All’s quiet now. Summer vacation has started, the halls and classrooms are deserted. Almost. It is 10 July 1992 and I am inside Moscow’s School No. 175 with Vladimir Dmitrievich Nikolaev, a pupil here from 1933 to 1941. Once this was School No. 25, hallowed ground, from 1931 to 1937 the most famous school in the Soviet Union, where a talented teaching corps instructed the children of Stalin and other representatives of the Soviet elite. The winner of many awards, School No. 25 was the object of my research for several years. It's a bit unnerving to imagine the sounds and images of the people who worked and played in these very rooms sixty years ago. Nikolaev interrupts, then enhances the experience: “This was the library; the deputy director’s office was here; Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, and I were in the same literature class there.”

Crucially important for expanding access to archives is what western archivists often call “intellectual access”–reference facilities that effectively and efficiently assist researchers in preparing for work in the archives, lead them to appropriate documents, and help them understand their archival context. The dramatic opening of Russian archives in the past decade has revolutionized research opportunities and scholarship in many fields. Today, not only are archives being declassified, but the finding aids for previously classified files are available to researchers and new reference facilities are being developed to an extent Likhachev and others never dreamed possible.

Since Marx was strong on criticizing capitalism, not so strong on the practical mechanics of revolution, and rather wobbly on the communist future itself, we cannot blame his Soviet followers if their ultimate goal always remained a religious mystery, veiled by the pseudoscience of political dogma. The veil enhances the mystery; it obscures the fact that there is a mystery—that the real transformation of society into Utopia and the individual into unfettered homo laborans cannot be described in scientific language at all but can only be symbolized.

This becomes clear when we move from politics to art, to the sphere of culture dominated by symbolic language. Despite its debt to the explicit Utopian tradition of Chernyshevskii and the nineteenthcentury radicals, Soviet literature limits itself to an exclusively symbolic depiction of the flowering of communism. In Christianity, a transformation of analogous importance is symbolized by the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.

Since the collapse of communism, much scholarship has examined the efforts by the countries of east central Europe and the former Soviet Union to develop democratic regimes. The majority of such studies have focused on institutional development and the problems of democratic transition at the national level. Although this focus is not at all surprising given the highly centralized political structures that have been the legacy of the communist past, the efficacy, indeed the ultimate success or failure of democratization, may well rest largely on the ability of local government to satisfy citizen demands. Local government is most directly involved in delivering the goods and services that affect people’s daily lives. Hence, citizens often form their judgments of political systems based on the performance of local government. To the degree that democracy depends on the loyalty of the citizenry, local government is important to the survival of democracy.

Who rules is the central question posed by scholars studying local government. This issue lies at the heart of democracy. While it is nowhere the case that citizens rule directly, in a democracy their preferences must have some effect on public policy.

The Russian prose poem was officially born in December 1882, when the journal Vestnik Evropy published Ivan Turgenev’s last work, a collection of fifty “poems in prose” (stikhotvoreniia v proze). Although the generic title of Turgenev’s prose miniatures seems to echo Charles Baudelaire’s Petits Poemès en prose (1869), the fate of the prose poem in Russia turned out very differently from that in its country of origin. Whereas the French poème en prose has become a mainstay of modernist poetry, the Russian stikhotvorenie v proze looks at first sight like a rather anemic plant struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment. In many respects, it constitutes a marginal genre par excellence: located in the no-man’s-land between poetry and prose, it was practiced mainly by minor writers, or by major writers only in early youth or old age (note the title Turgenev originally proposed for his prose poems: Senilia).

Only a few years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, communists throughout eastern Europe began constructing new societies according to models imported from the Soviet Union. One of the most important tasks facing them in this enterprise was to establish firm bases of social support. For this, the Soviet model seemed straightforward: communists had to destroy the power of the old elites and recruit new elites from underprivileged social strata. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks had attempted to achieve these goals through higher education. By using affirmative action in student admissions and setting up worker preparation courses—the rabfaky—they broke the ability of the former upper classes to bequeath status and rapidly increased the numbers of workers and peasants among university students. Between 1927-28 and 1932-33 the number of working-class students doubled to half of all students, while the total number of students more than doubled. Issues of ideology aside, the logic of this transformation was simple: underprivileged social classes were likely to reward communists with loyalty in exchange for upward social mobility. The middle and upper classes, on the other hand, had considered it their prerogative to aspire to elite status. Their attachment to communism would always seem suspect, because in the best of cases it was based upon ideological commitment alone.