Wages Provide the Soviet retail employee with the direct incentive to work. There are, however, many things which money alone cannot buy. Apart from his direct monetary earnings, the Soviet worker may find that what he is able to get out of life depends to an equally large extent upon where he works, how he works and what is thought of him as a citizen, as well as an employee, by the Party, the labor union, the management, and other active arms of official government policy.

The American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 is often cited today as an example of providential intervention in behalf of America's national security. Commentators shudder at the thought of Soviet air bases in what was once Russian America and praise the near miraculous foresight of Secretary of State William Seward.

Comprising as it does the only real estate transaction ever completed by Russia and America, Seward's annexation of Alaska properly holds a rather unique place in the diplomatic annals of both countries. The tendency of textbook writers to over-dramatize the role of Providence and to imply that Seward alone saw the value of Russian America is, however, both mistaken and unfortunate.

Studies of Russian culture in the eighteenth century concentrate on the era of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, with some attention paid to the reign of Elizabeth. They deal only scantily with the reign of Anna Ioannovna, except to point out the dismal aspects of this period of German misrule. A closer examination, however, reveals that during Anna's reign, separated by five years from that of Peter the Great, the Westernization of Russian culture not only continued but in some areas assumed new forms and new directions.

The Russian Old Believer and sectarian movement, as it appears in history, can be thought of, in anthropological terms, as a nativistic movement: that is, a movement of resistance to outside (in this case Western) cultural influence, and a reaffirmation and renewal of the native culture. In this sense, the movement comprised Old Believers, with or without priests, and an assemblage of sects of indigenous origin—Dukhobors, Subbotniki, Molokans, Skoptsy, and others. During the first period of its existence, the Old Believer and sectarian movement, besides being a nativistic movement, was at the same time a focus of resistance to the regime, as any form of religious dissidence must be under an essentially theocratic state.

Relations between the center and regions in Russia, being always in the limelight of attention in political science literature, remain a battlefield of different scholarly interpretations. Several narratives shape the current debate on Russian subnational regionalism or, in very legalistic terms, “federalism.” One is bent on applying to Russia such normatively-loaded concepts as multilevel and networked governance, meta-governance, indigenous governance, civil society participation, and others with strong liberal and institutional pedigrees. In this vein, Russia might be referred to—for example, along with Germany and France—as a “post-imperial democracy,” with an implicit anticipation of the prefix “post-” to signify Moscow's commitment to a democratic, rather than imperial, future. Seen from this perspective, with all its specificity Russia still conforms to basic standards of democratic rule and therefore can be approached, described, and analyzed in the language applicable to the liberal west, where institutions mitigate controversies over interests and create consensus over rules of the game.

In this close analysis of Aleksandr Sokurov's 2002 film Russkii kovcheg (Russian ark), Tim Harte explores the interplay between the medium of painting and cinema in this unprecedented ninety-minute single-shot film set in the grand halls and galleries of the Hermitage Museum. As Harte argues, the film's unique premise and setting allow Sokurov to convey how the museum, its art and history, and subsequently cinema can affirm a nation's culture, transporting die past ever so evocatively into the present in order to sustain culture's vitality. Throughout Sokurov's ninety-minute single-shot fusion of Western art and Russian history, a continual emphasis on the image of the frame prevails, with the frame constituting an important artistic and metaphysical threshold for the filmmaker. Constandy moving through the ubiquitous frames, Sokurov establishes his own cinematic rendering of culture's eternal essence.

During the K'ang-hsi (1662-1722) and Yung-cheng (1723-35) periods, Russia was the only foreign country with which China maintained treaty relations, the only “Western” state to which China sent diplomatic missions, and the only foreign power granted religious, commercial, and educational privileges in Peking. These were most unusual phenomena in Chinese foreign relations in view of China's claim to universal overlordship. As the Celestial Empire and the Middle Kingdom, China normally maintained no treaty relations with other states, sent no diplomatic missions abroad, and allowed no foreign country to keep permanent establishments in the capital city of Peking. It may therefore be asked, what differentiated Russia from the other foreign states in Chinese eyes and what prompted the Chinese to accord Russia preferential treatment?

Jeffrey Brooks argues that Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi drew on and recast a particularly Russian mythology of doomed rebellion in order to explore issues of free will, self-fulfillment, and redemption. The literary giants employed narrative structures similar to popular formulas. They imagined their work and even their lives in terms of an opposition between freedom and order, echoing themes of Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol'. By linking Tolstoi and Dostoevskii to mythologies of banditry, Brooks illuminates the interaction between high and low cultures. He locates their work in the context of social and cultural transformations of the liberal postreform era, showing how readers' expectations changed in a fluid society. Readers increasingly wanted freedom to triumph over the myth's earlier doom, but censors remained vigilant. He shows how Tolstoi and Dostoevskii satisfied both censors and readers by framing tales of adventure and romance with moralistic beginnings and endings conforming to the format of the long serial novel. The formulaic sandwich that frustrated the censors was used with similar effect by N. I. Pastukhov, author of Russia's first modern popular novel, The Bandit Churkin, which was serialized in Moskovskii listok in the early 1880s. Brooks affirms the mastery of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii that transcends time and place, but shows the roots of their work in Russian preoccupations with freedom and order.

In the study of politics, the concepts of nation and of class have received almost universal recognition as significant tools of analysis. The concept of generation, however, has remained, for students of politics, largely in the twilight zone of knowledge. This is remarkable, for historians and novelists have used it with considerable success, and more recently sociologists have emphasized its fundamental importance.

In 1955 the present writer examined the struggle being waged against the peasantry by the Communist Party in the USSR and came to the conclusion that the liquidation of the Soviet peasantry as a class is inescapable.

Since then, significant new legislation has been passed in the field of agriculture in the USSR.

All these new measures have the same tendency of bringing the peasant class in the USSR a few steps nearer to eradication and the kolkhozes nearer to the status of sovkhozes.

Two Kinds of Socialist Property: The Soviet Constitution (Section 5) recognizes two kinds of property: state property and cooperative property. Both are qualified as “socialist.”

First of all, I should like to support as strongly as I can Professor Meyer's plea that the study of the Soviet Union and of communism be integrated with the study of comparative politics. For a number of reasons Soviet and Communist studies have developed apart from the rest of political science in this country. Among these reasons is probably the general growth of area studies with their noncomparative stress during and especially after World War II. More particularly, the government's need for information about Communist countries and the mobility of personnel in this field between government agencies and universities have bent some of the scholarly work in it in the direction of intelligence work. Also, in the study of these countries, refugees from them have played a significant role. Quite naturally, they have been more inclined to deal with the countries of their origin alone and to see them as unique than to compare them with non-Communist systems.

The 1999 Ukrainian presidential election took place during a period of extreme political turmoil. The excitement of democracy had waned, the economy spiraled ever downward, and charges of corruption among the administration seemed the harbinger of communist victory. Nevertheless, Ukrainian voters returned Leonid Kuchma to the helm. Thomas F. Klobucar, Arthur H. Miller, and Gwyn Erb investigate this curious result, using a model that combines economic evaluations, the candidates’ personalities, and ideology. Relatively well-developed partisanship is present in Ukraine and was a major influence on voters’ choice. Surprisingly, economic evaluations had little impact on the Ukrainian vote. Instead, party identification, ideology, and leadership trait assessments led Ukrainians to vote for the “democrat.”

This article examines how the Jewish experience can change the larger picture of revolution and war in Ukraine and conventional history of “the Russian Revolution.” The case study of Kyiv's Jewish community shows that its creation as an imagined community and development in 1917 was in fact made possible by the war, which served as a catalyst for social development. The interethnic relationships in revolutionary Ukraine were built on the legacy and foundation of prewar tensions, which were reinforced by the ethnicization of politics brought by the war. The collapse of the Russian empire, the rise of nation-states, the emergence of a new order, which was neither known nor universally welcomed, pushed people to transgress old boundaries of social behavior, leading to mass violence in 1919 and 1920.

On Friday, 30 August 1918, the day M. S. Uritskii, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated, Lenin was scheduled to address the Corn Exchange in the Basmannyi district of Moscow at 6:00 P.M. and the Mikhelson Armaments Factory in the Serpukhovskii section later. The first speech passed without incident; at the Mikhelson factory he gave the same fifteen-to-twenty minute speech he had delivered at the Corn Exchange, an attack on the forces of counterrevolution. In both locations he concluded his speech with the words “there is only one issue, victory or death!” As Lenin returned to his car in the factory courtyard, three shots were fired and he fell to the ground with bullet wounds in his left shoulder and the left side of his neck; the third bullet hit a woman standing nearby. The workers accompanying him to his car ran off, crying, “they've killed him, they've killed him!” and the crowded courtyard emptied quickly.

The outstanding role of the intellectual in modern Russian history is beyond dispute. Among non-Communist historians there is a well-established consensus concerning the nature of the Russian intelligentsia and the distinctive part it played in bringing on the revolution. The nineteenth-century Russian intellectual was detached from practical affairs, committed to some abstract doctrine, and morally alienated by autocracy and class privilege. This reaction resulted from the cultural precociousness of Russia's westernized upper class, as contrasted with the frustrating backwardness of the government and the economy. Educated and sensitive Russians had nowhere to turn except to theory.

The cultural cleavage between this theorizing elite and the toiling masses has left traces even today—for example, in the official classification of the Soviet population into workers, peasants, and “toiling intelligentsia,” and in the remarkable prestige enjoyed by academic pursuits in Russia.

Departing from the familiar scholarly focus on the ideological content of works by intelligentsia forerunners, this article examines the record of everyday life in their private and public writing. Konstantine Klioutch kine argues that their obsessive focus on ordinary experience indicated that articulating mundane desires was as important to the two writers as expressing progressive views. As professional journalists, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov organized their experience primarily by way of writing. Accordingly, the article explores rhetorical procedures accommodating both ideology and desire in their influential account of themselves as prototypical new men.

The advent of an industrial labor force posed a formidable and, as it turned out in 1917, a fatal array of problems to the government of Imperial Russia. It had to find answers to a number of crucial questions. How was it to reduce the tensions at the factory and carry out its mandate as guardian of order and justice and the protector of the poor? How was the peasant-worker to be fitted into the traditional structure of Russian society? What was the place of industrial labor in the “Witte system”? And how could the government prevent the discontent of the peasant-worker from turning against autocracy itself?

Yet even Witte, who was perhaps more perceptive than his colleagues in regard to the various problems caused by industrialization, viewed “the labor question” with complete confidence.

On March 27, 1941 a coup d'état in Belgrade overthrew the Yugoslav government which only two days previously had signed the Tripartite Pact in Vienna. In its place was installed a new government headed by General Simović, chief of the Air Staff, while the regent, Prince Paul, was replaced by the young King Peter II. It was widely expected that the Simović government would renounce the Pact and align itself firmly with Britain against Germany. Although this expectation was to be disappointed, the anti-German and pro-British intent of the coup was accepted by both Churchill and Hitler. Churchill declared that the Yugoslav nation had “found its soul,” and in his postwar memoirs described the coup as “one tangible result of our desperate efforts to form an Allied front in the Balkans and prevent all falling piecemeal into Hitler’s power.” Hitler, convinced that Britain had “pulled the strings,” ordered the Yugoslav invasion for April 6.