While many studies of the early Soviet theater have focused upon its proletarian or revolutionary stages, in the polemics of that era a central topic of dispute was the so-called academic stage. The academic theaters of Moscow and Petrograd, which included the former imperial theaters as well as select representatives of the pre-revolutionary private stage, most notably the Arts and Kamernyi theaters, had no lack of critics or enemies in the years after October. The former court theaters were attacked as politically dangerous relics of the old regime, their artists were envied for their material privileges and status, their large budgets were coveted by less generously funded workers' and avant-garde stages, their art was condemned as conservative and out of harmony with the revolution and socialism. For Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii, however, these theaters were academies which would both preserve the best of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage and provide standards of technical excellence against which more innovative theaters could be measured.

“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.

Throughout the 1920s and into the years of Stalinism, progressive architects in the Soviet Union sought to construct new forms of housing and settlement that would offer the best of modern technology and whose design would include provisioning of services that would allow all citizens, especially women, to partake in creative work. Schools, dining facilities, laundries, parks, cinemas, clubs and housing in a choice of styles formed the core of these architectural dreams. In the tradition of the Populists, modernist architects initially saw themselves as teachers but some came to appreciate the necessity of listening and began to learn from worker assessments of housing and urban design. This communication formed the basis for bridging, at least in housing, the cultural gap between revolutionary elites and common people. Inherent in the modernist movement in architecture, as reflected most eloquently in the work of the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), was a greater democratization of political and social life.

The 1920s remain one of the most debated periods of Soviet history. Central to these debates is the issue of continuity between leninism and Stalinism, and the role of ideology under their respective leaderships. Supporters of “continuity” have usually emphasized the role of ideology as an intellectual bridge from the 1920s to the 1930s; conversely, those who question the continuity thesis usually point to major differences between leninism and Stalinism. I shall address this issue in relation to the history of attempts to organize writers in the early post-revolutionary period. My central claim is that Soviet discourse on writers and literature, articulated shortly after the revolution and elaborated during NEP, set a pattern which led to the absorption of writers into a unitary organizational apparatus and which culminated in the formation of the Writer's Union in April 1932. From 1917 to 1928, a clearly-articulated and largely consensual strategy of absorption of Soviet writers into a state-directed stream was spelt out well before Stalin was installed as the privileged speaker of “marxism-leninism.”

Much attention has been given lately to the utopianism that flourished in Soviet Russia during the civil war and NEP. Scholars have noted that the idea of women's emancipation figured as an important element in this utopianism, affecting diverse aspects of it—fictional portrayals of the communist society of the future, urban architectural plans, the character of public pageants, even clothing design. The names of the women who participated with men in creating these Utopian projects have been recorded. As yet, however, scholars have not asked whether the female Utopians of NEP shared the utopianism of their male comrades or whether women entertained a vision of their own, distinguishable from men's. If there are discernable differences, how do they compare to those which scholars have found between male and female Utopians elsewhere in Europe and in North America? Why did such diversity arise? What were its consequences?

“The Fatal Eggs,” written in 1924 and published in early 1925, was the first of Bulgakov's works to attract widespread attention—and a storm of controversy. Recipient of a few positive reviews as well as uniformly enthusiastic praise—privately expressed—from writers and editors, the novella was also the object of virulent attack from a number of (mostly proletarian) critics. Among the attackers were those who saw the work as a thinly veiled allegory and Professor Persikov's discovery of the “revolutionary” red ray as an allusion to the socialist experiments of the bolsheviks.

Much of the analysis of the results of republican and local elections held in the USSR in 1989-1990 understandably focused on the dramatic victories of candidates and groups committed to a radical reform of the old system. Anti-communist majorities were elected to the parliaments of several republics. The city governments of Moscow, Leningrad and Sverdlovsk fell under the control of activists associated with the self-styled “democratic bloc” and, in summer 1990, Boris Yeltsin was elected to chair the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. Conversely, local party officials suffered embarrassing defeats in the face of competition from popular fronts united under the banner of Democratic Russia. That the Party itself was in disarray over how to respond to these challenges was reflected in the open split between rival platforms at the 28th party Congress in July 1990. Taken together, these events could easily convey the impression that old party elites “lost” the local elections of 1990 and that they lost because they failed to adapt to the new rules of democratic politics.