The development or lack of development of private property rights in Russia commands interest and significance far beyond the narrow confines of legal history. The institution of private property serves not only as a bulwark of stability but also as a limit to the state's authority. In the words of Richard Pipes, “Ownership of property creates a commitment to the political and legal order since the latter guarantees property rights: it makes the citizen into a co-sovereign, as it were.” Elsewhere Pipes notes that in the west private property “confronted royal power with effective limits to its authority.”

For western observers, a striking concomitant of the end of communist party rule was the sudden appearance of national movements and national sentiments. We were not alone in our surprise: even more taken aback were party leaders, somehow persuaded by their own propaganda that party rule had resolved the so–called "national question." That this was far from true was evident all across the region: from separatism in Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia and the Baltic and other Soviet republics; to bloodshed between Romania's Hungarians and Romanians, and between Bulgaria's Turks and Bulgarians; to Gypsy-bashing in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; and widespread anti-Semitism–even in countries like Poland where there were virtually no Jews.

Historians of the Russian peasantry hold almost unanimously that serfowners routinely intervened in serf marriage: that they generally forbade serf women to leave the estate through marriage or marry at all without permission, commanded serfs to marry young, made compulsory matches when their serfs failed to marry on schedule, and otherwise prevented serfs from exercising free choice in marriage. Equally common is the assumption that the nobles’ interest in serf marriage was the multiplication of human property and the number of duespaying labor units, i.e., married couples. The one exception is Steven Hoch, who found that on the Gagarin estate of Petrovskoe, Tambov province, managers never intervened, at least in first marriages. They never had to, Hoch argues, because the heads of peasant households shared the owners’ interest in early and universal marriage. That was because estate managers allocated land, the only significant economic resource, to married couples on an egalitarian basis. Even Hoch accepts the standard view that, on other estates where different socioeconomic conditions held, estate authorities did have to intervene to ensure that serfs married early and universally.

Public opinion polls show that between 1988 and 1991 some three percent of adult Russians donated money to various political movements, four percent took part in strikes and just over six percent participated in mass rallies and demonstrations. Fewer than one percent of Russians j o i n ed new political parties, still nascent organizations that attract elites, not masses. At the same time, membership in the Communist Party dropped from ten percent to four percent of the adult population of Russia.

In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs, increasing numbers of peasants left their native villages for cities and industrial centers, in response to a growing need for cash and declining opportunities to earn it at home. At least until World War I, the vast majority of these migrants were men; women were the more stable element in the village. In the words of one student of peasant life, women “cling to the family and the land, and need particularly unfavorable circumstances to compel them to move somewhere else.“ Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close the economic circumstances that prompted peasant men to leave villages increasingly caused women to leave as well. Like their husbands, fathers and brothers, migrant women often chose urban destinations. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 650 peasant women per 1,000 peasant men in Moscow, and 368 migrant peasant women for every 1,000 migrant peasant men in St. Petersburg; by 1910, the proportion in St. Petersburg had increased to 480 per 1,000.

One hundred years ago, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii delivered the principal address to the Moscow Theological Academy. With his first tortuously long sentence the historian created an imaginary continuum, transcending time, between his audience and the saint. His words bear repeating:

In April 1928 a team of eight Soviet and eight German medical researchers set out for the remote area of Kul'skoe in the Buriat—Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the USSR to examine endemic syphilis and the impact of the anti—syphilis drug, Salvarsan, on the course of the disease. This three—month expedition was negotiated by some of the leading political and scientific figures on both sides and was launched with considerable fanfare, although it was not—nor was it intended to be—a scientific milestone in the field of venereology.

In recent decades, the rediscovery of historical ethnography in western historiography has produced an extensive literature on "popular Christianity" in many European societies. Until recently, however, this historiographical current has exercised very limited influence on historical study in the former Soviet Union. In one sense, Russian historians had no need for such influence; the populist tradition in Russian historiography and its continuation in marxist-leninist attire meant that the study of popular attitudes and beliefs was hardly the novelty it was in other countries in recent decades.

While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

Recent scholarship on the purges and Great Terror has contributed immensely to our understanding of the Stalinist political system that emerged in the mid-1980s. Research by J. Arch Getty and Gabor Rittersporn, among others, has challenged the totalitarian perspective that views the Terror as part of a grand scheme designed by Stalin to silence his opponents in the Party and government, establish his personal dictatorship and coerce society into unquestioning submission.1 Instead, these historians emphasize the limits of power and control wielded by the national leadership which found itself at times frustrated in its efforts to impose its will on both society and regional party organizations. They conclude that the "cleansing" of the Party and government was the partial product of a conflict between national and subnational officials, with initiative from below sometimes playing as important a role as central directives in fueling the purges.

The Communist Youth League (Komsomol) was founded in 1917-1918 in urban centers. Its leadership's perception of the peasantry and its quest to maintain a respectable proportion of workers in the membership impeded expansion in rural areas: in the name of “proletarian purity,” many leaders and activists opposed the blanket admission of all but the poorest peasants into their midst. But demographic realities made the Komsomol's outreach to young peasants imperative: peasants made up eighty percent of the Russian population; their children nineteen years of age or younger accounted for half of the rural population in the mid-1920s. More important, the state and the Party had reduced their rural personnel at the end of the civil war and the Komsomol found itself pressured to fill the gap.