that the government was offering privileges, including freedom from serfdom and the regular recruit obligation, to volunteers. In the spring and early summer of 1854, thousands of seignorial peasants left their villages to volunteer for military service. Many descended on Moscow. Seignorial peasants, however, had to have permission from their owners to volunteer, and the would-be volunteers were returned to their villages. Usually Russian peasants loathed military service in the regular army and did everything in their power to avoid being drafted. Why did so many peasants try to volunteer in the spring and early summer of 1854?

Like many other Russian women writers, Marina Tsvetaeva did not merely include women's language and physical experience in her poetry; they were central to her concern with poetry and poetic creation. These elements of her work have in recent years evoked an interest from women readers and feminist scholars of Russian literature which is reflected in the number of studies devoted to aspects of her work. Antonina Gove discusses the presence and chronological development of female roles in Tsvetaeva's poetry; Anya Kroth illustrates the importance of gender and specifically androgyny in Tsvetaeva's construction of a dichotomous world-view. Barbara Heldt's landmark study of women in Russian literature, Terrible Perfection, devotes several pages to Tsvetaeva as an autobiographer and a woman poet liberated from the “split selves” of her predecessors.

In 1890, Anton Chekhov traveled all the way across Siberia, spending five months in transit and three more in residence, to visit the penal colony on Sakhalin Island. The trip was enormously eccentric—it was dangerous, arduous, ill-advised for someone of Chekhov's delicate constitution and uncharacteristically adventuresome for someone so sedentary. Its eccentricity is heightened by the battery of cavalier explanations advanced by the writer, who justified his trip first as an attempt to erase a portion of his life, then as an effort to produce the only halfyear worth remembering, now as a mere change of pace, then as a pressing need to flee a romantic entanglement, at times as a scientific enterprise, at other times as a symptom of "Sakhalin mania."

Throughout the 1920s and into the years of Stalinism, progressive architects in the Soviet Union sought to construct new forms of housing and settlement that would offer the best of modern technology and whose design would include provisioning of services that would allow all citizens, especially women, to partake in creative work. Schools, dining facilities, laundries, parks, cinemas, clubs and housing in a choice of styles formed the core of these architectural dreams. In the tradition of the Populists, modernist architects initially saw themselves as teachers but some came to appreciate the necessity of listening and began to learn from worker assessments of housing and urban design. This communication formed the basis for bridging, at least in housing, the cultural gap between revolutionary elites and common people. Inherent in the modernist movement in architecture, as reflected most eloquently in the work of the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), was a greater democratization of political and social life.

The 1920s remain one of the most debated periods of Soviet history. Central to these debates is the issue of continuity between leninism and Stalinism, and the role of ideology under their respective leaderships. Supporters of “continuity” have usually emphasized the role of ideology as an intellectual bridge from the 1920s to the 1930s; conversely, those who question the continuity thesis usually point to major differences between leninism and Stalinism. I shall address this issue in relation to the history of attempts to organize writers in the early post-revolutionary period. My central claim is that Soviet discourse on writers and literature, articulated shortly after the revolution and elaborated during NEP, set a pattern which led to the absorption of writers into a unitary organizational apparatus and which culminated in the formation of the Writer's Union in April 1932. From 1917 to 1928, a clearly-articulated and largely consensual strategy of absorption of Soviet writers into a state-directed stream was spelt out well before Stalin was installed as the privileged speaker of “marxism-leninism.”

In the mid-1920s the Soviet government singled out about 150,000 ; citizens for an administrative category designated the "small peoples of the north." These were the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones of the Soviet Union who subsisted on hunting, fishing and reindeer herding and who were seen by bolshevik officials as the most backward peoples of the new republic, languishing in a pitiful and unacceptable state of "semi-savagery and outright savagery." As such, they needed to be understood as a peculiar phenomenon and governed differently from their more "cultured" countrymen.

As social and cultural historians have known for some time now, court records can yield rich rewards. Judicial proceedings, particularly those involving defendants with a good story to tell, can illuminate issues and mentalities—indeed whole cosmologies—that otherwise are beyond the purview of later generations. The more irreconcilable the narratives of prosecution and defense, the better, for their very irreconcilability is what provides historians with the opportunity for intervention and partial, albeit posthumous, vindication of the accused. But while the Soviet juridical system has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, almost all of it has been animated by political- or legal-historical questions. Little use has been made of trial proceedings and related materials to explore what they might reveal about other dimensions of Soviet life.

No spectacle in Soviet cities more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the 1920s than the millions of orphaned and abandoned children known as besprizornye. Whether portrayed as pitiable victims or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding population, they haunted the works of journalists, travelers and Communist Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it first,” a foreigner noted, “and is so shocked by the sight that the most widely known Russian youth are the … homeless children flapping along the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks of animated scarecrows.” By 1922 the number of waifs reached the neighborhood of seven million, inundating cities and alarming officials that the country might soon amass enough inveterate delinquents to disrupt the socialist transformation of society.

In an 1881 letter to his would-be Russian translator, Walt Whitman described his sense of a mystical resemblance—improbable yet undeniable—between Russian and America, two nations traditionally regarded as not merely geographically but also culturally marginal to the great nations of Europe:

In 1991, the Supreme Soviets of both the Soviet Union and the RSFSR approved legislation that was a decisive departure from the tentativeness about individual initiative that had characterized the Gorbachev era until then. Between January and July, a series of laws was enacted which pointedly endorsed entrepreneurship and outlined aspects of a program to remove a broad spectrum of enterprises from state control. Scholarly analysis, however, highlighted a potential obstacle to the incipient transition toward a market economy: public opinion. During the period that the 1991 laws were being enacted, most Soviet and foreign scholars studying the subject were maintaining that the Soviet people generally opposed private enterprise and that historical suspicion about capitalism would probably make the transition away from state ownership particularly difficult.

The idea of the "good tsar" originated in Muscovite times and obviously has since become a commonplace of Russian political culture. However, Gorbachev's statement does not really define a "good tsar" but what should instead be called a "reforming tsar," a term that more aptly characterizes the changed expectations of a ruler in the Imperial period of Russian history

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?

“The Fatal Eggs,” written in 1924 and published in early 1925, was the first of Bulgakov's works to attract widespread attention—and a storm of controversy. Recipient of a few positive reviews as well as uniformly enthusiastic praise—privately expressed—from writers and editors, the novella was also the object of virulent attack from a number of (mostly proletarian) critics. Among the attackers were those who saw the work as a thinly veiled allegory and Professor Persikov's discovery of the “revolutionary” red ray as an allusion to the socialist experiments of the bolsheviks.

The pivotal year 1905 posed an unwelcome challenge for Russian conservatives. Disturbed by mounting social and political unrest, they found it appalling that the Tsar should bend to oppositionist demands by granting an elected legislative assembly in the form of a State Duma. Even if they refused to admit it, they knew that this change in state structure meant limiting the Tsar's autocratic power. Fearful that further concessions would lead ultimately to the end of monarchical rule, many loyalists faced the prospect of taking action on their own to preserve what seemed to be a tottering autocracy.

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

Much of the analysis of the results of republican and local elections held in the USSR in 1989-1990 understandably focused on the dramatic victories of candidates and groups committed to a radical reform of the old system. Anti-communist majorities were elected to the parliaments of several republics. The city governments of Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk fell under the control of activists associated with the self-styled “democratic bloc” and, in summer 1990, Boris Yeltsin was elected to chair the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Conversely, local party officials suffered embarrassing defeats in the face of competition from popular fronts united under the banner of Democratic Russia. That the Party itself was in disarray over how to respond to these challenges was reflected in the open split between rival platforms at the 28th party Congress in July 1990. Taken together, these events could easily convey the impression that old party elites “lost” the local elections of 1990 and that they lost because they failed to adapt to the new rules of democratic politics.

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.