The literary reputation of Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) has fluctuated considerably over the years: she was praised in the 1830s, 1840s and early 1850s, reviled in the 1860s as unprogressive and consigned to oblivion from the 1870s until her death in 1893. At the turn of the century she was rediscovered by the Russian symbolists: Poliakov, Blok and Bely praised her, and Valerii Briusov edited a two-volume edition of her work (1915). Women poets of the time, such as Cherubina de Gabriak (Elisaveta Vasil'eva), Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Parnok, cited her and dedicated poems to her. After the revolution Pavlova was reconsigned to oblivion. Two scholarly editions of Pavlova's poetry appeared during the Soviet period (1937 and 1964) but accompanied by introductions deploring her unprogressive views on politics and art. At best they damned her with faint praise as “not first rate but all the same somewhat noteworthy.” The ambivalent attitude toward Pavlova may have reflected a conflict between the Soviet attempt to “claim the classics for the Soviet cause” while downplaying material that could not be construed retroactively to support the Soviet regime; Pavlova was identified with the politically conservative Slavophiles. Only after she had been rediscovered in the west did positive Soviet scholarship about her begin to appear.

“The Caucasus may be likened to a mighty fortress, marvelously strong by nature, artificially protected by military works, and defended by a numerous garrison.” This oft-quoted line was written by General A.A. Veliaminov in 1828 in a memoir which advocated the use of powerful military force to subdue the tribes of the north Caucasus. To take this fortress, a wise commander must “lay his parallels; advance by gap and mine and so master the place.” The extension of a fortified line further and further towards the mountains, using it as a base for attacks, was essential to Veliaminov's strategy of conquest.

Commentators on the imperial Russian polity have regarded the Security Law of 14 August 1881, which invested administrative officials with broad discretionary powers, as the keystone of the developing Russian police state, the virtual cause of the 1905 revolution, even “Russia's de facto constitution.” In truth, it merely codified and, in many respects, actually limited the powers granted by emergency measures adopted in the late 1870s, at the height of the terrorist campaign to murder Alexander II. The Judicial and Zemstvo Reforms of 1864 had marked the beginning of the development of the rule of law and a respect for civil rights in Russia, and the emergency legislation adopted between 1866 and 1881 was an only partially successful attempt by administrative Russia to return to traditional patterns of arbitrariness, or proizvol. Late imperial Russia's emergency legislation, in other words, was not a turning point on the path toward a modern “police state“ but a sign of that country's uneasy transition from an absolutist to a constitutional order.

There are two basic and conflicting views among scholars about the malleability of political culture—a group or nation's basic orientations to politics. By one account, culture is a relatively stable, ethnically or spatially specific predictor variable that shapes a nation's political institutions. In Russian studies, this is an approach that has emphasized the connection between the Russian autocratic past and the similarities between tsarist and bolshevik political institutions. Those attracted by this assessment of political culture are prone to think a statist, authoritarian political economy in Russia will be a constant regardless of the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. The other approach views political culture as being more malleable. It has two variants. One snares with the first approach the assumption that culture is a predictor variable, but emphasizes the effects of secular changes in education and changes in work experience on the distribution of attitudes in a society.

Most western and all Soviet studies of the Stalinist economy have ignored the role played by the stockpiling of grain in the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s. Thus in his major work on Stalinist agriculture published in 1949, Naum Jasny frankly admitted that data were insufficient to reach a conclusion, merely noting that “stocks from former years probably declined during 1932.” Baykov, Dobb, Volin and Nove said nothing about grain stocks. At the time, western commentators did pay some attention to the possibility that the stockpiling of grain exacerbated the famine. In autumn 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, and in spring 1932 British diplomats reported that Karl Radek had told them that, owing to the threat of war in the far east, enough grain had been stored to supply the army for one year.