The golden era of the study of folklore in the Soviet Union was the first decade after the Revolution, when the party and government, occupied with more urgent tasks, let the literary scholars and folklorists do their work relatively undisturbed. In 1925 the so-called “magna charta libertatis” for Soviet writers was issued by the Central Committee of the party, which permitted “free competition of various groups and currents.” As a result, the 1920s turned out to be rich and fruitful in literary scholarship, including folkloristics. In the study of folklore, different trends could freely coexist and thrive side by side. The most important of them were the historical school, Formalism, and the so-called Finnish school. The historical school continued the traditions of its leader Vsevolod Miller, whose first concern had been to find reflections of concrete historical reality in Russian byliny (epic songs). Thus the tendencies of the historical school are found in the commentaries to some bylina collections in 1918 and 1919, and also appeared strongly in the works of the brothers Boris and Iurii Sokolov, both of them disciples of Miller.

Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin has long been regarded as both a leader and archetype of nineteenth-century Russian liberalism. It is not clear, however, what “liberal” and “liberalism” mean with reference to nineteenth-century Russia. Russian liberals of the early twentieth century, seeking to create a tradition for their movement, put the most diverse figures from the past in the liberal pantheon. Soviet historians, with somewhat more justice but the same kind of zeal, have sharply demarcated mid-century radicals, with, whom they sympathize, from the liberals. American historians of Russia tend to characterize as “liberal” almost anyone who tried to achieve social and political improvements by nonrevolutionary means. And almost all historians have resorted to the tautology whereby “liberalism” denotes the activities and doctrines of those public figures whom we know to be “liberals.”

The interpolation of other-language material into the primary language of discourse is a well-known phenomenon in the speech of bi- and multilinguals. Social scientists studying bilingualism have termed this practice “code-switching.” In literature, code-switching is potentially available to any writer who commands another language besides his own and is not restricted from its use by literary canon. Practitioners of code-switching in the West include Petronius and Cicero, medieval translators, Rabelais and Montaigne, Sterne, Tolstoy, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, e. e. cummings, Hemingway, and Anthony Burgess. The motives for literary code-switching are many—terminological precision, connotative nuance, citation and allusion, display of erudition, an illusion of verisimilitude, irony, and word play.

At a very early stage of the Bolshevik experiment with economic planning it became obvious that the economy could not be made to function without the use of money and other financial instruments. In fact, a financial history of the Soviet economy would show a gradual but relentless expansion in the number and functions of financial instruments. This expansion has been gradual largely because Soviet economists, planners, and administrators have had both ideological (theoretical) and practical reservations about the appropriate uses as well as the potential abuses to which financial instruments can be put. The process has been relentless nonetheless, because for a number of essential economic functions the possible substitutes or alternatives to financial instruments are either impractical or nonexistent. Let me attempt to explain briefly the fundamental reasons for the ambivalence in Soviet financial policy.