The time has passed when it was automatically assumed that the Stolypin Land Reform represented an attempt on the part of the tsarist government to impose on an unwilling peasantry a predetermined plan for a change in land tenure. The revision of opinion has in large measure resulted from the work of George L. Yaney, who has shown that policy and the organization necessary for carrying it out evolved and changed during the course of the implementation of the Stolypin reform. Yaney argues that certain of the changes in the reform came about as a result of the government responding to pressure from the peasants. Inevitably, this pressure concerned those aspects of the land reform that affected the peasants most directly, for instance, the disposition of the land and the timing and sequence of withdrawal from the commune.

“Heresy” is developed here as an analytical term for the criminalization of speech questioning the basic tenets of a belief system, such as internal criticisms of state socialism or denial of the applicability of the term genocide to some mass crimes in a European Union that purports to make central the protection of human rights. European legislation to criminalize “genocide denial” is critiqued through a close analysis of international legal decisions dealing with whether “genocide” took place in the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Although granting both the facts as these courts found them and the serious criminality of the actions involved, Robert M. Hayden argues that calling them “genocide” broadens the definition of that term to the extent of losing the possibility of uniform application. Criminalizing “genocide denial” is thus not only contrary to principles of free speech and intellectual inquiry but manifests the same problem that Amnesty International identified in its reports in the 1980s on the vagueness of the “verbal crimes” provisions of the criminal laws of the formerly socialist countries. Hayden concludes that the punishment of heresy is a manifestation of power by a political elite that holds its values and assumptions to be immune from challenge.

A sizable literature on the temporal and spatial dimensions of urbanization in Russia has appeared during the past decade, and it is probably fair to say that we now have a reasonable understanding of the process in general terms. What is needed is much closer scrutiny of the impact of the gathering of people into towns. Urbanization inevitably brought change to social organizations, institutions, behavior patterns, and perceptions; in short, to the social geography of the city. But prerequisite to understanding how quickly and with what consequences such social changes took place is an understanding of the dynamics of urban population growth itself.

This article examines literature in Russia, as opposed to Russian literature, through the window of Tat'iana's reading, especially two novels by Sophie Cottin, in Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. A quantitative, sociological approach to European markets for novels shows that Russians and Europeans were reading the same popular French, German, and English sentimental novels by August von Kotzebue; Stéphanie-Félicité, comtesse de Genlis; August Lafontaine; and Cottin. Pushkin, however, positioned himself in the Russian literary field with the canonical novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson, and Madame de Stael, against the "mediocre" novels of Cottin. Nevertheless, in his ongoing efforts to write Russian novels, Pushkin covertly engaged with popular sentimental novels to integrate their conservative emphasis on duty, virtue, and love with Russian noble life. I argue that a likely intertext for the eponymous heroine of The Captain's Daughter was Cottin's European bestseller Élisabeth, ou Les exilés de Sibérie (1806).

Race and racial formations and categories define global systems of power and are not bound by history or culture. Nevertheless, with few noted exceptions, race as a category of analysis has largely been rejected and rendered inapplicable within Slavic, east European, and Eurasian Studies. This unwillingness to expand categories of critical analysis has created a void in our area and field of study, shaping a false sense of racelessness. Without the inclusion of race critical theories into our classrooms and scholarship, our students are left with minimal tools to address difference and social exclusion. In this article, we turn to critical perspectives to highlight some ways that race is being meaningfully incorporated into scholarship about the region. We illustrate why engagement with race and racialization is helpful for analysis, urgent, and necessary. Finally, we also address how our field can better prepare students as they engage these subjects.

The development-oriented work of Moscow's religious communities is examined in this article, with a focus on how a core group of faith organizations present themselves as offering an alternative vision of intervention and improvement that seeks to protect Russian citizens from what proponents suggest are the shortcomings of previous democratizing and civil society ventures. Staff and supporters within Moscow's faith-based assistance sphere contend that religiously affiliated assistance organizations are successful, not only because they parallel secular development programs in promoting values and practices of capitalism, democracy, and global human rights, but more importantly because they also claim to move beyond these approaches to tend to the well-being and transformation of the entire human being. Consequentiy, proponents argue that faith-based organizations are more attuned to values of humane treatment and civility, thereby making them better positioned to build a new Russian society that brings citizens and the state together in productive and caring relationships. Ultimately, this attention to the perspectives and ideals of religiously oriented development organizations provides a different vantage point for reconsidering the promises and consequences of Russia's neoliberal and democratizing transformations.

This article is a critical analysis of the prevalent interpretation of “war communism” in Anglo-American literature that views the economic policies of that period as temporary expedients to meet wartime and inflationary conditions. Although there are scholars whose accounts are notable exceptions to this interpretation, it is the dominant one and is found in popular works, textbooks, and important scholarly contributions. For example, Nettl states that “war communism” “represented a series of ad hoc measures to combat emergency situations.” Sherman writes that “as a necessary military measure, by the end of 1918 all large-scale factories had been nationalized and put under central control,” and he explains the requisitioning and allocation in kind of supplies from farm and factory as the consequence of inflation having ended the usefulness of money. Anderson states that with the outbreak of the civil war in May 1918 “an emergency policy of War Communism was adopted.” Fainsod says that “the policy of War Communism was the rule of the besieged fortress.” This article will show by a study of Lenin's writings during the “war communism” period that this prevalent interpretation suffers from the neglect of the original aspirations of Marxian socialism and consequently misrepresents the motives behind the economic policies of “war communism.”

“Mentality” has become a fashionable term among historians, as a supposedly neutral way of pointing to a pattern of beliefs that are typical of a particular group. “Mentality” seems to avoid the metaphysical mystery of phrases like “the spirit of Russia,” or the Marxist anger in the term “ideology,” which carries a charge of grandiose delusion, of self-interest disguised as universal truth. In deference to fashion and to the goal of irenic discourse, let us use the word “mentality,” though we know that new words do not remove old difficulties.

A central difficulty is the facile assumption that ideology and practicality are elemental contraries, that the conflict between them shapes the evolving mentality of communist regimes. This essay on Soviet history rests on a different assumption: that practicality is itself an ideological concept which can be understood only by reference to particular historical contexts. It is an illusion to imagine that practicality can be defined by reference to technics, a supposedly autonomous force that pulls all societies into a single anthill system. That technological fantasy has subverted the grand ideological theories of previous centuries and increasingly undermines even academic theorizing about human beings. Ideologists become servile functionaries — “public relations experts,” as we say in the West — while academics are reduced to other forms of technical expertise and to purely decorative functions. Soviet history presents an extreme version of that characteristic triumph of “pragmatism” in the twentieth century. To a large extent, I shall try to show, such “pragmatism” is mythic self-delusion, a way of avoiding dangerous threeway conflicts of forthright political rule, openly avowed ideological prophecy, and relentlessly quizzical higher learning.

In this Article I shall examine the visual form or appearance (shape, size, and other visible qualities) of Soviet socially produced things (excluding any detailed consideration of trends in the fine arts or of individual craftsmanship) in relation to forces in Soviet ideology which seem to have influenced this form or appearance. (I do not attempt to describe all influences which bear on Soviet design, which would require a much more complex approach and a more extended treatment.) My definition of Soviet “ideology” would be the same as Professor Meyer's: the body of doctrine that is taught by the Communist Party to all Soviet citizens. Whether or not this doctrine is true, or thought to be true, as well as why it is propagated, or whether this would be a complete definition—these questions are considered to be irrelevant in the present context.

On March 21, 1919, the Provisional President of the Hungarian People's Republic, Count Michael Károlyi, resigned and "transferred the power to the proletariat of the Hungarian peoples." The following day the head of the new government, Béla Kun, (whose official title was Commissar of Foreign Affairs), addressed himself "to the workers of the world" with a request to take up arms and defend the young Hungarian Soviet Republic from "imperialist attacks" on four fronts—Rumanian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, and Italian. His appeal was welcomed by the Rumanian, Serbian, Czechoslovak, and Italian workers' representatives at Budapest proclaiming their devotion to the Hungarian Commune almost within sound of the guns of the invading armies marching to destroy it.

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.

One of the most important events of the summer of 1917 was the opening of the All–Russian Council of the Orthodox church on 15 August in Moscow. In a dramatic opening ceremony, solemn processions from all the churches of Moscow converged on Red Square for the service led by Metropolitan Tikhon. The council had been convened by a 5 July order of the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, V. N. L'vov, with the concurrence of the Provisional Government. The calling of a church council–the first since Peter's establishment of the collegial system of administration–was a substantive change in church governance and also had a symbolic meaning. In pre-Petrine Russia, the councils not merely had played an ecclesiastical role but had formed an integral part of national government. (For example, Ivan IV and the church council had worked together to implement changes in the secular code of law as well as in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters.)

Both Western and, sometimes more grudgingly, Soviet historians have praised certain aspects of the Russian judicial reforms of 1864 and their effects. Judicial transformation of the law proved to be an important means both of adapting traditional law to the social and economic changes occurring in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and of fostering and facilitating further change. Moreover, the effects and implications of some of the reforms of civil law introduced by the new courts inevitably drew these institutions into many of the political controversies besetting Russia at this time. These issues surprisingly, however, have attracted little scholarly attention.

This paper seeks to assess the significance of the new courts’ reforming activities and to relate these activities to broader social and political issues by examining the development of property and inheritance law by the Civil Cassation Department of the Senate. As the highest court of appeal for civil actions in the new judicial structure, the Civil Cassation Department rendered definitive interpretations of civil law and exercised tremendous influence over the decisions of lower courts. An examination of its practice therefore would not only reveal the policy of the highest court in the land, but would also provide a fairly accurate picture of the way particular civil laws were interpreted and enforced throughout the empire. While the Civil Cassation Department affected all areas of civil law more or less extensively, a study of its development of property and inheritance law would be especially useful in assessing the extent, nature, and significance of its reformist activity both because of the crucial, multifarious functions of these branches of law in any society and because of particular controversies surrounding them in Russia.

In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of “tragic realism” during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theorization of modernity and of its privileged formal companion, the Bildungsroman. Seen against the background of Hegel's post-tragic conception of contemporary “actuality,” these authors can be understood as developing a historico-formal paradox, a vision of tragic realism. Tragic realism grasps contemporary life in terms of destructive and irreconcilable collisions and presupposes the broader historiographic vision of Russia's anachronistic position vis-à-vis the Hegelian vision of modern life.

This paper should begin with a series of disclaimers. It cannot pretend to be an analysis of all of Trotskii's ideas on economics and the economy, because this would call for a long book and because this author has not gone through the Trotskii archives or read all relevant published works. There is plenty of room for much more research on these matters, and I hope that Baruch Knei-Paz's admirable book on Trotskii's political ideas' will be followed by one that “reconstitutes” the great many fragments in which Trotskii's economic ideas are presented. Trotskii was not a professional economist, any more than Lenin was, but he did have much to say on economic affairs. What I shall do here is describe and analyze some of Trotskii's more important opinions and pronouncements.

Metaphors act as cues to social identities. Political discourse that communicates the distinctiveness of the rulers' identity sustains authoritarianism by cueing people to act as either oppressors or oppressed, while political discourse that cues identification by citizens with politicians promotes democracy by encouraging people to participate. In Politburo speeches from the era of Soviet authoritarianism, metaphors of size, superiority, distance, and subordination were abundant. These metaphors are suitable for emphasizing the separateness of politics from ordinary life and for communicating the inferiority of the populace. In Politburo speeches from the transition year 1989, these metaphors had already begun to decrease in frequency, while new metaphors, often borrowed from the discourse of international diplomacy, deconstructed the rulers' claims to continuing authority. In Russian political discourse from the first years of electoral politics, authoritarian metaphors decline even more sharply and are replaced by metaphors of choice and identification suitable for encouraging people to align themselves with electoral candidates.

The term Old Believers (or Old Ritualists) refers to a number of groups that arose as a result of Russian church reforms, 1654-1666, when Patriarch Nikon sought to make Russian practices conform to their contemporary Greek counterparts. Conscious of both a departure from tradition and an encroachment of central control over local autonomy, Old Believers endeavored to maintain the rites, symbols and prerogatives of traditional Russian Orthodoxy. With support of the tsar, Nikon began bloody persecutions that lasted, though in lesser degrees, until the decree of religious tolerance in 1905.