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.

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.

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.

The massacre of the Russian Mission at Teheran in 1829 by an infuriated and fanatical mob cut short the career of one of Russia's finest dramatists and nearly plunged Persia into another war with her powerful neighbor. The circumstances of Griboedov's death, the events which led up to it, and its international repercussions are among the most strange and tragic episodes in the history of the Near East.

Aleksander Sergeevič Griboedov was born in 1795 of a prominent Moscow family. He distinguished himself at a phenomenally early age at Moscow University and took part in the 1812 campaign when only seventeen. In 1815 he retired from the army and began his career at St. Petersburg, where his first comedy, The Young Couple, was produced in the same year. Two years later he was given a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from that time he was regularly employed in diplomatic work in Persia and the Caucasus. Griboedov's first visit to Persia was in 1819. He rapidly mastered Persian and Arabic and acquired a high reputation as a shrewd and reliable diplomat. In 1822 he became diplomatic secretary to General Ermolov, the commander-in-chief at Tiflis.

How Russia transformed itself from a relatively small principality on the steppe frontier in 1450 to a major Eurasian empire by 1800 is one of the fundamental questions of Russian historical study. The two main views posit a central role for Peter I (1682–1725) in that transformation either by singled-handedly “changing everything” and bringing Muscovy into the modern age through embracing contact with Europe and with the western enlightenment or by accelerating the pace of changes already occurring. In this article, Donald Ostrowski proposes that Russia's transition during this period can be better explained by examining the general trends of historical development and influences across Afro-Eurasia. This essay also raises questions about the use of the term modernization and examines eight categories of historical development: contact with the world; establishment of an empire; court politics; military; society and economics; governmental administration; church relations; and culture and education. Ostrowski concludes that in the early modern period one finds no turning points in Russian history, only more or less continuous trends, and that only roughly around 1800 do fundamental changes begin to occur within these eight categories.

The Communist Youth League (Komsomol) was founded in 1917-1918 in urban centers. Its leadership's perception of the peasantry and its quest to maintain a respectable proportion of workers in the membership impeded expansion in rural areas: in the name of “proletarian purity,” many leaders and activists opposed the blanket admission of all but the poorest peasants into their midst. But demographic realities made the Komsomol's outreach to young peasants imperative: peasants made up eighty percent of the Russian population; their children nineteen years of age or younger accounted for half of the rural population in the mid-1920s. More important, the state and the Party had reduced their rural personnel at the end of the civil war and the Komsomol found itself pressured to fill the gap.

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.

In April 1928 a team of eight Soviet and eight German medical researchers set out for the remote area of Kul'skoe in the Buriat—Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the USSR to examine endemic syphilis and the impact of the anti—syphilis drug, Salvarsan, on the course of the disease. This three—month expedition was negotiated by some of the leading political and scientific figures on both sides and was launched with considerable fanfare, although it was not—nor was it intended to be—a scientific milestone in the field of venereology.

The mass migration of millions of minority peoples from their homelands during and after World War II was a surgeon's solution to a problem of long standing for many East European countries and especially for Hungary. As a result of this drastic attempt to eliminate completely the historic conflicts between national minority groups and the dominant people of the state in which they lived, the efforts of earlier regimes to reduce national friction may seem to have lost importance for the current politician. Such friction is admittedly no longer part of a live and sometimes sensitive problem, the more so since the states of Eastern Europe as they existed between the wars have ceased to exist, and since the domestic factors which gave rise to Hungarian policies of the time have changed radically. Yet, there may come a time again when the solutions of the present are subjected to review. An analysis of the policies and experience of the past may then be helpful in reaching conclusions. It is in this spirit that this study is presented by one who shared in the execution of some phases of the policy.

Russian socialists often used the slogan "vroz' idti, vmeste bit'," which signified that socialists should maintain separate party identities (march apart), but, if revolution approached, join together to deliver the coup de grace. Even in ordinary times, in tsarist Russia "marching apart" was a luxury revolutionaries could rarely afford. Of course, various parties and factions did not completely sacrifice their independence, but at all levels they informally coordinated activities and, at key times, resorted to official interparty arrangements. Although some histories have mentioned left bloc tactics during the 1905 Revolution and in elections to the duma, the full extent of socialist cooperation has hitherto escaped note.

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said's Orientalism. Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.

The Stolypin Land Reform was a series of actions taken by the Russian Imperial government during the years 1905-17 to cope with the social and economic problems of the European Russian peasants. The basic part of any analysis of the Reform, therefore, should be a description of these actions as a coherent historical development in themselves. This essay presents such a description. The discussion is divided into four topics: general interpretation, the problems the Reform had to cope with, the general outline of its evolution, and the role of force in its execution. Related topics, such as the historical forces or events which produced the Reform, its results, or its significance in larger developments, are mentioned only incidentally.

One of the “Great Debates” among Soviet specialists in the social sciences today concerns the applicability of interest group theory to the study of Soviet politics. Though a large number of specialists have accepted the notion that interest groups do indeed play a certain kind of role in the Soviet system, there are still those who hold to the opinion, once taken for granted but in recent years challenged, that interest group theory simply does not apply to the Soviet Union. The strength of the latter argument lies in the fact that in the USSR interest groups do not operate publicly and openly, as they do in the United States; therefore, interest group theory as developed to fit the American context cannot describe or explain the dynamic processes of policymaking in Russia.

The March 1990 elections to republican and local Soviets in the USSR resulted in the transfer of power from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to the nascent democratic movement in a number of republics and localities. Among these was the Moscow City Soviet (Mossoviet). Of the 472 people's deputies elected to the Mossoviet, the clear majority were elected under the umbrella of the political bloc Democratic Russia. Running on a platform calling for the rejection of continued CPSU control of political life in the Soviet Union and Moscow, Democratic Russia's candidates won decisively in a majority of the electoral districts.