The peculiar treatment of sex in Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry has been noted by a number of literary critics. Simon Karlinsky, for example, points out the “reversal of sex roles” of the main characters in the fairy tale Tsar'-Devitsa (The Tsar-Maiden) and comments on the “interesting and significant” nature of this phenomenon “when viewed within the whole of Tsvetaeva's work and in terms of her personal biography.“

When Communist elites came to power in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, they attempted to create a new social and political order. As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.

If one examines the role of women in rural areas in different countries of the world, varying styles or patterns of development can be observed. A particular style found in socialist countries has been described as the “feminization of agriculture.” This pattern, prevalent in East European countries and especially in the Soviet Union, is largely a function of rapid industrialization and the demographic changes necessary to support development. In the Soviet case, for example, the absolute size of the rural population has been declining mainly because of rural-urban migration. Furthermore, this migration has been dominated by youth, a trend which, in combination with losses of males from the war years, has resulted in a rural population whose average age and proportion of women is rising.

Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union developed sophisticated and diversified criminological research. Well-trained lawyers, doctors, and social scientists obtained access to criminal statistics, research facilities, and funding and were unhampered by ideological limitations. The varieties of descriptive, statistical, and experimental research on crime conducted in criminological institutes by government agencies and independent researchers throughout the Soviet Union did much to advance criminologists’ understanding of the personality of the offender and the relationship between crime and social change.

The student-led Russian working-class movement of the early 1870s, only lightly studied to date, is intimately connected with the beginnings of the famous “to the people” movement of 1874. The main purpose of this essay is to explore this connection. When radical students in the cities experienced unexpected limitations on their efforts to organize city workers, they reformulated their plan and eventually decided that direct contact with the peasantry was possible. Thus the populism of the movement “to the people,” generally considered a student phenomenon inspired by books alone, may in fact have been the result of practical work among city workers, characterized by much trial and error.

The speech of the worker Peter Alekseev, delivered on March 9, 1877, at the famous trial of “the fifty,” occupies a sensitive position in the debate concerning the contributions and participation of workers and peasants in the Russian revolutionary movement. Between 1877 and 1917, the speech was reprinted more than twenty times by both populists and Marxists, thus providing the Russian free press with one of its classic publications. Adam Ulam has recently questioned Alekseev's authorship of the printed text on two grounds. First, Ulam considers the printed speech too polished to have been written by a worker.

Russia's balance of trade (torgovyi balans) and balance of payments (raschetnyi balans) were matters of great concern to the tsarist government before and after the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. Tsarist officials feared that the gold reserves required to maintain (or to go on) the gold standard would be lost if payments abroad exceeded receipts. Moreover, there was concern over the potential loss of political and economic independence if the government had to borrow abroad regularly in order to cover international payments deficits. Russia's foreign policy toward France and Germany was affected significantly by this consideration. Thus, considerable importance rested on the reported estimates of these two balances.