The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has been engaged over the past several years in a project to collect and analyze information on the Soviet and East European field. Some of the results of the work to date are presented in this report to the profession.

The field of Soviet and East European studies is a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. Not until World War II was there any considerable interest in the region in the United States. At that time, however, the federal government found itself acutely short of specialists on the area and had to scrape a shallow academic barrel. The lack of expertise led to the establishment of new military and civilian training programs; and the changed international situation in the postwar period gave further impetus to the extension of academic programs.

The NEP was an inherently unstable social and political system: It contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The Bolsheviks carried out policies in which they did not fully believe and with implications that worried them. Although the Tenth Party Congress in 1921 forbade factions within the party, the struggle for power during Lenin's final illness and after his death inevitably created factions. The struggle for power and the conflict between contrasting views concerning the future of society came to be intertwined. For the sake of economic reconstruction the party allowed private enterprise to reemerge. As time went on, many Bolshevik leaders came to be convinced supporters of the mixed economic system; others, on the basis of their reading of Marxist ideology, found such policies distasteful.

For western observers, one of the most striking policy shifts articulated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev since he became general secretary of the CPSU in March 1985 has been his insistence on greater democratization (demokratizatsiia) and self-government (samoupravlenie). In his speech to the Communist party's Central Committee on 28 January 1987 he explicitly identified “the many-sided development of democracy and selfgovernment“ as a key component of what he meant by the reconstruction (perestroika) of Soviet society. His speech to the plenum dealt in large part with this theme. In it, Gorbachev startled his audience both at home and abroad with proposals for the introduction of a degree of competitiveness in the elections of party leaders, state officials, and enterprise managers.

I am concerned in this paper with investigating the complex relationship of Maksim Gor'kii with the literature of his day, including the so-called realists, but particularly with the decadents, the symbolists, and other writers generally thought of as alien to Russian realism, whether critical or socialist. The stereotype of Gor'kii still dominant in some quarters presents him as walled off from “decadent” and “bourgeois” literary styles and from the carriers of such “contamination.” But Gor'kii was much more complex and more interesting than we have supposed, and he functioned during much of his career as part of a literary world in which “symbolism,” rather loosely denned, was the dominant literary tendency. I would like to adduce evidence of the effect on his writing of symbolist and other modern influences and of his close relationship, at the same time, to the popular culture of the day.

At the beginning of the day shift on 21 October 1917 more than 300,000 textile workers from 114 enterprises in Vladimir and Kostroma provinces defiantly refused to report to their shops. Instead, these predominantly semiskilled and unskilled workers of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region responded to an agenda prearranged by workeractivists among them to hear final instructions from newly elected strike committees, sing the “Marseillaise,” and post pickets. By the time this strike ended on 17 November, circumstances in Russia had changed significantly: A new revolutionary government was in office; the national economic crisis had further deepened; the struggle for authority in the factories was intensifying.

Since the 1960s much informed attention has been paid to the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), culminating in the recent appearance of John Milner's expert and sensitive study; with his centenary year one can only expect such interest, in east and west, has intensified. Though Tatlin's fields of activity were extraordinarily diverse (and by no means all conventionally “artistic“), attention has been concentrated both in his lifetime and since on what is, by common consent, the greatest (or most notorious) of his endeavors: the project, unrealized at full scale and probably unrealizable in his lifetime (though several maquettes have been produced) for his Monument to the Third International, popularly dubbed “Tatlin's Tower.“