I would like to begin this investigation of Pushkinian thematics with a fable, or better perhaps, a parable of my own making.

Once upon a time in the land of Rus’ there lived two brothers. And although they were sired by a noble father and reared as befits the sons of a nobleman, they differed from each other as the day differs from the night, for the elder brother was tall and fairhaired and born of a Russian princess, while the younger brother was swarthy, small, and the bastard son of a dark-skinned barbarian maiden.

As the boys grew up, to these bodily differences were added spiritual ones. For the elder brother was a dutiful son, who honored his parents and heeded his teachers and obeyed the laws of the land. After coming of age he traveled to the capital city and learned the ways of the imperial court and found favor in the eyes of the tsar.

Shortly before Lenin's death in early 1924, the Thirteenth Party Conference undertook an ambitious program to recruit thousands of workers into the Communist party. Subsequently known as the Lenin Levy—in memory, ironically, of the party's main adversary of mass worker recruitments—this campaign, which was repeated in 1925 and 1927, marked a key stage in the social and organizational history of the Soviet Communist party, for it brought the party into close contact with the shop floor for the first time since 1917.

Western historians are divided over the significance to be attached to this episode. Many echo the views held by prominent party leftists that worker recruitments were a cosmetic response to the problem of bureaucratism and a convenient means to swamp the party with members obedient to the secretariat.

In 1927 Nikolai Zabolotskii first began making public appearances with the young Leningrad poets Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii. Kharms and Vvedenskii had been allied in an informal group called the Chinari, a name Kharms intended to signify “enfants terribles.“ In the autumn of 1927, however, they decided to join with Zabolotskii in the OBERIU (Ob“edinenie real'nogo iskusstva). The nucleus of this group was composed of Zabolotskii, Kharms, Vvedenskii, Konstantin Vaginov, Igor’ Bakhterev, and Boris Levin, although at various times others participated in the OBERIU performances. It was not necessarily easy to become allied with the group: Kharms and Zabolotskii would test the creative potential of candidates by having them answer questions like “Where is your nose?” and “What is your favorite dish?“

The OBERIU held readings in dormitories and military sections and at the Union of Poets and the Institute of the History of the Arts.

On 26 November 1921, Lenin sent a note to Viacheslav M. Molotov, for transmission to the Politburo, requesting that it appoint Gregorii Iakovlevich Sokolnikov a member of the Board of the People's Commissariat of Finance (PCF). The next day the Politburo approved this suggestion. Nikolai Krestinskii, the Left Communist who had served as people's commissar of finance since July 1918 and who oversaw the virtual dismantling of that ministry, had become the Soviet diplomatic representative in Germany. Although he would formally hold the title of people's commissar of finance until December 1922, Krestinskii had ceased to play a role in the PCF a year earlier. Sokolnikov quickly took over the ministry, especially after he became deputy commissar in January, at which time Lenin wrote Sokolnikov saying that he was “actually in charge of the most important people's commissariat.” Thus, although Sokolnikov officially became people's commissar of finance only in December 1922, he was de facto, if not de jure, in control from the beginning of 1922.

Historically, leaders of the Soviet Union have shown extraordinary faith in the power of bureaucratic reorganization to solve political problems. The 1985-1987 restaffing and restructuring of the foreign policy establishment indicate that Mikhail Gorbachev shares this faith. In the first sixteen months of his leadership, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replaced its minister, two first deputy ministers, seven deputy ministers, a third of all Soviet ambassadors, and created four new departments. In addition, important changes were made in the central party apparat, affecting three of the CPSU Central Committee departments: The International Information Department was abolished. The Propaganda Department gained added prominence in international affairs with the appointment of a new chief, Aleksandr Iakovlev, who began playing a conspicuous role as Gorbachev's advisor at international conferences even before his elevation to the Politburo in January 1987. Of great significance for the Soviet foreign policy establishment as a whole, the International Department (ID) was given new leadership, a new arms control unit, and expanded missions.

In his “Poetic Responses to the Death of Gumilev,” Ivan Martynov has chronicled the repercussions of Gumilev's execution by the Cheka in August 1921 in the poetry of his contemporaries. Martynov recalls those poets who remained faithful to Gumilev and marked his death with memorable poems as well as the opportunists who publicly and loudly praised his executioners. Among those who betrayed Gumilev for selfish reasons, Martynov cites such former close friends as Elizaveta Polonskaia, Mikhail Zenkevich, Larisa Reisner, and Sergei Gorodetskii. Their cynicism and cowardice were, however, more than offset by the loyalty and resourcefulness of, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Georgii Adamovich, Nikolai Otsup, Ida Nappel'baum and Irina Odoevtseva. Despite the very real danger, these poets refused to renounce Gumilev in public. Because the Soviet censor would allow no overt references to Gumilev, much less poems in commemoration of his death, his friends were able to refer to him only obliquely in the months following his execution.