The Pedagogical Ideas and Practice of L. N. Tolstoy

Many people have written about the life, literary work and pedagogical activity of L. N. Tolstoy, but only the founder of the Communist Party, the great Lenin, fully and correctly indicated his real importance and role in Russian life, explained the sharp contradictions in his world outlook, presented a profound analysis of the great writer's creativity and showed that Tolstoy the artist and thinker mirrored "the specific historical features of the first Russian Revolution, its strength and its weakness."     

He Knew How to Make Himself Irreplaceable

Now that Sobchak is no longer with us, the remarks he made not long before his premature death take on the force of an invocation, a prophecy. I met with him—just think!—only last Monday in his small office on Nevskii Prospekt. It was Valentine's Day, and I felt that I was not intruding too much in Sobchak's family plans. "Lana," he told his wife on his mobile phone, "you didn 't know, but I am talking with Sosnov. No, I won't be late for dinner."     

Introduction to "The Diary of Anne Frank"

This is Ehrenburg's foreword to the Russian translation of the widely known record of a young Jewish girl growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland. It was recently issued (August 1960) by the Foreign Literature Publishing House in Moscow.     

Expressionism in Music—Real and Imagined

At the Congress of Soviet Musicians in April, 1960, there was considerable heated debate on modernist—and more specifically expressionist—tendencies in Soviet music. The debate was sparked by critical discussion of the recently published Volumes II and III of A History of Russian Soviet Music. During the debate Iosif Ryzhkin, musician, critic and musicologist, took sharp issue with the author of this article over the latter's defense of Prokofiev, whose work at one time was under indictment as "Western-influenced" and "decadent." Specifically the clash centered around the last opera written by the dean of Soviet composers, the monumental War and Peace. Ryzhkin and Danilevich disagreed sharply on the way this work was evaluated in Volume III of the History.     

Social Studies in Today's Schools

The need to create a new social studies course is mandated by cardinal changes in the country—by the desire to resurrect Russian statehood and overcome the "image of the enemy" in relations with other states; by substantial changes in the social sciences and opportunities that have opened up to explore the diversity of worldview positions, by perestroika in the sphere of education, designed to make it more humane and to shape citizens who are integrated into contemporary society and desirous of improving it; and by educators' and school students' vigorous rejection of the old content of the social disciplines. The old content deprived students of the opportunity to become properly acquainted with the multicolored picture of contemporary life in the country and the world; it failed to foster the correct orientation under rapidly changing circumstances and realization of one's own place in them.     

Where Is Russia Going and Why?

Russia is in the throes of economic and social change.¹ The changes are being monitored by VTsIOM [the Russian Center for Public Opinion Research]. VTsIOM processes its data in time series, and some of these series are published in the VTsIOM bulletin.² VTsIOM's bulletin and sociological data bank are extremely valuable sources of information regarding the "historic scale" of the Russian model for change in the 1990s. This article makes secondary use of dynamic indices, both unpublished indices and those published in the VTsIOM bulletin, based on public opinion surveys reflecting economic and social changes since March 1993 in order to engage in multidimensional analysis of the factors involved in Russia's evolution and the developmental alternatives.     

Abstract Humanism and Socialist Humanism

This article, taken from a leading Soviet literary journal, elaborates the concept of "social humanism" as applied to literature. It is also concerned with a frequently discussed question in Soviet literary criticism — the nature of the hero in Soviet and other modern literature. The authors are researchers at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. Voprosy Literatury (Problems of Literature), 1960, No. 12 — slightly abridged.     

Political Opposition in Russia: Is it Becoming Extinct

This article uses Russian experience to examine several issues concerning the relationship of electoral procedures, democratization, and liberalization. The author's interpretation of certain aspects of the political process in contemporary Russia does not coincide with the opinions of other researchers, including some published in our journal. L. Diamond raised a similar set of predominantly theoretical issues in "Is the 'Third Wave' of Democratization Over?" [Polis, 1999, no. 1].     

The Pussy Riot Case

The performance put on by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior (CCS) in Moscow is rightly considered a major event in the international protest movement of 2012. The Pussy Riot case became a litmus test for liberalism and for the schisms in Russian society, raising a wave of irreconcilable criticism from the radically inclined pro-Putin majority, including politicians, the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, and journalists. A central theme in the criticism directed against Pussy Riot was anti-Western rhetoric. Asserting that the West supported Pussy Riot's actions, the critics portrayed the performance as an attack on the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church and on Russian statehood. In the ideological components of the anti-Western campaign against this punk group, a parallel emerges between the Pussy Riot case and the Beilis trial held a hundred years earlier in terms of social antagonism and the appraisal of liberal values. Whereas Beilis's acquittal on the eve of World War I marked a tendency toward the establishment of democracy in Russia at that time, the conviction in the Pussy Riot case was a triumph for antidemocratic and anti-Western values, showing that contemporary Russia has completed its transition to an authoritarian regime.     

Competitive Changes on Russian Markets: The Example of Retail Chains

On the eve of the First Congress of Artists of the Russian Federation a ranking painter and critic gives his ideas on realism versus abstractionism, form versus content and the social responsibility of the artist. ("An Artist's Notes," Kommunist, 1960, No. 8—slightly abridged.)     

The Impact of Tolstoy

An analysis by a ranking Soviet writer was presented at a meeting at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, November 19, 1960, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy's death. This is a critical appraisal of Tolstoy, of his contribution to the mainstream of Russian and world literature and of his significance as a social thinker. ("Leo Tolstoy," Pravda, November 20, 1960—abridged.)     

The three basic paradigms of macrosociology: Functionalism,neo-Marxism and interaction analysis

Macrosociology is probably the least developed part of sociology. While macroeconomics is a well-organized body of knowledge which can be and is actually presented in textbooks which include a set of logically articulated topics, a treatise in macrosociology typically has the same appearance as philosophy texts; its chapters include presentations of A. Comte's, Durkheim's, and Weber's sociology, just as a philosophy text includes chapters on Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, etc. Why is this so? My contention in this paper is that the primary explanation for the difficulty experienced by sociologists in their attempt to give macrosociology a firm foundation derives chiefly from the coexistence in sociology of three basic paradigms which can scarcely be reconciled with one another. A second and complementary reason is that, while among these three paradigms: functionalism, neo-Marxism and interaction analysis, the third one is probably the most fruitful, at least potentially, although it has attracted less attention among sociologists than the others. In the present paper I will primarily refer to contemporary Western sociology, that is, to sociological works written after the Second World War and produced in Western countries.     

Ethnic Aspects of Gender Social Inequality

Egor Gaidar has just completed work on his book The State and Evolution. Analyzing the major trends in Russia's historical development, the author aims at a deeper understanding of what has happened to us in the recent past, which has been so stormy, of the precise point in our centuries-long journey at which we find ourselves, and of what is inscribed upon the milestone before which the wandering Russian knight stands once again, wondering: "Should I go left, or right?"     

The History of Materialist Psychophysiology

Although this historical sketch is far from complete, it gives some interesting facts concerning the progress of the materialistic point of view in physiology. This movement began with Sechenov's Reflexes of the brain in 1863, banned for its materialistic attitude. The ideas of the objective rather than subjective explanations were reinforced by Pavlov's reduction of mental phenomena to conditional reflexes. However, Pavlov was careful to assert that he did not deny the subjective phenomena — religion, art, literature — but that there was no scientific method of studying the subjective.     

Economic Management of Siberia

If nothing is done and we passively watch the outflow of population and the loss of business from Siberia and the Far East toward the west, then the Russian Federation will not be able to preserve its sovereignty in Asia for long. Studying the experience of the Kamchatka Joint-Stock Company, the Russian-American Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, and the East India companies, the author suggests that economic management is the only way to develop new and slightly developed territories. Government agencies can only regulate this development—commercial interest alone can drive it.     

"Political Islam" and Western Society

The term "political Islam" sounds strange to people who are not familiar with Muhammad's teaching: how can a religion be political? To a Muslim—for whom religion is inseparable from politics, the state, and from all spheres of a person's life—this formula seems equally strange, but for a different reason entirely. After all, in Islam there is no division into secular power and spiritual power; in fact, the Church as an institution does not even exist. The Christian formula "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" [Matthew 22:21] is unacceptable to Islam; and the Muslim rulers, beginning with the caliphs, have embodied both spiritual and secular power at the same time. From a Muslim standpoint, Islam's political influence is a natural phenomenon.     

Chechnya

The roots of the conflict between Moscow and Grozny lie in the history of Chechnya's relations with the Russian state. When Russia conquered Chechnya in the second half of the last century, the Chechens were, in terms of civilizational development, in a pretraditional stage characterized by the absence in practice of a stable state form capable of subordinating clan and tribal relationships to itself. The expansion of the Russian Empire was directed at regulating local conflicts among various clan and tribal groups and individual princes; however, this "civilizing mission" contained an incipient conflict between the center of the empire and these peoples. The Russian Empire's policy of annexation, implemented in a highly traditional country, predetermined the rise of conflict, manifested in the Caucasian war between Chechnya and Russia in the nineteenth century and the state of oppression that followed, in which Chechnya has now lived for more than a century and a half. Along with conflictual relations, a certain collaboration also developed and groups neutral to the conflict began to appear. This, in turn, stirred up conflict among the Chechens themselves.     

'To live this poor life': Remembering the Hottentots Huisie squatter fishery,Cape Town,c.1934-c.1965

The paper provides a social history of a Cape Town squatter fishing settlement, Hottentots Huisie, drawn primarily from the oral histories of its inhabitants before their forced removal under apartheid Group Areas legislation in the mid 1960s. Such use of oral history has fallen into disfavour with South African social historians, increasingly suspicious of the 1980s orthodoxy that all underclass biography is reducible to the essences of 'community' and 'resistance'. The life histories of Hottentots Huisie's inhabitants defy such easy categorization. Family not 'community' sustained the fishing economy. The tenuous economic base of squatter families, however, produced a robust patriarchy seeking to maintain male control over the labour of women and children through monopolization of the folk biology of fishing and its cash rewards, backed up by violence. Second generation squatter girls, however, refused domestic indenture to fishermen by deserting Hottentots Huisie for the greater freedom and opportunity of Cape Town's urban economy, dooming the settlement to extinction regardless of forced removal. Similarly, squatter 'resistance' to bureaucrats and bosses can also best be characterized as 'everyday' and took the form of squatting and crayfish poaching whose aim was 'working the system to their minimum disadvantage'. Ironically, the act of forced removal created the surviving Hottentots Huisie 'community' of memory.     

Folk Art of the Russians of the Mezen'

The distinctive features of the traditional culture of the Russians of the Mezen' have in many respects been determined by the history of the settlement of this area by various groups of Slavs. According to historical evidence, the Mezen' was settled in two currents—from the north by the descendants of people from Novgorod and from the south by a mixed Komi-Russian population.¹ Contacts with the Komi-Zyrians, who had settled in the upper reaches of this river and its principal tributary, the Bashka, played a considerable role in the development of the intellectual and material culture of the Russians of the Mezen'. Trade routes linking the basins of the Mezen', Pinega, Northern Dvina, and Pechora rivers, and relations with the Russian population living in the basins of these rivers, were of special importance for this region.