This chapter extends an earlier study of mine, on misogyny in the Russian popular puppet show Petrushka (the equivalent of Punch and Judy). In that earlier study I argued that in the Petrushka show a female character was very often held up to ridicule whilst the male hero was not, that sexuality was an important element in this ridicule, and that this situation raised important problems of audience reaction which had not been properly dealt with by the three standard interpretations of Petrushka (vulgar Marxist class-based analysis, reading of the text as primal fertility ritual and the Bakhtinian theory of carnival). The aim now is to move out from the study of the character and ramifications of one discrete popular urban tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and make some observations about the representation of women in a range of genres used for urban entertainment at that period. As before, I shall be putting considerable emphasis on the context of performance, and shall be analysing the question of the audience's reception. But I hope to take the final part of the discussion rather further, expanding a little on the possible implications of patterns in popular entertainment for wider issues of urban history at the turn of the century.

Like all of Russia's female revolutionaries, Ekaterina Dmitrievna Kuskova (1869–1958) forged her political career in a male-dominated oppositional movement that relegated women to a secondary, supporting role. Her forceful personality, however, along with an ability to articulate the demands of the moderate socialist and left liberal intelligentsia enabled her to overcome this marginalization and assume a place at the very centre of Russian revolutionary politics. By 1917, Kuskova had achieved considerable prominence as a non-party social democrat, well known even beyond intelligentsia circles for her work as a journalist and an activist in the cooperative movement. By this time, too, she had entered the ranks of Russian feminists as an outspoken advocate of women's rights. But it was socialism rather than feminism that informed Kuskova's politics in the period between the February and October revolutions, and she subordinated all other interests to the establishment of democracy in Russia. Moreover, throughout 1917 she continued, as she had in the past, to ignore her identity as a woman, remaining unconcerned with, if not actually unaware of, the extent to which her gender shaped her politics.

Any account of Kuskova's politics during this crucial year must remain incomplete until additional archival sources become accessible. Nevertheless, available sources are adequate to construct a fairly detailed, if still preliminary, description of her efforts to lay the foundations of democracy in the period between February and October.

By the turn of the century and throughout the Silver Age, Russian women writers had moved into the ranks of the profession, becoming increasingly visible and recognized by their peers as well as their audience. Some women writers were very successful and earned considerable rewards, others not. But by and large, this movement pointed towards a progressive acceptance of women writers as meaningful participants in the creative process of Russian literature and their eventual full integration into the dominant canon. The events of the First World War, the Revolution and the Civil War brought about significant changes in this promising development. The revolution and the civil war split Russia in two, literally and figuratively: one lost the very name of Russia and became first the RSFSR and then the USSR; the other, defeated by Lenin's government, rejecting and escaping the newly created RSFSR, constituted itself into a Russia beyond the borders, Russia Abroad.’ An approximate periodization should provide some orientation in the further development of Russian women writing in the post-1917 period.

As is well known, in the early period of the division ‘both Russias’ continued to promote modernism in its various forms at least until well into the twenties.

The number of women pharmacists in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia was minuscule – well under 1,000 by the First World War in a pharmacist population of some 10,000 and a general population of over 125,000,000. Nevertheless, an examination of women pharmacists in pre-Soviet Russia provides interesting information on significant socio-economic and political trends and developments and, additionally, serves as an indicator of the strength and vitality of female emancipation in the Russia of that era. Women pharmacists reflected the socio-economic, national and political diversity of late imperial Russia. Some became successful entrepreneurs, members of the pharmaceutical aristocracy, and worked for pharmaceutical professionalization. Others identified with the proletariat, becoming labour organizers, participants in strikes and Marxists of Menshevik hue. Still others withdrew to the sanctuary of the research laboratory. To a greater degree than their male colleagues, women pharmacists represented non-Russian minorities – Jews, Poles and Germans – but they exhibited an ‘imperial’ outlook at least until mid-First World War. All women pharmacists strove for their own emancipation and some extended a helping hand to their sisters. But their commitment to feminism and equal rights for women in general was subordinate to securing their own personal advancement and to their various political ideologies.

Women had been allowed to practise as pharmacists (aptekari) in women's medical facilities from 1871. They had been able also to own pharmacies. In 1901, of 3,518 pharmacies in the Russian Empire, wives of pharmacists owned 110 in European Russia and 20 in Asiatic Russia.

All the contributions to this volume were written in 1990 and revised before the disappearance of the Soviet Union. One small consequence of the final collapse of the Soviet system has been to render obsolete many place names and names of institutions that only a few months ago were still current usage. We have made some minor modifications to the texts of a number of the essays, but have decided to leave those by Sue Bridger and Mary Buckley substantially as they were. It would have been possible, if cumbersome, to have reset every ‘is’ as ‘was’ but to do so would give the impression that the conditions and debates recorded in both these chapters have disappeared along with the USSR. The problems that both these authors discuss are as pertinent to the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1992 as they were to the Soviet Union in 1990. As no one can be sure what the ‘former Soviet Union’ will look like a year, or five years, from now, it seems better to let these chapters stand, in effect, as eye-witness reports on the ‘woman question’ in the era of perestroika, and to leave it to future reporters to discover what effects the far-reaching political, economic and social changes of the coming years will have on the daily lives and aspirations of women in those lands that once comprised the Soviet Union.

One of the most startling features of the 1905 Revolution in Russia was the sudden entrance into the political arena of groups in society which had previously remained well outside it. Whereas the adoption of politics by some groups was seen as a fairly logical, even obligatory, development in a time of national crisis (the ‘reluctant’ Academic Union is a case in point) the politicization of other groups was unexpected and disconcerting. Two prime examples of the latter are peasants and women, both of which categories were commonly regarded as either pre-political or apolitical. The entry of these groups into politics was not universally welcomed, even in opposition circles, and their claims for political rights met very similar objections concerning their supposed ‘immaturity’. The fact that the demand for women's rights (though articulated in the main by educated middle-class women) was made on behalf of working-class and peasant women as well, served only to strengthen the opposition to it. As peasant women were the least literate of all social groups except nomadic tribes, it was easy to point to their assumed ignorance and their notoriously oppressed status within peasant society as reasons for not enfranchising them.

In radical circles the principle of women's suffrage caused few problems. It was written into the programmes of both the social democrats and the socialist revolutionaries and each party prided itself on its commitment to complete equality of all citizens, including unconditional universal suffrage.

The ‘Golden Age’ is a literary historical term used to designate the Pushkin period and the writing of poetry by men. The term ‘Silver Age’ designates the period of modernism, but also refers to the achievement of male poets. However, the Silver Age period was more of a Golden Age for women writers, especially for female lyric poets. In any case, the Silver Age was definitely a period of transition during which women became professionals in all areas of literary activity – in poetry, prose, drama, literary criticism, as well as in the area of popular literature. If at the beginning of the period there were no major female poets, by 1910 there were several. In 1909 Annenskii noted this wealth of female poets as a unique contribution of the modernist movement: ‘Female lyric poetry is one of the achievements of that cultural effort which modernism will bequeath to history’. By the end of the period, there was firmly established a female poetic tradition that has remained a vital stream in modern Russian literature both in the Soviet Union and abroad.

To explain this transition, one must consider aesthetic, historical, philosophical and economic factors. Historically women's status was changing, as Russian society itself was being restructured by the forces of industrialization and urbanization. Economically, a new market for popular commercial fiction gave women writers the possibility of earning a living by writing ‘women's novels’.

We are all familiar with those entertainments which bring on a troupe of dancing women when the action begins to drag. All too often they are silent. And so it is in many of the accounts, on celluloid (and now magnetic tape) as well as in print, of the story of the Russian Provisional Government of 1917. We must all have seen those pictures of its female defenders giggling like oversized girl scouts on Palace Square on the morning of the Bolshevik triumph. For those of us with a Communist Party formation, the only permitted eye-witness account until the death of the ‘Great Helmsman’ was that of John Reed. Reed was, of course, a socialist. More to the point, he was accompanied on his travels through Russia by Louise Bryant, who may not be recognizable as a sister to all varieties of contemporary Anglo-Saxon feminism, but who had a strong sense of fellow-feeling for Russian women of widely differing political views.

Reed caught up with the women soldiers of the Provisional Government just as the Bolsheviks were about to storm the Winter Palace. A young officer described the disposition of forces to him:

During the six years of Mikhail Gorbachev's attempted perestroika, the official approach to issues of concern to women has been markedly different from that relating to many other areas of social, political and economic life. At a time of radical change and questioning of the legacy of the past, policy on women has been characterized by a renewed commitment to programmes instituted during the ‘period of stagnation’. Legislative change on benefits, leave and the provision of part-time work has been designed to assist women to spend more time with their children and to promote further the ‘strengthening of the family’ begun under Brezhnev. In the area of family policy and women's roles in society, glasnost has provided a ready platform for conservative as well as radical voices. As economic reform begins to affect Soviet workers, however, government policies on the family may not necessarily prove to be the boon to women that their promoters promise.

The policy of glasnost has, of course, not only encouraged debate but has turned the spotlight on to areas of women's experience previously untouched by the Soviet media. Difficult and dangerous working conditions, prostitution and the treatment of abortion and childbirth have all come under scrutiny. Sex has ceased to be a taboo subject as censorship has been relaxed and attitudes have liberalized. Many of the issues raised are inevitably of concern to women of all ages, yet others affect young women disproportionately.

Glasnost was initially conceived by Gorbachev as a necessary means to the end of perestroika, and as relative to it. His heightened conviction that glasnost was integral to the reform process was reflected in the Resolution on Glasnost adopted at the 19th Party Conference in 1988. Glasnost was praised as a ‘sharp weapon of perestroika’ which helped people ‘better to understand their past and present’ and objectively ‘to assess the situation in the country’. Glasnost was a vital part of ‘socialist self-government’ and its extension was essential for democratization and for the ‘renewal of socialism’. Moreover, every citizen enjoyed ‘the inalienable right to obtain complete and reliable information on any social question’ that was not a state or military secret and ‘the right to open and free discussion of any socially significant issue’. Although by 1990 the consequences of glasnost in the republics had outstripped perestroika, Gorbachev's commitment to glasnost endured, even if he was bewildered, exasperated and provoked by some of its results. Glasnost remained crucial to his vision of socioeconomic and political change, but after 1990 with growing and contradictory qualifications.

The application of glasnost, however, has not been homogeneous across issues in content or pace.

Political relations between Vietnam and the Soviet Union date back to 30 June 1923, when Ho Chi Minh made the first journey by a Vietnamese revolutionary to Bolshevik Russia. Shortly after his arrival, Ho joined the Communist International (Comintern) and actively worked to establish a firm institutional relationship between the Comintern and Vietnam. In February 1930, Ho, acting on behalf of the Comintern, presided over the founding of the Vietnam Communist Party (VCP). Party-to-party ties were formally established in October 1930 when the VCP, now renamed the Indochinese Communist Party, joined the Comintern.

The Soviet Union granted diplomatic recognition to Ho Chi Minh's fledgling Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 31 January 1950, nearly five years after it was founded. However, it was only after the end of the First Indochina War (1946–54) that formal state-to-state relations were established, when a Soviet embassy was opened in Hanoi. In July 1955 Ho Chi Minh paid his first visit to Moscow as president of the DRV. During the course of this visit, the Soviet Union announced its first grant of large-scale economic assistance. The Soviet Union also contributed heavily to Vietnam's first three-year plan (1958–60) and first five-year plan (1961–65).

On the political front Soviet-Vietnamese relations were not particularly close during the Khrushchev period. This was reversed during the Brezhnev years, partly as a result of Moscow's military and economic aid to Vietnam during the Second Indochina War (1965–75).

The extraordinary changes in foreign and domestic policy initiated by the Soviet Union in the past six years under Mikhail Gorbachev have left all but a very few statesmen and scholars in the West perplexed and unsure of the foundation of their assumptions about policy toward that great half-Western/half-Eastern giant. The years since the death of Chernenko have been filled with contradictory trends, as the forces of conservatism and reform have engaged in a competition with one another. The events in the USSR have been both unprecedented and deeply rooted in the Russian and Soviet past – unprecedented because of the depth and abruptness of the turnaround in both domestic and international affairs, and deeply rooted in the recurrent problems with which the Russian and Soviet leaderships have been forced to deal since the advent of Imperial Russia under Peter the Great.

Because the dramatic shifts in the foreign policy of the USSR have had a direct and critical impact on the foreign policy of the United States, as did the hostility between the two countries which preceded these shifts, it has been the job of scholars since 1985 to probe carefully into the origins, goals, and future of the new political thinking about international relations in the Soviet Union and the foreign policy based on it. Three interrelated sets of questions cluster around these issues at this critical juncture in Soviet history, as Mikhail Gorbachev faces diminishing support for his reforms and appears to be moving toward the right in an effort to retain power.

Since Mikhail Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985 and the concepts of new thinking, openness, and restructuring were added to the Soviet lexicon on international relations, many interesting debates have arisen among Soviet academics and politicians about international politics in general and relations with the Third World in particular. The latter will be the main focus of this chapter.

Naturally, Gorbachev did not initiate this debate, and neither are debates about international relations anything new in the Soviet Union. What is new is the fact that Gorbachev's policies have lent a new dimension to these debates and have opened for discussion aspects previously considered outside the parameters of permissible academic debate. To the extent that Soviet social scientists responded to the new openness several key doctrinal concepts of the past, based on Marxist–Leninist philosophical assumptions, have been questioned. One of these was the concept of “non-capitalist development” (also referred to as “socialist orientation”) for Third World countries.

The amendments made to the latter will be examined, first, within the broader context of the recent Soviet reevaluation of international relations theory, whereafter the discussion will focus on the adaptations to and the eventual demise of the theory of socialist orientation in Soviet literature. In conclusion the African response to the reassessment in the Soviet Union will be briefly addressed.

At the beginning of 1990 Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership were confronted by the specter of Lithuania's becoming the first Soviet republic to declare its independence. In December 1989 the Lithuanian Communist Party, led by Algirdas Brazauskas, declared its independence of the Soviet Communist Party. Elections to the national assemblies of all republics were scheduled for March, and it was evident from the atmosphere in Lithuania that a newly elected parliament would declare the republic's independence. This is, in fact, what happened on 11 March 1990.

It was a matter of urgency for the Soviet leadership to prevent other states from recognizing such a declaration of independence. Making it clear to the world that Moscow would not accept an independent Lithuania thus became an important objective.

The aim of this study is to analyze Soviet signaling to the rest of the world in a bid to prevent recognition of Lithuanian independence. Although American reactions to events in Lithuania were undoubtedly of most interest to Moscow, the focus of this chapter will be on crisis communication between the Soviet Union and its small neighbors to the northwest. With their geographical proximity, historical ties, and groups of exiled Balts, the Nordic countries followed the course of events in the Baltic region with particular interest, and the stances they adopted were arguably not without political importance. Soviet policy toward the Nordic countries thus can be considered an important aspect of Soviet policy toward the West in general.