Since Viktor Shklovskii first made the distinction, critics of fictional forms who invoke the concepts of siuzhet and fabula have been prone to exalt the former at the expense of the latter. The preference is hardly surprising. The fabula is after all an abstraction. It designates the narrative in its raw or pre-aesthetic form from which the finished artistic product (siuzhet) is ultimately shaped. And it is a simple matter of definition that the literary critic must be primarily concerned with the literary artifact rather than its ingredients.

If the priority is legitimate, its implications should not be misunderstood. For fabula and siuzhet are not, after all, inimical or competing concepts. Our apprehension of the one stems directly from our experience of the other. True, a triumphantly ingenious manipulator of the stuff of fiction (a Sterne, a Joyce, a Nabokov) may create a nonlinear siuzhet of such kaleidescopic and multilayered complexity that our perception of the events as they are supposed “actually” to have occurred may become blurred.

Few official changes of course in the Soviet Union have been as dramatic as the adoption of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. Supplanting what had come to be called War Communism (1918-1920)—a boiling mixture of revolutionary euphoria, bitter civil war, foreign intervention, economic collapse, and growing peasant unrest—NEP represented a new departure in many areas of Soviet life. First and foremost, eyewitnesses were struck by the legalization of a considerable amount of private economic activity, in contrast to the harsh measures adopted by the Bolsheviks against the private sector during War Communism.

While this change seemed an improvement to most foreigners on the scene (and undoubtedly to most Russians), revolutionaries of diverse hues regarded the legalization of private trade in 1921 as a clear signal that the Bolsheviks had jettisoned the ideals of the Revolution.

Although historians have often noted the disadvantages of St. Petersburg's location for the development of a major city and seaport, they have paid relatively little attention to one of its most serious handicaps, its lack of direct and easy access to the products of the Russian interior. From the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 to the opening of the Mariinsk and Tikhvin canals in 1810–11, the difficulty of transporting goods from the provinces to St. Petersburg created serious problems for consumers, producers, and merchants as well as the imperial government. It affected important sectors of the national economy and influenced the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian government.

Part of the difficulty of supplying St. Petersburg stemmed from the seemingly insatiable demand for Russian goods that accompanied the development of that city.

The Petrashevskii affair has usually been seen in the West as an insignificant and slightly comic episode. The Petrashevtsy have been regarded as a handful of unconditional admirers of French socialism, whose activities were not related in either a theoretical or a practical manner to the development of the Russian revolutionary movement. As a result they have, until recently, been largely ignored by scholars. Interest in them is now beginning to develop, but there is still very little written on the subject. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Petrashevtsy, but their ideas have suffered the ideological distortion with which all pre-Marxian socialist thought in Russia has been viewed. The aim of this article is to take a fresh look at the Petrashevtsy and clear away some of the misconceptions that have crept into the analysis of their circles.

Historical studies of the Russian empire in upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century have tended to be animated by a narrow centralist bias or an equally narrow regional one. Although it is clear that the primary impulse for revolutionary situations in 1905 and 1917 resulted from events in St. Petersburg/Petrograd, a Russocentric approach to a society that was less than 50 percent Russian is surely inadequate. At the same time, studies of individual minority nationalities, however thorough, tend to view these groups in isolation. A comparative perspective, which could identify broader uniformities as well as local peculiarities, is usually lacking. In this article I shall present a synthesizing and comparative overview of the Revolution of 1905 in the Baltic Provinces and Finland. Although these areas constituted only 2 percent of the land area of the Russian empire and had less than 4 percent of its population in 1905,2 they were among the most modernized in the country, and their ethnic diversity and differing histories provide abundant material for a comparative case study.