(And slowly, as his mind and feeling / descend into a languid dream, / Imagination takes up dealing / her motley Faro game to him.)

At a card table at the beginning of "Pikovaia dama" (The queen of spades), Tomskii recounts a tale about his flamboyant grandmother, an avid Faro player. In her youth the Countess once lost a large sum to the Duke of Orleans aujeu de laReine at Versailles. When her husband refused to pay off her debt, the Countess turned to the adventurer and wonderman Count Saint-Germain for help.

The NEP was an inherently unstable social and political system: It contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The Bolsheviks carried out policies in which they did not fully believe and with implications that worried them. Although the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 forbade factions within the party, the struggle for power during Lenin's final illness and after his death inevitably created factions. The struggle for power and the conflict between contrasting views concerning the future of society came to be intertwined. For the sake of economic reconstruction the party allowed private enterprise to reemerge. As time went on, many Bolshevik leaders came to be convinced supporters of the mixed economic system; others, on the basis of their reading of Marxist ideology, found such policies distasteful.

Sasha Sokolov is the author of three remarkably different novels. The first, A School for Fools (1976), tells of a schizophrenic adolescent and his attempts to come to terms with the elemental experiences of sex and death in the small world of his special school, his family, and the dacha community where they summer. The second, Between Dog and Wolf (1980), is a complex tale of vengeance and violence. The hero, an elderly, one-legged, itinerant grinder named Il'ia, beats off a supposed wolf with his crutches. The dog, for such it is, belongs to Iakov, a game warden, who in revenge steals Il'ia's crutches. Their feud escalates. The grinder kills two of the gamekeeper's dogs and is eventually drowned by their owner who, unbeknownst to either, may be his son. Sokolov's newest novel, The Epic of Palisandr (1985), relates the adventures of its hero, Palisandr Dal'berg, “Son of the Kremlin.“

In the new Czechoslovakia a Communist Party did not exist in the early days. Such a party was created only in the fall of 1921, fully three years after the independence of Czechoslovakia had been effected. At the moment of liberation it is not an exaggeration to say that communism had hardly even a foothold among Czech and Slovak workers. A substantial wave of sympathy for the Russian Bolsheviks had swept over the country following the Revolution in 1917, and a radical mood, favorable to socialism, had spread widely among the Czech masses. These circumstances had not, however, encouraged even the beginning of organizing a communist movement among Czechs and Slovaks, or among the German minority.

The Revolution of 1905 challenged the symbolists’ belief that they could seclude themselves from the rest of society. Forced to reexamine their previous ideas, values, and attitudes, they developed new ideologies that took cognizance of the current crisis. Among the most prominent of the new ideologies was mystical anarchism, the doctrine of the symbolist writers Georgii Chulkov and Viacheslav Ivanov. Particularly attractive to the symbolists, mystical anarchism also influenced other artists and intellectuals; doctrines similar to it proliferated, and it engendered a polemic in which almost all the symbolists took part. Strikingly similar to the mystical anarchism of other periods of social upheaval, both in Russia and in the West, illuminating a facet of the little-known mystical and religious aspects of the Revolution of 1905, and providing an example of the response of apolitical writers and artists to revolutionary upheaval, Chulkov and Ivanov’s doctrine merits closer study than it has so far received.

This paper examines the rise of the “climate-kumys cure” in late imperial Russia and how it shaped perceptions of the steppes as a “curative place.” By positing that kumys (fermented mare's milk), a traditional food produced by steppe nomads, interacted with unique qualities of the steppe climate—including aromatic air, abundant sunshine, cool forest groves, rich feathergrasses, and brilliant wildflowers—to cure tuberculosis patients of their symptoms, the climate-kumys cure produced an imaginary of the steppes that contrasted with traditional Russian views of the steppes as barren, monotonous, and even dangerous. Knowledge about the steppe climate produced by proponents of the climate-kumys cure harmonized with Soviet medical professionals’ ideas about forging workers’ bodies and restoring their minds. An understanding of the steppes as healthy, however, did not stop the spread of disease, nor did it lead to preservation. Even as the climate-kumys cure rose in popularity, the steppes that had given rise to kumys were vanishing.

What was the nature of geographic variation in peasant unrest during the Russian Revolution? What explains this variation? We discuss and compare two extant sources of information on peasant disturbances from March to October 1917, we illustrate geographic variation in the actions recorded by these sources, and we statistically identify determinants of this variation. We show that two factors robustly drive province-level variation in peasant unrest in 1917: soil quality and the historical prevalence of serfdom.

Platonov studies continue to revolve around questions of resistance. Each article in this special section begins by articulating the parameters of a paradigm and then shows how Andrei Platonov distorts or subverts the model in significant ways. The author otDzhan remains an unruly figure, impatient with the stereotypes that nonetheless fuel his work, if only primarily through opposition. Once, the question was how to determine Platonov's attitude toward Soviet communism. Now that our understanding of both Platonov's oeuvre and Soviet culture has become richer and more complex, the issue of resistance remains but it has gained more facets.

Nicholas I (1825-55) gained the reputation of being the most reactionary tsar the Russian Empire ever had. The eminent historian S. M. Solov'ëv called him “the new Nebuchadnezzar.”

The ugly features of a government which oppressed the people and systematically suppressed all enlightenment and free thought became particularly evident under the autocratic “stick” of this sovereign. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people were still tied to the land, either as State and Imperial Crown peasants, or as private serfs; the latter, especially, living under the most miserable economic conditions, deprived of personal liberty, were degraded almost to the level of chattels.

Against such a background of despotism and serfdom there could develop only a system of justice representing a monstrous abuse of equity; and indeed the courts and their members at the time of Nicholas were in complete harmony with the epoch.

The title of this paper might suggest that it is intended to describe Chaadayev's philosophy. This is not so. An attempt will be made, rather, to argue the following points: first, that Chaadayev is chronologically the first philosopher of Russia because earlier persons to whom that distinction has been attributed do not really deserve it; second, that, unlike these so-called predecessors, Chaadayev in his writings provides a body of material which qualifies as a philosophy and which is presented as such; and third, that his philosophy is distinctively Russian, even though Chaadayev combines many Western philosophical characteristics with his native Russian outlook.

With Bismarck's dismissal as head of the German and Prussian governments in 1890, a number of policies bearing his personal stamp were called into question, including his Polish policy. The chancellorship of General von Caprivi (1890-94) saw a perceptible twist in the long history of relations between the Prussian/German governments and their Polish subjects, causing both contemporaries and historians to speak of an “era of reconciliation” (Versöhnungsära). During this period, Polish leaders supported government legislation and offered to work to strengthen the German Empire, while the Caprivi administration indicated its desire for better relations with the Poles and made a number of concessions to them. The Era of Reconciliation did not last long, however, not even as long as Caprivi's own tenure; its net results were meager, and after 1894 the idea of German-Polish cooperation faded away.

Although this period has attracted the interest of some scholars of German-Polish relations, it has not received (perhaps because of its aberrant character) its fair share of attention in general works on German-Polish relations. Quite fundamental questions—for example, what prompted the milder Polish policies and why did they turn out so disappointingly—remain without adequate answers. In considering these questions, it is important to keep in mind that the Era of Reconciliation was a two-way street: a merger of government policy under Caprivi with a parallel trend toward “loyalism” within the Polish leadership.

In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of audientic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey “sincerity,” understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov document these new sensibilities regarding self, authenticity, desire, and emotions.