Russian Research Center Studies

Facing directly a central problem for our day—the future form and policies of the Soviet Union—Barrington Moore explores the possible alternatives confronting the Soviet leaders and sets up a framework into which anyone—scholar, student, or “general reader”—can place events as they happen and thus assess the direction in which the USSR is moving.

Here is the history of the disintegration of the Russian Empire, and the emergence of a multinational Communist state. Pipes tells how the Communists exploited the new nationalism of the peoples of the Ukraine, Belorussia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Volga-Ural area—first to seize power and then to expand into the borderlands.

This is the first intensive study of the developing national consciousness in 18th-century Russian life and letters. Historians have paradoxically argued a lack of national consciousness in this period both from Russia’s backwardness and its imitativeness. As Hans Rogger points out, however, “neither the dearth nor the excess of Western influence, neither too little Enlightenment nor too much French frivolity are adequate formulations of the question for Russia”; and he demonstrates convincingly that the impact of European attitudes was already forcing Russians to articulate a national cultural identity well before the 19th century.

Although Alex Inkeles covers a wide range of subjects, he has one primary purpose: to identify the main elements of the process of modernization in the Soviet social system. While he thus provides a broad description of Soviet institutions and the ways in which they function, his chief concern is to find the principles common to social change in all aspects of Soviet society and to determine if these principles underlie the same process in other countries, both those with and without a revolutionary tradition.

For nearly thirty years, from the late 1920s to the late 1950s, the keystone of the entire Soviet collective farm system was the network of MTS (machine-tractor stations) which owned, housed, operated, and repaired heavy farm machinery for the surrounding farms. Here Robert Miller analyzes the history of the MTS and relates his findings to the development of Soviet administrative policies.

Public pronouncements of Russian leaders—prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary alike—attested the crucial role of the agricultural problem, its economically and politically explosive nature, and its persistence over the years. Emphasizing the continuity of problems and policies too often dichotomized into tsarist and Soviet eras, Lazar Volin created a sweeping panorama of the century between the emancipation of the serfs and the 1960s.

That Strakhov was always classified by his contemporaries as a “conservative” gives his life a special significance in Russian intellectual history. In this first full-length intellectual biography in any language of Strakhov, Linda Gerstein provides a guide both to the individual and to the amazingly complex picture of Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century.

For centuries the exchange of letters between Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584) and Prince Kurbskii, Muscovy’s first notable defector, has been considered an authentic and important source for sixteenth-century Russian history. Edward Keenan draws on all the tools of source study and literary criticism to demonstrate that the “Correspondence” is a forgery, and in fact was composed some decades later in the seventeenth century.

Chernyshevskii (1828–1889), a pivotal figure in the Russian protest movement after the Crimean War, was esteemed by Marx and Lenin. This first thorough treatment of Chernyshevskii in English is a biography and a presentation of his views on philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, economics and social relations, politics and revolution.

The efforts of Dmitry Tolstoi’s ministry resulted in comprehensive reforms that shaped the Russian school system until early in the twentieth century. Beginning with the historical, political, biographical, and administrative contexts for Tolstoi’s reforms, Sinel then provides a detailed examination of Tolstoi’s transformation of Russian education at all levels, particularly the secondary level, which was the cornerstone of his program.

The Dynamics of Soviet Politics is the result of reflective and thorough research into the centers of a system whose inner debates are not open to public discussion and review, a system which tolerates no public opposition parties, no prying congressional committees, and no investigative journalists to ferret out secrets.

For six decades the Soviet system has been immune to military rebellion and takeover, which often characterizes modernizing countries. How can we explain the stability of Soviet military politics? asks Timothy Colton in his compelling interpretation of civil–military relations in the Soviet Union.

Naimark sorts out the political cases of some 5,000 anti-czarists and relates their histories. The narodovol’tsy believed in terrorism and state power to introduce socialism, social democrats tried to prepare urban workers for a future role in parliamentary institutions, and populists believed in raising people’s consciousness for change.

How does the excessive bureaucratization of central planning affect politics in communist countries? Mark Beissinger suggests an answer through this history of the Soviet Scientific Management movement and its contemporary descendants, raising at the same time broader questions about the political consequences of economic systems.

Published amid the unraveling of the second Yugoslavia, The Contested Country lays bare the roots of the idea of Yugoslav unity—its conflict with the Croatian and Serbian national ideologies and its peculiar alliance with liberal and progressive, especially Communist, ideologies.

Much of the Soviet population remains indifferent, if not downright hostile, to the idea of reform. This phenomenon, so different from the Solidarity movement in Poland or the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, has been explained in terms of a “social contract”—a tacit agreement between the regime and working class whereby the state provided security in return for political compliance. This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract.

Through Graham, executed engineer Peter Palchinsky tells of Soviet technology and industry, the mistakes he condemned in his lifetime, the corruption and collapse he predicted, the ultimate price paid for silencing those who were not afraid to speak out. Palchinsky’s story is also the story of the Soviet Union’s industrial promise and failure.

Once the hub of the tsarist state, later Brezhnev’s “model Communist city”—home of the Kremlin, Red Square, and St. Basil’s Cathedral—Moscow is for many the quintessence of everything Russian. Timothy Colton’s sweeping biography of this city at the center of Soviet and post-Soviet life reveals what such a position has meant to Moscow and ultimately to Russia itself.

Solnick argues that the Soviet system fell victim not to stalemate at the top nor to revolution from below, but to opportunism from within. In case studies on the Communist Youth League, the system of job assignments for university graduates, and military conscription, he tells the story from a new perspective, testing Western theories of reform.

A foremost Russian writer of the Soviet period, Bulgakov (1891–1940) has attracted much critical attention, yet Haber is the first to explore in depth his formative years. Blending biography and literary analysis of motifs, story, and characterization, Haber tracks one writer’s answer to the dislocations of revolution, civil war, and Bolshevism.

Brudny argues that the rise of the Russian nationalist movement was a combined result of the reinvention of Russian national identity by a group of intellectuals, and the Communist Party’s active support of this reinvention in order to gain greater political legitimacy. The author meticulously reconstructs the development of the Russian nationalist thought from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, as well as the nature of the Communist Party response to Russian nationalist ideas.

In the decades before and during the rise of the Russian novel, a new form of prose writing took hold in Russia: travel accounts, often fictional, marked by a fully developed narrator’s voice, interpretive impressions, scenic descriptions, and extended narrative. In illuminating analyses of major texts as well as lesser known but influential works, Andreas Schönle surveys the literary travelogue from its emergence in Russia to the end of the Romantic era.

In this compelling study of the treatment of “enemy” minorities in the Russian Empire during the First World War, Eric Lohr uncovers a dramatic story of mass deportations, purges, expropriations, and popular violence. A campaign initially aimed at restricting foreign citizens rapidly spun out of control. It swept up Russian subjects of German, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds and drove roughly a million civilians from one part of the empire to another, resulting in one of the largest cases of forced migration in history to that time. Based on extensive archival research, much in newly available sources, Nationalizing the Russian Empire is an important contribution to the study of empire and nationalism, the Russian Revolution, and ethnic cleansing.

Matthew Lenoe traces the origins of Stalinist mass culture to newspaper journalism in the late 1920s. In examining the transformation of Soviet newspapers during the New Economic Policy and the First Five Year Plan, Lenoe tells a dramatic story of purges, political intrigues, and social upheaval. Deeply researched and lucidly written, this book is a major contribution to the literature on Soviet culture and society.

Challenging the claim that workers supported Stalin’s revolution “from above” as well as the assumption that working-class opposition to a workers’ state was impossible, Jeffrey Rossman shows how a crucial segment of the Soviet population opposed the authorities during the critical industrializing period of the First Five-Year Plan.