This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

Some years ago, in his biography of Nikolai Bukharin, Stephen Cohen postulated that there was a reservoir of latent support in the Party's rural and urban cadres for Bukharin's moderate alternative to Stalin's rapid industrialization and the forced collectivization of agriculture of the first five-year plan. Cohen did not suspect that potential support for Bukharin and his policies of gradual industrialization and retention of private farming also existed in the Red Army's company and battalion party cells, as well as among some regimental leadership of the political administration of the Red Army (PUR). At first glance, Cohen's seems to have been a natural omission; after all, the army, with its hierarchy of commissars and political officers (politruki) ostensibly dedicated to the general line of the Party, appeared obedient and loyal to the dictates of the party Central Committee. PUR showed apparently little interest in the struggle between Stalin and Bukharin over future industrial policy.

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, “Face toward Production.” Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of “rightists” who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

“Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers…If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians.” So wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, always a sharp-eyed anthropologist of Soviet everyday life. Historians who have encountered this treasure trove in Soviet archives newly opened over the past few years are likely to agree. The great volume of public letter-writing–the “mountains” of complaints, denunciations, statements of opinion, appeals, threats and confessional outpourings that ordinary Russians sent to Soviet political leaders, party and government agencies, public figures, and newspapers–constitutes one of the major discoveries associated with the opening of the archives.

Mikhail Zoshchenko spent his literary life playing discourses off against one another. In his early miniatures, the cacophony of peasant brogue, tradesmen's dialects, propaganda clichés and bureaucratese was controlled and masterful. In his longer works, the mixture of scientific style and mundane or satirical anecdote often seemed to take on a life of its own. Nowhere is this more true than in Before Sunrise.