Since the Twentieth Party Congress, a controversy has developed in the Soviet Union concerning the activities and views of Anatolii Vasilievich Lunacharsky (1875-1933). Lunacharsky was the USSR's first commissar of education and an important and controversial figure in the arts during the 1920s. Of particular interest in the current debate is the underlying issue of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union today. In praising or attacking Lunacharsky, writers can set forth in an oblique manner their views on topics that cannot always be openly discussed. In this debate those who advocate change in the arts policy and those who support the current policies can confront each other, in an acceptable way, on such issues as censorship, the party's role in the world of art, artistic experimentation, and a variety of other issues of vital concern to artists and writers in the Soviet Union.

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.

A notable characteristic of Solzhenitsyn's earlier works, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichto Cancer Ward, was their apparent philosophical and aesthetic eclecticism. Their author seemed neither to reveal the intellectual origins of his work nor to articulate in his novels a coherent philosophy of history or theory of art. One critic was forced to conclude that artistically Solzhenitsyn was an “eclectic with conservative leanings” whose main concern was with truth and honesty in literature. The publication of August 1914 tended at first to allay this feeling. Parallels of both form and content could be drawn between the new novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Further reflection, however, suggests that the comparison with Tolstoy raises as many difficulties as it resolves. But this does not mean that the riddle of the origins of Solzhenitsyn's thought remains insoluble. When examined in conjunction with the Nobel Prize lecture and the programmatic letter of September 5, 1973, to the Kremlin leaders, August 1914 does reveal the sources of Solzhenitsyn's philosophical and aesthetic views.

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.

I concur with Professor Meyer that Communist area studies must rejoin the main lines of the discipline of political science. An unfortunate methodological separation has existed much too long, a separation that might be figuratively characterized as a “loose, bipolar system,” with Sovietology at one pole and systematic political science at the other. The schism between Kremlinology, deductive reasoning, and, frequently, spectral evidence, on the one side, and scientific concept formation, empiricism, verification, and theory-construction, on the other, must come to an end. Professor Meyer's paper is a contribution toward this objective, both on its own merits and for the critical discussion that it will undoubtedly stimulate.

In March 1921 Lenin predicted, “If there is a harvest, everybody will hunger a little and the government will be saved. Otherwise, since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means to satisfy their own hunger, the government will perish.“ By early summer, Russia was in the grip of one of the worst famines in its history. Lenin's gloomy forecast, however, was never put to the test. At almost the last moment, substantial help in the form of food, clothing, and medical supplies arrived from a most unexpected source —U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

Hoover undertook the relief of Soviet Russia not as an official representative of the United States government but as the head of a private agency —the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.).

This essay examines Sergei Tret’iakov’s and Dmitrii Prigov’s turn to the newspaper in their search for a symbolic form adequate to the geopolitical flux at the beginning and endpoints of Soviet history. Fusing the epic and the sublime with the modernist montage principle, both present the newspaper as embodying simultaneously totalizing and disintegrative imaginings of space. Reflecting his avant-gardist and statist commitments, Tret’iakov’s newspaper-epic and ocherk journalism figure the tension between socialist internationalism and socialism in one country and between federal and centralist models of the state. Prigov’s newspaper art embodies the contrary pressures of resurgent nationalisms and globalization in perestroika-era and post-Soviet Russia. Having linked the decline of print culture to the Soviet Union’s demise, Prigov addresses the return of an imperial Russian spatial imaginary by highlighting how the tension between spatial boundlessness and totality in the print newspaper anticipates and complicates the information sublime of the digital age.

Lev Tolstoi had originally intended to open Anna Karenina with a scene in Princess Betsy’s salon, later moved to part 2 of the novel, in which the work’s central themes are all touched on in the conversation of the gathered guests. This introductory discussion primarily concerns illicit liaisons, but alongside the talk of adultery, one guest states, “The theme is everything. Once one has a theme, it is easy to embroider on it” (121). These words obliquely acknowledge a debt to one of the novel’s sources, Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” a story about improvisation in which that art is conceived not merely as the instantaneous or impromptu invention we usually think of, but even more importantly as the appropriation of someone else’s topic. Anna Karenina, and some of Tolstoi’s later works as well, make important borrowings from Pushkin’s story about borrowing, employing both themes from “Egyptian Nights” and therefore the methods of the Italian improvisor in it.

The relatonship between wage and price levels is clearly an appropriate subject for study in a number of comparisons of relative wellbeing. In measuring real wage changes within any economy, for example, we must measure the relative changes in these two levels over a specified time period. If there has been no drastic change in the number of dependents per wage earner, the measure of real wage changes should ordinarily give us some indication of the change in the level of living. Likewise, a study of the relationship between wage and price levels in two economies as similar as those of the United States and Canada would also seem to produce meaningful results. But what happens when we attempt to compare price and wage levels for economies where the institutional differences are very considerable?

A letter from I. I. Panaev dated February 10, 1847, brought to Turgenev, then in Berlin, much literary gossip and some news concerning the Contemporary. Panaev, together with Nekrasov, had recently taken over the magazine. The January and February issues included the first short stories by Turgenev. They were well received, wrote Panaev. He thought that the third issue also, then in preparation, “would not be too bad.” It would include, among other contributions, the first part of a novel by Gončarov. “Gončarov,” added Panaev, “beams and quivers with delight while reading the proofs, but tries very hard to look indifferent.” The novel was Gončarov's first published work, The Usual Story. According to Belinskij's testimony, the novel had an “unprecedented success” and “made a sensation in Petersburg.”

The precise nature of Russian-American diplomatic relations during the War for American Independence has always presented a problem for historians. On the one hand, the Declaration of Armed Neutrality by Catherine II in February 1780 seemed to represent an effort to limit British sovereignty on the seas, and news of its promulgation was greeted with enthusiasm in the struggling American colonies. But on the other hand, the reception by the Russian empress of Francis Dana, the American envoy (1781-83) sent to St. Petersburg in the aftermath of the declaration to obtain Russian aid, was far from hospitable, and was in part responsible for the strained diplomatic relations between the two nations for several years thereafter. This contradiction, more apparent than real, prompted Frank A. Golder, one of America's first historians of Russia, to call for more research in the area of Russian-American relations.

In the first days of 1938, Kalman Kanya, Hungary’s foreign minister, privately expressed the opinion that there was nowhere in Europe a “will to war” and that, barring accidents, peace seemed assured for at least a year. In a technical sense Kanya’s prediction was borne out by events, but he clearly did not foresee the Central European upheavals that were only months away. In the crisis over the Austrian Anschluss, Hungary was to remain a powerless bystander, unable, and to a certain extent unwilling, to raise a voice of protest. The Czechoslovak crisis was an entirely different matter. Virtually all politically conscious Hungarians believed that Prague’s time of troubles should be exploited to obtain territorial revision and strengthen Hungary’s position in East Central Europe. But, as previous historians of this subject have indicated, Hungary’s course in the unfolding Czechoslovak crisis was hesitant and indecisive.

During most of the Soviet industrialization period, consumer goods enterprises and the distribution network could rest assured that almost any consumer product—any size, color, style, and quality—would be sold if offered to the public. This was the nature of the market during that period; the sellers held the upper hand, and they tried to fulfill their plans without being concerned much about the demands of buyers. But in the postwar period, especially after the death of Stalin, the production of consumer goods and personal incomes increased simultaneously, and gradually more and more consumer demands were answered. A concern for consumer welfare was emerging. With the advent of buyers’ market conditions, no longer were all consumer goods that arrived on the market automatically sold; inventories accumulated and the problems of the trade network multiplied.

In a recent article in this journal Brym and Degtyarev made a number of claims about the dangers of anti-Semitism in Moscow. On the basis of a telephone survey conducted in 1992, they concluded their analysis with these ominous admonishments: "The evidence thus suggests that some large categories of Moscow's population hold attitudes that are authoritarian, xenophobic, illiberal on social issues and, of course, anti-Semitic. Given the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the city, Moscow's 150,000 Jews and the 300,000 in the rest of Russia have reason to be anxious." These are serious and important findings, suffused with both theoretical and policy implications. It is therefore important to have a careful look at their data, analysis and substantive conclusions.

Works of broad historical synthesis have been rare in all periods and all countries. Modern Russian historiography is not an exception. Among the Russian historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only three names can be cited as coming under this head: Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevski. And of these three Klyuchevski occupies a position which is, in a sense, unique. Karamzin, the “Columbus of Russian history” as Pushkin has called him, discovered that subject for the general reader to whom he appealed more than to the specialists in the field. By no means a mere dilettante, as he has been so often pictured, he still was primarily a great literary artist, and only in the second place a scholar. His importance lay more in the field of general Russian culture than in that of historical scholarship. On the contrary, Solovyov has remained essentially a historian for historians. Devoid of literary brilliance, and lacking in architectonic ability, he has left us the twenty-nine volumes of his History of Russia from the Earliest Times, to be consulted with the help of the index rather than to be read through and enjoyed. Both the size and the arrangement of his monumental work have given it a somewhat forbidding nature. For a casual reader his general conception of Russian history is hidden behind the mass of detailed material, for the most part presented in a strictly chronological order. Of the three masters of Russian historiography, Klyuchevski alone combines a great literary skill, rivaling that of Karamzin, with profound scholarship, not inferior to that of Solovyov; hence his simultaneous and equally powerful appeal to the general reader and the specialist.