To most Western observers Soviet penal policy means Stalin's labor camps, and what is known about the camps comes from the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In our admiration of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of the camps, however, we ought not to accept on faith his version of Soviet penal history. Solzhenitsyn treats Soviet penal practice before 1929 simply as a stage in the development of the camps. He finds the roots of Stalin's camps in Lenin's Russia, and from those roots, he argues, the camps developed steadily and inevitably. To be sure, with hindsight one can plausibly regard the civil war camps as precedent for the later ones and the camps of Solovki during the 1920s as the embryo from which the Stalinist camps grew. But to look only at these developments is to take a selective or partial view of early Soviet penal history, for the civil war period contained the embryo of another penal policy, a progressive policy, which differed radically from that practiced by the Cheka and OGPU. And it was this progressive policy, not the Cheka's approach, which gained the predominant position during the NEP years.

The CPSU Politburo has traditionally been regarded as a group of politically powerful individuals. This article will suggest that it can simultaneously, or even alternatively, be viewed as a collection of positions. Politburo membership is not a full-time job. All members hold positions in other institutions, which constitute their occupations, the areas in which they are building their careers. Despite the absence of formal rules linking Politburo seats with specific offices, it is unthinkable that the connection would be random or that it would be arbitrary. Because the positions provide institutional identifications for individuals and tie the work of the Politburo to the activity of important Soviet elites, the pattern of representation depicts the institutional balance of forces in the regime and reflects the overall character of the Politburo and its role in the political system. A positional view of the Politburo is thus essential to defining it and understanding its development as an institution.

A sizable literature on the temporal and spatial dimensions of urbanization in Russia has appeared during the past decade, and it is probably fair to say that we now have a reasonable understanding of the process in general terms. What is needed is much closer scrutiny of the impact of the gathering of people into towns. Urbanization inevitably brought change to social organizations, institutions, behavior patterns, and perceptions; in short, to the social geography of the city. But prerequisite to understanding how quickly and with what consequences such social changes took place is an understanding of the dynamics of urban population growth itself.

Historians of Stalinism have noted that Stalin received praise from unlikely sources in the Russian emigration. A pertinent case in point is the enthusiastic commendation by Aleksandr L'vovich Kazem-Bek (1902-77), a self-styled neomonarchist, and his émigré party called the Mladorossy (Young Russians). The subject of this article is the career of this would-be Führer of the émigré radical Right. My objective, however, is not only to describe a significant historical aspect of the emigration but also to bring to light a case where Stalinism won converts from a movement of hypertrophied and openly fascist Russian nationalists. Recent scholarly attention to the history of the emigration, long a neglected chapter in histories of post-1917 Russia, has inspired this exploration into the politics of the emigre radical Right and its special appeal to the émigré “sons,” the bitterly disillusioned second generation in exile.

Statements of doctrine by Symbolists both in France and in Russia indicate that the literary movement was based on a form of philosophical idealism, often Neo-Platonism. But its theoreticians were silent about the decadent themes which appear in Symbolist poetry. Symbolists liked to represent themselves as attuned to the ineffable—or if mystics, to the divine—but their works reveal an inclination to philosophical pessimism and other forms of melancholia. Indeed, a tension between belief and cynicism can be noted in their works which resembles, and sometimes overlaps with, a juxtaposition of good and evil. Among the French, Charles Baudelaire called the opening section of Les Fleurs du mal (1857) “Spleen et Idáal.” Paul Verlaine dedicated his collections of verse alternately to Christian ideals of purity, as in Sagesse (1881), and to self-indulgent bohemianism, as in Parallélement (1889). Stáphane Mallarmá's satyr in “L'Apràs-midi d'un faune” (1876) is the emblematic representative of amorality brought to glimpse the world of Platonic Ideas. And Joris-Karl Huysmans's archdecadent hero, des Esseintes, exhausted himself in sensual delights before being brought near to a Catholic conversion.