Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are five in number, and four of them (“The Shot,” “The Blizzard,” “The Stationmaster,” and “The Lady-Peasant“) belong to the same literary species. The narrative features binding this quartet of stories together are, in the main, conventional. Each relates—among other things—the story of a young man who, having won the affections of a beautiful woman, overcomes some obstacle (or series of obstacles) which threatens their union, thereby paving the way to, or consolidating, a mariage d'amour at the end of the tale. All of which is to say that embedded in each is one of the oldest of all plots, the “successful courtship.“

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soviet historians, roaming the wide range of speculation that glasnost has opened to them, are trying to exorcise the terrible memory of Stalinism by exploring the might-have-beens, the alternative policies and lines of development that the Soviet Union might have chosen at the critical turning point a decade after the revolution. Articles and conferences one after another on this period have been focusing on "alternatives" or "the Choice of Paths of Social Development."

Sometime between 1533 and 1536, a certain Ivan laganov, writing from prison, addressed a petition to the child ruler Ivan IV in which he suggested that his release would be in the interests of state security. laganov apparently had enjoyed a successful career as a political informer under Ivan’s father, and after the death of Vasilii III had continued to serve his new sovereign in the same manner. On his last mission, he explained, he had reported to Ivan’s boyars as ordered, informing them of the “dangerous talk” he had overheard: “At that time, Sire, I could not plug my ears with pitch; what I heard, Sire, I reported, in the way in which I served and reported to thy father.” As a result, laganov now found himself in fetters, tortured “in the manner of evil traitors and brigands,” and deprived of food and drink.

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.

In hope it began; in perplexity it ended. The twenty-three-year presence of the American Young Men’s Christian Association in Russia that began in 1900 and reached a peak between 1917 and 1920, when more than 440 YMCA staffers served in that country and the Association spent almost eight million dollars for its operation, was over in 1923. In fact, the Association was required to curtail certain of its activities between 1917 and 1920 by both the conservative Kolchak movement in Siberia and the radical Bolshevik government, and eventually, like other groups, it was forced out.

Following the argument of urban geographers that “superstar” cities are the engines of economic growth in a globalized era, Kremlin advisor Aleksei Kudrin and others have argued that Russia should invest in a handful of major cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg. That advice has now become part of official government planning. In stark contrast to the developed world, however, Russia's population is not concentrated in a few urban centers, but in several hundred medium-sized cities and towns, many distributed across Russia's vast territory, often far from other metropolitan agglomerations. These include more than a hundred officially-designated “monotowns,” whose fate is dependent on a single industry, which the government ranks according to the severity of their “socio-economic conditions.” This paper will explore the dilemmas faced by monotowns in particular, and the challenge to authorities of balancing the need for new economic growth from urban metropolises against preventing social unrest in declining industrial communities.

In this article, I identify the Christian “hajj” to Jerusalem as an important Ottoman sociocultural phenomenon. I argue that by the nineteenth century the Balkan Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire had restructured and reinterpreted their Holy Land pilgrimages to mirror the Muslim hajj to Mecca. As a result, the ritual trip to Jerusalem was transformed into a mechanism for upward social mobility and communal empowerment. By exploring the structural and functional similarities between the Muslim and the Christian hajj, this article contributes to studies of Muslim-Christian interactions outside “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. It also reveals striking distinctions between the Balkan Christian hajjis and the Russian palomniki, calling into question the influential scholarly assumption of Eastern Orthodox practices' homogeneity, an assumption that stands largely uncontested in the field of Slavic studies.

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

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?

Like all working classes everywhere and at all times, the Russian working class on the eve of the revolution was internally differentiated. As Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg have recently emphasized, Russian workers were distinguished from one another by skill level, strength of ties to the land, gender, age and other factors. And those distinctions mattered: they affected the form and intensity of workers’ anti-regime actions which extended from reluctant submission to un-rehearsed rebellion, to organized political protest.

“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”

Following the devastation of World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) called on all patriotic youth to join volunteer labor brigades and to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure. Party propaganda for the brigades emphasized not only their economic function but also their role in nurturing a generation of people with new values, beliefs and standards of behavior.

This article explores the associational life of late imperial Kiev to gauge the extent of Jewish participation in the city's civil society and the nature of interethnic relations in the voluntary sphere. Natan Meir demonstrates that, despite political and societal circumstances that often discouraged positive interactions between Jews and their Russian and Ukrainian neighbors, the voluntary association made possible opportunities for constructive interethnic encounters. These opportunities included a range of experiences from full Jewish integration to a segregation of Jewish interests within the sphere of activity of a particular association. While taking into account the central role of intergroup tensions and hostility in Kiev, Meir notes that the frequency of contacts between Jews and non-Jews was higher than most scholars have assumed. By placing the case of Kiev against the larger framework of the Russian empire as well as other European states, Meir contributes to our understanding of the development of late imperial civil society and of the modern Jewish experience in the late Russian empire and across urban Europe.

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.

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.