During the past ten years Russian area students have directed increasing attention to comparing aspects of their specialty with those of other social systems. That this interest was so late in developing has caused some of them to be defensive, if not apologetic. Often, however, both practitioners and the critics of Russian area studies have failed to realize that from its inception the field has been devoted to an implicit comparison, not between geographically distinct social systems but between successive periods in the region we have commonly designated “Russia.” The failure to note, or at least to stress, this- comparative aspect of Russian area studies has many causes, but two stand out. For area specialists, the relation between the Soviet and the prerevolutionary periods was so obvious it scarcely needed emphasis. For general empirical theorists, on the other hand, the problem of temporal boundaries of social systems has rarely been salient.

The opinions of Nikolai Ivanovich PirOgov (1810–81) provided the basis for much of the widespread debate on the “university problem” which preceded the adoption in 1863 of the General Statute of Russian Universities. Though Pirogov's equally important views on primary and secondary education and his general pedagogical philosophy have been examined in some detail, there is no systematic treatment of his views on university reform. The purpose of this article is to help elucidate those views, to demonstrate the relationship of Pirogov's ideas on university government to his activities as curator of the Odessa and Kiev school districts, to define the limits within which Pirogov's ideas were acceptable to the government of Alexander II and to a majority of the professorial community, and to compare his recommendations for reform with the statute of 1863 and with events which immediately followed its implementation.

In the nineteenth century Russia and the United States emerged as nations on the periphery of the West European economic and political vortex. Their relations with each other had been, for the most part, prompted by or integrated with some larger issue involving the powers of Western Europe. Economic relations were no exception. Both nations were traditionally exporters of raw materials to industrialized, urbanized nations, which in turn were prepared and eager to exchange manufactured goods for raw materials. Russian and American products were therefore competitive rather than reciprocal, and profitable mutual exchange of goods had not developed. Both nations were debtor nations and had relied on the surplus capital of the small and large investors of Western Europe to provide the beginnings of internal transportation and industrialization.

Hungary was a feudal monarchy at the beginning of 1848 and was part of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Although Hungarian publicists continually emphasized that the country could look back to nearly a thousand years of statehood and national existence, the foreign relations and the fiscal and military affairs of Hungary were directed almost exclusively from Vienna. Internally the country was governed by the native nobility, which constituted about 5 percent of a population of approximately fifteen million. The nobility exercised its power through the Diet and elective county assemblies. Nobles alone had the right to vote. Until 1844 they alone held public office, and most of them paid no taxes. The immense majority—the peasantry—lived in feudal bondage. The taxes of the serfs maintained the state, and their dues and labor services supported the nobility.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

One of those organs of tsarist government that apparently broadened its responsibilities and competencies during the nineteenth century was the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). At the turn of the century the Ministry's authority extended over political and civil police, local agrarian affairs, licensing of physicians and veterinarians, gathering of statistical data for the empire (including censuses), postal and telegraphic services, press licensing and censorship, civil engineering, as well as other, equally diverse, areas. The publicly announced rationale for this vast range of competencies was that these functions all were directly related to the public welfare. As a government document written for Western consumption in the 1890s put it, the Ministry was “allotted the very extensive task of caring for the universal welfare of the people, the peace, quiet, and good order of the whole Empire.”

Classical Marxism, in contrast to various forms of Utopian socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism, treated anti-Semitism with utter contempt. The German Social Democratic leader August Bebel summed up the prevailing attitude of classical Marxism when he dubbed anti-Semitism the “socialism of fools.” Lenin was even sharper in his denunciation: “Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews,” he cried in March 1919. Yet fifty-five years after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union has become the principal exemplar of the “socialism of fools,” with anti-Jewish discrimination practiced in various areas of politics and employment and in the ethnic-cultural field. Especially disquieting is the massive anti-Zionist propaganda campaign which incorporates the traditional negative stereotypes of Jews.

One of the “Great Debates” among Soviet specialists in the social sciences today concerns the applicability of interest group theory to the study of Soviet politics. Though a large number of specialists have accepted the notion that interest groups do indeed play a certain kind of role in the Soviet system, there are still those who hold to the opinion, once taken for granted but in recent years challenged, that interest group theory simply does not apply to the Soviet Union. The strength of the latter argument lies in the fact that in the USSR interest groups do not operate publicly and openly, as they do in the United States; therefore, interest group theory as developed to fit the American context cannot describe or explain the dynamic processes of policymaking in Russia.