Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the “peasant yokel” who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a “half-literate intellectual,” sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.

The Moscow Station in Petrograd was the scene of a familiar ritual of the Revolution late on the night of March 20, 1917 — the triumphant return of exiled revolutionary leaders. The red banners on the locomotive from Irkutsk read “Train of the Social Democratic Deputies of the Second Duma.” On board were the legendary leader of the arrested Social Democratic faction, the Georgian Menshevik I. G. Tsereteli, and a group of his followers known as the Siberian Zimmerwaldists. They were experienced in revolutionary politics, closely knit, and completely dedicated to the policies and leadership of Tsereteli. Within ten days of their arrival in the capital, these men would take control of the bloc of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries which held the majority in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the First All-Russian Conference of Soviets. In the coming months they would provide effective, often forceful leadership for the Soviets, guiding them by a new and distinctive political strategy which they called Revolutionary Defensism.

Eurasianism, the theory that Russia was neither Europe nor Asia but a world unto itself, Eurasia, runs through much, if not all, of George Vernadsky's enormous scholarly output. Eurasianism was the fuel of his impressive productivity, the central, unifying theme of his varied investigations of Russian, Byzantine, and Inner Asian history. Despite the high esteem in which Vernadsky came to be held, there have been few examinations of his contributions to historical knowledge. Yet Vernadsky's career and his scholarship have much to tell us of the fate of the Imperial Russian historiographic tradition in the twentieth century.

Vernadsky is most often associated with the theme of the significance of the Mongols in Russian history. Vernadsky's observations on this topic over the course of his nearly sixty-year career provide an excellent medium for understanding the ambiguities of his adherence to Eurasianism and for tracing the evolution of his Eurasianism in response to the different political and cultural environments in which he worked. As we shall see, the assumption of his eulogists that Vernadsky's Eurasianism was static is too simplistic, while the equally facile conclusion that Vernadsky gradually tempered the extremist elements of Eurasianism is too imprecise to be satisfactory. Indeed, the development of Vernadsky's historical concepts is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated.

Ezra Pound once remarked that “the history of English poetic glory is a history of successful steals from the French.“ To a certain degree, the same can be said of Russian poetry, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, when the process of literary development paid little attention to national boundaries. The Acmeists, for example, owe many of their aesthetic and stylistic principles to French poets of at least three chronological periods: the medieval troubadours, the Parnassians, and, most obviously, the Symbolists. French influence did not cease with Baudelaire and Verlaine, however. The impact of the next generation of French poets was also felt in Russia, and the parallels between French Post-symbolism and Russian Acmeism are significant. Whereas Symbolism has long been acknowledged as a world-wide artistic phenomenon, the international scope of the movement which succeeded it has received little attention. In fact, Post-symbolism was also a movement of international proportions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, British and Russian poets looked to their contemporary French counterparts as a source of innovation and manifested their influence in two parallel independent movements — Anglo-American Imagism and Russian Acmeism. In exploring the transmission of French influence to Russia in the early twentieth century and the French sources of Acmeism, I hope to establish a basis for a comprehensive study of Post-symbolist poetry and for a more complete understanding of Acmeism.

Ten years have elapsed since the publication of my general directory of archival repositories in Moscow and Leningrad and six years since its first bibliographical supplement. Space does not allow a full review here of all the finding aids and related reference literature issued in subsequent years. Yet a number of significant new publications deserve attention. A further incentive for this review is the appearance — in the western Ukrainian center of Lviv — of an extensive new directory of Soviet archives and manuscript collections. The appearance of such a long overdue, basic reference tool immediately arouses considerable interest.

The publication of this volume in Lviv evokes a long and distinguished tradition of archival development and historical scholarship in Galicia. Yet the inherent problems and logistics of preparing a directory of all-union scope in Lviv might explain some of the problems of the volume, while its issue in Lviv, unfortunately, makes the volume more difficult to obtain in the West. Nevertheless, the breadth and scope of the contribution stand as a tribute to the vision and energy of the author-compilers from Lviv University, Iu. M. Grossman (Iu. M. Hrossman) and V. N. Kutik (V. N. Kutyk). A detailed review of the Lviv directory can here also draw attention to other recently published archival reference aids and recent Soviet archival developments in general background literature and bibliography and in Grossman and Kutik's coverage of specific institutions and their finding aids.