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.

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.)

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.

A close look at Russian peasant art yields two divergent impressions. The profusion of styles and techniques is amazing, testimony to the ready creativity of peasant craftsmen. But throughout this wealth of invention, a constant tone prevails: the images portrayed are few and everywhere much the same.

Two images predominate: the sun, at times accompanied by flowers, birds, and animals; and a flowering tree (drevo zhizni) or a woman raising her arms, with two figures, often armed men on horseback, at either side. Most designs in peasant art involve one of these persistent images. The concern of the present paper is to explore what they may have meant.

The cultural myth of the provinces provides the contemporary cultural elite with a semiotic apparatus for formulating Russia's new, postimperial identity. Today, cultural production locates true Russianness outside newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow. In mass culture, the traditional privileging of the center over the backward provinces gives way to the view of the provinces as a repository of national tradition and moral strength. Conversely, high literature and art-house films provide an alternative, harshly critical image of them. In both cases, a particular concept of Russianness is negotiated, one in which the provinces play a central role. Ultimately, both redirect nationalist discourse away from the deeply unsatisfying model of Russia versus the west and instead offer a hermetic national identity based on an “us versus us,” rather than “us versus them,” model.

A great many available statistics describe the population history of Russia, but explanations for these statistics are limited or nonexistent. The useful studies of fertility and migration that have appeared are primarily accurate reports of what happened. Studies of Russian mortality are wholly lacking, an understandable situation, since as late as 1913 only thirteen out of fifty provinces of European Russia had medical statistical bureaus. Despite all past efforts the history of Russia's health remains obscure.

While the health of the Russian people today is comparable to that of other Europeans, before the Revolution of 1917 it was extremely poor. In 1897, the year of the first national Russian census, the infant mortality rate for European Russia was 260 for each 1,000 births, compared to 222 for Germany, 164 for France, 156 for Italy, 156 for England and Wales, and 109 for Ireland.

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

Fin-de-siècle Prague, a provincial capital city in the Habsburg empire, was a site of Czech-German nationality conflict. In 1902 it was also home to the largest exhibition of Auguste Rodin's art outside France during his life. Due to the nationalism that enveloped Czech culture and politics, the Rodin spectacle was no mere display of modernism. National activists in the Manes Association of Visual Artists, including Stanislav Sucharda and Jan Kotera, designed the Rodin exhibition to advance Czech cultural maturity through cosmopolitan art and to convince foreigners of the Czech nation's singularity, unity, and progressiveness. Ultimately, though, the events surrounding the exhibition of Rodin's works in Prague projected Czech disagreement over the meanings of folk heritage and western progress for national identity. Still, the blending of modern display and cultural diplomacy strengthened French-Czech relations and in small but significant ways helped secure Czechoslovakia's creation at the end of World War I.

It is commonly reported in the West that the representation of women in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is far below their representation in the population at large, and that although there are slightly increasing rates of admission, continuation of the large disparity seems to constitute a relatively permanent feature of central recruitment policy and procedures. In 1970, for example, women formed 53.9 percent of the general population and 22.2 percent of the CPSU. However, that aggregate figure masks a considerable degree of regional variation. Publication of data from several regional party archives provides the opportunity to examine more closely the process of female mobility within the party and to advance more precise notions about determinants of that process than had previously been possible.

Focusing on the funerals of two populist political prisoners, this article examines how Petersburg's radical youth expropriated an allegedly unchanging, sacred ritual to extend the parameters of public discussion and social critique in late imperial Russia. Drawing on their experiences of Russia's religious and revolutionary past, the youth who accompanied their peers to the grave used the special, “sacred” time and space effected by the performance of customary burial rituals to offer their fellow citizens revolutionary alternatives to the existing regime.

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.

On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

During the Crimean War, Crimean Tatars were charged en masse with collaborating with the Allies. At the war's conclusion, nearly 200,000 Tatars left the peninsula to relocate in the Ottoman empire. Mara Kozelsky contributes to an understanding of this critical episode in the Crimean War by examining secret surveillance documents, a collection that records complex state attitudes toward Tatars from the Allied landing on the Crimean coast to the Treaty of Paris. These documents reveal that intelligence operations provided no evidence of a collective Tatar guilt and instead testified to the diversity of pressures on state policies toward subject populations on the front lines of battie. Shifting wartime conditions, religious tensions, and repeated crises at the front highlighted unresolved debates about religion and loyalty to the state. Some officials recommended deporting the Tatars, others encouraged their migration, and still others advocated on the Tatars’ behalf.

In Poland the writing and teaching of history is not merely an academic discipline. In times of adversity history has served as an affirmation of national values. It is therefore not at all surprising that in the fall of 1980, when the movement for free association swept the country from Gdańsk, the liberation of history and historians from political constraints became an integral part of the efforts for renovation. For some thirty-five years the recasting and rewriting of Polish history had been central to the process of imposing and legitimizing Communist rule. Reform of the system in 1980 required, among other things, a coming to grips with the mendacious political mythology the system had spawned in striving to create the appropriate historical antecedents for a People's Poland.

The story of Polish historiography since 1945 demonstrates the tenacity of cultural patterns and habits of mind that have made it impossible to impose an interpretation alien to the national sense of identity and a methodology at odds with the canons of objective scholarship. And the regime failed to reshape the traditional interpretations despite the seemingly overwhelming advantages it enjoyed in terms of power, institutions, and funds.

It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.