Sources of the first half of the fourteenth century provide evidence that a sharp rift in institutional continuity occurred in Muscovy. This rift constituted a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" in the evolutionary development of the Rus' political system. The political institutional structure inherited from the Vladimir-Suzdal' component of Kievan Rus' ended abruptly, and, concomitantly, a new political structure similar to that of the Kipchak Khanate was established. I contend in this article that the Muscovite princes introduced Mongol political and military institutions into Muscovy on a wide scale during the first half of the fourteenth century.

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.

Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has resulted in an astounding flood of hitherto forbidden foreign classics. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories, and James Joyce's Ulysses were all published during 1988-1989, and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Saul Bellow's Herzog, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Chaim Nachum Bialik, and Czeslaw Milosz have all been promised for 1990.' It is as if permission were given, a list of forbidden books were consulted, translations were commissioned, and the books were published. In the case of Joyce, for example, Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and Ulysses was published in 1989. Surely, it would seem, the Russian Ulysses was a child of glasnost.

At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks appeared to enjoy considerable social support. They were perceived as the proponents of soviet power; support for the Bolshevik party meant support for soviet power. The majority of workers (especially those in large industrial centers) identified with the Bolsheviks because they promoted greater workers’ control at the workplace. The Bolsheviks were perceived as uncompromising defenders of workers’ interests. For the peasants, the Bolsheviks represented a party of black repartition, that is a party that encouraged peasant land seizures. For the soldiers, the Bolsheviks were a party that promised to stop the war. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks exemplified direct rule from below, the rule of Soviets. All of these diverse constituencies converged in their support for the Bolshevik party at the end of 1917, each for a different reason.

Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the "Revolution from Above." Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.' The history of the massive automotive complex at Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in microcosm the many problems that often bedeviled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed up in Moscow.

Stavrogin is an immense and bewildering character. In the opinion of Konstantin Mochulskii, he is "Dostoevsky's greatest artistic creation." He is complex and mysterious—and frightening because plausible. There is much more to him than the obvious Byronic dimension, and we are clearly confronted by more than just another Russian hero who is bored, passive, and las de vivre. He is strikingly handsome, powerful, and brilliant—exceptional in every way—but a miserable failure as a human being. In the excluded chapter "At Tikhon's," Tikhon tells Stavrogin, "I was horrified to see your great unused powers had been so deliberately turned toward filth" (434). How can a person of such intelligence and talent fail so abjectly in life and do so little good but so much evil? This question obviously fascinated Dostoevskii who probed Stavrogin deeply, looking for the answer, and ended up with a character whose complexity is rare even for Dostoevskii.

The following article, a translation of an essay by Romanian historian David Prodan, summarizes his research concerning three and a half centuries of serfdom in Transylvania, a subject on which he has worked in minute detail for fifty years. The essay presents a global image of the Transylvanian variant of European serfdom, a variant that shows serfdom in its gravest form–that of personal servitude, in which the peasant is bound to both the lord and the soil–and considers how this bondage came about. In this brief introduction, I will place the essay within the context of Academician Prodan's writings and of other work on serfdom in Eastern Europe.

In recent years, scholars of international relations have realized how poor have been their predictions, based on relative military or economic strength, of the outcome of negotiations or disputes. The strong often do not prevail or must compromise to a surprising extent. The Soviet Union's relations with its six East European allies have also exhibited this phenomenon. Even during the period when Soviet leaders were committed to maintaining control over Eastern Europe as a vital underpinning of Soviet security, and despite the Soviet Union's disproportionate strength in the region, the East European states departed from Soviet wishes in a variety of ways. In the late 1980s, this departure, for a while, took the ironic form of Romania, the GDR, and Czechoslovakia flouting Soviet calls for reform.

Chingiz Aitmatov has long been a powerful figure in Soviet literature, but few critics in the west or the Soviet Union have treated him as a serious writer. Many of the reasons why Aitmatov's reputation is not commensurate with his achievement are clear enough; the few westerners who have bothered with Aitmatov tend to agree that he offers "a somewhat new mix from the old patterns of Soviet literature with an admixture of Central Asian lore, but the game he is playing is as old as socialist realism itself.

Communist governments have traditionally contended that "negative" phenomena, including drug abuse, were alien to socialism and could flourish only within the exploitation, moral depravity, and spiritual vacuousness of capitalism. Recent accounts in official media of Eastern Europe–often employing lurid and perhaps hyperbolic language–now admit that the New Socialist Man can, like his capitalist counterpart, become a victim of what the media themselves often call "narcomania."1 Regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, the U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia, to varying degrees, are willing to acknowledge the existence of drug abuse in their societies. A Soviet source explains why: "Concealing an illness will not make it go away; it will only drive it inward. We have come to realize that openness is needed in the struggle against drug addiction; that we must look the truth in the eye, no matter how unsavory it is.

Anna Akhmatova's Rekviem is a deceptively simple piece. Compared to the opacity and self-conscious literariness of Poema bez geroia, Rekviem seems transparent, much like Akhmatova's early lyrics, and appears to demand little in the way of commentary or elucidation.1 Its very form and scope, however, as well as the dates of its composition (1935-1961), identify it as a product of the "later Akhmatova"–the Akhmatova who resumed writing in the mid-1930s after a decade of relative poetic inactivity, the Akhmatova who created Poema bez geroia.

Ukrainian peasant women of the postemancipation Russian Empire, like their Russian counterparts, faced an oppressive patriarchal system in both family and village. Over the ages peasants strictly delineated tasks and functions according to gender and age in order to meet the demands of a predominantly agricultural economy. The precariousness of subsistence agriculture and the peasantry's burdensome obligations to family, community, and state reinforced inflexible and oppressive power relations in the village. Ukrainian peasants feared that any departure from the subordination of woman to man, child to parent, young to old, and weak to strong would threaten the existence of their society and culture.

Literary history has to some extent spoiled our apprehension of the work we know as Mertvye dushi. Thanks to the author's letters, his friends' memoirs, and the carefully assembled fragments of his projected sequel, we cannot escape the awareness that Nikolai Gogol' left the novel incomplete, unachieved.1 In fact, however, when viewed in the context of other works by Gogol', this "unfinished" novel is marked by a special type of closure and formal unity. The text is modeled on the riddle, particularly the type of riddle known as parable, and the illusion of open-endedness is designed to mock the thirst for an answer awakened by the enigma.

Recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction not only point in the creator's direction and thus to the realm beyond specific fiction, but they sometimes serve to set and mark local temporal and spatial conditions within the created universe. Invitation to a Beheading is probably the most convincing case in point. The novel's dimensions are defined almost exclusively through a thematic network, and even much of its plot is propelled by periodic devices, of which many are interlinked, and perhaps all are retroactive, if only because each serial occurrence must refer to its antecedent in order to keep the thematic circuit closed.

Early in March 1914 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her new acquaintance Vasilii Rozanov

Several features of this passage stamp it as characteristically Tsvetaevan: the emotional excess, the hero worship of her husband, the preoccupation with familial blood lines. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the quasi-mythical quality with which she imbues the figures of husband and child. Whereas Tsvetaeva's powers as a maker of myths are commonly acknowledged, the extent to which her mythmaking shaped her most intimate relationships has yet to be explored. In the case of her daughter, the mythic relationship assumed the dimensions of a Greek tragedy.

Until recently, the Soviet military establishment has tended to sanctify the essential elements of what it perceived to be the reasons for its success in the Great Fatherland War. Well beyond the familiar inclination of military organizations to plan for the last war, Soviet military leadership quite consciously and rather extensively has employed the past as a model to be used for the solution of contemporary problems. That the past has become so deeply imbedded in the Soviet military is perhaps not surprising, for as a careful, western observer once noted, “No crisis born of failure has arisen that would impel a reexamination of how things ought to be done.” Today, such a crisis clearly exists. Failure in Afghanistan and collapse of the national economy, combined with the emergence of significant new weapons technologies, have unquestionably been central factors. Moreover, evidence strongly points to the fact that the Soviet authorities themselves increasingly understand the situation in crisis terms and that a genuine reexamination of Soviet military thinking has been in progress for some time, certainly since before 1985.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the tsarist government faced an increasingly restive reading public, well-informed on a variety of issues through the proliferation of mass-circulation newspapers. A punitive censorship served as the basis for the autocracy's policies toward the press, but by 1900 it had long outgrown the requirements for dealing with a society undergoing modernization. As public opinion tacitly began to be recognized as a factor in national development, some officials realized that they must adapt to the changing journalistic demands of Russia's readers. Hoping to gain public support for the government, they knew that the prohibition of certain controversial topics would not generate the backing they sought. Following the example of successful commercial publishers, they argued that the government should take an active lead in supplying news.

The search for avenues to express changing cultural values has shaped recent politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the past decade tens of thousands of GDR citizens became involved in new social movements that included issueoriented groups within both the Protestant church and such mass organizations as the Kulturbund (League of Culture) and the Freie Deutsche Jungend (Free German Youth, FDJ). The rise of these issue-oriented movements evoked reactions from the former government ranging from repression to accommodation. Perhaps the most striking example of the old regime's response to social change can be seen in the emergence of a very visible gay and lesbian movement. Beginning with a handful of activists within the Evangelical church, the East German gay and lesbian movement expanded into state and party institutions throughout the republic. In 1985, partially in response to the growing movement, the state began a campaign to end discrimination on the basis of sexual and emotional orientation.

Russian socialists often used the slogan "vroz' idti, vmeste bit'," which signified that socialists should maintain separate party identities (march apart), but, if revolution approached, join together to deliver the coup de grace. Even in ordinary times, in tsarist Russia "marching apart" was a luxury revolutionaries could rarely afford. Of course, various parties and factions did not completely sacrifice their independence, but at all levels they informally coordinated activities and, at key times, resorted to official interparty arrangements. Although some histories have mentioned left bloc tactics during the 1905 Revolution and in elections to the duma, the full extent of socialist cooperation has hitherto escaped note.