The world-wide struggle over petroleum that was carried on in the period between the first World War and the second World War occupies a significant place in the chronicle of Soviet-Western relations. Soviet oil was a prize as well as a contestant in this struggle and was deeply involved in the controversies over control of oil resources and markets that created so deep a rift in international relations in the interwar years. The facts in the case provide a striking illustration of the power of oil as a source of international friction. The quarrels which are here resurrected were composed in due time, and differences were reconciled. But the old struggle over oil has been revived in a new setting and is again contributing its share of suspicion to the troubled international scene.

The first World War and its aftermath saw a fundamental change in the world petroleum situation. Oil had emerged as a vital factor in military strategy and an eagerly sought-after fuel, demanded in ever greater quantities by a motorized world. As a result, the international oil groups redoubled their efforts to acquire control over the most promising foreign sources of production.

In Langston Hughes's 1934 essay “Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” (published in Travel magazine), the author writes mournfully about the Soviet reforms that put an end to the practice of effeminized male dancers, bachi, performing in the teahouses of Central Asia for exclusively male audiences; in doing so, Hughes expresses an enthusiasm for the queer contours of the bachi tradition. This article connects that enthusiasm with Hughes's earlier involvement in cultural efforts aimed at increasing queer visibility within the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. By situating “Boy Dancers” in this context, the underexplored role of the Russian Revolution in fostering queer solidarity among global communities of color is highlighted.

This paper argues for greater integration of considerations of women and gender in the history of the 1917 Russian Revolutions. Two key issues have long been discussed by historians: the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, and the role of class in the revolution. Neither has been adequately analyzed in relation to gender. Women's suffrage has been largely neglected despite the fact that it was a significant issue throughout the year and represented a pioneering advance won by a countrywide coalition of women and men from the working class and intelligentsia, and from almost all political parties. In this centennial year, accounts of the Revolution remain one-dimensional; women remain the other.

The process of imposing socialist realism on Lithuanian literature, which became a part of the Soviet multinational project after the Soviet occupation in 1940, does not directly follow the general pattern of transferring the Russian model. The agents of the Soviet national literary field not only transposed standard socialist plots to local realia, but also had to transform them in order to legitimate occupation, to reject the legacy of the independent Lithuanian republic, and to reinterpret anti-Soviet resistance. In the process of inventing the national sources of socialist realism and forging “the most advanced artistic method,” overcoming the constraints of the Lithuanian literary tradition proved impossible. This article discusses the encounter of inherited literary structures with the external model and its effects on the development of Lithuanian socialist realism.

In the spring of 1863, Lev Tolstoi, newly married and soon to be a father, began to conceive of the work that would eventually become War And Peace. That same spring he also took up beekeeping. While in practical terms his “bee passion” proved relatively short-lived, it was an exceptionally intense engagement with a miniaturized and uniquely observable biological and social universe. In this article, Thomas Newlin explores how Tolstoi's dual enmeshment in “swarm life”—that is, in the biologically fraught realms of marriage and beekeeping—influenced both the unconventional form of War and Peace and its equally unconventional ideas (in particular Tolstoi's linked conceptions of the nature of history and of consciousness). The implications of a “swarm” model of history ultimately troubled Tolstoi, however; his doubts about the imperatives of biology do not play themselves out fully in War and Peace but instead lurk just beneath its surface.

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.

This article discusses Viktor Shklovskii's exilic narratives of the early 1920s, Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, and Zoo, or Letters Not about Love. I suggest that in these texts, published in Berlin shortly after the show trial against the right Socialist Revolutionariès, Shklovskii casts himself as a "sentimental hero," evoking sympathy for the narrator's plight by mobilizing some of the devices of the sentimental novel but also struggling with the implications of this sentimentalism. The article outlines Shklovskii's attempts to prove his political reliability during his exile, juxtaposing his private correspondence with his memoirs, and argues for a more nuanced interpretation of Shklovskii's political biography through the prism of the history of emotions.

The work of Daniil Kharms was lost to the West for many years. A poet and black humorist, creator of Russia's short-lived literature of the absurd, Kharms shared the fate of many of his contemporaries. His work, which was passed from hand to hand after his disappearance in 1941, began to surface in print only in the late 1960s. But in spite of a number of recent publications, Kharms remains largely unknown and misunderstood. His eccentric, often grotesque stories are too easily dismissed as lacking depth. Part of this misunderstanding stems from an incomplete knowledge of Kharms's work: because Western readers are limited to published materials, they are unable to perceive the strong religious strain that underlies much of Kharms's writing.

One of the sites of socialist construction that grabbed Soviet public attention in the 1920s and 1930s, peat also dramatized the difficulties faced by Soviet artists in devising representational modes appropriate to their new tasks. In the mid-1920s stories by Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksandr Peregudov, and Aleksandr Iakovlev granted a voice to peat workers by augmenting existing literary forms with documentary and agitational methods. In the 1930s, artists (including Peregudov and Arsenii Tarkovskii) focused on Peat’s role in the powering of socialism, dissolving the stuff of peat in the imaginary map of social and cultural forces. Analogous strategies of mechanics and energetics can be seen in film and graphic art of the 1920s and 1930s. Later works on peat by Prishvin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn register the resistance of nature—including language and other artistic media—to engineered or speculative solutions, calling into question the very possibility of representing Soviet political, economic and social values.

The difficulties facing the student of contemporary Soviet conditions in his search for reliable evidence on detail are well known. Court cases, so far as reported, have obvious advantages in comparison, let us say, with the literary productions of authors, who aim at illustrating the direction in which Soviet society is supposed to move, as well as in comparison with the published reports of refugees. These reports may be supposed not to reflect the outlook of the typical Soviet citizen. Further, the refugees’ experiences are subject to processes of selection and editing, which are to a greater or lesser extent conditioned by the state of international relations and of public opinion in the country of publication. The court case, in contrast, represents facts established by the authorities under conditions in which maximum precision is desired, and it is published not only because of its propagandist but (and mainly) for its legal interest.

The seventeenth-century chronicles record an interesting event under the year 1574:

At that time Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich enthroned Simeon Bekbulatovich as tsar in Moscow and crowned him with the crown of the tsars, and called himself [simply] Ivan of Moscow; he left the city and lived in Petrovka. All the offices of tsardom he passed to Simeon, and himself rode simply, like a boyar with shafts, and whenever he comes to Tsar Simeon, he sits at a distance from the Tsar’s place, together with the boyars.

That such an event did in fact take place, we have the testimony of contemporary witnesses, the English envoy Danyell Silvester and the imperial envoy Daniel Printz a Bucchau, as well as official documents which have been preserved from the time of Simeon’s reign as tsar.