Years ago Harold Berman observed that for many people in the west the term Soviet law represented a contradiction. Popular imagination found little place for law or criminal justice in a society where terror or extralegal coercion played a major role. Yet, as Berman argued, even in Stalin's Russia law and force existed side by side, and there was a “surprising degree of official compartmentalization of the legal and the extra-legal.” Berman recognized that the separation of law and terror was no accident; rather it was a product of the regime's commitment to law and the functions it could perform for a stable, conservative social order. Three decades later western Sovietologists are only starting to come to terms with the conservative phase of Stalin's rule; and, despite a fine essay by Robert Sharlet, the promotion of law has yet to be incorporated into the standard portrait of Stalinism. A major reason is the continuation of doubts about the possibilities for law where terror also reigns.

Students of the Soviet Union have been reassessing the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s. By shifting the focus of research from high politics to the constituent parts of the political and social system, recent scholarship has exposed the confusion and conflicts that plagued the nascent Soviet bureaucracy as it struggled to put down roots in the country and to satisfy the enormous demands placed upon it by the center and periphery. This research has brought new recognition of the extent to which the political leadership in the 1930s was bedeviled by local resistance to central directives, by poor communication and inadequate staffing in the bureaucracy, and by the low “cultural level” of those asked to implement policy.

The first months of Soviet power raise important questions about the ideology of the transition to socialism and about the nature of Bolshevik power. The destruction of the old state apparatus was accompanied by vigorous institution building; the “red guard attack against capital” was balanced by the emergence of potentially powerful Soviet economic apparatus. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed in March 1918 was followed by a period of state capitalism in which a strong socialist state was to supervise elements of capitalism in the economy. All stages were accompanied by vigorous debate within the party and, from March 1918, by the political alienation of a section of the working class. By the onset of full-scale civil war and the transition to war communism in late spring 1918 the Bolshevik party and the institutions of the new Soviet state dominated the political life of the country. Was there something in Marxist ideology that, when interpreted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, encouraged centralized and dirigiste forms of government regardless of actual conditions? A large body of literature now exists that examines this issue from various perspectives. This literature has recently been enriched by a number of studies that look at events from the perspective of lower-level participants and area case studies.

But the impervious geode
Was entered, and its inner crust
Of crystals with a ray cathode
At every point and facet glowed
In answer to the mental thrust.
Robert Frost, “All Revelation”

A crucial year for Osip Mandel'shtam was 1930: it was in October of that year, in Tiflis, on the way back from Armenia, that poetry returned to him, after five years during which he wrote almost no verse. The Armenia poems (numbers 203-218) are among the first of the “new verse,” and, with their theme of penance for unproductivity and attempt to transform the factors of disturbance—the sense of limitation, confinement, deprivation—into sources of new energy, they testify to Mandel'shtam's current concern with the operations of his work. Moreover, at this juncture Mandel'shtam gives programmatic attention to the principles of his writing.

Vodka was big business in nineteenth century Russia, was it is in the Soviet Union today. In the 1850s, the total turnover of the trade was at least 200 million rubles, or more than 20 percent of the value of all internal trade. In 1859, the government's share of this huge turnover exceeded 120 million rubles, which accounted for more than 40 percent of all ordinary revenues. As Nikolai Ogarev pointed out, this huge sum was enough to cover most of the peacetime expenses of the army on which Russia's status as a great power depended. Figures for 1859 were certainly unusual; nevertheless, liquor revenues averaged 32 percent of ordinary revenues throughout the period from 1805 to 1862. Vodka was the single most important source of government revenues in this period, and the government had, therefore, a huge stake in the success and expansion of the trade.

On 6 July 1874, the government of Alexander II published an edict announcing the formation of a mounted Bashkir squadron in the Orenburg guberniia. The modest scale of the endeavor—a squadron-sized element added little to Russian military strength—belied its historic importance. The Bashkirs, in 1874, stood at a watershed in their long history of military service to Russia marking the divide between decades of irregular frontier duty and inclusion in the ranks of the regular army. The evolution of Bashkir military formations, paralleling the course of social change, offers a most instructive case in little-studied aspects of imperial policy towards subject national minorities and their employment in the armed forces in particular. A virtually forgotten component in Russia's rich military tradition, the contribution of “native” units organized among the inorodtsy of the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Asia was indeed significant.

In 1920 the Polish army defeated the Bolsheviks before the gates of Warsaw. The Polish victory preserved the independence of the reborn state, delayed Russian expansion for a generation, and left to historians a number of controversial issues. Certainly the most passionately debated aspect of the war is the authorship of the Polish victory. Gradually western scholarship has come to credit the laurels to Poland's Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but there are still those who emphasize the role of other Polish soldiers or of the Frenchman, General Maxime Weygand. From the midst of this historiographical controversy, we may discern the dim outlines of a simultaneous, yet obscured episode: the aborted political comeback of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. It is the purpose of this essay to reconstruct the latter against the background of the former.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.

One of the most striking innovations in late eighteenth century prose fiction was the introduction of a distinct narrator's voice. To throw some light on the emergence of this innovation, I will compare three works: “Povest’ o Frole Skobeeve,“ an anonymous work from the 1720s; Ivan Novikov's “Novgorodskikh devushek sviatochnyi vecher,” which appeared in a 1785 collection of his short stories; and Nikolai Karamzin's “Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch',” which appeared serially in his Moskovskii zhurnal in 1792. These works will be viewed as representative of three stages in the eighteenth century development of narrative prose structure.