Империи, окраины и диаспоры: Евразия как антипарадигма для постсоветского периода

This review examines the book Cultural History of Russia published in 2020 by the publishing house of Charles University, Prague. This inquiry into the main areas of interest in both past and contemporary history of Russia has long been expected not only by students, specialists in Russian studies and in cultural studies, but also by a broad audience of those is interested in Russian cultural history. The authors seek to arrange the book according to the conceptual model; this innovative approach aims at underlining such cultural concepts that are basic and constitutive of the modern Russian culture. For these ends, facts, achievements and problems of the Russian cultural history are interpreted. The authors introduce students and readers to modern Russia, endowed with centurieslong heritage, multinationalism, large territory, but also with cultural contradictions and clashes. The book resolves a hard issue of presenting the real amalgam of views of the Russians on such disputes, and pays special attention to the Russian mass media and Runet. Therefore, suggests the book, modern Russians are in search of cultural identity, which is proved by heated discussions. The nine chapters help readers to get rid of the usual stereotypes in the image of Russians, invites the public to reflect on the achievements and contradictions of the cultural history of Russia. Discussion questions and tasks are what helps students that would read the book engage with the Russian realities and with each other. What is also beneficial for the use of this book in classes is that it is written according to the standards allowing a non-native speaker who has an A2-B1 level of Russian to understand all the information efficiently. To adapt the book to the needs and mental realities of European students, it is published in both print and digital format — the latter includes extra video and audio tapes. In the context of integrating the students with the material the authors should also be given the credit. They entangle the history and culture of medieval, modern and 21th century Russia with European history and the global cultural space. Overall, the book serves as an example in both fields: the cultural research and the textbook initiating and enhancing lingual and cultural understanding of Russian realities. The publication will remain a landmark among the educational achievements not only of the Charles University, but also of the community of European scholars specializing in Russian studies.

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 554 which presented a new perspective on the co-reign issue in documents 14 and 15. Meanwhile, the most recent publications cited are from 2010. There are also various errors in dating, the first being that of Stephen Nemanja’s charter for the Holy Virgin’s monastery at Polimlje (8), which is without reason dated from 1168–96 rather than the wider 1166–96. Stephen Nemanja’s charter for the Chilandar monastery (9) is given as the widest possible (after June 1198, before 13 February 1199) even though the narrower (the autumn of 1198) has been proven in the literature as very probable. Similarly, Stephen Nemanjić’s second Žiča charter (15) is dated ‘1221–1224?’, even though the cited literature reveals that there is no reason for setting 1224 as a borderline. Stephen Nemanjić died in 1227, therefore the only viable dating can be 1221–27. Other shortcomings include the manuscript of Stephen Nemanjić’s charter for Chilandar (12) — previously considered to be the original — which is for the first time here described as ‘original (?)’ (p. 79) but without any explanation why. In some places the identity of the author of the manuscripts is mentioned, but for documents 4 and 12 this information is omitted, even though one of the cited references points out that both were written by the same person. Lastly, dates in the list of contents are misleading, as they sometimes differ from dates given in descriptions of particular documents in the Zbornik itself. In summary, the Zbornik offers a complete edition of sources with useful indexes. However, this prominent publication is not free of methodological and meritorical shortcomings in its accompanying materials. Łódź B. Szefliński Merridale, Catherine. Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History. Allen Lane, London and New York, 2013. xvii + 506 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Suggestions for further reading. Index. £30.00. History can be focused and organized in any number of ways. Microhistory à la Carlo Ginzburg can produce startling new visions of the world; a variety of this approach is to select a city, street, institution, building, and craft a history around that object. In her Red Fortress, Catherine Merridale has produced a stimulating narrative of Russian history by focusing — none too narrowly — on the most famous building in Russia: the Kremlin. The rather silly subtitle of the British edition (cited above) only partly captures Merridale’s vision; the American subtitle (History and Illusion in the Kremlin) better reflects the book’s content. In any case, this is an admirable and serious romp through Russian history from the twelfth to the twenty-first century. Merridale’s approach is chronological but does not limit itself to the building we now know as the Kremlin. Rather, while keeping this fortress, the buildings REVIEWS 555 within it and its environs in central Moscow as the book’s centre of gravity, she does not hesitate to pursue — sometimes at considerable length — various topics, anecdotes, people, events that illuminate larger issues in Russian and Soviet history. This approach probably makes the book more engaging for non-specialists, who are given a great deal of general Russian historical background even while the author pursues in detail the specific architectural and artistic history of this object. For example, Merridale expounds at some length (pp. 87–98) on the events of Ivan the Terrible’s reign but in the end comes back to the Kremlin itself and the changes to it during these years. To take another example, chapter six covers both Peter I’s reign (wars, conflict with conservative forces, reforms) on the one hand and the impact of these years (fire, plans for buildings in the classical style, decay, attempts at restoration), not to mention a capsule history of Moscow’s changed role as the second capital after Peter’s founding of St Petersburg. The narrative is stately, occasionally a bit slow-moving, but full of delicious anecdotes, curiosities and solidly-researched history that goes back and forth between narrow focus (the Kremlin itself) and the wide lens (Russia). The fate of the Kremlin in the decades from March 1917 may well be the least known part of this story...

Foreigners' Historical Research and Life in the Soviet Union Dietrich Beyrau Translated by Georg Wurzer Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Memoir of Cold War Russia. 346 pp. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. ISBN-13 978-1784532956. $29.95. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stuck on Communism: Memoir of a Russian Historian. 202 pp. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501747373. $27.95. As a rule, historians do not lead a very exciting life in comparison with other professions, inasmuch as they do not suffer from censorship or other reprisals or become witnesses of interesting events.1 It is more, if anything, about intellectual adventures, about the thrill of researching in archives and libraries, and sometimes about controversy and interpretive authority. Sheila Fitzpatrick, born in 1941, and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, born in 1949, are contemporaries of the Cold War. They developed very different attitudes for dealing with this political constellation, in spite of sympathies for the Soviet Union, or respectively for some Soviet milieus. While the memoirs of Siegelbaum provide a retrospect of his entire life till 2018/19, those of Sheila Fitzpatrick concentrate on her study years in Oxford and her research in Moscow on the topic of the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment under A. V. Lunacharskii (1918–29) at the end of the 1960s. She tells about her life in Moscow in the circle of Igor´ A. Sats, a former collaborator of Lunacharskii, who was on the editorial staff of the journal Novyi mir in the 1960s, and under the care of a daughter of the people's commissar, Irina [End Page 420] Anatol´evna Lunacharskaia. They both helped her with her research into the people's commissariat. ________ To remain "stuck on communism" more than 30 years after its downfall, one must be pretty devoted. Siegelbaum underlines this by referring to himself as a "Russian" historian. (Sheila also calls herself "a Soviet historian" on several pages in her book.) However, Lewis Siegelbaum is a US citizen, and his father Martin was born in New York in 1915 as well. His grandparents were originally from the Pale of Jewish Settlement in Russia and Austrian Galicia. His Jewish origin is of negligible importance for the author: he calls himself a "non-Jewish Jew" following Isaac Deutscher (33). His interest in (Soviet-) Russian history stemmed less from his family's origin and more from his admiration for the Russian Revolution. It was a remote love. This love cannot necessarily be linked to the witticism of Moshe Lewin: according to Lewin, the American Left knew what it disliked—American capitalism; it liked what it didn't know—communism (15). This may be valid for Siegelbaum's teenage years but not for the decades in which he devoted himself to Soviet and Russian history and got to know the reality of communism. His love of communism was closely connected to his lifelong attachment to his father, who was a member of the Communist Party of the United States and was made to pay for this. In the McCarthy era he was dismissed from his position as a schoolteacher and stayed afloat as a sales manager for computer firms. Even after his retirement, Lewis felt dedicated to the ideals both of his father and of Rosa Luxemburg, despite his privileges as a "white male" (168) and scholar, notwithstanding some reservations against the Soviet Union. His leftist orientation meant participation in anti-Vietnam demonstrations in his young years. He was a member of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and participated actively in demonstrations at Columbia University. The end of Siegelbaum's revolutionary activities was largely due to Stephen Cohen, whom he admired as his mentor and who remained in dialogue with the leftist students. His system-critical and leftist attitude coincided with his later antipathy to the upper-class attitudes of the dons at Oxford University. He had this in common with Sheila Fitzpatrick, who hid her difficulties of adaptation as an Australian and leftist by learning to "mimic the Oxford style" (103). She also descended from a family that was embedded in the leftist milieu in Australia. For Fitzpatrick, this was an obligatory legacy...

December 2 on marked the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The evil empire and the Cold War disappeared, not with civil strife or the long-feared global conflagration, but suddenly and almost bloodlessly. As the nemesis and mirror of the west, the USSR had acted as a polestar for everything from foreign policy to weapons systems to popular culture, one that could divide as much as it united. Soviet history itself was contested ground, as it could be made to speak to everything from the general validity of socialism (and therefore capitalism) or to the nature of Russia (and therefore, the west). Twenty years on, this political valence has ebbed but has not disappeared entirely.Michael Kort's The Soviet Colossus, a classic survey of modern Russian history, is emblematic of the debates surrounding the Soviet past and how perspectives have changed - or, in some cases, stayed the same - as we move away from the Cold War/ Colossus remains among the most widely used texts on the USSR, and for good reason; it is accessible, well written, and covers a great range of material in a fairly short space. First published in 1985, Kort's work offered a general history of the USSR together with a concise account of pre-revolutionary Russia. Kort examined Russian political development from ancient Rus' through to the end of the old regime, highlighting the origins of the Russian autocracy, the intelligentsia, and the various strains of the late imperial period before moving on to Soviet history proper. The first edition of Colossus carried through to the gerontocracy of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chemenko, and though the author was aware of the internal strains within Soviet society - and presciently drew attention, for instance, to the challenge of resurgent nationalism - he, like most contemporary observers, did not believe that such problems had become a challenge to the system itself (293). Kort amended successive editions to reflect new developments (the book now extends to the Putin era), though his treatment of earlier periods is largely unchanged.Colossus' narrative traced broad lines of continuity between pre- and postrevolutionary Russia, evoking throughout a highly bifurcated view of the world - east versus west. In part, this perspective grew out of the reality of the divergence between Russia and Europe, and in part reflected a rhetorical and heuristic tradition that has a long pedigree in both western and Russian historical scholarship. Consistent with this view, Colossus stressed the statist, bureaucratic, and authoritarian nature of Russian and Soviet societies, tracing historical continuity across the revolutionary divide. Yet in seeking continuity, Kort projected his conception of the USSR - totalitarian and antiwestern - deep into the Russian past.Kort's work fell firmly within the totalitarian school of Soviet history, a model that has been challenged over the years but remains popular. Broadly speaking, this approach conceives of the Soviet Union as a dictatorial police state in which a single ruler (Stalin) or the Communist party elite controlled an atomized, brutalized, and apathetic population through terror, surveillance, economic planning, and propaganda. This interpretive framework owed much to the pioneering theory of Hannah Arendt, as well as to the accounts of Russian emigres fleeing to the west. Foundational works by Robert Conquest, Merle Fainsod, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and others focused on the centrality of Communist ideology, along with the creation and function of the Soviet party-state, at the time still shrouded in much uncertainty.2 Such works provided invaluable accounts of the inner function of the Kremlin - the view from within the black box - along with the horrors of the Gulag, the purges, and collectivization. The totalitarian approach also stressed similarities between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, a view that had policy implications for governments facing the postwar emergence of a Soviet superpower. …

SUMMARY: In his article Ronald Suny takes aim at a critical examination of relationship between modernity and the Soviet experiment, ideology and analytical apparatus employed for exploration of Soviet history, placing that examination in the context of historiographic discussions in the US Slavic field. The author takes as a point of departure the recent book by J. Scott and combines the analysis of Scott’s argument with a scrutiny of major interpretative models used in American historiography for Soviet studies, namely the “Totalitarian” and “developmentalist” ones. He differentiates between the modernization trend, which focuses on processes of social change in Soviet society, revises the image of the 1917 revolution and the nature of the soviet political regime, and modernity trend, which emphasizes the legacy of enlightenment and modern rationality in the Soviet experiment, stressing the revisionist impact of both on the historiographic image of the Soviet history. However, the author notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union has reversed the balance between the “Totalitarian” and “developmentalist” interpretations of Soviet history to the advantage of libertarian perspective on modern state and society, which now necessitates a reconstruction of relationship between soviet socialism and European modernity. Identifying modernity as a normative discourse, Suny analyzes the interplay between modernism and antimodernism, asserting that soviet socialism was not an alternative to modernity but rather an alternative within the range of historic variations of modernity. He then reviews in detail two major contributions to Soviet history by US historians of Russia, M. Malia and S. Kotkin. While welcoming their approaches to the Soviet Union as a variant and modification of European modernity, he criticizes their way of reducing the Soviet experience to the Bolshevik ideological blueprints, offering instead an understanding of Soviet ideology (socialism) and politics as a dynamic, contingent, and eventually evolving discursive process.

In 2021 and 2022, review articles on the latest international historiography on the history of Russia in the 16th-18th centuries were published in the Hungarian online scientific journal on historical Russian studies RussianStudiesHu. The journal issues also introduce readers to new research by Russian historians, but in this article I will primarily focus on the current state of Russian studies about the 16th-18th centuries in Central, Eastern and Western Europe and the United States. In review articles on the history of Russia from 1462-1689, historians from Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States, as well as French-speaking scholars, call this period of Russian history the "late medieval", "pre-modern" or "early modern" era. Some researchers argue that until the mid-17th century, Muscovy had little in common with European states. And based on review articles of international historiography, it can be established that the central figures of the historiography of the 18th century in almost every country are Peter I and Catherine II, and there is still no consensus regarding the periodization of Russian history in the 18th century.

Stephen F. Cohen (1938–2020) Alexander Rabinowitch My decades-long friendship with the late Stephen F. (Steve) Cohen, eminent historian of 20th-century Russia and courageous public intellectual, began in the fall of 1961, when we were graduate students in Russian/Soviet studies at Indiana University, Bloomington (IU).1 Having recently received an MA in international relations and history at the University of Chicago, I was completing course requirements for the PhD in Russian history at IU. Steve, who originally came to IU on a partial golf scholarship, had received a BS in economics and public policy and was then completing requirements for an MA in government and Russian studies. Already at that time, the IU Russian and East European Institute (REEI) was one of the premier American centers for interdisciplinary study of Russia, with especially great strength in Soviet politics, culture, and history. The historically grounded approach to studying that part of the world practiced by my primary adviser, the noted diplomatic historian and innovative pedagogue John M. Thompson, and Steve's chief mentor, the distinguished political theorist and leading Sovietologist Robert C. Tucker, dovetailed. This was also the approach of a large cohort of advanced graduate students with Soviet and East European specializations in both the government and history departments at IU. We tended to take many of the same courses, frequently developed related scholarly interests, and formed close, sometimes lifelong, mutually supportive friendships—as was the case with Steve and me. In the spring of 1962, Tucker accepted a permanent senior position at Princeton University and left IU. At about the same time, Steve received an MA in government and Soviet studies and transferred to Columbia University to begin work on a PhD in Russian studies. However, my close association with him continued during the 1962–63 academic year, when I was [End Page 430] conducting research in New York libraries and archives for my doctoral dissertation on the Bolsheviks and the July 1917 uprising in Petrograd. During that period, we met often, as both of us were living just four blocks apart on New York's Upper West Side, not far from the Columbia campus. One of the last times I saw Steve was in September 2019, when we, together with our spouses and soul mates (Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editorial director and publisher of The Nation with extensive firsthand experience in Moscow; and Janet Rabinowitch, a historian of modern Russia and long-time senior editor and director of Indiana University Press), participated in an REEI-sponsored roundtable titled "Russian Odysseys." The "odysseys" were Steve's and mine. We were to reflect on the roots of our long engagement with Russia, the importance of our educational experience at IU, and our professional careers in the Russian studies field. In addition to both of us being IU alums, the university had been my home base for most of my professional life, while Steve and Katrina had been generous supporters of REEI's student financial aid program and were frequent, always well-received guest lecturers. According to the roundtable format developed by Katrina and Janet, they were to take turns "deposing" us. The large, informal room where the event took place was packed for the occasion—Steve and Katrina could always be counted on to draw big crowds. The mood was friendly and relaxed, yet focused. This was due largely to Steve, whose pioneering research on the Soviet historical experience was well known and greatly admired, and who was as engaging, intellectually lively, and even entertaining in such congenial surroundings as he was crisp, quick, passionate, and often simply overwhelming in serious semiprivate or public debate. To give a few examples from our "odyssey" roundtable: I responded to an initial question from Janet about how and when my Russian odyssey began by describing my birth and upbringing in a prominent Russian émigré family. Responding to a follow-up question from Katrina about what had brought me to IU and the impact of my IU experience, I described the effect of my youthful interactions with prominent Russian refugees, military service, and the first Cold War on the formation of my early, thoroughly negative view of Soviet history and politics...

Most scholars reading these pages in the peaceful quiet of a library or a comfortable chair at home probably would agree, if asked, that violence is not an admirable historical phenomenon. On reflection they would soon recognize, however, that an instinctive abhorrence of violence hardly rises to the level of a universal truth: a few years ago, for example, Soviet historians certainly operated within a framework that endorsed revolutionary violence, and all but the most committed pacifists would maintain that violence is sometimes necessary. Yet that instinctive abhorrence, related to a historical link between the absence of violence and standards of "civilization," is certainly one reason why political violence has become such a favored topic of study in recent years. Studying violence has become a way to focus attention, often in new ways, on the causes and mechanisms of some of the most controversial episodes in the modern period, such as genocide, population transfers, revolutionary and state terror, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and communist purges.

First published in 1933, Youth in Soviet Russia presents Klaus Mehnert' s honest and personal account of the state of the youth in USSR. It contains themes like living human beings, student and class, student and the state, the idea of the Komsomol, the literature of the youth, youth and the theatre, the youth commune, trends and attitudes towards sex and marriage with the development of new morality. Mehnert, a German born in Russia offers valuable description of his personal experiences while living with Russian youth during four successive autumns. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Soviet history, Russian history, and communist history.

Women’s Autobiographical Narratives:Soviet Presentations of Self Anne E. Gorsuch (bio) Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 443 pp. ISBN 0-691-01949-5 (paper). $24.95. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya, eds., A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. 236 pp. ISBN 0-8133-3366-0 (paper). $25.00. Simon Vilensky, Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. 335 pp. ISBN 0-253-33464-0 (cloth). $35.00. In Eva Hoffman's moving memoir of her emigration from Poland to North America, she describes the constructed nature of memory in reference to another earlier Jewish emigrant: "The America of her time gave her certain categories within which to see herself – a belief in self-improvement, in perfectibility of the species, in moral uplift – and these categories led her to foreground certain parts of her own experience, and to throw whole chunks of it into the barely visible background."1 These three excellent edited collections of Soviet women's life stories show that the same was clearly true, in different, but even more exaggerated ways, in Soviet Russia. The collections are part of a recent outpouring of memory from the former Soviet Union in the form of autobiography, published diaries, and oral interviews.2 This outpouring stems in part from the post-Soviet [End Page 835] opening of Russia and the release of previously private material, as well as from the possibility of asking questions about topics and of people previously closed to us. The focus on women's memoirs accords with this "opening," as the private lives of women have been generally less accessible to our eyes and our understanding than the more public lives of (some) men.3 As the citation from Eva Hoffman suggests, however, using life stories as sources for historical understanding prompts questions as well as suggesting new answers. Some of these questions relate to the life stories themselves, others to the meaning ascribed to these life stories by historians and literary scholars. What were the "categories" within which Soviet women saw themselves? What was the relationship between women, the Soviet experience, and women's own sense of self as described in these life stories? Was women's sense of self a gendered sense? Secondly, how do we use these life stories? How do we compare and evaluate the meaning, or even the "truth," of works written for official purposes, diaries written for the desk drawer, comments made around the kitchen table, and interviews done 40 years later? Are they best understood as narratives or are they also repositories of experience? Can we generalize about women's selfhood in Soviet Russia on the basis of these individual accounts? In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, contains the widest variety of source materials from the widest variety of women – émigrés writing from Paris, dissidents writing in the 1960s, Soviet heroines writing their autobiographies for newspapers, and peasant women telling their life stories in [End Page 836] oral interviews. Although the book extends from 1917 to the eve of World War II, the collection is organized around key historical periods – the Revolution and Civil War, NEP, and the 1930s – and there are only a few women whose stories cover the entire period. In contrast, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History contains the life stories of only eight women, again of varied backgrounds (working class, peasant, the daughters of nobles and of parish priests), but we hear about each life experience from the Revolution through the early 1950s. These narratives come to us through interviews conducted by Anastasia Posadskaya in the post-Soviet period, and then selected, edited, and annotated by Posadskaya and Barbara Alpern Engel. The editors of A Revolution of Their Own write that they looked for "ordinary" women to interview; they "did not actively seek out stories either of...

Sergei Fedorovich Platonov (1860-1933) Russian and Soviet historian, teacher. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the Historical and Philological Department, full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At first, he did not think about devoting himself to history, he wrote poetry and dreamed of a career as a professional writer.Much in the life of S.F. Platonov of the last years of the gymnasium period remains unknown. It is to this period that researchers have turned today. And it turned out that at that time young Platonov had diverse interests, primarily in the field of poetry, theater hobbies. It was during these years that there were meetings with people, communication with whom had a great impact on the formation of his worldview and hobbies. Such acquaintances should include meetings with E.N. Kalaidovich, V.N. Berkut, V.F. Kenevich, a high school literature teacher widely known in scientific circles for his works in the field of wing studies. It is about close communication with these people, already being a mature man, a world-renowned scientist, S.F. Platonov will write many warm lines in his biographical works. Not only long conversations were conducted with V.F. Kenevich, he was initiated by a high school student of the Bychkov gymnasium into his poetic experiments. And acquaintance with individual poems caused him enthusiastic responses.

ARTICLES A key challenge faced by historians of the 1990s all over the world has been to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist rule in Russia. But more fundamental question, less often addressed, is the real nature of the Soviet system that was finally swept away. Understanding the convulsions of the recent past demands reconsideration of the tumultuous history of the entire century. The astonishing events of 1991 have implanted an almost universal stereotype about the fallen regime. It is considered, in Russia as well as abroad, to have been a 74-year experiment that failed, or some variation on that theme. This judgment flows from literal, simplistic reading of Communist ideology as the main determinant of the Soviet experience. It differs from official Stalinist and neo-Stalinist propaganda only in putting negative rather than positive value on that record. The entire Soviet experience is thus presumed to have had simple historical unity, as the direct, undeviating pursuit of disastrous revolutionary utopia. It follows from this assumption that any proclaimed goals or practices associated with the Soviet system must be rejected without qualification. This reasoning has led the post-Soviet regime into historical vacuum, pursuing its own form of counter-utopia to the point of new national disaster. The main dissent from this viewpoint in Russia has not been based on any new alternative, but only on the opposite valuation of the undifferentiated Soviet past, the nostalgic faith that everything associated with the Soviet regime was essentially correct and heroic. Both attitudes, government and opposition, have been equally oblivious to the real Russian past, and neither has offered the guidance needed to lead the country out of its post-Soviet impasse. Today's profoundly unhistorical misunderstanding of the Soviet experience revolves around three basic problems. First is the nature of the Russian Revolution as long-term process, and its significance as the framework for the overall development of Russian society. The second problem is the challenge of modernization that Russia has faced all during its revolutionary experience, along with the ambiguous relationship between Russia and the West in this respect. A related question is to define the character of post-revolutionary society in Russia, and its relation to modem social trends around the globe. The problem of modernization and social change leads in turn to the third main question about the Soviet regime, namely the relation between ideology and reality, and the confusion that Communist doctrine has created about the social nature of the system. Finally, out of an investigaton of these foundations of Soviet reality some conclusions can be derived about the alleged successes and failures of the revolution and about the assumptions that have governed the post-Soviet regime. THE PROCESS OF REVOLUTION Revolution, obviously, is the central fact in the history of Russia in the twentieth century, as well as cardinal theme of global history in this era. Russians do not need to be reminded that revolution is tragic experience. It is tragic not only in the human suffering it entails, but in the hopes for better world that it feeds on and then betrays. But it would be misguided to blame those hopes, and the ideologies that convey them, for the crimes that may have been committed in their name. This is the approach of ideological reductionism, familiar error in the understanding of revolutions and their consequences, and nearly universal mistake in the post-Communist atmosphere. All the misery of revolution is attributed to the wrong-headed ideas of revolutionaries whose thinking supposedly traces back to the Enlightenment and the hubris of rational intervention in the affairs of society. In reality, revolutions are far more complex and multi-dimensional, far more deeply embedded in the historical evolution of given society, than the simple explanations of dangerous ideas or nefarious plots imply. …

Audio-Visual Aids for Russian and Soviet History: Progress, Problems, and Possibilities

It is difficult to think of a time during the last half century of Russian and Soviet history when education was not being subjected to a reform of some kind. Indeed, teachers and administrators became so wearied by this constant tinkering that they either implemented the changes at the most minimal level possible, or they ignored them altogether. In the post-Soviet period, educational reforms have continued to be promulgated, the results of which have come in for considerable criticism. An example of this criticism is provided by our lead article, "Reform of the System of Education: What We Are Losing," which presents the results of a roundtable discussion held in Novosibirsk. The participants looked at the situation in both the secondary schools and in higher education, and were generally critical of the state's refusal to fund the changes for which it was calling. There was also dissatisfaction with the size of the bureaucracy that school and university administrators had to deal with (not to mention the "fees" that had to be paid); with the move to a twelve-year secondary system when the eleven-year system had not even been achieved yet; with the inability of the economy to employ university graduates; with attempts to have a single, national standard of student performance; with teachers' incomes set at well below the minimum wage; with the loss of universal secondary education; and so on. What was lacking, however, was a detailed consideration of schools in rural areas and small towns, where conditions are considerable worse than in the cities and towns from which the participants came.

The separation, in the 1960s, of gerontology in the USSR into psychogerontology, social gerontology, and gerontohygiene was the result of long development of various aspects of study of the problem of old age and longevity in domestic science. Analysis of publications in the scientific literature, beginning with the 19th century in Russia, shows that psychological problems of gerontology have been reflected in many Russian philosophical, general biological, and medical studies. It is obvious mat psychogerontology has become a domain of knowledge in its own right at the interface among gerontology, psychology, and mental health, which in turn have developed within the framework of various sciences—philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and others. Hence, it is necessary to trace the interdisciplinary connections in the genesis of psychological knowledge of old age in Russia.