The Moscow Station in Petrograd was the scene of a familiar ritual of the Revolution late on the night of March 20, 1917 — the triumphant return of exiled revolutionary leaders. The red banners on the locomotive from Irkutsk read “Train of the Social Democratic Deputies of the Second Duma.” On board were the legendary leader of the arrested Social Democratic faction, the Georgian Menshevik I. G. Tsereteli, and a group of his followers known as the Siberian Zimmerwaldists. They were experienced in revolutionary politics, closely knit, and completely dedicated to the policies and leadership of Tsereteli. Within ten days of their arrival in the capital, these men would take control of the bloc of Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries which held the majority in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the First All-Russian Conference of Soviets. In the coming months they would provide effective, often forceful leadership for the Soviets, guiding them by a new and distinctive political strategy which they called Revolutionary Defensism.

The artist Kazimir Malevich once called Vladimir Maiakovskii's lyric “Iz ulitsy v ulitsu” the best example of “versified cubism.“ Although Maiakovskii's early poetry has often been linked to developments in the pictorial arts, the precise nature of this connection requires more detailed examination. Investigation of the role of the visual arts in a literary interpretation appears exceptionally intriguing considering that Malevich, both a contemporary of Maiakovskii and a painter of high caliber, paid special tribute to this poem in painterly terms.

Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales, “Three Deaths,” War and Peace, “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich. There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer.

The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.

One of the dilemmas of revolutionary regimes is the difficulty they experience in creating new structures of rule out of resources inherited from the ancien regime. In Russia, the Bolsheviks came to power dedicated to building a socialist society and creating new institutions whose forms were predicated on an unfolding theory of how the transition to socialism would occur. Such a method of shaping institutions was deductive and synoptic, standing in sharp contrast to the evolutionary adaptation of old institutions to new functions. One may wonder how free revolutionary regimes in fact are to construct institutions a novo. The early Bolshevik attempt to establish “control” structures, that is, institutions and procedures for the external auditing and monitoring of economic and other public organizations, is a case in point. Of interest are the extent to which the Bolsheviks were successful in creating effective control bodies and the reasons behind their success or failure.

The range of topics that Vladimir Odoevski treated in his fiction and journalistic pieces is impressive. His interests embraced what we today think of as the more or less discrete categories of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. His acquaintances referred to him as “the Russian Faust.“ Included in his oeuvre is a substantial body of music criticism, and indeed, he may rightly be considered Russia's first music critic. Odoevskii's opera criticism, an admittedly narrow topic, is the subject of this article.

There is good reason for concentrating on Odoevskii's writings about opera. For the operaphile there is the vicarious pleasure (and occasional mortification) of sharing a musically literate listener's reactions to then contemporary or nearly contemporary masterpieces by Mozart, Gluck, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, and others. On a less visceral level, an acquaintance with Odoevskii's opera criticism enhances our overall appreciation of the broad patterns underlying Odoevskii's complete literary output as well as Russian cultural history in the nineteenth century.

The large role which literary allusion plays in The Brothers Karamazov has often been noted by critics. Ralph Matlaw calls the novel “one of the most ‘literary’ books ever written.” Victor Terras more recently has observed that “more than any other novel of Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov is a work ‘written in the margins of other books.’” If scholars took the time to investigate in detail every literary reference in this novel, no doubt the size of current Dostoevskii bibliographies could be doubled within the year, though without contributing substantially to our knowledge of the work. Why then should a lone reference to the biblical story of Joseph merit intensive consideration? The answer concerns both the context and the content of the reference, which is found in the subchapter entitled “Of the Holy Scriptures in the life of Father Zosima.” The bible stories mentioned in this section might be considered as a body in order to illustrate what role the Scriptures have played in the elder's life, and what role they may play in the regeneration of all men. Within this subchapter no fewer than a dozen biblical stories and books are singled out, yet only two are discussed at any length: the Book of Job and the story of Joseph. In the latter case not only is the story paraphrased and quoted (or, better, misquoted) but it is also given a particular and untraditional interpretation by Zosima.

Eurasianism, the theory that Russia was neither Europe nor Asia but a world unto itself, Eurasia, runs through much, if not all, of George Vernadsky's enormous scholarly output. Eurasianism was the fuel of his impressive productivity, the central, unifying theme of his varied investigations of Russian, Byzantine, and Inner Asian history. Despite the high esteem in which Vernadsky came to be held, there have been few examinations of his contributions to historical knowledge. Yet Vernadsky's career and his scholarship have much to tell us of the fate of the Imperial Russian historiographic tradition in the twentieth century.

Vernadsky is most often associated with the theme of the significance of the Mongols in Russian history. Vernadsky's observations on this topic over the course of his nearly sixty-year career provide an excellent medium for understanding the ambiguities of his adherence to Eurasianism and for tracing the evolution of his Eurasianism in response to the different political and cultural environments in which he worked. As we shall see, the assumption of his eulogists that Vernadsky's Eurasianism was static is too simplistic, while the equally facile conclusion that Vernadsky gradually tempered the extremist elements of Eurasianism is too imprecise to be satisfactory. Indeed, the development of Vernadsky's historical concepts is far more complex than has hitherto been appreciated.

Each of the foregoing articles deals with a separate department of Soviet government. Thomas Remington’s State Control Commissariat began as an agency for auditing accounts; David Christian’s procuracy has always had the task of checking on the legality of the government’s operation. In practice the two departments seem to have been doing the same thing: sending out agents with virtually arbitrary power in the hope that they will make the government’s operating departments obey the government’s rules and perform their tasks with maximum efficiency. Remington refers to this activity as control. Christian calls it supervision. Christian’s term monitoring comes close to describing both activities.

Preliminary results from the 1979 Soviet census reveal that non-Slavic minorities make up over a quarter of the populace. Ethnic diversity has been and will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, an important consideration in Soviet policy making. Analysis of nationality trends is thus a key aspect of Western study of Soviet domestic politics. Assessment of Soviet labor force prospects, for example, depends in part on the occupational skills, Russian fluency, and geographical mobility of the Soviets of Muslim heritage in the fast-growing southern tier of the USSR. Soviet military capabilities will be increasingly affected by a rising proportion of Muslims of draft age. In addition, long-term population projections hinge on an evaluation of how rapidly these same groups will exhibit the low fertility associated with demographic modernization.

Ezra Pound once remarked that “the history of English poetic glory is a history of successful steals from the French.“ To a certain degree, the same can be said of Russian poetry, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, when the process of literary development paid little attention to national boundaries. The Acmeists, for example, owe many of their aesthetic and stylistic principles to French poets of at least three chronological periods: the medieval troubadours, the Parnassians, and, most obviously, the Symbolists. French influence did not cease with Baudelaire and Verlaine, however. The impact of the next generation of French poets was also felt in Russia, and the parallels between French Post-symbolism and Russian Acmeism are significant. Whereas Symbolism has long been acknowledged as a world-wide artistic phenomenon, the international scope of the movement which succeeded it has received little attention. In fact, Post-symbolism was also a movement of international proportions. In the first decades of the twentieth century, British and Russian poets looked to their contemporary French counterparts as a source of innovation and manifested their influence in two parallel independent movements — Anglo-American Imagism and Russian Acmeism. In exploring the transmission of French influence to Russia in the early twentieth century and the French sources of Acmeism, I hope to establish a basis for a comprehensive study of Post-symbolist poetry and for a more complete understanding of Acmeism.

No culture enjoys a perfect integration or a static equilibrium of its component traits. The diffusion of features of culture is a constant and crucial dynamic process. Acculturation, as a process of change dominated by the mutual influence of different cultures in close contact, is especially suited to interdisciplinary scrutiny. The study of acculturation is equally challenging for the linguist, the ethnographer, the anthropologist, and the historian interested in investigating processes and forms of cultural change, cultural integration, and causes for the selective receptivity of cultures.

The multinational character of Soviet society against the background of its socioeconomic and ideological homogeneity renders a special quality to the dynamic tension between unity and diversity, especially with regard to culture, cultural change, and integration. Consequently, an investigation of acculturation as a component of the broader ethnic processes is not only justified, but imperative.

Ten years have elapsed since the publication of my general directory of archival repositories in Moscow and Leningrad and six years since its first bibliographical supplement. Space does not allow a full review here of all the finding aids and related reference literature issued in subsequent years. Yet a number of significant new publications deserve attention. A further incentive for this review is the appearance — in the western Ukrainian center of Lviv — of an extensive new directory of Soviet archives and manuscript collections. The appearance of such a long overdue, basic reference tool immediately arouses considerable interest.

The publication of this volume in Lviv evokes a long and distinguished tradition of archival development and historical scholarship in Galicia. Yet the inherent problems and logistics of preparing a directory of all-union scope in Lviv might explain some of the problems of the volume, while its issue in Lviv, unfortunately, makes the volume more difficult to obtain in the West. Nevertheless, the breadth and scope of the contribution stand as a tribute to the vision and energy of the author-compilers from Lviv University, Iu. M. Grossman (Iu. M. Hrossman) and V. N. Kutik (V. N. Kutyk). A detailed review of the Lviv directory can here also draw attention to other recently published archival reference aids and recent Soviet archival developments in general background literature and bibliography and in Grossman and Kutik's coverage of specific institutions and their finding aids.