It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.

At the beginning of the twentieth century St. Petersburg fell victim to a wave of petty crimes and violence. Starting around 1900 the press began to report an increasing number of cases of annoying public rowdiness, drunkenness, rock throwing, shouting of obscenities, and the like. Soon more serious crimes were added to this list: armed assault, robbery, and brawling. None of these crimes was new and they seem to have had little in common with one another, yet they were all lumped together and collectively portrayed as a new urban blight.

This disparate assortment of offenses was dubbed hooliganism, and the word—imported from England where it recently had been coined—was quickly absorbed into Russian usage. Between 1900 and 1905 hooliganism received a substantial amount of attention in the popular press, where by 1905, it had been transformed from a vaguely defined and relatively isolated phenomenon—one crime among many—into a social problem of serious proportions. Hooliganism had become a sign of urban social disintegration and a symbol of the “degeneracy” and “danger” of the urban lower classes.

In recent years, there has been a minor explosion of interest in Aleksandr Bogdanov and other radical Russian intellectuals of pre-Stalinist days. After being in limbo for half a century, their ideas seem almost fresh and vibrant: Set against subsequent Soviet history, their aborted visions of a socialist future seem to give a sense of what might have been. And who knows—in the Gorbachev period, as the Soviet Union sorts out its problems and policies, some of their ideas might enjoy a new lease on life. For these and other reasons, they have recently attracted special interest.

Of course, in Bogdanov's case, there is much to be interested in. Born Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Malinovskii in 1873, Bogdanov trained as a physician in Moscow and Khar'kov, worked briefly as a psychiatrist, and published widely on philosophy, politics, social theory, social psychology, economics, and culture.

Maksim M. Litvinov was the most colorful and controversial of the major European diplomats in the 1930s. As Henry Roberts has observed, Litvinov's “chubby and unproletarian figure radiated an aura of robust and businesslike common sense that was in striking contrast to the enigmatic brutality of the Politburo.” But this cultured and reflective man served that Politburo for the better part of his life, and he did so until his disillusionment overwhelmed him, and he made a complete break with the policies of the Soviet leadership. The obvious question is why Litvinov continued this bizarre relationship so long—one between the cosmopolitan “citizen of Geneva” and the reclusive and often violent men in the Kremlin. A definitive answer is, of course, impossible given the sources, but a clue can be found in an examination of Litvinov before the Bolshevik Revolution, a topic that has received virtually no attention from western scholars. As will be shown, the rotund and cooly analytical diplomat was for a considerable period of time a man wholly dedicated to violent revolution—and not just in the abstract. Litvinov was one of the apparatchiki of the movement who was not afraid to get his hands dirty in the sometimes messy business of fomenting revolution. Litvinov changed greatly over the course of his life, but it seems clear that for a few decades he was never fully able to repudiate these early years. Therefore he remained at his post, continuing to serve the government that sprang from the revolution, even as his own disillusionment grew.

The Yugoslavs are infected by what calls the disease of “historical optimism.” Shocks, emanating from the international economy over the last decade or so, were seen as a developmental problem or, at worst, a transitory difficulty. This argument seems to follow these lines: Contemporary capitalism, of course, is doomed to collapse sooner or later; contemporary etatism is also in a state of crisis and will evolve toward Yugoslav self-management socialism. The socialism of self-management, however, could not itself be in crisis, because, if it is in crisis, what is left?

In fact the word crisis was not used to describe the state of the Yugoslav economy until September 1982 when it was discovered that foreign debt could not be serviced and required rescheduling. By then the Yugoslav foreign debt was $20 billion, the unemployment rate stood at 10 percent to 16 percent (depending how you measure it), and inflation was at 40 percent. Only then did the policymakers realize that these problems were a consequence of prolonged economic mismanagement, excessive borrowing abroad, arbitrary decision making, and an autarchic economic policy in general.

I would like to begin this investigation of Pushkinian thematics with a fable, or better perhaps, a parable of my own making.

Once upon a time in the land of Rus’ there lived two brothers. And although they were sired by a noble father and reared as befits the sons of a nobleman, they differed from each other as the day differs from the night, for the elder brother was tall and fairhaired and born of a Russian princess, while the younger brother was swarthy, small, and the bastard son of a dark-skinned barbarian maiden.

As the boys grew up, to these bodily differences were added spiritual ones. For the elder brother was a dutiful son, who honored his parents and heeded his teachers and obeyed the laws of the land. After coming of age he traveled to the capital city and learned the ways of the imperial court and found favor in the eyes of the tsar.

The Bolsheviks created a new system for the production and distribution of the printed word to replace the prerevolutionary print media. This innovation was in many respects the most remarkable of the early revolutionary years, since it led to the radical dichotomy between public and private codes of behavior that has plagued Soviet society ever since.

The central feature of the new information system was a publishing monopoly, with corresponding prepublication censorship of all reading material. The link between producers and consumers that the market had provided was cut, and Bolshevik publishers did not have to offer what consumers wished to read. The result was to alter abruptly the flow of printed information and particularly the flow to and from the lower levels of the reading public.

Shortly before Lenin's death in early 1924, the Thirteenth Party Conference undertook an ambitious program to recruit thousands of workers into the Communist party. Subsequently known as the Lenin Levy—in memory, ironically, of the party's main adversary of mass worker recruitments—this campaign, which was repeated in 1925 and 1927, marked a key stage in the social and organizational history of the Soviet Communist party, for it brought the party into close contact with the shop floor for the first time since 1917.

Western historians are divided over the significance to be attached to this episode. Many echo the views held by prominent party leftists that worker recruitments were a cosmetic response to the problem of bureaucratism and a convenient means to swamp the party with members obedient to the secretariat.

Geography and history textbooks used in Serbia contributed to the origins of World War I in probably the first instance in which one country used the contents of textbooks as one of its justifications for declaring war on another. Much has been published about Austro-Hungarian reactions to provocative statements by prominent individuals in Serbian newspapers and journals; however, no study has been made of the textbooks to which reference is made in the Habsburg ultimatum of 23 July 1914. The ultimatum listed ten specific demands, including one for the suppression of publications that incited “hatred and contempt” of the monarchy and threatened its “territorial integrity.” Point three, which is the focus of this study, called for the elimination “without delay from public instruction in Serbia both as regards the teaching body and the methods of instruction, all that serves or might serve to foment propaganda against Austria-Hungary.“

Alexander Musulin, the counselor in the foreign ministry who drafted the ultimatum, characterized the Serbian reply as “the most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill that I know.” It stated in essence that Serbia was ready to satisfy Austria-Hungary's demand upon receiving proof of the charges. Concerning textbooks, the reply noted that Austria “made no representation except one concerning a schoolbook, and that on that occasion the Imperial and Royal Government received an entirely satisfactory explanation.”

In 1967 Irina Grekova's story “Na ispytaniiakh” was published in Novyi mir. The story depicts a unit of the Red Army on maneuvers in the summer of 1952 in a backwoods area of Russia. Grekova refrained from using the usual gloss reserved for such institutions as the Red Army and within several months was forced to resign from her job as professor of mathematics at the Zhukovskii Military Academy. The story was attacked by the party and, on orders of General Aleksei Epishev, chief of the political administration of the army, banned from army libraries. Twenty years later, in 1986, “Na ispytaniiakh” reappeared in a collection of Grekova's works entitled Porogi. The recent version of the story has been subject to various editorial changes, most of which concern the Stalin years. These revisions illuminate the party's changing attitude towards the Stalin era and specifically show which facets of Stalinism the party was more open about during the late Chcrnenko–early Gorbachev era and which were still too sensitive to be discussed openly.

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.

Many Bolsheviks heralded the October Revolution of 1917 as the beginning of a new era in history; by 1921, however, much of this optimism had disappeared. Civil war, peasant rebellion, empty factories, closed schools, strikes in the industrial establishments that had survived, and the Kronstadt Revolt made many party members weary and cynical. A few, however, stubbornly adhered to an untarnished vision of a grand future. They could be found especially among those officials responsible for primary and secondary schools at the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros). Anatolii V. Lunacharskii, commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929; Nadezhda K. Krupskaia, his chief assistant for school policy; and their colleagues still believed that they possessed the means to reshape not only the schools but also human behavior and society. While the party engineered a calculated retreat with the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the state slashed the educational budget, Narkompros remained determined to challenge the present and storm the future. It did so by launching a program of sweeping changes in the content and methods of school instruction. With a faith it hoped was infectious, Narkompros assumed that teachers would follow its lead. It would not be so simple.

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.

In 1927 Nikolai Zabolotskii first began making public appearances with the young Leningrad poets Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii. Kharms and Vvedenskii had been allied in an informal group called the Chinari, a name Kharms intended to signify “enfants terribles.“ In the autumn of 1927, however, they decided to join with Zabolotskii in the OBERIU (Ob“edinenie real'nogo iskusstva). The nucleus of this group was composed of Zabolotskii, Kharms, Vvedenskii, Konstantin Vaginov, Igor’ Bakhterev, and Boris Levin, although at various times others participated in the OBERIU performances. It was not necessarily easy to become allied with the group: Kharms and Zabolotskii would test the creative potential of candidates by having them answer questions like “Where is your nose?” and “What is your favorite dish?“

The OBERIU held readings in dormitories and military sections and at the Union of Poets and the Institute of the History of the Arts.

Although Prince Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii served as minister of the interior of Russia for only five months beginning on 25 August 1904, he nearly managed a volte-face in the government's relationship to society. The dimensions of his plans for reform during this crucial period have not been thoroughly explored. While his conciliatory attitude toward the zemstva is well known, less familiar is his intention to broaden civil liberties and anchor them firmly in the law, an intention expressed in a memorandum he submitted to Nicholas II on 23 November 1904. In that memorandum Mirskii recommended a whole range of measures designed to restore harmony between government and society— from the extension of basic civil liberties and the broadening of local zemstvo and municipal council authority to the curbing of the Okhrana regime and the restoration of proper legislative and administrative procedures within the government.

When Chingiz Aitmatov's Plakha first appeared in Novyi mir in 1986 many readers here were astounded at the uncanny ability of this established author to ride the wave of the future. This sensational novel, with its stark portrayal of the drug trade, exploitation of the environment, and social alienation in the Soviet Union, was seen by many as the ultimate expression of newfound creative freedoms under Mikhail Gorbachev. For all its seeming novelty, however, Aitmatov's venture into the area of exposé literature has not been an isolated incident. Plakha is only one of a number of recent Soviet novels that focus exclusively on the ills of contemporary Soviet society.

The appearance of exposé literature under glasnost could be viewed simply as a direct effect of the loosening of controls under Gorbachev. Its emergence at this time, however, is actually the result of a whole complex of factors, only one political. Soviet literature has already dealt with such issues as the environment, impending nuclear catastrophe, and a disappearing national memory. These issues, in fact, form the thematic core of the trend of fantastic literature that immediately preceded glasnost and ushered in fundamental changes in Soviet literary discourse. This article is an attempt to examine four Soviet novels that appeared before the era of glasnost. My purpose is to elucidate the nature of the changes occurring in Soviet literature in the mid-1970s and early 1980s and the contribution of this literature to glasnost.

On Friday, 30 August 1918, the day M. S. Uritskii, chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, was assassinated, Lenin was scheduled to address the Corn Exchange in the Basmannyi district of Moscow at 6:00 P.M. and the Mikhelson Armaments Factory in the Serpukhovskii section later. The first speech passed without incident; at the Mikhelson factory he gave the same fifteen-to-twenty minute speech he had delivered at the Corn Exchange, an attack on the forces of counterrevolution. In both locations he concluded his speech with the words “there is only one issue, victory or death!” As Lenin returned to his car in the factory courtyard, three shots were fired and he fell to the ground with bullet wounds in his left shoulder and the left side of his neck; the third bullet hit a woman standing nearby. The workers accompanying him to his car ran off, crying, “they've killed him, they've killed him!” and the crowded courtyard emptied quickly.

On 26 November 1921, Lenin sent a note to Viacheslav M. Molotov, for transmission to the Politburo, requesting that it appoint Gregorii Iakovlevich Sokolnikov a member of the Board of the People's Commissariat of Finance (PCF). The next day the Politburo approved this suggestion. Nikolai Krestinskii, the Left Communist who had served as people's commissar of finance since July 1918 and who oversaw the virtual dismantling of that ministry, had become the Soviet diplomatic representative in Germany. Although he would formally hold the title of people's commissar of finance until December 1922, Krestinskii had ceased to play a role in the PCF a year earlier. Sokolnikov quickly took over the ministry, especially after he became deputy commissar in January, at which time Lenin wrote Sokolnikov saying that he was “actually in charge of the most important people's commissariat.” Thus, although Sokolnikov officially became people's commissar of finance only in December 1922, he was de facto, if not de jure, in control from the beginning of 1922.