The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are five in number, and four of them (“The Shot,” “The Blizzard,” “The Stationmaster,” and “The Lady-Peasant“) belong to the same literary species. The narrative features binding this quartet of stories together are, in the main, conventional. Each relates—among other things—the story of a young man who, having won the affections of a beautiful woman, overcomes some obstacle (or series of obstacles) which threatens their union, thereby paving the way to, or consolidating, a mariage d'amour at the end of the tale. All of which is to say that embedded in each is one of the oldest of all plots, the “successful courtship.“

The history of Soviet espionage, by the party’s own admission, did not begin in earnest until 1927, when the tiny and previously ineffectual military espionage operation came under the direction of a Moscow-trained Latvian immigrant, Alfred Tiltin. Living in New York as a Canadian under the fictitious name of “Joseph Paquette,” the debonair new director of the Soviet Military Intelligence organization in the United States recruited arid began grooming a second-in-command who would assume control of the spy group Upon Tiltin’s recall to Moscow early in 1929. The man was Nicholas Dozenberg, an early member of the American Communist Party, the first editor of the Communist publication Labor’s Voice, which later became the Daily Worker, and a man whose dedication to the Comintern was above question.

On the evening of October 31, 1921, a special edition of Gazeta Lwowska reported the sensational news of the arrest of all the delegates to a “Communist congress” that had convened only a few hours earlier on the grounds of St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv (Lwów in the Polish version). According to the newspaper, “the congress had been in preparation for some time [and] was attended by various Communist organizations, although central leadership was in the hands of the Ruthenians.” On the following day the events in Lviv were reconstructed, rather loosely, by the leading newspapers in Poland. Cracow’s Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny—exclaiming that “the hajdamacy [Ukrainian bandits] have even turned over the church for Bolshevik purposes“—related that among those arrested were members of the secret Ukrainian organizations KUM and Volia.

In February 1846 Polish-speaking peasants in the western districts of Galicia, the Austrian part of partitioned Poland, struck down a national uprising composed largely of Polish nobles (szlachta) and joined Austrian troops marching on the tiny Republic of Cracow, where a Polish National Government had been established. Between four hundred and five hundred manors were sacked and over a thousand Poles killed. This peasant revolt is’ the point at which the national and social problems cross most strikingly in Polish historiography. Every historian of these events must explain how Polish peasants could rise against Polish patriots seeking to free Poland from the foreign yoke.

Controversy began immediately, but for almost a century, until World War II, debate was confined within fairly narrow interpretive limits. All the major treatments were based on one or another version of an “outside agitator“ thesis.

The period 1917-21 in Russia found the fledgling Bolshevik government engaged in desperate military struggles with imperial Germany, with several White Russian armies assisted in varying degrees by foreign troops and supplies, with national movements for independence, and with a newly restored Poland. Yet despite an ever-present military threat to the very existence of the new government, many Bolshevik leaders remained constantly aware that theirs was a revolutionary regime, with the goal of achieving a radical trans? formation of the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions they had inherited. Consequently this same period witnessed, in addition to the crucial military conflicts, several experimental efforts to achieve thoroughgoing institutional change.

Higher education was one such target of reform, and this paper will describe succeeding attempts undertaken during 1917-21 to implement three radically different blueprints for reform of the higher educational system.

The literature of Muscovite Russia is vast and uneven in quality. In spite of the efforts of scholars, many literary works have not been sufficiently studied to permit one to assign them their proper place in Russian literature. One such work is the Laodicean Epistle (Laodikiiskoe poslanie). A number of articles have recently been written on it, and it has figured prominently in the books of two of the leading specialists in Muscovite history and literature. Discussion has centered on questions of the extent of the work, the original text, its interpretation, and possible sources. None of these points has been decided to the satisfaction of scholars concerned with the intellectual and literary developments of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This article is an attempt to provide other explanations for some of the questions raised by the text.

Since the first Russian publication of Count B. C. Münnich’s “Memoirs” in 1842 historians have employed them as a useful primary source on eighteenthcentury history. However, the Russian title, Zapiski, is misleading. Münnich was not writing his personal memoirs or even a state memorandum: instead he was offering a proposal for central government reform with an accompanying historical justification. Scholars have occasionally remarked on this aspect of the document. But it has gone unrecognized that Münnich’s writing also bore a strongly partisan political imprint. The political design only becomes clear in the context of the prolonged battle for position and influence waged between two powerful court parties in the first years of Catherine II’s reign. At a crucial stage in this struggle Münnich used his proposal in an apparent attempt to break the deadlock and facilitate Nikita Panin’s rise to power in late 1763.