As the archetypal young prose writer of the 1960s, Vasilii Aksenov represented the hopes of the Khrushchev generation for the good life and for cultural and political liberalization. Rebelling against the ideological puritanism of socialist realism and the moral imperative of Russian literature, Aksenov’s writing reflected the pleasure principle, hedonism, unofficial popular culture, and the aesthetics of consumption. He perceived life as a multicolored, multinational carnival, which became the backdrop of his heroes’ adolescent identity crises and later problems of mid-life and aging. In response to Stalinism, war, and Soviet ideological bombast, Aksenov and his generation created a literature with a clearly western orientation; experimental, playful, and linguistically subversive, it was optimistic, but not in the socialist realist sense.

Four different conceptions of the role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union can be discerned as having had an influence upon its recruitment policy at different periods. One or the other of these conceptions has dominated in each phase of the Party's growth, with the exception of the Civil War years and the period of World War II. In those two turbulent times a relatively open door policy prevailed, and devoted war service seems to have been the main criterion of suitability for membership.

When this study was originally prepared nearly thirty years ago, it was part of a larger government memorandum. As such it was written within a framework of exploring problems of economic relations with the USSR after the war, with the expectation of a large and mutually beneficial trade in mind. At the time, I presented a general analysis of these problems in a longish pamphlet. I was unable, however, in that publication to touch upon the problem of Soviet policies on, and relations with, international cartels, because the government document in question was classified as “secret,” as was the information I had obtained in the course of preparing it. The recent declassification of that document by both the Department of State and the Department of Justice (from whose Antitrust Division a large body of valuable information had been received) has caused me to consider publication of the material on the four case studies of Soviet participation in international cartels—to wit, the cases concerning matches, phosphates, potash, and platinum. I feel that such publication is warranted essentially for two reasons.

In the historiography of the Russian intelligentsia, liberal Slavophilism has suffered a sad neglect. Whereas Marxist and Populist historians alike have hallowed the radical Westernizers, the liberal Slavophiles have been relegated to a minor position, and Slavophilism presented as an ideology of obscurantist conservatism. In one respect this is understandable: the liberal Slavophiles were above all moderates and did not offer the violent expressions of resentment against the existing order that appealed so much to the revolutionary mentality. But although moderate, Slavophilism in the forties and fifties was a powerful progressive force, instrumental in bringing about the Great Reforms. In their concrete notions of reform and their determination and ability to carry them out, the liberal Slavophiles far surpassed the Westernizers, who in the forties were still groping in the labyrinth of Hegelian philosophy and who in the fifties were disoriented by the failure of the revolution of 1848.

The history and development of social services for families and children in the Soviet Union prior to 1967 have been studied quite extensively.1 Soviet writings published since that time, more critical and probing than most earlier materials, as well as a field trip in October 1971 by this writer, make it possible to update our knowledge and to suggest what the future Soviet policy will be in this increasingly important area.

In recent years two lines of research on USSR power and personnel have challenged some long-standing interpretations of the bases of Soviet political activity. In one line, historical studies dealing with the Stalin era have called into question the conventional emphasis, epitomized in the totalitarian model, of a single leader who commands an army of loyal apparatchiki and monopolizes the political agenda. A number of scholars have shown that chaos and confusion in personnel matters were the salient characteristics of this period, rather than a coordinated system for the recruitment, placement, and promotion of cadres—an image suggested by both the totalitarian model and Stalinist boasting of a “monolithic party,” a “unified state structure,” and so forth. In substantive policy, the actual results in implementing regime directives in the Stalin period regularly bore no better than the faintest resemblance to the announced policy. Absent the well-oiled machine highlighted in images of the “totalitarian party,” the regime's failure to control real policy results seems to have followed as a necessary consequence.

The article proposes an extension of the understanding of 1968 in a threefold manner: an extension of the timeframe of the events (the action in ’68), a further extension to include the legacy of 1968, and a spatial-geographical expansion to make the analysis global. By elaborating on these extensions, the article considers 1968 as a global moment in which diverse histories converge and then diverge again, while the synchronicity of events generates an enhanced consciousness of the world, making the outlines of larger structures and connections more visible. Seeing 1968 in this way, the article argues, can provide a more adequate grasp on eastern Europe's ’68 and its variegations.

Halfway between the publication of Széchenyi's Credit (Hitel, 1830) and the revolutionary year 1848, the Diet of 1839-40 stands out as an interesting episode of the Hungarian Reform Age. The importance of this period is generally recognized, but its interpretation is still problematic. Pre-World War I liberal historiographers tended to blame the “government of Vienna” for all the blunders committed before 1848. The conservative Szekfű school, more charitable to Metternich and Austria, was no less nationalistic in its approach to the non-Magyar minorities of Hungary, maintaining the myth of Magyar “spiritual supremacy” between the two world wars. Today, Marxist Hungarian historians try to be fair in their writings about the nationality problem but frown upon analyses of Austro-Hungarian cooperation, considering them apologies for the Habsburg Gesamtmonarchie. Modern Western historians, too, differ in their evaluation of nineteenth-century Hungarian reform and its leaders.

The second edition of the Diary of a Writer (1876-1877) marked a crucial point in Fedor Dostoevskii's literary career: in spite of critics' attacks, many “ordinary” readers were overwhelmed by the author's charisma and began writing to Dostoevskii from different parts of Russia, expressing their views on the moral, social, and political issues dealt with in the Diary. Such success was also guaranteed by the original rhetorical and genre system of the Diary of a Writer, which, wisely modulated and addressed, aimed to involve readers and persuade them to share the author's beliefs. Raffaella Vassena explores the case of the article “The Jewish Question” in the issue of March 1877, where Dostoevskii's rhetoric actually failed to bring about what he had intended. By concentrating on new archival materials, Vassena investigates the reasons for this failure and submits a new perspective on the controversial question of Dostoevskii's attitude toward Jews.

In Southeastern Europe the zadruga, or communal multiple family, has long held a central place in peasant life and, especially during its decline in recent decades, many controversies have been waged around it. While no single definition embraces all varieties of zadrugas, for present purposes the zadruga may be described as “a household composed of two or more biological or small-families, closely related by blood or adoption, owning its means of production communally, producing and consuming its means of livelihood jointly, and regulating the control of its property, labor, and livelihood communally.” The growth of an exchange-economy, the displacement of peasant custom by the written law of the jurists and of the more individualistic town, the spread of new rules of dowry and inheritance, have contributed to break down the zadruga in many regions of the Balkans. Naturally, the question has been asked whether the zadruga can survive.

While it is never wise to read the Vitae sanctorum as strictly historical accounts, we must be cognizant of the medieval hagiographers' frequent efforts to transform political history into theological and spiritual history. Thus did the authors and redactors of the vaiious texts concerning saints Boris and Gleb seek to project a piously viable and ideologically useful Christian argument for the sanctity of these princes who had perished in the course of the protracted civil war following the death of Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich of Kiev (d. 1015).

The persistent stress on the most extreme aspects of Russian history, in a search for the roots of Bolshevism, has led to a remodeling of the Russian past into patterns more consistent with the Soviet present. As one result of this bias, such tendencies as liberalism and moderate agrarian socialism have been, at best, summarily discussed, and Lenin's Tkachevist interpretation of Marxism has obscured the basically reformist character of Russian Marxism that persisted from Plekhanov's Organization of Labor group, through Legal Marxism and Economism into the Menshevik and Liquidator opposition to Bolshevik policies.

In the current poststructuralist and reader-response era, interpretations, especially “correct” ones, are no longer fashionable. Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov have also lost some of their luster in the wake of the rediscovery of Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov, or, for that matter, the Russian Vladimir Nabokov, and the recent general revision of the postrevolutionary literary canon. When Il'f and Petrov do receive critical attention, the focus invariably turns on the ambiguity of their message, pro-Soviet yet provocative, their deliberate literariness, and intertextuality. These same qualities, however, that earn the “in” authors their literary laurels are, in the case of Il'f and Petrov, viewed as evidence of moral compromise and stylistic shallowness.

The Slavic peoples of the Austrian Empire developed a labor movement which owed its character to two elements: the common problems of all workmen in their relationship to the dynasty, the aristocracy, the Church and the predominant German minority on the one hand, and the national aspirations of the Slavs on the other. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the influence of these two elements up to dismemberment of the Empire following the defeat of the Imperial armies in World War I.

The first ten articles of the Constitution of the USSR establish the social ownership of the means of production as the political and economic basis of the Soviet state. Article Eleven sets forth the second distinguishing feature of the Soviet economy: “The economic life of the USSR is determined by the state national economic plan.“

The extent and efficiency of Soviet planning is a subject of absorbing interest to students of the Soviet economy. Interest is heightened by the effusive writings of Soviet economists, which depict the plan as an all-embracing, tightly knit system of relationships and controls which leaves little or no room for errors or misallocation of resources. The plan reaches down to the most minute elements of the economy.