In 1770 Etienne Falconet notified Empress Catherine II that he preferred to carve only a brief inscription on the base of his monument to Peter the Great: Petro Primo/Catharina Secunda. The empress did not object, and when the statue was finally unveiled in 1782 it bore the sculptor's lapidary phrase on its gigantic granite foundation. Catherine is presumed to have relished the equation which the motto implied, that Peter had been Russia's first great modern ruler while she, although not descended from him, was the second. In the context of whatever it might mean to be an enlightened autocrat, it is often assumed that Catherine both represented and understood herself as Peter's only true heir, the continuer and completer of what he had begun.

But some of Catherine's friends, writing what they knew would please her, said differently. After observing, not altogether tongue in cheek, that brevity was a virtue which inscription writers should cultivate, Melchior Grimm suggested that the motto's appeal might be further enhanced by removing the numbers and leaving just two words, “Petro/Catharina,” a move which would also have dispensed with the pecking order which the numbers implied. And from the edge of Switzerland, Voltaire sent greetings in 1774 to his favorite Petersburg correspondent: “Meanwhile, Madam, allow me to kiss the statue of Peter the Great and the hem of the dress of Catherine the Greater.”

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

Historians of the Russian peasantry hold almost unanimously that serfowners routinely intervened in serf marriage: that they generally forbade serf women to leave the estate through marriage or marry at all without permission, commanded serfs to marry young, made compulsory matches when their serfs failed to marry on schedule, and otherwise prevented serfs from exercising free choice in marriage. Equally common is the assumption that the nobles’ interest in serf marriage was the multiplication of human property and the number of duespaying labor units, i.e., married couples. The one exception is Steven Hoch, who found that on the Gagarin estate of Petrovskoe, Tambov province, managers never intervened, at least in first marriages. They never had to, Hoch argues, because the heads of peasant households shared the owners’ interest in early and universal marriage. That was because estate managers allocated land, the only significant economic resource, to married couples on an egalitarian basis. Even Hoch accepts the standard view that, on other estates where different socioeconomic conditions held, estate authorities did have to intervene to ensure that serfs married early and universally.

In this article Lynn Mally examines the efforts of a Comintern affiliate called MORT (Mezhdunarodnoe ob“edinenie revoliutsionnykh teatrov) to export models of Soviet theatrical performance outside the Soviet Union. Beginning with the first Five-Year Plan, MORT was initially very successful in promoting Soviet agitprop techniques abroad. But once agitprop methods fell into disgrace in the Soviet Union, MORT abruptly changed its tactics. It suddenly encouraged leftist theater groups to move toward the new methods of socialist realism. Nonetheless, many leftist theater circles continued to produce agitprop works, as shown by performances at the Moscow Olympiad for Revolutionary Theater in 1933. The unusual tenacity of this theatrical form offers an opportunity to question the global influence of the Soviet cultural policies promoted by the Comintern. From 1932 until 1935, many foreign theater groups ignored MORT's cultural directives. Once the Popular Front began, national communist parties saw artistic work as an important tool for building alliances outside the working class. This decisive shift in political strategy finally undermined the ethos and methods of agitprop theater.

This study will trace the evolution of rights of women to acquire and own land in Russia during the period 1100-1750. While detailed studies of particular periods are valuable, only with a chronological comparison can one appreciate the overall direction in which women's legal rights were developing and, specifically, whether they were contracting or expanding. Taking the long view in legal history is particularly important because changes in legal rules and legal status are often gradual, even glacial, and such change may be perceptible only over centuries. An overview is also important for the placement of past and future studies of particular periods in context. While it would be more conventional to conclude at the end of the Muscovite period rather than in the early empire, there were developments in women's rights in the Muscovite period which reached logical conclusions only in the mid-eighteenth century, such as the consolidation of a widow's rights to her husband's property.

The Yugoslavs are infected by what calls the disease of “historical optimism.” Shocks, emanating from the international economy over the last decade or so, were seen as a developmental problem or, at worst, a transitory difficulty. This argument seems to follow these lines: Contemporary capitalism, of course, is doomed to collapse sooner or later; contemporary etatism is also in a state of crisis and will evolve toward Yugoslav self-management socialism. The socialism of self-management, however, could not itself be in crisis, because, if it is in crisis, what is left?

In fact the word crisis was not used to describe the state of the Yugoslav economy until September 1982 when it was discovered that foreign debt could not be serviced and required rescheduling. By then the Yugoslav foreign debt was $20 billion, the unemployment rate stood at 10 percent to 16 percent (depending how you measure it), and inflation was at 40 percent. Only then did the policymakers realize that these problems were a consequence of prolonged economic mismanagement, excessive borrowing abroad, arbitrary decision making, and an autarchic economic policy in general.

The nationalities policy in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and specifically during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was more complex than has been indicated by many American interpretations. In the Soviet press of that period, many newspapers and periodicals carried articles that dealt with nationality issues. I will consider here the possibility that publication of these articles was part of a propaganda program originated by state policy.

The Hungarian Communists placed great importance on higher education, especially in the years between 1948 and 1954. It was in the universities and other institutions of higher education that they hoped to train a new Communist intelligentsia and a body of technical experts. This group was to replace the old intelligentsia and play a key role in the building of socialism. Yet the university students took up arms against the regime in 1956. Does this imply a direct failure in Communist indoctrination or is it a more complex phenomenon?

Hungary has undergone a revolution in education in the past eleven years. After the nationalization of schools in 1948 and Communist control over the key university posts in the same year, the educational system became the servant of the state, or, more exactly, of the Communist Party.

Contemporary Soviet historians of biology have attempted to add historical prestige to Trofim Lysenko's controversial theory of evolution by reinterpreting past Russian social thought on evolution. One Soviet historian has not hesitated to go back as far as the eighteenth century to find Russian antecedents of various aspects of Lysenko's theory, although the relevance of this rewriting of history to the scientific merits of Lysenkoism remains at best obscure.

But the attempt does raise several significant questions: What were the major interpretations by pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers of evolution and particularly of Darwinism? What implicit assumptions about the process of evolution and the nature of man do these interpretations contain? What influence did they have on the development of a Russian Marxist interpretation of Darwinism?

It is obviously impossible to answer all these questions in a single article.

In recent years the history of early printing in Western Europe has received renewed attention from scholars with an interest not only in elucidating the internal evolution of printing, but also in demonstrating the relevance of this development for history in general. Indeed, some historians of printing now argue that the advent of movable type was a major landmark of the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. This proposition has given rise to the still bolder hypothesis that a “printing” or “typographical” revolution visibly altered European culture in the post-Gutenberg era.

While Western scholarship has directed considerable attention to printing in early modern Europe, the history of communications outside the West has gone relatively unnoticed. The failure to consider even those societies that stood on the periphery of European experience — Russia, Byzantium, the Balkans — is especially surprising since in many ways these societies were part of European culture. In the case of Russia, at least, the neglect of theoretical issues does not stem from a lack of published information, since the study of the Russian book has a long and rich past among Russian and Soviet bibliographers and literary historians.

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.

The natural inclination of most “area” scholars—not to mention others—is to become preoccupied with the personalities, institutions, and achievements of the dominant culture, through the nationally aggregated values and norms. The justification for this approach is a belief in the supposedly inexorable process of the “homogenization” of the national culture and the inevitability of greater centralized control as a result of the technology of mass communications and organization. But it is increasingly apparent that even in “developed” countries, such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—let alone Italy, Nigeria, or Pakistan—some of the more insistent and intractable “national” problems turn out to be basically regional in origin and character. At least as important in the long run as conflict of ethnic or religious origin is the increasingly familiar deepening of regional inequalities in the richer nations as a result of more perfect interregional competition, diffusion of information, and the high potential mobility of educated and affluent populations. At first glance the Soviet Union, with its traditional practice of centralized control over the bodies and souls of its citizens and the all-pervading pressure toward national coherence and uniformity, might appear more appropriate than most countries for study as a national system with national character and goals. Yet here, too, some of the more interesting and thorny problems facing the Soviet leaders and planners concerning the health and general viability of their country resolve themselves into essentially regional ones.

In this study, Yulia Mikhailova and David Prestel suggest that the political culture of pre-Mongolian Rus’ may be similar to that of post-Carolingian Europe, where public order still existed in the absence of a strong centralized authority. In Rus’ as also in the west, there was an order of norms rather than of institutions. Drawing on sources such as the Testament of Vladimir Monomakh and the Homily of Princes, Mikhailova and Prestel maintain that cross kissing was considered a sacred obligation for Rus’ rulers, a view given further support by the behavior of princes as recorded in the chronicles. They appear to trust oaths made on the cross and accept that there will be negative consequences for those who break them. Violations threaten one's salvation, and when chroniclers are favorably disposed to certain princes, they attempt to demonstrate that their violations are justified by an offence on the part of the prince with whom the agreement was enacted.

The Purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the magnitude and direction of the appreciable internal migration that occurred in Russia during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first part of the article is a description of regional migration patterns, the second part an analysis of these patterns, primarily in terms of economic differentials.

Migration is a complex phenomenon. The supply of migrants to an area is related to such factors as income, distance, size of population, distribution of information, social and cultural amenities, location of resources, and government policy. Some factors may influence potential migrants more than others at a particular stage of economic development. Economic factors seem to be crucial, especially in the early stages of economic development. A useful way to interpret economic data is to compare income differences between areas. Specifically, we shall analyze the relationship between migration by guberniia and differences in indicators of income as inferred from socioeconomic data.

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) elicits extreme and contradictory audience responses. Some filmgoers find it amusing and clever, while others consider it repulsive, even obscene. Analyzing the film's hero as a traditional and archetypical trickster figure, a master of contradictions, a violator of boundaries, can help explain audience reaction. But while traditional folklore tricksters act in a fantasy world, Sacha Baron Cohen entered the lives of real people in trickster (dis) guise. For theater audiences removed from the interactions that created Borat, this film might serve the function of traditional trickster narratives, even as those appearing in the film feel exploited. By using real people and real situations, Baron Cohen has also precluded a follow-up or sequel: folkloric tricksters adapt with time, but a person immediately recognizable as a Hollywood figure cannot reassume trickster (dis)guise.

The most vulnerable member of the peasant household was reported to be the soldatka, the soldier's wife. The quintessential outsider in a community based on married couples, the soldatka suffered from the general coldness of the village toward single women. Stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, she was seen as a loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children. We know little about her. Popular imagination has been informed largely by the soldatka's plaintive voice in folk "recruit" laments. Historians have paid scant attention to the marginal members of peasant society. Yet focusing on the weaker persons in the peasant household provides insight into little-known subjects: family antagonisms, interpersonal relationships, and the status of women.

The concessions embodied in the Manifesto of October 30, 1905 were wrung from the Russian autocracy by an opposition united as it had never been before. For once all the forces of Russian society which stood for change were focused on a common goal, the acquisition of a constitution and political rights. This remarkable consensus was largely the achievement of a group of Russian liberals, the osvobozhdentsy or “liberationists” inspired by the émigré newspaper Osvobozhdenie and guided by the Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] inside Russia. The idea of a national front against autocracy did not, however, originate with the “liberationists.” Tendencies towards union within the ranks of the Russian opposition can be perceived over a decade before the appearance of the first issue of Osvobozhdenie. In the 1890s these tendencies were strengthened and national front tactics popularized by the work of the Russian Free Press Fund [Fond Vol'noi Russkoi Pressy] in London.

Russian formalism has been of interest in the west for at least three decades since the publication of Victor Erlich's authoritative study of the school in 1954. Almost every year significant new contributions are made to the analysis of the formalists’ scholarship; their multiplex theory, with all of its different, and at times seemingly contradictory, aspects, is elucidated, and many of these aspects are successfully incorporated in modern criticism and literary theory in the west. I will not dwell upon the better known “internalist” aspects of the formalists' work, nor will I try to summarize their theory. Several leading members of the school systematically attempted to create a coherent theoretical framework for the sociology of literature. In this article I will look at the sociology of the Russian formalists from the point of view of a sociologist, analyze it, and suggest that the formalist sociology of literature makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of literature, but also to the understanding of social reality and to the discipline of sociology.