In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian imperial authorities advocated colonizing Siberia and linking it to the center. This process was difficult: not only was the region remote, but it also had a reputation for lawlessness that was intensified by the 1822 expansion of the exile system. In this article, Abby M. Schrader examines one attempt that authorities undertook to civilize Siberia. Attributing much of the disorder that prevailed in Siberia to the region's severe gender imbalance and lack of stable households, officials sought to promote marriage among banished men. In doing so, authorities laid bare important preconceptions about Russian women's socio-sexual role. Rather than perceiving women as agents, they saw them as tools that could be deployed to enhance the larger social order. Placing stock in the potential for women to settle Siberia's exiles also provided authorities with an opportunity to displace blame for the failure of their policies upon women.

During the Napoleonic wars the future existence of Habsburg Galicia was regarded as uncertain, and in the period following the Congress of Vienna the identity of the province was likewise unclear. The eighteenth-century creation of Galicia gave way to the nineteenth-century attempt to create Galicians and to discover a non-national provincial meaning of “Galicia,“ capable of reconciling and transcending national, religious, and linguistic differences. In this article Larry Wolff juxtaposes the political perspective of Metternich and the literary perspective of dramatist Aleksander Fredro in order to analyze the imperial and provincial dynamics of the idea of Galicia, with fürther attention to the public sphere of newspapers and journals, and the cultural perspectives of Galicians like Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (the son of the great composer) and Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński (founder of the Ossolineum library in Lviv). This article traces the evolving cultural meanings of Galicia up until 1835, the year of the death of Habsburg Emperor Franz and the year that Fredro was denounced by a Polish critic as a “non-national” writer. Especially in Fredro's celebrated comedies, it is possible to discern the submerged ideological tensions of empire and province that shaped Galician identity in the early nineteenth century.

The Seventh World Congress of Sociologists in Varna, Bulgaria, held in September 1970, marked a major stage in the development of social science, particularly sociology, in the one-party states of Eastern Europe. Taking place in the most orthodox country of an increasingly diverse bloc, the congress was characterized by the largest and best-organized participation to date of sociologists from Eastern Europe. One country in the area—Albania—did not participate at all; and Yugoslavia, which is probably the country with the most developed social science community and institutions, had a notably small delegation. Yet the fact is that for prestige reasons, if no other, the East European countries and the Soviet Union did their best to show the state of their current development of sociology. This was shown in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most delegates presented papers.

The obscurity of poems is differently motivated. The later poems of Wallace Stevens are obscure in part because what he wished to say, the one thing that he was trying more and more monomaniacally to say, namely, that there is an imagined life greater and more real than the ordinary life of the senses, became increasingly complex and intractable and hence more difficult to say. The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had to say involved, if said plainly, the danger of death.

The CPSU Politburo has traditionally been regarded as a group of politically powerful individuals. This article will suggest that it can simultaneously, or even alternatively, be viewed as a collection of positions. Politburo membership is not a full-time job. All members hold positions in other institutions, which constitute their occupations, the areas in which they are building their careers. Despite the absence of formal rules linking Politburo seats with specific offices, it is unthinkable that the connection would be random or that it would be arbitrary. Because the positions provide institutional identifications for individuals and tie the work of the Politburo to the activity of important Soviet elites, the pattern of representation depicts the institutional balance of forces in the regime and reflects the overall character of the Politburo and its role in the political system. A positional view of the Politburo is thus essential to defining it and understanding its development as an institution.

In the years since the appearance of The Master and Margarita a large body of critical literature has been devoted to a search for unity, or rather a search for the key that unites the novel's three disparate realms, with their separate settings, casts of characters, levels of language, and characteristic narrative voices. One approach has been to search for formal unity using the novel's structural elements (narrative modes, setting, time-space coordinates). Another approach has been to search for thematic unity by tracing the moral and philosophical threads that run through the novel as well as the literary antecedents of each of the characters. Some critics have reached the conclusion that there is no unity—that the novel is in fact a faulty, fragmented piece of writing.

To the Memory of Arcadius Kahan, 1920–1982

Ever since the publication of V. L. Ianin's study of the Novgorodian mayors (posadniki) in 1962, the commonplace image of republican Novgorod with its political institutions grounded in the sovereignty of the veche—the “democratic” assembly of the city's free male population—has undergone considerable change. It is now generally conceded that Novgorod was essentially a boyar oligarchy, but controversy still surrounds Ianin's contention that the veche from its inception was primarily composed of boyars and other wealthy landowners, who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were known as the well-to-do (zhit'i liudi). Most scholars are willing to accept the view that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the veche was dominated by a boyar oligarchy, but some, including Knud Rasmussen, Henrik Birnbaum, and Jörg Leuschner, believe that the composition of the veche in the twelfth century was more complex and that Novgorodian “democracy” was more evident, at least until the late thirteenth century, when the boyars working through the Council of Lords (Sovet gospod—first recorded in 1291) usurped the “rights” of the populace. Following the work of Klaus Zernack, Leuschner believes the veche was composed of all the free males including those from the subordinate towns (prigorody) outside Novgorod. But in the last two centuries of the republic's existence, certainly following the reforms of 1416 and 1417, Novgorod changed, in Birnbaum's words, “from a quasi-democratic form of government based on the veche to a purely oligarchic rule determined exclusively by the feudal lords.“ Having admitted that representation in the veche became limited to some forty “feudal” clans, Birnbaum accepts the contention of Carsten Goehrke that Pskov, the political and legal institutions of which are thought to have approximated those of Novgorod, retained its genuinely democratic veche throughout the fifteenth century. Thus Pskov is brought to the front lines to debunk the “extreme views” of Ianin, characterized by Goehrke as increasingly dogmatic and speculative, and is now caught in the controversy surrounding Novgorod.

The image of the “Terrible Tsar” struck the imagination of his contemporaries with such force that it continued to tower in Russian consciousness until quite recent times. In chronicles and tales, folk songs and stories, and in historiography from Karamzin on, Ivan IV remained alive, more vivid even than Peter the Great. And the impact was not restricted to Russians; beginning with the Dutch, English, Italians, Danes, and Germans—adventurers, diplomats, merchants, prisoners, mercenaries— who visited the Russia of Ivan IV, the Tsar left an impression in West European minds such that today men who know nothing about Russia or its history will know the name of Ivan the Terrible.

Editor’s Note: In his covering letter for the following piece Mr. Hollander remarked that “sociologists rarely make themselves heard on the pages of the Slavic Review” and expressed the hope that other readers will also be “inclined to join the debate.” We should like to take the opportunity thus provided to invite all sociologists to raise their voices in our pages. We also join the author in his hope that others will enter the debate.

During the nineteenth century a series of revolts took place in Albania. These revolts, although some of them were on a relatively large scale, were local in character and aimed neither at national autonomy nor independence. Their primary target was the taxes and the draft which the Ottoman Government, in accordance with its program of reforms—the so-called Tanzimat—was trying to impose upon the Albanian people. It was not until the Congress of Berlin that the movement began to take a different course.

When Russia defeated the Turks at the end of 1877, she imposed upon them the Treaty of San Stefano (March 3, 1878), which accorded to the Balkan Slavic nations large pieces of Albanian land. Serbia was allotted a strip of Albanian-inhabited territory in Old Serbia. Bulgaria and Montenegro were especially favored. The first country was to expand westward even into Albania, including the major part of the province of Korea (Koritza).

In recent years the historiography of Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning with Brenda Meehan's 1976 article “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” most attention has focused, appropriately, on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the interim, several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.

In the second two decades of the nineteenth century the picture of Russia presented in French journalistic writing was fear-inspiring. In particular, during the Napoleonic Wars and, even more pronounced after the advent of Nicholas I to the throne, French publicists initiated anti-Russian campaigns, which were destined to culminate later in the mid-nineteenth century as one of the catalyzing causes in the final alignment of France against Russia during the Crimean War. The purpose of this article is to trace the origins of this Russophobia in French pamphlets, travel books, and other popular works about Russia, as well as in diplomatic reports, before 1830.

Historians have little reason to believe that the so-called intelligentsia corresponded to any real group of men in Russian society. It is true that the term has been used very frequently in the past one hundred years, but it has been denned in so many ways and been the subject of such bitter partisan debate that it has lost any objective meaning. Historians in the West can hardly communicate on the subject any longer, for no two of them seem to give the term quite the same meaning. The confusion extends even to terminology. The Russian word intelligentsiia has passed directly into the English language as a collective noun. But what then is the term for the individual—intelligent or intellectual? Some historians carefully use the Russian noun; others accept the English noun as the approximate equivalent.

The peace arbitrator was created in 1861 to be the main administrative autiiority in the countryside during die implementation of emancipation. In this article Roxanne Easley examines the institution of peace arbitrator and its role in mediating interests and fostering communication between landlord and peasant and as a potential generative agent of civil society in the postemancipation countryside. After the initial shock of confrontation between landowners and peasants, coercion, arbitrariness, and custom began to share public space with dialogue, process, and law in the solution of public disputes. The peace arbitrator, as die point of intersection for each group’s ideology(ies) and as instructor in formal communication, was at the heart of this change. But a permanent, fully institutionalized vehicle for mediating public interests did not fit with the autocracy’s vision of orderly social change nor with its habitual compartmentalization of die social estates. In response to this threat, the state first neutralized the unusual public principles that underlay the institution of peace arbitrator and then eliminated it in 1874. Easley explores the unintended growth of public politicization in rural Russia as a consequence of emancipation and the boundaries of autocratic reformism.

Nearing death, Nikolai Stepanovich of Anton Chekhov's “A Boring Story” struggles with the question of whether his newfound pessimism results from recent illness or belated insight. While the novella's physiologistprotagonist never reveals his self-diagnosis, it can be surmised from a careful reading of his scattered symptoms in light of contemporary medical intertexts that he fears he is suffering from a diabetes of nervous origin, the etiology of which was first hypothesized by his real-life colleague, Claude Bernard. The search for a historical disease concept, however, far from resolving Nikolai Stepanovich's crisis of identity, opens onto an expanse of further problems, including the reduction of mind to body in post-Griesinger psychiatry as well as the social pathology of fin-de-siècle “neurasthenia.” Caught between the options of illness and insight, Nikolai Stepanovich follows the course of his own spiraling thoughts, which—in a paradox typical of a tradition of melancholia extending from Aristode to Sigmund Freud—seem to grow more penetrating the more his marasmus advances, yet unearth less meaning from his life the deeper they penetrate.

In this article, Katherine Metzo examines the creation of Tunka National Park in Russia's Lake Baikal region. Formed in the last days of the Soviet Union, the park represents the efforts of local indigenous elite to manipulate state policies on conservation to return control over natural resources to the local population. Metzo sees the formation of the park as part of a cultural revitalization movement through its ties to a broader Buriat national-cultural movement that emerged in late socialism. Movement leaders were vnye, in Alexei Yurchak's sense of the word, as they promoted their personal as well as the national-cultural agenda through the inbetween spaces created in the discussion of nature conservation.

The Russian and American media spheres converged to an unprecedented degree during the 2016 US presidential elections when reports of a possible dossier on Donald Trump emerged. This article considers the degree to which the media tactic of kompromat, which is the Russian abbreviation for “compromising material,” can infiltrate the US media ecology.