It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.

Maksim M. Litvinov was the most colorful and controversial of the major European diplomats in the 1930s. As Henry Roberts has observed, Litvinov's “chubby and unproletarian figure radiated an aura of robust and businesslike common sense that was in striking contrast to the enigmatic brutality of the Politburo.” But this cultured and reflective man served that Politburo for the better part of his life, and he did so until his disillusionment overwhelmed him, and he made a complete break with the policies of the Soviet leadership. The obvious question is why Litvinov continued this bizarre relationship so long—one between the cosmopolitan “citizen of Geneva” and the reclusive and often violent men in the Kremlin. A definitive answer is, of course, impossible given the sources, but a clue can be found in an examination of Litvinov before the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic that has received virtually no attention from western scholars. As will be shown, the rotund and cooly analytical diplomat was for a considerable period of time a man wholly dedicated to violent revolution—and not just in the abstract. Litvinov was one of the apparatchiki of the movement who was not afraid to get his hands dirty in the sometimes messy business of fomenting revolution. Litvinov changed greatly over the course of his life, but it seems clear that for a few decades he was never fully able to repudiate these early years. Therefore he remained at his post, continuing to serve the government that sprang from the revolution, even as his own disillusionment grew.

In 1967 Irina Grekova's story “Na ispytaniiakh” was published in Novyi mir. The story depicts a unit of the Red Army on maneuvers in the summer of 1952 in a backwoods area of Russia. Grekova refrained from using the usual gloss reserved for such institutions as the Red Army and within several months was forced to resign from her job as professor of mathematics at the Zhukovskii Military Academy. The story was attacked by the party and, on orders of General Aleksei Epishev, chief of the political administration of the army, banned from army libraries. Twenty years later, in 1986, “Na ispytaniiakh” reappeared in a collection of Grekova's works entitled Porogi. The recent version of the story has been subject to various editorial changes, most of which concern the Stalin years. These revisions illuminate the party's changing attitude towards the Stalin era and specifically show which facets of Stalinism the party was more open about during the late Chcrnenko–early Gorbachev era and which were still too sensitive to be discussed openly.

In recent years two lines of research on USSR power and personnel have challenged some long-standing interpretations of the bases of Soviet political activity. In one line, historical studies dealing with the Stalin era have called into question the conventional emphasis, epitomized in the totalitarian model, of a single leader who commands an army of loyal apparatchiki and monopolizes the political agenda. A number of scholars have shown that chaos and confusion in personnel matters were the salient characteristics of this period, rather than a coordinated system for the recruitment, placement, and promotion of cadres—an image suggested by both the totalitarian model and Stalinist boasting of a “monolithic party,” a “unified state structure,” and so forth. In substantive policy, the actual results in implementing regime directives in the Stalin period regularly bore no better than the faintest resemblance to the announced policy. Absent the well-oiled machine highlighted in images of the “totalitarian party,” the regime's failure to control real policy results seems to have followed as a necessary consequence.

On Friday, 30 August 1918, the day M. S. Uritskii, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated, Lenin was scheduled to address the Corn Exchange in the Basmannyi district of Moscow at 6:00 P.M. and the Mikhelson Armaments Factory in the Serpukhovskii section later. The first speech passed without incident; at the Mikhelson factory he gave the same fifteen-to-twenty minute speech he had delivered at the Corn Exchange, an attack on the forces of counterrevolution. In both locations he concluded his speech with the words “there is only one issue, victory or death!” As Lenin returned to his car in the factory courtyard, three shots were fired and he fell to the ground with bullet wounds in his left shoulder and the left side of his neck; the third bullet hit a woman standing nearby. The workers accompanying him to his car ran off, crying, “they've killed him, they've killed him!” and the crowded courtyard emptied quickly.

Since the sixth century, the spiritual center of Eastern Orthodoxy has been Constantinople's Hagia Sophia Cathedral and, since the eleventh century, that of Russian Orthodoxy in two cathedrals dedicated to that same Holy Wisdom. Yet few Orthodox believers would recognize any icon of Sophia.

Vladimir Solov'ev, in his poem “Three Meetings” (1898), describes three visions of Sophia—each a somewhat indistinct image of feminine beauty, suffused in a “golden azure” light. Possibly, Solov′ev's perception of Sophia originated in an icon he saw as a child (his first vision having occurred when he was nine); the Orthodox church, however, found his almost fanatical obsession with the divine femininity of Sophia to be highly objectionable. In particular, the Sophiology based on Solov′ev's writings, and advanced after his death first by Pavel Florenskii and then by Sergei Bulgakov, was attacked by the church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Bulgakov's idea of Sophia was seen by the church as “involving a fourth feminine hypostasis in the Holy Trinity” who acted as a “gnostic intermediary between God and the world”; it was condemned as heretical. The church's unyielding position in this controversy was (and is) that only Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the true Sophia—the Divine Wisdom of God—in accordance with 1 Cor. 1:23-31: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”

Conflicting accounts about the autobiographical writings of Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov have circulated for decades. Some of the confusion can be clarified by an examination of the correspondence of his British wife Ivy Low Litvinov. On 7 December 1941, when Litvinov arrived in Washington, D.C., as the new Soviet ambassador, he was accompanied by Ivy. The American Left, which had lionized him during his previous United States visit to negotiate recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, welcomed both Litvinovs with high enthusiasm in the 1940s. In the United States for the first time, she renewed acquaintance with various American intellectuals, whom she had met over the years in Moscow. Among them was the writer Joseph Freeman, one of the editors of the radical communist journal New Masses.

Ivy wrote frequently from her embassy quarters in Washington to Freeman, her closest confidant, who lived in New York. Those letters that have been preserved provide a sense of Maksim Litvinov's tenuous position as a diplomat, indispensable for negotiating with the west but also unmanageable within the Soviet leadership.