Some time ago a leading biographer of Joseph Stalin observed with a touch of irony that de-stalinization was a process “not only made possible but actually initiated by the death of Stalin.” Accordingly, some have turned to events in the final months of the dictator's life for evidence that, to the last, Stalin retained a firm grip on the levers of power; others have pointed to the new era of moderation in agriculture, literature and criminal justice which appears to have set in following Stalin's death. It was, so it seems, only with the conclusion of Stalin's reign that the hopes for stability and liberalization first raised at the end of World War II could finally be met. Only the dictator's death, it has been argued, could have put an end to absolute autocracy and opened the way for a new era of oligarchical rule.

When Bulgarians elected a parliament dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in their first, free postcommunist election, they were considered the mavericks of eastern Europe. As Misha Glenny critically points out, “Bulgaria bucks the trend” was a recurrent phrase in English-language reports of the 1990 contest. But four years later, after an intervening non-socialist government, a second socialist victory seemed to be following trends set in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland. In a front-page article in The New York Times several months before Bulgaria's 1994 election, the east European trend towards embracing ex-communists is described as beginning in Lithuania, with no mention of Bulgaria's earlier socialist victory and its continual socialist electoral strength. Then, following the election, the Washington Post reported that the results “brought the fourth former Communist Party to power in Eastern Europe, after Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.“

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.

Lenin's views on law, like so many other aspects of his intellectual life, appear in scholarly and political literature primarily as weapons—a striking quotation from State and Revolution here, an insistent instruction to the commissar of justice there—arms wielded in the service of particular aims and, often, interpretations of the Soviet project. A collection of these citations would yield a most disparate arsenal—jabs, slings, barbs and bombs, and sometimes the most precise button-pressings (especially when Lenin was head of state)—an arsenal drawn, it would seem, from different wars and different epochs of combat technology. It might also seem from such a survey that, where law was concerned, Lenin's various missiles were hurled at each other.

When Jesus confronts the man possessed by demons in the eighth chapter of Luke, a collective, alien voice issues from the familiar human form: "And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him" (Luke 8:30). Dostoevskii's novel The Devils (Besy, 1871-1873), to which the continuation of this passage serves as epigraph, makes use of the rich metaphor of possession in many aspects: as madness, as ideological enslavement, as national destiny.

Several young Russian and Ukrainian writers responded to the era of Great Reforms by taking up a new enterprise: literary ethnography. Their ethnographic expeditions and reports of 1856 to 1862 manifested new political, cultural and social scientific movements within the empire. They not only investigated obstacles to forging a diverse, multinational population into a common empire, they also called the attention of educated Russians and the Russian state to cultural legacies of the countryside. Some were deemed worthy of preservation; others seemed inconsistent with modern ways. They sought a new socio-political path for the public. In these ways they began to link the various peoples in the empire, the imperial state and educated Russia at a time of social and political disclocation.

How does language influence politics? Usually when this question is posed, it is understood to concern relations within a polity among communities whose members speak different languages. Our concern, however, is what contribution politicians’ language may make to the choice between authoritarianism or democracy. Of course, we reject any reduction of that determination to language alone.

The study of change in political Russian during the Soviet and post-Soviet era has concentrated on the consequences of variation in content. As Meyer observed, during the Soviet period scholars mainly evaluated the degree to which “routine thinking in terms of the official doctrine … [exerted] an effect on actions taken or not taken…” Remington called attention to the existence in the Soviet period of “two interdependent but opposed codes,” one for “the ritualized world of public life” and the other for private interaction—a difference that, as early as 1960, Tucker had traced back to origins in tsarist Russia.

Much of what we know about the prerevolutionary Russian working class comes to us through the prism of its more politically active and committed element, or through the historical record of events resulting from the interaction of "conscious" and less "conscious" workers. The tensions between intelligent^ and activist workers and, to a lesser extent, between activist and nonactivist workers have been ably portrayed in various monographs; of these, however, those studies that focus on the making, so to speak, of worker activists have tended to depict their subjects either on very broad canvases or in finely drawn miniatures.

“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.

In March 1922 (in the very heat of the campaign to confiscate Church valuables), L.D. Trotskii sent a memorandum to the Politburo, arguing that the “proletarian revolution had finally reached the Church.” Indeed it had: over the next few years the Russian Orthodox Church would undergo tremendous convulsions and intense internal conflict. In May 1922, amidst a violent confrontation with the bolshevik state over the seizure of Church valuables, a small group of radical priests took control of the Church and engineered a temporary but controversial withdrawal of Patriarch Tikhon from active leadership. Their aim was not only to end the conflict with Soviet authorities (by recognizing its legitimacy and endorsing its confiscation of church valuables), but also to implement fundamental reforms in Russian Orthodoxy.

Our view of the cultural situation in late imperial Russia is changing. Long set aside as a distinct period in literary and cultural history, the decades embracing the turn of the twentieth century have customarily been described according to two master narratives. The first has tied developments in cultural life to the political struggle between revolution and reaction, and to the history of Russian revolutionary ideology. The second focuses on the evolution of style, recounting the transformation of realism and the concurrent emergence of decadence and modernism. Recent scholarship, however, has begun to reveal the limits of these paradigms by directing attention to fundamental changes in the institutions of Russian literature. Jeffrey Brooks has shown how the Russian reading public expanded and diversified in the wake of the Great Reforms, thus preparing the way for a broadly based popular literature governed by market forces. As technology improved in the areas of printing, transportation and communications, the potential of this new market was increasingly exploited so that by the turn of the century popular literature had risen from its origins as a virtual cottage enterprise to the status of a major industry.

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.

The former Soviet state openly and directly manipulated patterns of economic development and the allocation of social resources in order to influence individual-level demographic decision making. In perhaps the most notable example, the state, through an internal passport system and limits on central city registration, attempted to regulate patterns of population movement and urban growth. In this paper I shall show that while the operation of the passport and propiska system was quite similar to market-based signals in terms of individual perceptions of costs and benefits, the non-migration functions of the passport and “propiska,” or registration system, operated in an anti-market fashion. By preventing migrants from integrating themselves into distributional networks in restricted cities, the passport and propiska system generated a situation in which potential migrants either acquired propiskas through semi-legal avenues, denied themselves access to distributional networks or elected not to migrate.