The intent of the framers of the Electoral Law of June 3, 1907, was, as Peter A. Stolypin would have it, “constitutionalist,” but it was very nearly the antithesis of “democratic.” In reverting from a broadly representational to a Prussian-style, tax-property, categorical basis, Stolypin sought no fundamental revision of the principles underlying the Electoral Law for the Imperial Duma of November 11, 1905. He was committed to the concept of a constitution providing for representative government, but in accordance with his own predilections he wished to revise the terms of representation in a way that would ensure a preponderance of “trustworthy” elements in the Duma while still permitting most major segments of public opinion to be represented.

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.

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.

The terms metaphor and metonymy, as defined by Roman Jakobson, produce important insights when applied to the novels of Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi. The oeuvre of each novelist constitutes a remarkably consistent whole because it emanates from the creative unconscious, rather than from conscious thought processes. In Jakobson’s view, metaphor involves the “combination of heterogeneous elements”; such elements in Dostoevskii include contrasting styles, genres, and references to other art forms such as painting. Windows juxtapose interior and exterior space, as the reading of letters juxtaposes private to public communication. By contrast, metonymy involves the linking of similar elements. As a metonymical writer, Tolstoi tended to take the opposition between self and other that he inherited from the romantic tradition and transform it into a relationship between self and self. The purpose of his well-known device of estrangement is to create just such transformations. In courtship, the self-other relationship is that of man to woman; Tolstoi minimizes this relationship by avoiding all sincere expressions of desire that lead to marriage.

Russian Eastward expansion, which played a major role in shaping the destinies of the Russian people and in creating the largest contiguous land empire in the world, began at the dawn of Russian history. The great Asiatic expansion of the Muscovite period which brought the Russians to the shore of the Pacific Ocean was preceded by centuries of eastward advance in European Russia. In the beginning of Russian history, two Russian principalities, Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal, were engaged in exploring, conquering, exploiting, and colonizing the area west of the Ural Mountains. A study of their colonial activities not only furnishes some of the background of later spectacular Asiatic expansion, but also throws light on the relations between these two early states within the framework of medieval Russia.

The Novgorodian colonial expansion was directed toward the northeastern corner of European Russia, into the vast region stretching from Lake Onega to the Ural Mountains and from the northern tributaries of the Volga to the Arctic Ocean. Among the Russians, the Novgorodians were the first to penetrate this region. Anxious to obtain commodities which they could use in their trade with Western Europe, they were aided in their quest by the northern system of rivers and portages.

To comment on Sidney Monas’s “GULag and Points West” is not an easy task. The article as a whole lacks focus and consistency, and it is simply not clear what moved Monas to compose this often diffuse collection of misrepresentations and misconceptions. In the past I have been an admirer of the author and his scholarship, but it is difficult to extend my admiration to this essay.

One of Monas’s intentions may have been to provide an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s writings which have appeared since his expulsion from the USSR. If so, the effort is highly flawed. While he does discuss—often in rather pedestrian fashion—Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, Lenin in Zurich, From Under the Rubble, and certain of Solzhenitsyn’s recent publicistic writings, Monas omits all consideration of such significant works as the ninety-six-chapter version of The First Circle, published in 1978, or the important chapters from the “Red Wheel” historical cycle which Solzhenitsyn has been publishing in recent issues of the journal Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia. This omission necessarily skews any analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s thought.

“Yesterday the Czar [sic] of Muscovy was brought from Greenwich in his majesties barge, and at present lyes incognito at a house joyning to the water-side in Norfolk Street.“ Thus simply a contemporary chronicler recorded the arrival in London of Peter I in January, 1698. What did the people amongst whom he was setting foot for the first and only time know of the country from which he had come?

Not unexpectedly, they knew very little about Russia, and few of them felt more than a superficial interest in events there.

Khadzhi-Murat, Tolstoi's last major fiction, stands alone in his oeuvre in flagrant violation of his late ethical and aesthetic standards—an unprecedentedly dark apprehension of the human condition and a reconceptualization of piety. At its heart are silences—literal, near-, figurative, and implicit—in unspoken critique of all nontrivial language, narrative, moralizing, and teaching. Silence first strikes the reader in the hero's refusal to murmur against God as he dies, but retrospectively turns up everywhere, despite the obvious presence of lots of words: in the peculiar plot that has nothing to say; in the refusal to perform the usual Tolstoian adjudication of the disparate viewpoints depicted; in the hero's childhood reminiscences, hidden from listeners even as the essential in them is hidden from him; in the painful taciturnity of God himself, which, like the other core themes, is purposefully barely mentioned. Khadzhi-Murat's, indirection enacts an intuition whose mere assertion would fail, since it is an intuition about assertability itself. Something central has shifted for Tolstoi; now it is through silence and absence—the gaps in the said and the sayable—that the most important truths come to us, hence that is the only truthful way to inscribe them.

Odessa was founded on the fault line between autocratic agricultural Russia and the international trade routes of emerging global capitalism. It was the place where the use value of agricultural products was converted into the exchange value of commodities. In the rift between these two systems of values, and between the epistemological and psychological perceptions associated with them, a third kind of ontological and epistemological space emerged. This space was conditioned by the evolving patterns of the Odessa grain trade regulated by stock trading, and induced in its turn a unique perception of time, history, and the relation between the real and fi ctitious. This article pinpoints the link between the mechanisms of the Odessa grain trade, the patterns of subjectivity and temporal perception that were molded by Odessa's business culture, and the modes of literary representation that elaborated these patterns into a specific literary idiom associated with Odessa literature.

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.

In Russia, modern political thought made its appearance in the last third of the eighteenth century; the major stimulant for the debate was the “revolution” (Pushkin's definition) wrought by Peter the Great. Political thinking did not develop much earlier, except for an episodic manifestation in 1730, because it took educated Russian society almost half a century to assimilate the impact of Peter's reign. The “debate” of 1730 was not so much an expression of opposing ideas and concepts (there was an amazing degree of agreement on these), as an emotional reaction to a conflict in social interests. Of course, by the time of the last third of the eighteenth century, the “revolution” of Peter the Great had affected the entire country and created social and cultural conditions which in turn produced some very real problems that cried for solution.

At the beginning of December 1944, a mere six weeks after the return of a “liberation” government to Greece, fighting broke out in Athens between British troops and the principal guerrilla force which had resisted the Germans. This sudden turn of affairs created general bewilderment at the time, both in Athens and elsewhere; and not a little indignation arose at the sight of erstwhile allies fighting against one another at a time when Germany, the common enemy, was not yet overthrown. The passage of time, and the publication of a number of books, now permit a more adequate understanding of the events which gave so decisive a turn to postwar Greek life.

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.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been charged with the responsibility of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information on the economy of the USSR. This review analyzes the quality of the CIA’s research, compares it with academic Sovietology, and raises certain questions regarding the internal mechanisms of the agency. For obvious reasons, the inquiry is confined to the unclassified materials produced by the agency. Moreover, I will be reviewing only a selected proportion of the published materials. The sheer volume is overwhelming: a request for publications produced a box weighing forty pounds. While my general comments refer to older materials, I will be concentrating on the most recent publications. The number of publications and variety of subject matter prohibit a traditional review article. Consequently, I intend an overall and much more general evaluation of research by the CIA.

In this article, Vasiliki P. Neofotistos analyzes the reappropriation of the term Šiptar, a derogatory Macedonian term for Albanians, by male members of the Albanian community in the Republic of Macedonia. Neofotistos shows how the reappropriation of the ethnic slur reflects constellations of social value, that is to say, larger systems of meaning and action concerning who and what is valued in life, that have emerged with Macedonian independence. Albanian men tap into familiar divisions found in the larger Macedonian society and create meaningful forms of collectivity as they deal with rapid social, economic, and political change in the context of Macedonia's postsocialist transformation of social practices and ideals. This case study of Macedonia sheds light on the dynamics of social relations within socially marginalized groups.

(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.