In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

For over a hundred years the fate of Russian Jews has been of special concern to many Americans. During the first half of this period, tsarist policies toward the Jews were the major irritant in the otherwise comparatively harmonious relations between the United States and Russia. The result was a recurring diplomatic dispute over the Jewish question, the course of which provides a barometer for gauging the changing situation of the Jews in the Russian empire. The dispute centered largely on individual acts of discrimination by Russian officials against Americans. Many of them involved naturalized citizens of Russian origin, most of whom were Jews. Behind the State Department protests on their behalf lay the more complex issue of mounting American indignation at the increasingly difficult situation of Jews in Russia after 1880.

American reactions varied from holding public meetings on the issue to exerting pressure on United States government agencies. Former president Ulysses Grant was one of the main initiators of a rally in New York in 1882 protesting anti-Jewish atrocities in Russia. The pogroms received considerable coverage in the Western press: the April 1882 Century, for instance, carried a vivid account of riots that raged for more than twenty-four hours in Elizavetgrad during Easter Week of 1881 and spoke of “world wide sympathy, and a protest almost unprecedented in its swiftness.”

The Western ideal of journalistic objectivity, influenced by liberal principles of the rulers' accountability to the ruled and the empirical skepticism of science, developed as an occupational response by journalists to marketplace competition among commercially or politically motivated suppliers of information and came to define the journalist's professional ethic of impartiality and independence. At the same time the term professionalism must be used advisedly. Journalism is a field with some but not all of the attributes of a profession. By the usual tests of the freedom of the practitioners to govern entry and exit from the field, to possess an exclusive right to carry on their trade, and to set the standards of performance, journalists are not as autonomous as, for example, physicians and attorneys. If they sought to close the shop to outsiders or to set standards of writing and reporting, they would be infringing upon the prerogatives of “management”—editors and publishers.

The revival of Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the century coincided with a wave of anti- Semitism, and many Russian intellectuals of the time, following Vladimir Solov'ev, understood the defense of the Jews as their Christian duty. For Solov'ev, however, interest in the Jews went beyond ethical considerations and ran deeper through his philosophy than even his Utopian vision of a theocracy based on Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the expression of what may be Solov'ev's central concept–the Divine Sophia–achieved clarity through his selective reading of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The argument that follows does not seek to prove influence, for Solov'ev approached the study of Kabbalah with well-formed philosophical convictions. Rather, Solov'ev's fascination with Jewish mysticism arises from affinity and recognition, as the Russian theologian sought a vocabulary with which to explain his own mystical intuitions.

Soviet law is the law of a society of a new type. That society is an ideocracy, or a society allegedly ruled not by men, but by an idea, the idea in question being, of course, Marxism in its Leninist-Stalinist interpretation. An ideocracy seems, however, to require as much enforcement as any other type of society. Nobody questions the fact that, in the Soviet Union, coercion, both on the legal and extralegal level, reaches high levels of intensity.

In so far as Soviet law expresses the ideocratic nature of Soviet society, it must be, and actually is, unique. But not all is unique in that law; there are also many elements in which Soviet law differs only slightly from pre-Revolutionary Russian law. Since Imperial Russian law belonged to the family of Western law (in contradistinction to the Chinese, Hindu, Islamic and other families of law) and more exactly, to the class called “civil law” (in contradistinction to the common law of the Anglo-Saxon countries), European jurists and even American jurists, though not so easily, can find in that law many traits with which they are familiar.

This article focuses on Soviet policy toward genealogically defined identity groups in the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. For Soviet authorities, kinship loyalties were problematic chiefly because they hindered the emergence of class consciousness among the Turkmen. Soviet officials pursued two essentially contradictory policies in their attempt to eliminate “tribalism” in the Turkmen republic. First, they sought to undermine the economic basis of genealogical affiliation by dismantling the existing system of collective land tenure. Second, they devised a policy of “tribal parity”, which attempted to suppress kin-based conflict by guaranteeing fair and equal treatment for all genealogical groups. Instead of allowing class consciousness to supplant kinship loyalties, however, Soviet rule tended to increase the salience of distinctions based on genealogy. Because of the close linkage between genealogy and socioeconomic standing in Turkmenistan, Soviet attempts to foment class conflict inadvertently exacerbated descent group conflict.

In the eighteenth and more particularly in the nineteenth century, Russia enjoyed a reputation for unusually strong currents of religious spirituality. Most frequently these mystical currents have been traced to peculiarly native traditions, such as the Eastern patristic literature and the “naturally” mystical bent of the Russian mind. The influence of Western mysticism has been minimized, if not entirely overlooked. Actually, Western mysticism and theosophy were eagerly absorbed in Russia by religiously oriented thinkers from the reign of Peter the Great on into the era of romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Finally, Western mystical sources provided the chief inspiration for the leading theologian and philosopher in late nineteenth-century Russia, Vladimir Soloviëv (1853-1900), whose thought in turn had a decisive impact on the intellectual currents of the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture before World War I.

This paper examines Poland, Hungary, the UK and the US the most surprising cases of populist reaction. It argues that the social polarization caused by the failures of hyper-liberal reforms to the state, and the association of Social Democratic parties with those reforms, has provoked alienation from liberal democratic politics.

In 1832, an imperial manifesto established a new social estate (soslovie) of “honored citizens.” The new status was granted to successful merchants, professionals, and artists, and gave them permanent (and sometimes inherited) privilege. Honored citizens have been largely forgotten or discounted, both by literary authors of the nineteenth century and by historians. They were, however, a conscious effort on the part of the imperial state to create a middle class in the context of an estate-based social structure, an effort that followed several decades of previous experimentation and discussion. Thousands of subjects of the Russian Empire took on the new status, to the point that by 1897 honored citizens outnumbered merchants. They understood themselves as having an honorable place in the social structure, and were understood as a sign of the status of Russian towns. Honored citizen status gave a certain amount of stability to the new middle class, although not every honored citizen prospered. As a social estate, honored citizens were unique, for they were not unified in opportunity, and because they did not have a collective association—they were individuals in the law. They were, as a result, present and important but paradoxical: while defined by estate law, they were closer to individual subjects or even citizens than almost anyone else in imperial society. In addition, their lack of a collective voice muted their radical potential, masking them from contemporary and historical view.

If, in a nation where comprehensive statistics on social problems are rarely if ever published, legislative action and press attention to such problems may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they are regarded, then the Soviet Union's alcohol problem is serious indeed. On April 8, 1967, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved a decree, On Compulsory Treatment and Labor Re-education of Habitual Drunkards (Alcoholics). This decree, which went into effect on September 1 of the same year, provides for one to two-year terms in special “treatment-labor” medical institutions for excessive drinkers who violate “labor discipline, public order, and the rules of the socialist community.” The new institutions were subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the RSFSR Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order (MOOP, now renamed MVD). While it contained a number of significant departures from earlier legislation, the decree's most important point was its “preventive” emphasis. Previously an offending drunkard had to be on trial for a crime in a people's court before proceedings for compulsory treatment could be instituted.

In the 1950s the Soviet school system stabilized and teachers incorporated non-Russian national histories into the elementary curriculum. Shoshana Keller argues that in Soviet Uzbekistan teachers defined Uzbek nationhood partly through historical narrative, which told children that the Uzbek people had existed continuously from ancient times but the nation achieved independence only under Russian/Soviet leadership. Children learned that for millennia Uzbek hero/martyrs had fought losing batdes against foreign invaders. The best Uzbeks were from the lower classes, but the nation had also produced high culture. Above all, children were taught to imagine themselves, not within Eurasian Islamic historical time, but within European historical time as envisioned by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Iosif Stalin. What children learned about Uzbek history in school was central to the formation of a personal sense of national identity and to the larger Soviet project of nation building.

In this article, Emma Widdis suggests that a sensory history is a crucial counterpart to the recent emotional turn in Russian and Slavic scholarship on Russian and Slavic history and culture. In particular, the Soviet revolutionary project was a unique attempt to create new models of human experience to correspond to the new political order—an attempt to shape sensory experience itself. Widdis suggests that the still-young medium of cinema was a privileged site for the investigation of new models of sensory perception, for the working out of the problematic relationship between the body, the mind, and the world that had such ideological potency in early Soviet Russia. Linking close readings of little-known films from this period to a broader analysis of the discursive field within which they operated, Widdis suggests that, in the period of transition between 1928 and 1932, intensified sensory (and particularly tactile) experience emerged as a new and revolutionary mode of being in the world.

Czechoslovakia has undergone revolutionary changes in its political and institutional structure several times in the twentieth century. In 1918 the leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks decided to sever their political umbilical cords to Vienna and Budapest, giving birth to the Czechoslovak Republic, a democratic state that differed considerably from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had emerged. In 1938 this democracy gave way to a semiauthoritarian regime, the so-called Second Republic. The Second Republic existed for a few months at Hitler's sufferance, only to be divided into two parts, both controlled by the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. In 1948, after a three-year attempt to harmonize Communist and non-Communist parties in a left-leaning National Front government, Czechoslovakia became for twenty years an autocratic Communist state. During these two decades the methods of rule varied from totalitarian (1948-53) to what might be called moderately authoritarian (1963-67).

Beth Greene discusses the media portrayal of sales and marketing activities in the early phase of the Hungarian market reforms in the late 1960s. Using articles from the popular and specialist press and archive sources from Hungarian Radio and Television, the author argues that under the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), sellers were elevated as symbolic figures of market socialism and thus the modern socialist economy. The media portrayed sales activities as addressing endemic problems of the command economy, mediating production and consumption, and creating a buyer's market in which sellers would compete for customers. This article provides a unique approach in examining the role of sellers and selling under the market socialism, adding to the rich literature on state socialist consumption and challenging the traditional view that Soviet bloc governments sought to control production and consumption independently and irrespective of their connection to the market.

The ancient tale of Joseph, son of Jacob, and Zulaykha was a "best seller" on the Silk Road from Russia to China. Before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Tatars, a Turkic-speaking people living in the middle Volga, used this tale to propagate Islam among the animistic and Eastern Orthodox Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples. Tatars drew upon this famous tale to address the internal communal fractures caused by Russian colonization, which opened the doors to Eastern Christianity, a far stronger competitor than the local indigenous religions. While scholars have shown interest in the tale's literary value and linguistic history, there has been no effort to investigate its readership. Yet the story of Joseph and Zulaykha as presented in popular poems and religious books empowered both men and women on the Volga frontier to refashion their religious and national identities. Today proponents of national revival call for the reappropriation of such tales to restore boundaries between Tatars and Russians.

The application of Marxist concepts to Russia has long served to obscure some of the main lines of Russian development, for there is probably no country in Europe in which Marxism has so little relevance as in Russia. Marxist studies of the labor problem in Russia are particularly subject to great confusion, since two of Marxism's fundamental tenets are directly contradicted by any realistic study of Russian labor. It has, for example, been no secret to specialists who have read something on Russian labor other than the works of Lenin and Stalin that Russia did not have a proletariat in the Western sense of the term. The workers in Russia were for the most part peasants who remained members of a village commune and possessors of allotment land. Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings from the land, a part of them were seasonal workers, who came to seek work in the factories in the fall and winter, and regularly returned to their land in time for the harvest.