In a letter to his friends in Russia in 1850, Aleksandr Herzen complained of the “democratic orthodoxy” that was forming among the exiled revolutionaries of 1848:

In 1940, there were only 400 television sets in the Soviet Union. By 1950, there were 10,000; a decade later, some 4.8 million. Then in the five years between 1965 and 1970, the availability of television sets more than doubled, and by 1976, Soviet industry was producing 7 million sets annually. In 1960, only 5 percent of the Soviet population could watch television, but by 1986 that figure had risen to 93 percent, and television signals could be received in more than 86 percent of the territory of the U.S.S.R. Nearly all the households that are unable to receive television are in sparsely settled rural areas, mainly Siberia.

Although television is a relative newcomer to the Soviet media system, it has exerted an enormous effect on leisure time use. It has also reoriented patterns of information acquisition. Of the events in the world abroad covered by the Soviet media 86 percent are known to people through television, 77 percent through the newspaper, and 62 percent from radio.

A general strike spearheaded by those controlling the railroads forced tsarist autocracy to its knees in 1905. This tactic, unprecedented in Russian history, was born in Saratov early that year. Saratov's pioneering role derived from an operative principle of solidarity across class, caste, professional, and political lines. However much the crowds filling Saratov's streets resembled those elsewhere, protesters in the middle Volga city came away from the strike after Bloody Sunday with something unique—they had wrung major concessions from local administrators. The economic victory belonged to the men and women of the Riazan'-Urals Railroad who, significantly, had acted together. Their mutually reinforcing interactions, their wedding of economic and political demands framed an effective mechanism for conducting a general strike.

Recent monographs on Russian social development have raised a number of hypotheses regarding our general understanding of processes of political and social change. In his volume on the early history of Russian workers Reginald Zelnik, for instance, proposes that moderate labor unrest reinforced traditional repressive patterns, while extreme conflicts motivated innovative reform. In the work of Robert E. Johnson and of Victoria Bonnell we find the suggestion that workers in small-scale enterprises and artisan shops were often more radical and organized than those in larger industrial enterprises. The fragmented and antagonistic nature of Russian society, with multiple splits of both an intergroup and intragroup nature, has been noted in the work of both Roberta Manning and Allan Wildman. Diane Koenker, focusing her research on the period of the 1917 revolutions, has brought out the moderating and integrating effect of the urban setting on Russian workers. These are only a few of the many thought-provoking hypotheses that have been raised.

“Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu” is the last of the three poems that Osip Mandel'shtam addressed to Marina Tsvetaeva. The poets had met briefly in Koktebel' in the summer of 1915; they were reintroduced that December in Petrograd, and soon after Mandel'shtam made the first of several visits to Tsvetaeva in Moscow. He responded to her gift of the city, “Iz ruk moikh — nerukotvornyi grad/ Primi, moi strannyi, moi prekrasnyi brat” and to the affection of her “Otkuda takaia nezhnost'” with “V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora,” a celebration of his companion against the wondrously integrated Russo-Italian backdrop of the old capital. But in his next poem to her, “Na rozval'niakh ulozhennykh solomoi,” a sinister note is heard that relates their friendship to a darker side of Moscow's past, to Tsvetaeva's identification with Marina Mnishek and to his own confused identity at her side.

The Soviet Nationalities Collection at Columbia University is one of the largest and most varied collections of its kind in the nation. Established in the 1960s, it now numbers more than 15,000 volumes in forty-seven different languages from the Altaic, Transcaucasian, Uralic, Paleo-Siberian, and Indo-European language groups. It grows at a rate of about 500 books a year.

The collection supports instruction and research in fields including language and literature, political science, economics, history, folklore, religion and philosophy, and the arts. Although not cataloged until recently, the collection has long been used by scholars from research centers at Columbia, such as the Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, the Center for the Study of Central Asia, the Program on Soviet Nationality Problems, and the Department of Slavic Languages. Its reputation growing by word-of-mouth, the collection has also attracted visiting scholars and requests through interlibrary loan.