The policy of “using non-communist hands in the building of communism,” almost as old as the Soviet government itself, came to an end at the outset of the First Five-Year Plan. In the early 1920s the Communist Party had come to accept the realities of a socialist regime confined to an underdeveloped country. Consequently, during the years of the New Economic Policy (1921- 28), the party sought to guide numerous institutions in which its members and supporters were a minority. To this end, the Communist Party created a network of scholarly institutions staffed by Marxist scholars which paralleled the traditional institutions staffed and led primarily by non-Marxist scholars. The purpose of this essay is to recount some of the conflicts between Marxist and non-Marxist historians and to make some suggestions about connections between these conflicts and ongoing political changes.

An article printed in 1970 in the third edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, of which several volumes are still to appear, defined bibliofil'stvo and bibliofiliia as the pursuit of collecting “rare and valuable publications.” The author of the entry, O. G. Lasunskii, had nothing but praise for the activity:

In January 1964, Western observers of the Soviet scene were startled by the publication of the major short works of Franz Kafka in Inostrannaia literatura, a leading Soviet literary journal. This event was all the more surprising because it came only a few months after a wide-ranging party campaign against “modernism” in the arts, with Kafka among those singled out for special condemnation. Publication was viewed as evidence of a possible new thaw, and received considerable attention in the Western press. Over ten years have now passed, and, in these days of the expulsion and incarceration of protesters and the suppression of dissent, it is timely once again to examine the fate of Franz Kafka in the land which for decades pretended that he did not exist. As the following pages will show, the debate over Kafka was much broader than his works themselves: it raised questions which were disturbing Soviet society and reflected, in microcosm, forces struggling to determine the very direction of Soviet life.

Over twenty years ago Merle Fainsod warned against underestimating the “fluid play of bureaucratic politics” in the Stalinist political system. However, scholars have generally regarded the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) of the VKP(b) as immune to this process during Stalin’s reign as general secretary. They have assumed either that Stalin did not permit conflict between the directors of the various bureaucratic divisions in the Secretariat or that such conflict could simply not develop in the leading organ of the party’s apparat.

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that “the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes.” It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal “wagon-tongue” during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.

A score of years ago geography was characterized as spatial interaction, the underlying concepts of which were complementarity, intervening opportunities, and distance. Without additional consideration of the first two, the last of these concepts is intrinsic to this study. According to Ullman, distance, which may be interpreted in many ways, is measured economically, that is, in terms of the cost and time involved in transporting a product. A good is transportable only when its inherent value is sufficient to overcome the “friction“ of distance. Hoover states this clearly: “When goods of high value per pound are shipped, the transfer charge constitutes a smaller relative addition to the total cost of the delivered article, and such goods are said to be ‘more transportable’ or to be capable of bearing a higher transfer charge.“