Sources of the first half of the fourteenth century provide evidence that a sharp rift in institutional continuity occurred in Muscovy. This rift constituted a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" in the evolutionary development of the Rus' political system. The political institutional structure inherited from the Vladimir-Suzdal' component of Kievan Rus' ended abruptly, and, concomitantly, a new political structure similar to that of the Kipchak Khanate was established. I contend in this article that the Muscovite princes introduced Mongol political and military institutions into Muscovy on a wide scale during the first half of the fourteenth century.

Stavrogin is an immense and bewildering character. In the opinion of Konstantin Mochulskii, he is "Dostoevsky's greatest artistic creation." He is complex and mysterious—and frightening because plausible. There is much more to him than the obvious Byronic dimension, and we are clearly confronted by more than just another Russian hero who is bored, passive, and las de vivre. He is strikingly handsome, powerful, and brilliant—exceptional in every way—but a miserable failure as a human being. In the excluded chapter "At Tikhon's," Tikhon tells Stavrogin, "I was horrified to see your great unused powers had been so deliberately turned toward filth" (434). How can a person of such intelligence and talent fail so abjectly in life and do so little good but so much evil? This question obviously fascinated Dostoevskii who probed Stavrogin deeply, looking for the answer, and ended up with a character whose complexity is rare even for Dostoevskii.

In recent years, scholars of international relations have realized how poor have been their predictions, based on relative military or economic strength, of the outcome of negotiations or disputes. The strong often do not prevail or must compromise to a surprising extent. The Soviet Union's relations with its six East European allies have also exhibited this phenomenon. Even during the period when Soviet leaders were committed to maintaining control over Eastern Europe as a vital underpinning of Soviet security, and despite the Soviet Union's disproportionate strength in the region, the East European states departed from Soviet wishes in a variety of ways. In the late 1980s, this departure, for a while, took the ironic form of Romania, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia flouting Soviet calls for reform.

Early in March 1914 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her new acquaintance Vasilii Rozanov

Several features of this passage stamp it as characteristically Tsvetaevan: the emotional excess, the hero worship of her husband, the preoccupation with familial blood lines. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the quasi-mythical quality with which she imbues the figures of husband and child. Whereas Tsvetaeva's powers as a maker of myths are commonly acknowledged, the extent to which her mythmaking shaped her most intimate relationships has yet to be explored. In the case of her daughter, the mythic relationship assumed the dimensions of a Greek tragedy.

The search for avenues to express changing cultural values has shaped recent politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the past decade tens of thousands of GDR citizens became involved in new social movements that included issueoriented groups within both the Protestant church and such mass organizations as the Kulturbund (League of Culture) and the Freie Deutsche Jungend (Free German Youth, FDJ). The rise of these issue-oriented movements evoked reactions from the former government ranging from repression to accommodation. Perhaps the most striking example of the old regime's response to social change can be seen in the emergence of a very visible gay and lesbian movement. Beginning with a handful of activists within the Evangelical church, the East German gay and lesbian movement expanded into state and party institutions throughout the republic. In 1985, partially in response to the growing movement, the state began a campaign to end discrimination on the basis of sexual and emotional orientation.

In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place." Freidin's richly suggestive remark hints at both the nature of and the reasons for Mandel'shtam's "orphandom," and the means by which he sought to surmount or circumvent his pervasive homelessness and achieve a "homeland, a house, a hearth" in culture.

In both the west and the Soviet Union the reputation of the late lurii Trifonov has come to rest principally on the candor with which his works, particularly those of his Moscow cycle, examine ethical themes. To non-Soviet scholars Trifonov offers the appealing biography of a writer who, having begun his career with a Stalinist novel (Studenty, 1950), nonetheless welcomed the Thaw (Utolenie zhazhdy, 1963) and then evolved into a chronicler of the moral decline into which Soviet society was sliding under Leonid Brezhnev.