While many studies of the early Soviet theater have focused upon its proletarian or revolutionary stages, in the polemics of that era a central topic of dispute was the so-called academic stage. The academic theaters of Moscow and Petrograd, which included the former imperial theaters as well as select representatives of the pre-revolutionary private stage, most notably the Arts and Kamernyi theaters, had no lack of critics or enemies in the years after October. The former court theaters were attacked as politically dangerous relics of the old regime, their artists were envied for their material privileges and status, their large budgets were coveted by less generously funded workers' and avant-garde stages, their art was condemned as conservative and out of harmony with the revolution and socialism. For Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii, however, these theaters were academies which would both preserve the best of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage and provide standards of technical excellence against which more innovative theaters could be measured.

The results of the first free elections in Yugoslavia since World War II, held in 1990, set the stage for the civil war that broke out in summer and fall 1991. In those elections, strongly nationalist parties or coalitions won in each of the republics. In Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and to some extent in Macedonia, nationalists asserted anticommunism in order to bolster their appeal and their legitimacy internationally, while the new Socialist Party of Serbia (nee the League of Communists of Serbia) and the League of Communists in Montenegro effected Ceausescu-like transformations by turning nominally socialist parties into openly nationalist ones.

Since the early 1980s, the crisis of Yugoslav society has been brought to public awareness through discussions in the mass media, both within Yugoslavia and outside of the country. While the causes of the crisis were initially analyzed within the framework of the ideology of Yugoslav self-management socialism, the past several years have seen increasing use by politicians and writers from the northwestern parts of the country of an orientalist rhetoric that relies for its force on an ontological and epistemological distinction between (north)west and (south)east

“Young people need their own theater, akin to their own spirit,” wrote the actor Nikolai Kriuchkov in a memoir of his life in the theater in the 1920s and 1930s. While he acknowledged that the Soviet Union had developed a network of professional Komsomol theaters aimed at youth, Kriuchkov charged that in general these theaters simply duplicated the repertoire of conventional stages. But TRAM, an acronym for the Theater of Working-Class Youth (Teatr Rabochei Molodezhi), where Kriuchov got his start, was different. “It had its own topical themes, its own character, and young people went willingly.”

In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said's Orientalism. Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

At the turn of the twentieth century most Polish political activists dreamed of recreating the Polish state, although they disagreed about where the new Poland should be located and whom it should include. In the years before 1905 the National Democratic movement—the “Endecja,” as it was commonly called—envisioned an expansive Poland stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the Dnieper to the Oder. How could a movement which came to be known for its pragmatism and tactical flexibility espouse such an unrealistic, if not absurd, ambition? How could nationalists who insisted upon cultural unity desire a nation which would include millions who neither spoke the Polish language nor considered themselves to be Poles? This article will argue that these questions can be illuminated by examining the Endecja's definition of that enigmatic Polish term, naród (nation).

Aleksei Iu. German's film My Friend Ivan Lapshin, based on prose works written by his late father lurii P. German (1910-1967), was completed in 1983 and released two years later to some scandal. The prose works themselves had quite a different fate. The elder German published prolifically during some of the most repressive periods of Russian literary history, from the 1930s through the 1960s, although most of his works were published in the earlier two decades. His first works appeared in print in 1931 in Molodaia gvardiia and he continued to publish in this journal throughout the decade; his published works of the 1930s and 1940s include Our Acquaintances (1934), Our Friend the Militiaman (1940) and Stories about Feliks Dzerzhinsky (1947). Aleksei German states that his father held steadfast to his faith in communism, despite the occasional political difficulties he encountered during the course of his career. The son insists that the ideas which pervade so many of his father's published works were not a product of careerism, but rather of his world view: he truly believed in socialist realism.

In a footnote to her detailed commentary on the poems of Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) Sophia Poliakova states that the poet “did not make a secret of” her lesbianism and that “many of her poems are incomprehensible without knowledge of this […] extremely personal [fact].” Yet, in her otherwise excellent discussion of the poet's creative development, Poliakova does not treat the crucially important relationship between Parnok's affectional preference and her creativity which, in my opinion, played a central role in the refining of what the poet referred to as a “voice like mine.” Parnok's lesbian orientation was also partially responsible for the problems she encountered with Soviet censorship that effectively muffled her voice.

On January 1, 1938 virtually every trace of anything Finnish, including the language, disappeared in the Karelian ASSR, where until the day before Finnish had been one of the two official languages (with Russian) and the language of instruction in schools and of a wide variety of published materials—newspapers, literary journals and almanacs, J educational texts, translated belles lettres (both Russian and foreign) and official documents.

The history of Finnish in the Karelian ASSR dates from the Peace of Tartu (1920) which established the Finnish-Soviet border. It also stipulated that the "language of administration, legislation and public education" in the newly formed Karelian Workers Commune should be the "local popular language and designated Finnish that language. This might seem strange, since in 1923 there were in Soviet Karelia only 1,051 Finns, half of whom lived in the capital, Petrozavodsk.

The March 1990 elections to republican and local Soviets in the USSR resulted in the transfer of power from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to the nascent democratic movement in a number of republics and localities. Among these was the Moscow City Soviet (Mossoviet). Of the 472 people's deputies elected to the Mossoviet, the clear majority were elected under the umbrella of the political bloc Democratic Russia. Running on a platform calling for the rejection of continued CPSU control of political life in the Soviet Union and Moscow, Democratic Russia's candidates won decisively in a majority of the electoral districts.