After a long period of considerable discrimination and abuse neutrality has now regained a semblance of legitimacy as a valid principle of international law and international relations. This recent transfiguration of a concept, which only fourteen years ago was being reviled as morally reprehensible, can be credited to a wide variety of diplomatic developments, such as, for example, Cold War tensions, the newly won independence of former colonial possessions, and others. In great part, too, it can be explained by the strenuous sponsorship lately exerted on its behalf in world affairs by the leaders of the Soviet regime. In effect, the latter now take the initiative, at every possible opportunity, in generously lavishing praise and support on the neutrality of the so-called “bourgeois” nations in all its various manifestations.

Russia's balance of trade (torgovyi balans) and balance of payments (raschetnyi balans) were matters of great concern to the tsarist government before and after the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. Tsarist officials feared that the gold reserves required to maintain (or to go on) the gold standard would be lost if payments abroad exceeded receipts. Moreover, there was concern over the potential loss of political and economic independence if the government had to borrow abroad regularly in order to cover international payments deficits. Russia's foreign policy toward France and Germany was affected significantly by this consideration. Thus, considerable importance rested on the reported estimates of these two balances.

The social conditions for scientific work in the Stalin era are often assumed to have been patterned more or less after Lysenkoism and Soviet genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Much less is known about other areas of Soviet science in the same period. Were Lysenkoism and the fate of genetics typical or atypical of what was happening in other areas of Soviet science under Stalin? The case of Vladimir I. Vernadskii, an earth scientist, and his scientific school in the years between 1928 and 1945 documents the survival and development of an important tradition very different from that of Lysenkoism and suggests something about the mentality of one segment of the scientific intelligentsia with strong ties to prerevolutionary Russian science. The fate of the Vernadskii school suggests something of the diversity and complexity of Soviet science, even during the worst years of the Stalinist regime and illuminates some of the ways Soviet scientists like Vernadskii were able to protect their scientific enterprises and continue a critical tradition in Russian science despite political interference.

Despite some early critical reservations, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has become one of the icons of postrevolutionary Russian literature. The bibliography of scholarly commentary on the work—mostly adulatory, and in some cases even hagiographical—is vast. Bulgakov has become, especially for western critics, the epitome of the artistmartyr. Persecuted by the Soviet writing establishment, he was able, through his long suppressed satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (published for the first time in 1966-67), to survive and turn the tables—aesthetically and morally speaking—on his former oppressors. Life is short, art is long; or as Woland expressed it, manuscripts do not burn.

Indeed, there is ample justification for such a hagiographical approach. By 1928, when Bulgakov was drafting the first plans for The Master and Margarita, his literary prospects were already growing dim. In the 1930s, no longer able to publish original fiction, he survived by adapting works for the theater and by translating.

On 6 July 1874, the government of Alexander II published an edict announcing the formation of a mounted Bashkir squadron in the Orenburg guberniia. The modest scale of the endeavor—a squadron-sized element added little to Russian military strength—belied its historic importance. The Bashkirs, in 1874, stood at a watershed in their long history of military service to Russia marking the divide between decades of irregular frontier duty and inclusion in the ranks of the regular army. The evolution of Bashkir military formations, paralleling the course of social change, offers a most instructive case in little-studied aspects of imperial policy towards subject national minorities and their employment in the armed forces in particular. A virtually forgotten component in Russia's rich military tradition, the contribution of “native” units organized among the inorodtsy of the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Asia was indeed significant.

In this article, Anna Wexler Katsnelson focuses on Grigorii Aleksandrov's musical comedy, 'Svetlyi put' (The Radiant Path, 1940) as a way of investigating the modes of screening laughter in the USSR in the 1930s and exploring the reasons for the film's gradual disavowal of laughter. The key questions posed by the article are why does laughter disappear from the nominally comedic, purposefully merry Svetlyi put'? Where is its affective energy redirected? And, finally, is laughter on film at all possible under the conditions of high Stalinism?

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel‘nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost' to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

Richard Pipes's contribution to our understanding of Russian history has been substantial and my own interest in Russian history dates from taking his course on imperial Russia in college some thirty years ago. It is thus only with great reluctance that I would disagree with him. Nevertheless, I respectfully submit that his response to my article suffers not only from insufficient evidence but also from serious conceptual flaws.

According to my definitions, any society must combine “science,” “technology,” and “design” whenever it creates useful material objects. Science establishes principles which technology (with some admixture of common sense, and guidance from economics) embodies in physical components through manufacture. Design attends to the composition and arrangement of these components, as well as to the appearance and balance of qualities of the assembled product, with a view to satisfying consumers and other users. Given a conception of three essentially distinct elements, imports of advanced equipment by the USSR do not necessarily signify an inability to create original designs. The intention might rather be to put certain designs into production, using processes not offered by indigenous technology.

In this article Barbara Walker examines the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie in the Moscow human rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some participants in that movement have expressed emotional satisfaction in the belief that they were motivated by the desire for self-giving; but that belief has sometimes been received with doubt. Walker uncovers the social phenomenon of a charity movement for the benefit of political prisoners that, she argues, lies near the social and emotional heart of the human rights movement. An important theme of the charity movement, whether real or constructed, is emotional purification of a sense of personal and social contamination stemming from participation in what some experienced as corruption in Soviet state and society. This article draws on ideas of spiritual atonement and salvation through altruism as explanatory cultural factors in this phenomenon.

The United States and bulgaria stood in opposing camps during World War I. Although at war with each other's allies, they nevertheless maintained normal diplomatic relations throughout the hostilities. The explanation of this anomaly lies in the fact that both countries were guided by expediency rather than principle in formulating their mutual policies. While the Bulgarian leaders hoped by maintaining relations with the United States and appealing to Wilsonian principles to insure Bulgaria against the consequences of a possible defeat, the American policy-makers viewed Bulgaria as the weakest link in the chain of Germany's allies whose removal from the Central Alliance might expedite victory.

When, on February 3, 1917, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, President Woodrow Wilson was already formulating his famous political strategy of trying to drive a wedge between the German people and the German Government by expressing continued friendship for the former and deep hostility to the latter.

In 1940, there were only 400 television sets in the Soviet Union. By 1950, there were 10,000; a decade later, some 4.8 million. Then in the five years between 1965 and 1970, the availability of television sets more than doubled, and by 1976, Soviet industry was producing 7 million sets annually. In 1960, only 5 percent of the Soviet population could watch television, but by 1986 that figure had risen to 93 percent, and television signals could be received in more than 86 percent of the territory of the U.S.S.R. Nearly all the households that are unable to receive television are in sparsely settled rural areas, mainly Siberia.

Although television is a relative newcomer to the Soviet media system, it has exerted an enormous effect on leisure time use. It has also reoriented patterns of information acquisition. Of the events in the world abroad covered by the Soviet media 86 percent are known to people through television, 77 percent through the newspaper, and 62 percent from radio.

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

Throughout the 1920s and into the years of Stalinism, progressive architects in the Soviet Union sought to construct new forms of housing and settlement that would offer the best of modern technology and whose design would include provisioning of services that would allow all citizens, especially women, to partake in creative work. Schools, dining facilities, laundries, parks, cinemas, clubs and housing in a choice of styles formed the core of these architectural dreams. In the tradition of the Populists, modernist architects initially saw themselves as teachers but some came to appreciate the necessity of listening and began to learn from worker assessments of housing and urban design. This communication formed the basis for bridging, at least in housing, the cultural gap between revolutionary elites and common people. Inherent in the modernist movement in architecture, as reflected most eloquently in the work of the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA), was a greater democratization of political and social life.

Nabokov’s The Gift opens with the mock specificity of a date: 1 April 192-, which immediately, we are informed, calls attention to the Russian novelistic practice of “honest fictionality.” The long metaliterary excursus draws attention away from the specificity of one particular date, which the author, as it were, refuses to complete: on 1 April 1922 Nabokov’s father, the respected statesman Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was buried in Berlin, three days after his heroic, though fortuitous death in a right-wing assassination attempt on a former Kadet ally, P.N. Miliukov.

Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandel'shtam's most autobiographically engaged masterpiece of the 1930s is no ordinary journey.2 Written in Moscow during the summer of 1931, a year after his six-month sojourn in Armenia and Georgia, this contemplative journey adheres to an “itinerary” shaped by the path Mandel'shtam followed both in his quest for truth—“that truth which helps us to form a better sense of ourselves in tradition”—and in his search for a method to articulate that truth—a “method of creative cognition, a suitable means of gaining a sense of life.” His “method of creative cognition” mediates between the poet's contemplation of contemporary reality and his meditation on the mystery of creation, or the creative impulse, whose origins he seeks in the deepest structures of language and legend, whose eternal principles he ponders in the organic phenomena of nature, and whose multiplicity of expression he experiences in the art, architecture, and archaeology of Armenia.