For long years Russia’s legal history has intrigued the scholars of Eastern Europe, and some in the West, but little attention has been devoted in English to the most ancient sources, those to be found in the chronicles and the Russkaia Pravda. Although Russian legal history offers little of the continuity of institutions to be found in Anglo-Saxon law, its earliest documents are matters of concern even to Soviet legal historians in an effort to understand a heritage that has left its impact upon contemporary developments. In order to sketch a part of that heritage conveniently for English-language readers, this brief article has been prepared.

The natural inclination of most “area” scholars—not to mention others—is to become preoccupied with the personalities, institutions, and achievements of the dominant culture, through the nationally aggregated values and norms. The justification for this approach is a belief in the supposedly inexorable process of the “homogenization” of the national culture and the inevitability of greater centralized control as a result of the technology of mass communications and organization. But it is increasingly apparent that even in “developed” countries, such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—let alone Italy, Nigeria, or Pakistan—some of the more insistent and intractable “national” problems turn out to be basically regional in origin and character. At least as important in the long run as conflict of ethnic or religious origin is the increasingly familiar deepening of regional inequalities in the richer nations as a result of more perfect interregional competition, diffusion of information, and the high potential mobility of educated and affluent populations. At first glance the Soviet Union, with its traditional practice of centralized control over the bodies and souls of its citizens and the all-pervading pressure toward national coherence and uniformity, might appear more appropriate than most countries for study as a national system with national character and goals. Yet here, too, some of the more interesting and thorny problems facing the Soviet leaders and planners concerning the health and general viability of their country resolve themselves into essentially regional ones.

During the past ten years Russian area students have directed increasing attention to comparing aspects of their specialty with those of other social systems. That this interest was so late in developing has caused some of them to be defensive, if not apologetic. Often, however, both practitioners and the critics of Russian area studies have failed to realize that from its inception the field has been devoted to an implicit comparison, not between geographically distinct social systems but between successive periods in the region we have commonly designated “Russia.” The failure to note, or at least to stress, this- comparative aspect of Russian area studies has many causes, but two stand out. For area specialists, the relation between the Soviet and the prerevolutionary periods was so obvious it scarcely needed emphasis. For general empirical theorists, on the other hand, the problem of temporal boundaries of social systems has rarely been salient.

Sometime between 1533 and 1536, a certain Ivan laganov, writing from prison, addressed a petition to the child ruler Ivan IV in which he suggested that his release would be in the interests of state security. laganov apparently had enjoyed a successful career as a political informer under Ivan’s father, and after the death of Vasilii III had continued to serve his new sovereign in the same manner. On his last mission, he explained, he had reported to Ivan’s boyars as ordered, informing them of the “dangerous talk” he had overheard: “At that time, Sire, I could not plug my ears with pitch; what I heard, Sire, I reported, in the way in which I served and reported to thy father.” As a result, laganov now found himself in fetters, tortured “in the manner of evil traitors and brigands,” and deprived of food and drink.

The labor unrest that spilled out onto the streets of St. Petersburg in January 1905 and shook the autocracy was hardly a new phenomenon in Russia. Historiography— both Western and Soviet—has shown persuasively that labor discontent was widespread in Russia’s industrial centers for at least the preceding two decades. An explosive combination of miserable working and living conditions and repressive regimentation was further aggravated by only partially redeemed hopes of government-sponsored reforms in the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, reform legislation was vitiated from the start by the government’s desire to keep the workers under strict control. This aim not only took precedence over the wish to see their grievances redressed, but amounted to a philosophy running through the whole corpus of Russian labor law and virtually institutionalized in the Department of Factory Inspection, created by a decree of July 1, 1882. Designed originally to seek out infractions of the labor laws, it soon became a policing agency for the factory owners.

The opinions of Nikolai Ivanovich PirOgov (1810–81) provided the basis for much of the widespread debate on the “university problem” which preceded the adoption in 1863 of the General Statute of Russian Universities. Though Pirogov's equally important views on primary and secondary education and his general pedagogical philosophy have been examined in some detail, there is no systematic treatment of his views on university reform. The purpose of this article is to help elucidate those views, to demonstrate the relationship of Pirogov's ideas on university government to his activities as curator of the Odessa and Kiev school districts, to define the limits within which Pirogov's ideas were acceptable to the government of Alexander II and to a majority of the professorial community, and to compare his recommendations for reform with the statute of 1863 and with events which immediately followed its implementation.

On his return to Russia in July 1843 after a period of convalescence in Western Europe, Iazykov was confronted by a literary situation which bore little resemblance to the one he had left in July 1838, five years earlier. Many important nineteenth-century poets had already died by the time of Iazykov’s departure: Ryleev (1826), Venevitinov (1827), Griboedov (1829), Delvig (1831), Gnedich (1833), Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the fabulist Dmitriev (all in 1837), and Polezhaev (early 1838). Nevertheless, poetry continued to be the dominant form of literary expression, at least until April 1840, when Lermontov first published the full text of Geroi nashego vremeni. By late 1843, however, the tide had turned decisively in favor of prose. Many more poets had died—Davydov and Alexander Odoevsky (1839), Kozlov and Stankevich (1840), Lermontov himself (1841), and Koltsov (1842). Baratynsky and Krylov were to die in 1844.

In the nineteenth century Russia and the United States emerged as nations on the periphery of the West European economic and political vortex. Their relations with each other had been, for the most part, prompted by or integrated with some larger issue involving the powers of Western Europe. Economic relations were no exception. Both nations were traditionally exporters of raw materials to industrialized, urbanized nations, which in turn were prepared and eager to exchange manufactured goods for raw materials. Russian and American products were therefore competitive rather than reciprocal, and profitable mutual exchange of goods had not developed. Both nations were debtor nations and had relied on the surplus capital of the small and large investors of Western Europe to provide the beginnings of internal transportation and industrialization.

In the wake of the rising interest in Soviet nationalities and the problems that the nationality phenomenon produces for the Soviet political and economic system, it is gratifying to read a geographer's discussion of regionalism in this huge Soviet state. The nationality question can be best elucidated by inter-disciplinary studies; logically it follows that the question of regionalism does not belong exclusively to the jurisdiction of geographers and economists. It is obvious, however, from reading Professor Hooson's article that geographers can make a considerable contribution to the understanding of the development and prospects of Soviet nationalities.

The connection between regionalism and nationalities is not artificial. Soviet regionalism, whether considered in geographical, historical, or other terms, is intertwined with the prospects of nationalities, because these groups provide much of the demographic matrix in which development occurs and to which the Kremlin's political decisions apply. The political aspect, furthermore, is especially pronounced in the Soviet case, because the large, compactly settled national groups live in regions adjacent to the borders of the Soviet state; theoretically their republics have the right to secede from the Soviet Union. The Soviet state itself was organized to accommodate these nationalities, and they are supposed to share in decision-making as well as in the benefits that the Soviet system can confer.

Hungary was a feudal monarchy at the beginning of 1848 and was part of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Although Hungarian publicists continually emphasized that the country could look back to nearly a thousand years of statehood and national existence, the foreign relations and the fiscal and military affairs of Hungary were directed almost exclusively from Vienna. Internally the country was governed by the native nobility, which constituted about 5 percent of a population of approximately fifteen million. The nobility exercised its power through the Diet and elective county assemblies. Nobles alone had the right to vote. Until 1844 they alone held public office, and most of them paid no taxes. The immense majority—the peasantry—lived in feudal bondage. The taxes of the serfs maintained the state, and their dues and labor services supported the nobility.

In discussing the Ausgleich of 1867 historians generally focus on the complex political and economic arrangements and pay little attention to the military controversy over the problem of restructuring the Habsburg army. Yet this problem almost prevented conclusion of the political agreement and greatly endangered its implementation. Count Julius Andrassy, one of the leading Hungarian negotiators, called it the “sword of Damocles suspended over our heads,” and the common war minister, Franz Baron Kuhn, believed that “the future existence of the monarchy” depended on “a successful solution of the army question”.

In discussing the contribution of the Polish “Formal” or “Integral” School to the development of literary research, one of the difficulties is whether to view it mainly as an echo of Russian Formalism or as a scholarly movement in its own right. There is no doubt that the often strikingly suggestive theoretical slogans and undeniable practical achievements of the Russian Formalists—such as Shklovsky's insights on the theory of the novel, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, M. A. Petrovsky's Morphology of the Short Story, and the research of Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Roman Jakobson in the field of poetry—all greatly attracted those Polish scholars who were looking for a coherent, strictly literary set of criteria, discouraged as they were by the inflation of biographism and psychologism in literary research. Yet the impact of Russian Formalism was limited in scope and in many respects rather indirect. On the one hand, the reaction against the one-sidedness of the psychological school came in Poland independently, and in some ways even earlier than in Russia. For this the Polish scholars did not need to go to Russia—they had both ancient (Aristotle) and more modern sources (German, Italian, French, and others). On the other hand, many of the Polish scholars did not even know the Russian language, though they knew some Western languages very well. (The scholar who was to become the foremost promoter of Formalism, Manfred Kridl, knew very little Russian when he came to teach at the University of Wilno. It was under the influence and with the help of a group of students that he became familiar with the writings of the Formalists.)

Numerous sources, both secular and ecclesiastical, attest to the widespread popularity in Kievan Rus' and Muscovite Russia of the professional minstrelentertainers known as skomorokhi. To the folklorist these curious jacks-of all- trades, reminiscent of the French jongleurs and German Spielmänner, have become identified primarily with the singing, composing, and eventual transmission to the peasants of the north of heroic tales and historical songs (byliny and istoricheskie pesni). To the sociocultural historian the skomorokhi represent both a preliminary or formative stage in the evolution of the Russian theater and an important chapter in the early history of secular music in Russia. But whether one views them through the eyes of the folklorist or the historian there is little doubt that these veselye liudi or veselye molodtsy, as they were sometimes referred to, played an important role in the social and cultural life of the Eastern Slavs from the eleventh through the seventeenth century.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

During most of the Soviet industrialization period, consumer goods enterprises and the distribution network could rest assured that almost any consumer product—any size, color, style, and quality—would be sold if offered to the public. This was the nature of the market during that period; the sellers held the upper hand, and they tried to fulfill their plans without being concerned much about the demands of buyers. But in the postwar period, especially after the death of Stalin, the production of consumer goods and personal incomes increased simultaneously, and gradually more and more consumer demands were answered. A concern for consumer welfare was emerging. With the advent of buyers’ market conditions, no longer were all consumer goods that arrived on the market automatically sold; inventories accumulated and the problems of the trade network multiplied.