The Stalinist revolution began to accelerate in Poland, as throughout eastern Europe, in 1947, with the implementation of multi-year plans, the repression of opposition and the enforcement of unity in the bloc; by the beginning of 1950, the transformation of the bloc was more or less complete. The construction of the Stalinist system did not occur in a vacuum but was shaped in part by societies, and the regimes which emerged were thus more complex than has been generally acknowledged. That complexity stems in part from Stalinist regimes’ interest in transforming society through mobilization and integration, rather than merely subduing it. Active participation in political and economic life was required; mere acquiescence to the demands of the regime was insufficient; and class conflict was to be eliminated, replaced by an alliance between the working class and its former adversaries.

Like other multinational states in Europe, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire found itself confronted, indeed threatened, by the growing strength of non-Russian national movements. Unlike other contemporary national “awakenings,” however, the Polish question in the Russian Empire had roots extending beyond the eighteenth century and posed, at least in the minds of Russian administrators, a serious and persistent threat to Russian national interests in the empire’s vulnerable western borderlands. From the 1830s an anti-Polish policy had been pursued in these areas, but only after the 1863 uprising did the Russian imperial state dedicate itself to a policy of radical elimination of Polish influence in the so-called “western provinces,” a fusion (sliianie) of these territories with the Russian interior in terms of administration, economy, culture and nationality.

Historians have not been at their finest in attempting to measure standard of living, and late imperial rural Russia is no exception. Given the absence of reliable measures for personal or household income or even of real wage trends—the most common proxy for the standard of living—scholars have been forced to employ a variety of other surrogates, often with unfortunate results. For Russia, recourse has been made to peasant tax arrears, mass consumption of “luxury” or nonfood items, and rye-wages. Shifts in the size of land allotments, numbers of livestock and patterns of land tenure often have been the focus of study; others have emphasized trends in net national product, grain retained in the village or grain yields generally. Diet has been assessed both quantitatively, in terms of caloric intake or protein derived from meat products, and qualitatively, underscoring harvest variability. Still other studies have looked at population trends, at times addressing the malthusian dilemma and suggesting that Russia was overpopulated. And frustration has recently led one historian to suggest we give up.

It has long been accepted by historians that the conjuncture of grain crises of 1927-1929 marked a turning point during which the Soviet Union descended into the tumult of Stalin’s “revolution from above.“ There is, however, no agreement as to what caused this outcome. Was the country pushed down this road as a deliberate act of policy by Stalin to enhance his dictatorial power? Did bolshevik ideology, which favored rapid industrialization and bureaucratic centralized state control, predetermine the end result? Did the sequence of events in this period generate an uncontrollable dynamic of crises and conflict between strengthening state power and societal, particularly peasant, resistance? To reach a more definitive answer to these fundamental questions I have undertaken a case study of a pivotal policy development of this period, one which bridged the crucial transition from NEP to “dekulakization”: the so-called “Ural-Siberian method” or “social influence” method of grain collection.

On 31 October 1905, at the height of Russia’s first revolution, the peasant assembly (skhod) of Markovo, a village in the northwestern corner of Moscow province, issued a resolution (prigovor) marking the birth of the “Markovo Republic” and the election of P.A. Burshin, the village elder (starosta), as its first president. This manifesto announced that henceforth the peasants would refuse to obey the established authorities, pay taxes or rents, or provide any conscripts for the draft. Eight months later, when provincial Governor Dzhunkovskii arrived in Markovo on an inspection tour of the rebellious countryside, local peasants, hoping to plead their case, greeted him with the traditional welcome of bread and salt. Dzhunkovskii rebuffed both the welcome and the pleas. Instead, he rode off to a prominent local landlord’s estate and agreed to send in troops to forcibly replace the communal leaders and end on-going rent strikes. Two weeks later cossacks arrested the elders and effectively dissolved the Markovo Republic.

Like all working classes everywhere and at all times, the Russian working class on the eve of the revolution was internally differentiated. As Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg have recently emphasized, Russian workers were distinguished from one another by skill level, strength of ties to the land, gender, age and other factors. And those distinctions mattered: they affected the form and intensity of workers’ anti-regime actions which extended from reluctant submission to un-rehearsed rebellion, to organized political protest.

Nabokov’s The Gift opens with the mock specificity of a date: 1 April 192-, which immediately, we are informed, calls attention to the Russian novelistic practice of “honest fictionality.” The long metaliterary excursus draws attention away from the specificity of one particular date, which the author, as it were, refuses to complete: on 1 April 1922 Nabokov’s father, the respected statesman Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was buried in Berlin, three days after his heroic, though fortuitous death in a right-wing assassination attempt on a former Kadet ally, P.N. Miliukov.

It may come as a surprise that the author of the Soviet classic Bronepoezd14-69 (Armored Train 14-69) produced an experimental novel in 1929- 1931, entitled Y, whose satiric spirit, rich texture and philosophical depth suggest a close kinship with such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov. In western criticism, Vsevolod Ivanov has been largely remembered as one of the Serapion Brothers, whose Partizanskie povesti (partisan tales) and short stories (“Dite” [“The Child“] being the best known example) about the civil war in Siberia and central Asia were written in a highly individualistic ornamental style and responded to the call for immediacy and relevance in literature.