Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.

Brym and Degtyarev argue that in the "volatile" post-Soviet context, the potential for anti-Semitism is high. On the basis of responses drawn from 988 interviews conducted in Moscow in 1992 they conclude that the number of anti-Semites in Moscow is much higher than in the United States or Canada, and they also conclude that anti-Semitic orientations are part of a broader authoritarian, xenophobic and illiberal set of attitudes.

The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russian-ruled Poland, with its dramatic manifestation of the transformation of the country’s political culture, marks a major, if not entirely appreciated, watershed in modern Polish history. Influenced, if not sparked by events in the central provinces of the Russian Empire, most notably Bloody Sunday, the revolution in Russian Poland quickly acquired a momentum of its own based on local conditions. In Poland the revolution was characterized by several nationwide general strikes and the sudden emergence of a viable labor movement; by a long, bitter, and partially successful boycott of the Russified school system; by unprecedented popular striving for the benefits of secular culture and education; by the gmina (communal) movement in the countryside that aroused a large part of the Polish peasantry from its traditional indifference to national issues; and by the rapid growth of political and social organizations that claimed to represent the interests of mass constituencies. Preceded by four decades of fundamental demographic, economic, and social change, the revolution propelled the largest and most significant part of Poland into a new era of broad, popular participation in the political, social, and cultural life of the country.

This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Dmitrii Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony no. 13 ﹛Babi Yar),I present an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representations of the Nazi genocide in a now forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 Piano Trio, “In Memory of Our Perished Children.” I trace the genesis of this work in Gnesin's web of experiences before and during the war, examining Gnesin's careful strategy of deliberate aesthetic ambiguity in depicting death—Jewish and Soviet, individual and collective. Recapturing this forgotten cultural genealogy provides a very different kind of European historical soundtrack for the Holocaust. Instead of the categories of survivor and bystander, wartime witness and postwar remembrance,we find a more ambiguous form of early Holocaust memory. The story of how the Holocaust first entered Soviet music challenges our contemporary assumptions about the coherence and legitimacy of Holocaust musicas a category of cultural history and present-day performance.

Although Cement was a model for later socialist realism, Katerina Clark has argued that Gleb Chumalov does not achieve consciousness, a requirement for later heroes, but instead remains spontaneous. In this essay, Eric Laursen argues against Clark's widely accepted interpretation. By introducing the idea of instinct (class, worker, revolutionary), which Anna Krylova has shown to be central to Bolshevik thought in the early years of the twentieth century, Laursen argues that Gleb does gain consciousness. Gleb does not move from spontaneity to consciousness, however. Instead he learns to control and guide his own instincts and those of others. Two other characters also transform themselves. Gleb's wife Dasha illustrates a similar but distinct path forwomen. Sergei Ivagin, who must abandon conscious thought to first develop instinct, illustrates a different path for the intelligentsia. The attainment of consciousness is presented as a rebirth or maturation and involves the acquisition of “conscious language.” In the party purge at the end, those who speak unconsciously, therefore misleading and confusing the masses, are cast out of the party. The newly conscious Gleb and Dasha, who now speak properly, take their place as leaders.

A nation's shared culture reflects its status as an "imagined community."1 Different sections of the imagined community, however, have their own ideas about what the shared culture should include and what ought to be excluded from it, and this incessant debate over the cultural canon affects the nation's sense of identity. The rise of the civil rights movement and feminism in the United States in the 1960s, for example, challenged the dominance of "dead white males" in the American literary canon. Political as much as aesthetic considerations, then, dictate what the canon of works that constitute any shared culture should include. Similarly, political circumstances often determine the "correct" interpretation of these works.

In May 1927 Sir Austen Chamberlain precipitated the first great international crisis of the post-Locarno period by denouncing the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement and severing Britain's diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Although Germany was not directly involved, the dispute nevertheless was to have a profoundly disturbing effect on German-Soviet relations. By raising the possibility of a wide-ranging diplomatic, economic, and perhaps even military confrontation between London and Moscow, it strained Germany's diplomatic system, which rested on the Locarno Pact (1925) and the Treaty of Berlin (1926). Thus it posed some fundamental questions for the German Foreign Ministry: Were the policies associated with those agreements compatible with each other only in fair weather? Did Germany have the freedom to remain neutral if the dispute should deepen? In short, was it still realistic to believe that Germany could maintain equally intimate ties with London and Moscow? Because Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had previously denned a balancing role as the sine qua non of Germany's international revival, the imbroglio soon led to a great debate in the Wilhelmstrasse. The issue on which it turned was, as a leading participant observed, “whether Germany's ties with Russia are worth enough to our present and future political interests so that it pays to assume the political expenses and risks involved in maintaining them.”

On October 4, 1946, Klement Gottwald, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and at that time Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak Republic, declared that the experience of Czechoslovakia had shown “what had been foreseen theoretically by Marxist classics, namely, that there exists another path to socialism than by way of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the soviet state system. Going by this path are Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, and also Czechoslovakia.” So ran the report of his speech in the collection of his articles and speeches, Ten Years, published in 1947. Only two years later, the same speech was included in a new collection of Gottwald's works, with, however, the phrase “a dictatorship of the proletariat” deleted, and the country, Yugoslavia, omitted. This editorial modification of an authoritative statement puts into sharp relief the change of view which had occurred in the interval in the interpretation placed on the people's democracy by Czechoslovak Communists.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy direct taxes were levied on the basis of periodic fiscal surveys. The records of these surveys were called soshnye pis'ma, pistsovye knigi, and perepisnye knigi (sokha registers, cadastral books, and census books respectively). Extant copies, though often fragmentary and considerably fewer than the total number of books originally compiled, represent our best source of information about the socio-economic history and population of Muscovy. Statistical data from these books span the period from the 1480s to 1717 and bear directly on such problems as population size and movement, identification of topographic features, the social and economic composition of urban and rural society, taxation, trade and manufacture, and the peasant economy on church, private, and state lands. Two of the most useful kinds of information are the enumeration of the taxed population, in terms of households and male occupants, and the quantitative and qualitative description of taxable property.

Since World War II a great number and variety of books, pamphlets, and articles devoted in whole or in part to international law have appeared in the Soviet Union. Not all of these publications are available in the United States. The articles are too numerous to be listed here. Substantial contributions have appeared not only in the central legal periodicals such as Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo (Soviet State and Law) and Izvestija Akademii Nauk SSSR, Otdelenie Èkonomiki i Prava (News of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Section of Economics and Law), but also in the publications of institutions of higher learning and research in the provinces as well as in Moscow and Leningrad. The books include general texts, specialized monographs, collections of documents, and dictionaries. Popular lectures touching on problems of international law have been recorded and distributed in pamphlet form. This extensive literature may help outsiders to understand the Soviet conception of international law, its role in Soviet policy, and its value in predicting future Soviet actions and attitudes.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was national as well as political in character. The official policy of repressing national minorities had aroused discontent; the force of nationalism had made itself felt among the submerged nationalities in Russia, promoting both the desire to throw off legal disabilities and the hope of gaining national rights within the Russian Empire. The Jews, subject to the most onerous restrictions, had begun to join nationalistic organizations in the hope that they could influence in some measure their destiny.

Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.