Anyone familiar with Soviet history can identify A. I. Rykov: Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a major leader of Right Communism, a victim of Stalin’s purges. But this tells us very little. Because of Rykov’s predilection for practical as opposed to ideological-literary work, his relative colorlessness in comparison with the other Bolshevik luminaries, and a lack of material, he has not been attractive to scholars. Yet Rykov looms large within the Bolshevik movement; he was prominent long before the revolution as well as after 1917. Furthermore, the seeds of Rykov’s positions of the 1920s—which clearly had an impact on the policies and politics of those years—were definitely sown before 1917.

In this article, Elżbieta Ostrowska employs categories of postcolonialism to examine two novels by Henryk Sienkiewicz,With Fire and Sword and Fire in the Steppe, and their filmic adaptations by Jerzy Hoffman. Her aim is to reconstruct their ideological discourse regarding Polish national identity and its positioning within Europe. Located between east and west, Poland was both a colonizing power (of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia) and a colonized country (by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary). These two novels, written during the time of partitions, offer a nostalgic vision of the country’s past power and its colonizing aspirations. Ostrowska argues that various textual efforts aimed at solidifying the notion of national identity and its positioning within a geopolitical order of Europe are disrupted by structures of female desire implicitly present in both the novels and films. These structures puncture the solid fabric of the national historical epic and undermine the hegemonic notion of Polish masculinity.

If one examines the role of women in rural areas in different countries of the world, varying styles or patterns of development can be observed. A particular style found in socialist countries has been described as the “feminization of agriculture.” This pattern, prevalent in East European countries and especially in the Soviet Union, is largely a function of rapid industrialization and the demographic changes necessary to support development. In the Soviet case, for example, the absolute size of the rural population has been declining mainly because of rural-urban migration. Furthermore, this migration has been dominated by youth, a trend which, in combination with losses of males from the war years, has resulted in a rural population whose average age and proportion of women is rising.

There is general agreement in the historical literature devoted to the reign of Alexander I that Mikhail Speranskij was the most outstanding political figure of the period. But far less agreement is shown when it comes to an appraisal of his political career and to a critical analysis of the basic intent of his reform proposals.

Some historians, like M. N. Pokrovskij for example, see him merely as a puppet in the hands of economic and social forces, the editorial secretary whose job it was to put into legal form the demands of the growing Russian bourgeoisie. Others, with less of a dogmatic socio-economic approach to history, see in him an intelligent imitator and adapter of French or other Western administrative models. The dean of modern Russian historiography, V. Kljucevskij, though recognizing Speranskij's significance and the interest presented by his personality, views him as a theoretician and “idéologue,” very little interested in either the practical results of his plans or the individual welfare of the people, garnering his abstract conceptions indiscriminately from the most disparate sources. And the “cadet” historian of nineteenth century Russia, Aleksandr Kornilov, considers Speranskij a genuine liberal constitutionalist who aimed at replacing an obsolete and tyrannical political system with a limited monarchy whose major features were his own invention.

All performance involves some kind of communication between performer and spectator. After the socialist realist model was established in the mid-1980s, Soviet professional theaters typically relied on conventional input from patrons: attendance, emotional reactions during performances, and applause. Known for its exceptional interaction with audiences, the Taganka Theater decorated its lobby to correspond to a production and even asked spectators to cast ballots indicating whether they enjoyed the performance of Ten Days that Shook the World. But for professionals, such efforts to bridge the gulf between the stage and the house were unusual.

At a very early stage of the Bolshevik experiment with economic planning it became obvious that the economy could not be made to function without the use of money and other financial instruments. In fact, a financial history of the Soviet economy would show a gradual but relentless expansion in the number and functions of financial instruments. This expansion has been gradual largely because Soviet economists, planners, and administrators have had both ideological (theoretical) and practical reservations about the appropriate uses as well as the potential abuses to which financial instruments can be put. The process has been relentless nonetheless, because for a number of essential economic functions the possible substitutes or alternatives to financial instruments are either impractical or nonexistent. Let me attempt to explain briefly the fundamental reasons for the ambivalence in Soviet financial policy.

In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father (“Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia“) and one for his mother (“Mysl’ o tebe udaliaetsia …“). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.