Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.

Modern Russian literature created its image of Moscow by depicting a number of typical inhabitants of the city and by identifying specific locales in which they lived. These settings — buildings, streets, squares, small neighborhoods, and larger regions — lent the authenticity of recognizable landmarks to generalizations about personality and life style. Similarly, descriptions of “typical” if fictitious Muscovites provided actual Moscow locations with specific, characteristic qualities. As these literary images of Moscow evolved, so too did their settings: first one area and then another became the “typical” Moscow. Thus the city's cultural topography changed with the values symbolized by Moscow's landmarks and local populations.

In nineteenth-century Russian memoir literature no work succeeds better than “My Literary and Moral Wanderings” at vividly evoking the historical circumstances of a specific time and place. In this, his best known work, the critic and poet Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev (1822–1864) depicted the Moscow of his childhood in the late 1820s and early 1830s. However, writing in 1862 and 1864, Grigor'ev described a Moscow that had changed radically in the intervening thirty years. The city's image had been preeminently aristocratic for several decades following 1812, but by mid-century a new image of merchant Moscow began to appear. The “Wanderings” confirm this change with rich descriptive material illustrating the concomitant shift in the city's cultural topography.

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.

American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

Estonia's Communist movement has received little attention in the West. The chief exceptions are its role in an abortive putsch in 1924 and the Soviet occupation and annexation of Estonia in 1940. Existing Western sources — primarily general histories or surveys — that deal with the interwar period of 1918 to 1940 tend to dismiss the Estonian Communist Party as electorally insignificant and to view it as a mere branch of the Party in the neighboring Soviet Union. In contrast, Soviet sources see it mainly as a native movement of significant popularity, the activity of which was suppressed by a bourgeois nationalist regime. Since the Estonian Communist Party participated in all parliamentary and local elections through fronts, a more accurate interpretation of its popular appeal may be gained through an examination of national election statistics. Detailed results of parliamentary elections are available and have remained an untapped source of primary data.

It is commonly supposed that confessional adherence was the decisive element in the growth of Croat and Serb nationhood: “In the differentiation of Serbs from Croats and the rise of modern Serb and Croat national consciousness, religion played the essential role in the Serbo-Croatian linguistic area. Whereas the Catholics by rule became Croats, the Orthodox were Serbs.” This none too precise formulation assumes that, quite independently of preexisting South Slavic affinities, a homogeneous national “mass” became heterogeneous by reason of outside dispensational intervention. Without fully analyzing whether religion indeed separated the South Slavs into different nationalities or whether religious affiliation simply reflected the allogenic nature of the South Slavic settlement — such an analysis would be difficult to sustain on the basis of current ethnogenesic knowledge—I suggest that the confessional “rule” is hardly as firm as some scholars suppose and needs to be qualified.