During World War II, images of mothers constituted one of the most striking—and lasting—additions to Soviet propaganda. The appearance of “Mother Russia” has been understood as a manifestation of the Soviet state's wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its embrace of nationalism. Yet “Mother Russia” (rodina-mat', more literally, the “motherland mother“) was an ambiguous national figure. The word rodina, from the verb rodit', to give birth, can mean birthplace both in the narrow sense of hometown and in the broad sense of “motherland,” and it suggests the centrality of the private and the local in wartime conceptions of public duty. Mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between home and nation, between love for the family and devotion to the state. From this point of view, the new prominence of mothers in wartime propaganda can be understood as part of what Jeffrey Brooks has identified as the “counter-narrative” of individual initiative and private motives, as opposed to party discipline, that dominated the centrally controlled press's coverage of the first years of the war.

More than a decade ago, in a discussion in this journal, Leopold Haimson argued that peasant soldiers’ perception of Soviet power in 1917-18 “did not encompass any conception of the relationships between themselves, their village communities, or even the peasant estate as a whole, and other social groups—let alone any generalized view of the Russian body politic as a whole.” He went on to note that this peasant particularism “reflected a continuity in the mentalité of Russian peasants stretching back to the very inception of the Russian state.” Peasants rejected any superordinate authority and consistently acted out “a profound urge to be left alone.” Haimson's description of Russian peasants at the outset of civil war is a powerful evocation of peasant mentalités, not only of peasants in Russia but of peasants the world over, and would seem to preclude their inclusion in a nation.

Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the “taming of the arts.” Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the “revisionist” generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham suggested that the middle-class values apparent in the literature of mature Stalinism might reflect a “Big Deal” between the bureaucracy and the cultural tastes of the new Soviet “middle class,” while Sheila Fitzpatrick maintained that even in the heyday of Stalinism, some prominent intellectuals held positions of “cultural authority,” enabling them to influence the course of cultural life.

Since the 1930s, the zealous, idealistic proponents of musical revolution in Soviet Russia, the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh muzykantov (Russian association of proletarian musicians, RAPM), have served primarily as an embarrassing footnote to the history of Soviet music and cultural politics. Scholarly opinion of RAPM is remarkably consistent in its condemnation, as Russian-Soviet scholars and westerners alike dismiss the organization for its "simplistic" (western) or "vulgar" (Soviet) ideology and aesthetics. This consensus suggests that RAPM deserves its place in the dustbin of history alongside the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (Russian association of proletarian writers, RAPP) and other militant advocates of cultural revolution. But the condescending (western) and embarrassed (Soviet) dismissal of RAPM is itself simplistic. Seeing members of RAPM as undertalented and unwitting tools of the regime's agenda, or misguided if well-intentioned deviationists, obscures the important role the proletarian musicians played in the evolution of Soviet musical culture and aesthetics.

Long before Moscow's annexation of Novgorod in 1478, relations between the two principalities had been troubled. Novgorod had repeatedly defied successive Moscow princes, disrupting trade, defaulting on tax and rent payments, and refusing to accept the jurisdiction of Muscovite legal authorities. By the middle of the fifteenth century, chronic disputes intensified into overt hostilities. Moscow conducted three military campaigns against Novgorod in 1456, 1471, and finally 1478. The last campaign was followed by the introduction of Muscovite governors into Novgorod, the wholesale eviction and resettlement of the local land-owning elite, as well as other measures undertaken to consolidate Muscovy's authority.

The object of this article is to revisit the themes originally explored in this journal thirty-five years ago in a discussion somewhat misleadingly entitled, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917.”’ As older readers of the Slavic Review may recall, this discussion set off heated debates centered on the theses presented in this article about the dual processes of polarization that I distinguished in the dynamics of the political and social crisis in urban Russia even before the outbreak of war: polarization between the industrial workers employed in Russia's urban centers and the well-to-do strata of urban “society,” including those of the professional intelligentsia; and polarization between both the upper and lower strata of Russia's urban centers and the bureaucratic circles that sought to represent the interests and will of the sovereign.

The status of the Serbian standard language in the years since the breakup of Yugoslavia has been controversial. Serbian linguists were ill prepared for the demise of the unified Serbo-Croatian language in 1991 and found themselves scrambling to create a new linguistic order. While die Croatian linguists in socialist Yugoslavia had long advocated a separate literary language called Croatian, rather than Croato-Serbian, the Serbs had continued to insist on the joint language and readily accepted the term Serbo-Croatian. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbs finally had to recognize that given Croatian and Bosnian-Muslim linguistic separatism, a joint literary language was no longer possible. In this paper, I examine the consequences of the breakup of Serbo-Croatian for Serbs in the Yugoslav successor states, especially in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). I discuss the emergence of three ideologically opposed factions of Serbian linguists. The debate among Serbian linguists has been heated and acrimonious, reflecting broader political struggles within the FRY. I suggest that politically motivated turmoil in Serbian linguistic circles has put the New Serbian on a chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable path into the future.

It has been suggested that the core of Andrei Platonov's linguistic and artistic innovation as embodied in such masterpieces as Chevengur and Kotlovan (The foundation pit) lies in his masterful undermining of the Utopian project. If utopianism consists, as Gary S. Morson suggests, in an attempt to fuse the transcendent with the everyday, then Platonov's unique contribution to the genre's undoing lies in "a series of ontologically vivid parodies of the genre in which the fusion routinely fails to take place." Thus the pathos of the author's works of the late 1920s and early 1930s revolves inescapably around the failure of the ideal to materialize and become reified. This movement is reciprocal, since the material substrata of being are never infused with the animating warmth of spirit; instead matter acts as a void that condemns the spirit it would ideally preserve to entropy and finally death.

In recent years the historiography of Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning with Brenda Meehan's 1976 article “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” most attention has focused, appropriately, on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the interim, several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.

Around 1900, Poland saw the outgrowth of a nativist primitivism, one that consciously redefined the periphery as a site of cultural resistance. Primitivism, as Colin Rhodes points out, “does not designate an organized group of artists, or even an identifiable style arising at a particular historical moment, but rather brings together artists’ various reactions to ideas of the primitive.” Within the subject ethnicities of central Europe at the turn of the century, “ideas of the primitive” that were taking shape in the then stillemerging discipline of anthropology were influencing various constructions of national and regional identity. The nationalist imperative of the new discipline was emphasized by Jan Karlowicz, who, writing in 1906, argued that “a people certain of its own existence may calmly study its own folklore from a purely scientific point of view. Tribes deprived of their independence and living in endless fear of suppression and decay, however, must, while reflecting upon the nature and conditions of folkloric tradition, consider practical questions as part of such inquiries. For whenever reference is made to national peculiarities and attributes, there constantly arises the question: to be or not to be.” Karlowicz's remarks point toward a deeply subjective primitivist discourse whose articulations, in critical writing about the applied arts as well as literary representations of rural popular culture, form part of what Eric Hobsbawm terms the “invention of tradition.”

Of the many unexplored aspects of the history of Russian Poland on the eve of the Great War, the condition of peasant agriculture during this time of fundamental social and economic change is one of the more striking. While it has long been acknowledged that the years following the revolution of 1905 “brought excellent conditions for every producer,” that “the advances in agriculture in Congress Poland were considerable,” and that “this progress extended … to the peasants as well,” the role of the Russian state in the development of the Polish countryside, particularly during the period of agrarian reforms associated with P. A. Stolypin, has escaped the attention of historians.