Few would dispute the claim that the razverstka, the Bolshevik method of grain procurement, was a centerpiece of “war communism.” Yet there exists no adequate treatment of the razverstka in the scholarly literature, and indeed there is widespread confusion about the nature and purposes of the razverstka policy as well as about the circumstances of its introduction and its replacement in 1921 by a food-supply tax (prodnalog). A closer look at the actual razverstka reveals some surprising features and in the end casts doubt on the validity and usefulness of the war communism notion itself.

The razverstka was introduced in the second half of 1918 as a result of experience in trying to enforce a state grain monopoly by means of the foodsupply dictatorship decreed in spring 1918. To understand the razverstka method we must first look at the more ambitious aims of the previous policy of a fullfledged grain monopoly.

Recent monographs on Russian social development have raised a number of hypotheses regarding our general understanding of processes of political and social change. In his volume on the early history of Russian workers Reginald Zelnik, for instance, proposes that moderate labor unrest reinforced traditional repressive patterns, while extreme conflicts motivated innovative reform. In the work of Robert E. Johnson and of Victoria Bonnell we find the suggestion that workers in small-scale enterprises and artisan shops were often more radical and organized than those in larger industrial enterprises. The fragmented and antagonistic nature of Russian society, with multiple splits of both an intergroup and intragroup nature, has been noted in the work of both Roberta Manning and Allan Wildman. Diane Koenker, focusing her research on the period of the 1917 revolutions, has brought out the moderating and integrating effect of the urban setting on Russian workers. These are only a few of the many thought-provoking hypotheses that have been raised.

As is well known, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was founded on December 1,1918, did not achieve the success envisaged for it. It is generally assumed that the state was the direct product of Yugoslavism, a Croatian concept formulated in the nineteenth century, which found adherents among the Serbs and Slovenes. Although there is no consensus among scholars concerning the precise definition of Yugoslavism, in its basic terms the concept called for the union of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in one state. The proponents of Yugoslavism argued that as long as the three nations remained separate they were subject to domination by their stronger neighbors, whereas united they would be in a better position to determine their own future. These proponents never agreed on the exact political organization of the union, whether it should be a centralized or federalized state, but they assumed that the kingdom would have one army and a single foreign and trade policy, and that each nation would retain considerable local autonomy, for example, in education, religious affairs, and police jurisdiction. Yet the ultimate success of Yugoslavism was dependent on the acceptance by Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of the basic premise that they were in essence one people, and that eventually they would no longer give primacy to their Serbianism, Croatianism, and Slovenianism but would offer their undivided loyalty to the larger Yugoslav concept.

Local self-government holds an important, if not the most important, place both in the constitutional system of the new Yugoslavia and in the process of her formation and development. One of the starting points for the constitutional revision which has taken place by stages in Yugoslavia since 1950 is the reorganization of local self-government. This reorganization has been carried out under the General Law on People's Committees of April 1, 1952, and other republic laws enacted subsequently

In order to understand the organization and the activity of the system of local self-government, we must describe in general outline the course it has followed in its development. The organs of local self-government are called the “people's committees.” They were organized under the name of "National Liberation Committees" at the very outset of the struggle for national liberation, that is, in the early days of the uprising against the invader in August, 1941.

Western and Soviet scholars have generally maintained different interpretations of the period between 1905 and 1917 in Russia, describing it respectively as a time of amelioration or of immiseration for the masses. Both groups, however, have stressed the progress of capitalism in prerevolutionary Russia. Despite standard references to the agrarian problem, most of the attention given to socioeconomic development in this period has focused on industrialization and the urban sector. Yet 87 percent of the population was rural when revolution broke out in 1905, and 85 percent still rural when it erupted again in 1917.

During the interrevolutionary period the imperial government adopted a program that was intended to provide a take-off base for agriculture. Prime Minister Stolypin’s policy was aimed at the replacement of the archaic communal structure by a new order of individualized peasant landholdings that would give scope to personal initiative and technological innovation.

In 2018, Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, was the most popular of all Russian historical figures of the twentieth century; the fame of White officers such as Alexander Kolchak and Anton Denikin was also on the rise. Obviously, broad sympathy for the last Romanov does not imply support for a potential restoration of the monarchy, yet the past few years have seen the activation of several monarchist lobbies, especially around the Russian Orthodox Church and in some well-connected Kremlin circles that seek the ideological hardening of the Putin regime. In this article, I use the case study of the monarchist idea to explore how the Kremlin manages the production of a large and diversified set of ideologies. I explore how the relationship between state authorities, ideological entrepreneurs, and some societal actors such as the Church is articulated along a continuum of permanent complementarity and competition in the production of ideologies.

In this article, Irina Paert reexamines the relationship between Old Believers and officialdom. She focuses on the impact the criminalization of Old Believer marriages had on dissenting communities in Nicholas I's Russia (1825-55). Although Paert emphasizes the difference between Old Believer and official approaches to marriage, she also draws attention to endemic conflicts and contradictions within the local and central governments regarding the implementation of policies, and she identifies a variety of grass-root responses to these problems. In addition to ecclesiological disagreements between different branches of Old Belief, conflicts existed within specific congregations, which were divided along class and gender lines. Paert thus raises new questions about the boundaries separating the official culture from that of religious dissent, and Orthodox from Old Believer communities, and she questions the persistent representation of the Old Believer community as a “counter-society.”

The intent of this article is to join in the slowly rising chorus of voices expressing dissatisfaction with the methods used so far in the analysis of Communist political systems. I shall argue, perhaps in rather circuitous fashion, that political scientists in the West have failed, by and large, to apply to the Communist world the rich store of concepts developed for the comparative study of political systems and that the concepts that have been used have been applied in ways that are objectionable. If, as is at times maintained, our discipline tends to be provincial or ethnocentric in its methods, this tendency has been most pronounced, perhaps, in the study of Communist systems. As a result, very little work done has been genuinely comparative. The discipline has failed to place the Communist world into any of the several systematic conceptual frameworks it has developed.

The sheer size of the Russian foreign debt in 1917 has profoundly affected our view of the influence of foreign capital on tsarist diplomacy. It has been argued by both Western and Soviet historians that Russian foreign relations were in good part influenced by, or even determined by, Russia’s debtor status to France and—to a lesser degree—to Great Britain. Thus a Western historian argued recently that in the last years of tsarist rule “foreign credit became a tool of power politics and a limitation on Russian sovereignty in general. … Between 1887 and 1917 Russian policy was tied to French policy, inasmuch as French investments were controlled, to a large extent, by the French Government.” Recently published Soviet works, while revising Stalin’s judgment that Russia was economically a semicolony of Western capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the Entente countries pushed tsarist Russia into a military alliance with them.”

Leonid Gaidai’s comedies of the 1960s owed their phenomenal success to Gaidai’s visual style of humor, which starkly contrasted to verbal instantiations of official Soviet ideology within narrative-driven Soviet cinema. An attentive comparison between Gaidai’s comedies and the satirical films of El'dar Riazanov accounts for the outstanding popularity of the former and the more modest success of the latter. What makes Gaidai unique is his interest in visual, especially physical, humor. Gaidai privileged key elements of physical comedy, such as the primacy of visual over verbal humor, an exhibitionistic enlargement of the human body as a comic attraction, the transition from a still image to a moving picture as a visual attraction, and, most important, a chain of loosely connected sight gags (which became his signature structure) over a coherent and cohesive narrative. By contrast, Riazanov’s satires tended to mock social vices and therefore relied heavily on a goal-oriented ideological narrative.

In response to his banishment to barbaric Tomis, on the Black Sea, in 8 C.E., Ovid composed the Tristia, entreaties to Emperor Augustus to permit his return to civilized Rome. Feeling equally alienated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Czech expatriate poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, produced the slim collection Tristium Vindobona. One poem, “První dojmy” (First impressions), finds Machar's narrator and alter ego tormented by visions of an otherworldly and unattainable Prague. “Na Kahlenbergu” (On Kahlenberg) takes the narrator to the eponymous hill outside Vienna, where he invokes his distressed land to the north. The legacy of Habsburg dominion over the Czechs appears to him as a “wide and bloody path“ spanning historical battlegrounds from Diirnkrut, near Vienna, to the White Mountain, west of Prague. Czech critics in 1893 hailed Tristium as both a literary and a political event, its stature enhanced by its publication under the “shadow of bayonets,” that is, during an official state of emergency in Prague. The young critic Emanuel z Čenkova raised only an amicable objection in his review in Literární listy: Machar's narrator could easily come home—eluding reverie and history—since “express trains cross like lightning” between Vienna and Prague.

In the early twentieth century, police-regulated prostitution experienced a burst of attention from Polish-language news media. In this article, Keely Stauter-Halsted considers the extended moment of “moral panic” that unfolded when a series of public exposes revealed the scope and potential dangers of sex trafficking. Taking into account the ways “respectable” urban audiences absorbed revelations of illicit commercial transactions on city streets and increased “white slavery” activity beyond the Polish lands, Stauter-Halsted stresses the image of the prostitute as a threat to the embattled nation. The figure of the impoverished, morally compromised streetwalker encroaching on bourgeois social spaces and invading the bourgeois home challenged the sense of middle-class respectability so crucial to Polish national regeneration. By exposing innocent members of the community to sexually dangerous behavior, the prostitute came to represent decay, degeneration, and venereal disease attacking the national body, a conclusion used by social purity activists in their protoeugenics campaigns.

In December 1927, Alan Gregg set off for Moscow on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Medical Education to carry out a “survey of local conditions” in Soviet medical education. The visit, which had been five years in the making, was eagerly anticipated by foundation officials as the first opportunity to secure “reliable knowledge” about the new Russia. Once in the field, Gregg was confronted by important dilemmas of judgment. He had gone to Russia with a made-in-America model of medical education favored by Rockefeller Foundation officers. Was Soviet medical education a variant of the model or something radically new? In making judgments on this issue, Gregg spoke with a variety of actors involved at all levels of Soviet medical education. Which voices to credit, which to discount? Solomon examines Gregg’s landmark voyage to Russia as an instance of the challenges that face expert travelers who seek to “know” a foreign locale.

Movement from the USSR's margins to Leningrad and Moscow, among groups ranging from traders to professionals, intensified in the late Soviet period. Using oral histories, Jeff Sahadeo analyzes the migration and place-making experiences of migrants from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Asian RSFSR, all of whom were often referred to then as well as now by the Soviet host population as “Blacks.” Sahadeo argues that the “two capitals,” despite being closed cities, became critical to advancement strategies for citizens unionwide, inextricably binding Soviet periphery and center. Sahadeo explores how race emerged as an important factor in place making but argues that this can only be understood through its interplay with class, gender, professional status, and other categories of identity. Soviet “Blacks” externalized experiences of difference as they sought incorporation into host societies while maintaining links between their adopted and native homes. Place-making strategies led them to see Leningrad and Moscow, not as Russian-dominated cities, but as modern spaces of Soviet progress.

During the first half of the 1870s the character of the revolutionary movement in Russia changed considerably. At this time the movement spread its base of operation and its organizational effectiveness beyond the confines of St. Petersburg. The idea of a widespread revolutionary movement led by radical circles operating in several large cities was not a new conception in the 1870s. The efforts of Zemlia i Volia, Velikoruss, Ishutin, Karakozov, and Nechaev are all testimony to the emergence of a permanent underground opposition aimed against the ruling tsarist regime. Between 1869 and 1874, however, this process reached a new level with the activities of the Chaikovsky Circle, which managed to survive for five years under various names and in spite of even more various ideological approaches to the problem of revolution. This circle succeeded in building a truly nationwide network of affiliated groups which provided the initial revolutionary experience and loyalty to radicalism for many later members of the second Zemlia i Volia, Narodnaia Volia's executive committee, and the growing ranks of young Russian Marxists in the 1880s.

Throughout the post-World War II period, the prevailing paradigm of international politics among Western scholars has assumed that the major task confronting the decisionmakers of all states is achieving security in an anarchic state system. It follows from this assumption that relations between relatively equal superpowers constitute, in Arnold Wolfers's phrase, “the relationship of major tension” in the postwar world. In the 1970s, however, there has been a revival among Western scholars of an alternative perspective on world politics: the theory of economic imperialism, or, as it is usually labeled in the 1970s, “dependency theory.” It is a perspective which focuses on unequal relations between states. In that perspective, “the basic model of international politics [is] the imperialist system that was centered upon states of unequal economic development,“ where “the relationship of major tension was between the developed and underdeveloped economies.“

It is clear that the global impact of the Russian Revolution over the last century has been immense. What is less clear, however, is the global impact on the revolution. Historians have appreciated that contemporaries made immediate comparisons with previous revolutions, especially the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, but considerations of broader global influences on the revolution have been rare. This article explores how historians can study these global influences, exploring the circulation of ideas and their influence on people and policies. Whilst not denying the continuing primacy of traditional “internal” factors in explaining the nature and process of the revolution, the article argues that globalizing 1917, as contemporaries did, helps historians to better understand the widespread belief in progress that fueled developments as people sought to create a new country, and to appreciate how people tried to make sense of the tumultuous events of revolution.