Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.

Forty years ago the USSR was rushing toward a degree of economic isolation unparalleled by any industrial economy at peace. The autarkic position reached by the Soviet economy in the mid-1930s seemed to be a fundamental characteristic of Soviet policy. In the past two decades, however, Soviet foreign trade has grown rapidly. Thus, it is of both current and historical interest to understand and reassess the circumstances under which the USSR sharply curtailed economic relations with the world capitalist economies in the 1930s. Conventional interpretation stresses that Stalin, during the First and Second Five-Year Plans (1928/29-1932, 1933-37), deliberately pursued economic autarky—a policy intended to reduce Soviet foreign trade as quickly as possible to a “tolerable minimum” and without regard to the possible economic gains from higher levels of foreign trade. According to this explanation, the initial expansion of trade between 1927/28 and 1931 is interpreted as a policy of “imports of machinery intended to end imports” and the subsequent cutback in imports is cited as evidence of its success. In the following analysis of the policies and events that culminated in Stalin’s “autarkic policy,” it is argued that the collapse and stagnation of Soviet foreign trade after 1931 were unforeseen and caused by events beyond the control of Soviet planners.

The linguistic behavior of the titular nationalities of the five Central Asian union republics of the Soviet Union illustrates that when groups with distinctive languages and cultural traditions come into contact with one another, very complex linguistic adjustments can occur. This essay examines the relationship between the continued use of the non-Russian languages as mother tongues and the spread of Russian as a second language among Central Asians. Central Asians display an interesting response to the conflicting pressures to learn Russian as an aid to upward social mobility and to maintain traditional languages as a sign of identity with the ethnic group. While remaining strongly attached to their national languages, they are simultaneously moderately attracted to Russian as a second language.

The words Obshchina and Mir should be familiar to all students of nineteenth-century Russia. Yet most Russian historians would probably be hard pressed to distinguish properly between the two terms. Current scholarship offers scant help regarding precise definitions and usages of these nouns. Semantic as well as historical questions are raised by their use, and the semantic questions are compounded by the fact that both Russian words are usually translated into English as “commune.” Each of these words does have its own history and a meaning which separates it from its counterpart, however, and this article attempts to eliminate some of the confusion surrounding the use of the two terms.

S. S. Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 to 1849, is usually described as a reactionary. The reason for that judgment is clear. Many of the steps Uvarov took as minister seemed designed to block the realization of the liberal goals set by the reformers who assisted Alexander I in founding the modern Russian educational system in 1801-4. One important aspect of that liberal, modern, system was its “all-class” character. An educational system which admitted students of all classes was perceived by “reactionaries“ as a threat to the established order, despite the relatively small numbers of people involved. Thus, “Uvarov was disturbed by the trickle of students from lower classes who were finding their way into the universities. As in secondary schools, the admission of such students was hindered by legalistic formalities and an increase in tuition fees.“

Language planning often aims to fix the statuses, roles, and functions of languages, and hence the choices among languages that speakers and writers make. This has been called “language status planning.” A second object of language policy, however, is the content and structure of languages themselves: vocabularies, sound systems, word structures, sentence structures, writing systems, and stylistic repertoires. Intervention of this kind is “language corpus planning.” The Soviet distinction between the “functional development“ of a language and its “internal development” or “enrichment” is parallel. Soviet language policies deal both with status problems (for example, how long and how widely should language X be used?) and with corpus problems (for example, how should language X be developed and regulated?). The Soviet Turkic languages exhibit these issues with particular complexity because of their number, their close interrelations, their similarity to a non-socialist country's language (Turkish), their dissimilarity to Russian, their pre-Soviet Arabic (if any) alphabets, and their traditions of borrowing from Arabic and Persian, associated culturally with Islam and perceived backwardness.

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

Some seventeen years ago, P. N. Berkov wrote: “The least-known aspect of the still comparatively unexplored field of Anglo-Russian cultural relations in the eighteenth century is that of the history of the stage and of stage-plays.“ The statement is hardly less true today. Berkov went on to say that a single question—“that of how far the Russian reader and theatergoer was familiar with Shakespeare’s work“—had attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention. Even in this area, however, work remains to be done, and it will be the aim of the present essay, by demonstrating the relationship between Kheraskov’s drama Gonimye and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to add a small but necessary link to the chain of our knowledge of Shakespeare in Russia.

Dostoevsky, having lived in the area of central Petersburg around Sennaia Ploshchad' (Haymarket) for several years, was well acquainted with the problems (prevalent in this section) created by the rapid, unplanned growth of the city. In a little-noted passage in Crime and Punishment which recounts Raskolnikov’s thoughts just before the murder (part 1, chapter 6), Dostoevsky connects these urban changes to Raskolnikov’s thoughts and subsequent actions. Raskolnikov imagines a reconstruction of Petersburg aimed especially at the improvement of the wretched, crowded Sennaia area. This passage reveals important facets of the character of Raskolnikov and of the thematics of the novel. The city has two forms, both of which have a powerful psychological influence on Raskolnikov: his motive and rationale for the murder draw support from both the squalor of Sennaia Ploshchad' and the model of Napoleon III’s reconstructed Paris. For Dostoevsky, however, the reality of Sennaia undermines the rational, utilitarian schemes of Napoleon and Raskolnikov and, by extension, Raskolnikov’s whole intellectual rationale for the murder.

A close look at Russian peasant art yields two divergent impressions. The profusion of styles and techniques is amazing, testimony to the ready creativity of peasant craftsmen. But throughout this wealth of invention, a constant tone prevails: the images portrayed are few and everywhere much the same.

Two images predominate: the sun, at times accompanied by flowers, birds, and animals; and a flowering tree (drevo zhizni) or a woman raising her arms, with two figures, often armed men on horseback, at either side. Most designs in peasant art involve one of these persistent images. The concern of the present paper is to explore what they may have meant.

This study is an assessment of the theories and practices of teaching Russian to the local (indigenous) Turkic and Iranian speaking peoples of Soviet Central Asia. More specifically, it is a description of the processes by which the programs of teaching Russian as a second language (TRSL) are implemented in the classrooms of Central Asia. An investigation of methodologies in TRSL, qualifications of teachers, and some of the characteristics of the target group— the young Central Asians—sheds light on the factors accelerating or inhibiting the acquisition of Russian as a second language in this part of the USSR.

The Russo-Polish War occasioned some of the most anxious moments in the history of relations between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic. Within Germany, the advance of the Red Army toward Warsaw in 1920 aroused strong, but contradictory emotions. First, it led many Germans to anticipate the destruction of Poland and to hope for the restoration of the Reich’s former eastern territories. Simultaneously, however, the westward Russian march raised fears of the invasion of Germany by Bolshevik forces. Within Russia, a similar dichotomy of views about Germany existed. On one hand, the German government was considered a hostile, though negligible and temporary—a Communist revolution there was thought imminent—factor in Russia’s situation. On the other, Germany was held important enough to Russia that serious proposals of a far-reaching alliance against Poland and the Entente were made to her. The former view rested on a fundamentally optimistic assessment of Russia’s prospects; the latter, on a sober one. Grounds for concern were afforded by the Soviet Republic’s grave economic problems and by worry about whether the weary Red Army could defeat Pilsudski’s forces, whose offensive capacity had been demonstrated by their capture of Kiev in May 1920. If Germany, which had had military forces in the field against the Bolsheviks only a year before, should actively assist the Poles, Russia’s situation could be appreciably worsened. Surprisingly, therefore, although there are several recent, excellent studies of Soviet-Polish affairs and the Russo-Polish War, and a voluminous literature on relations between the Soviets and the Weimar Republic, little attention has been paid to Soviet policy toward Germany during the conflict with Poland. To explain that policy, and its apparent contradiction, is the purpose of this article.

Contemporaries and latter-day critics of Constantine Leontiev have tended to respond to him in one of two ways. The first and by far the more common approach has focused on his reactionary political views, homosexuality, and quirks of personal life; the second, on his talent as a writer. The eccentric psychopolitical image of Leontiev created in the first instance has injected a paradoxical note of disharmony into the appreciation of a seemingly inverse grace and form in his fiction. The man has come to represent one thing, his literary work something quite different and unrelated. Although critics like Vasilii Rozanov, Nicholas Berdiaev, and Father Georges Florovsky have hinted at the ideological factors which suggest possible ways of resolving this paradox, no real organic interpretation explaining Leontiev’s fiction in terms of his own cultural situation, his ideas, beliefs, and ideological problems is available.

While historians have studied Pilsudski’s coup d’état in Poland extensively, histories of interwar Eastern Europe either totally ignore or make only guarded references to an alleged attempted coup in Czechoslovakia in the same year under the aegis of the prominent general and former Russian legionary, Radola Gajda (1892-1948). In 1926, Gajda, the acting chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Army, was removed from his post to be tried and convicted for having committed several treasonable offenses against the Czechoslovak state. Historians agree that Gajda harbored Fascist political sympathies—as after his dismissal from the army, he became the leader of the “National Fascist Community” (Národnί obec fašistická or NOF), the small Czech Fascist movement—but no one has written in detail about Gajda’s career in the army before 1926. Two older accounts of Czechoslovak politics by Ferdinand Peroutka and Harry Klepetář briefly discuss the sensational scandal surrounding Gajda, and several Communist historians have asserted that Gajda reached an agreement with the Slovak leader Vojtech (Béla) Tuka to carry out a coup against the government during the 1926 Sokol gymnastic congress.

Just over two centuries ago, on July 21, 1774, at the village of Kuchuk.Kainardji, Russia and Turkey signed a peace treaty which not only marked one of history's great shifts in power relationships, but also became a continuing source of controversy among statesmen and scholars. Most of the terms of the treaty, which ended a six-year war, are clear, easy to summarize, and obvious in their impact. But articles 7 and 14, which dealt with the protection of Christianity in the Ottoman Empire and with an Orthodox church that Russia could build in Istanbul, have been subject to widely varying interpretations. The central question is whether Russia received, under these articles, a right to act as protector of Ottoman Christians. Many historians have contended that the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji did confer such a guardian role on Russia, and some have adopted the opinion that the treaty, especially in this regard, was an example of “Russian skill and Turkish imbecility.“ Other historians have maintained that any such right, under the treaty, was vague. Still others have said it was nonexistent. A reexamination of the historical evidence is long overdue.

On August 6, 1919, a bloodless coup d'état occurred in Budapest, forcing the Socialist “trade union” government to resign, and bringing Hungary’s radical phase to an abrupt end. Hungary’s revolutionary experiments had been resounding failures, and the majority of the population was relieved. The first revolution of October 31, 1918 had promised democracy, independence, and unimpaired territorial integrity but had brought instead only disappointments— political instability and foreign occupation. The second revolution, which declared Hungary a Soviet republic on March 21, 1919, was no more successful than the first. The proletarian dictatorship, originally welcomed as a remedy for the discredited democratic institutions, rapidly lost its appeal, and the world revolution, initially held out as an answer to Hungary’s territorial mutilation, failed to become a reality. By the end of July, the Rumanian army was at the gates of Budapest and internal dissatisfaction had assumed threatening proportions.

The history of the Rumanian socialists of Hungary in the decade before the outbreak of the First World War and during the final crisis of the Dual Monarchy in 1918 offers a striking illustration of the importance of national feeling in socialist and working-class movements of peoples who had not yet achieved their national-political emancipation and who were still overwhelmingly agrarian. In seeking support, Rumanian socialists had to compete with the middle-class Rumanian National Party, which was well established as a staunch defender of Rumanian rights against the aggressive nationality policies of the Hungarian government, and the church, which maintained a strong hold over a devout and traditional peasantry. They were hampered also by having only a modest constituency of their own. Not only was the Rumanian working class small, but in those places where Rumanian factory workers had congregated in significant numbers—Budapest, Arad, Timisoara—they were swallowed up in the greater masses of Magyar and German workers.and were in danger of losing their national identity. They provided only a fragile base for an independent socialist party. Until the First World War, Rumanian socialists developed their activities under the aegis of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary (MSZDP). In time, they found ideological and financial subordination to the MSZDP to be a serious handicap in efforts to recruit new members. At a time of growing national tension, they were hard put to explain how a party dominated by Magyars, even socialists, could benefit Rumanians. Yet, in spite of their protestations of socialist internationalism and their open disdain for nationalistic impulses, they could not ignore nationality. Indeed, the idea of nationality lent their movement a distinctiveness that set it apart from the other socialist movements of Hungary and, in the end, gave it its reason for being.