For western observers, a striking concomitant of the end of communist party rule was the sudden appearance of national movements and national sentiments. We were not alone in our surprise: even more taken aback were party leaders, somehow persuaded by their own propaganda that party rule had resolved the so–called "national question." That this was far from true was evident all across the region: from separatism in Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia and the Baltic and other Soviet republics; to bloodshed between Romania's Hungarians and Romanians, and between Bulgaria's Turks and Bulgarians; to Gypsy-bashing in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria; and widespread anti-Semitism–even in countries like Poland where there were virtually no Jews.

In April 1928 a team of eight Soviet and eight German medical researchers set out for the remote area of Kul'skoe in the Buriat—Mongolian Autonomous Republic of the USSR to examine endemic syphilis and the impact of the anti—syphilis drug, Salvarsan, on the course of the disease. This three—month expedition was negotiated by some of the leading political and scientific figures on both sides and was launched with considerable fanfare, although it was not—nor was it intended to be—a scientific milestone in the field of venereology.

While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

During the last three decades of the tsarist regime the business tax system became the experimental vanguard of the entire tax structure. Thirty-one years before a general income tax on all estates (sosloviia) was confirmed in April 1916, Russia's first permanent income taxes on business were imposed in January 1885.

In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) has been hailed by followers in many countries as a forerunner of symbolism, if not as the father of modern poetry tout court. In Russia, Andrei Belyi celebrated him together with Nietzsche in 1909 as a "Patriarkh Simvolizma"; and Valerii Briusov wrote in the same year: "Is it possible to question the importance of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal for the formation of the whole worldview of modernity?" Ellis (L.L. Kobylinskii), the most zealous of all Russian symbolist "Baudelaireans," even tried to convince the menshevik social democrat, N. Valentinov, that Baudelaire was "the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison with whom all Marxes, Engelses, Bakunins, and the rest of the brotherhood which they created, are simply nothing."