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The Soviet theater: a documentary history, edited by Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky, New Haven CT and London, Yale University Press, 2014, xxiii + 754 pp., US$125.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-300-19476-0Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky have produced an essential, welcome, and muchneeded sourcebook for all scholars - young or grizzled - studying Soviet, especially Russian, theatre. In a task that has taken 20 years, Senelick and Ostrovsky have followed an extensive paper trail. Happily, they have chosen to mimic their subject and, like the Soviet government, interpreted the concept of "document" in the widest possible sense; thus, they include not only official records, decrees, and other pronouncements, but also protocols, minutes of meetings, excerpts from memoirs, diaries, letters, reviews (occasionally foreign, as well as Soviet), and criticism, in addition to the occasionally quoted passages from plays and satires. This widely cast net has brought home great riches culled from the libraries and archives of the Russian Federation, the United States, and Israel. History comes alive with a multiplicity of voices and opinions: enthusiastic, admonitory, anxious, fearful, officious, declamatory, satiric. Together, these documents are witnesses to the constantly shifting, volatile, and often dangerous, commingled terrain of art and politics in the Soviet period.Indeed, the authors forcefully and necessarily emphasize the complete interconnections of art and politics throughout the whole Soviet period, from the heady days of experimentation through repression to the descent into stagnation. This tome thus provides a necessary corrective to the many English-language books and articles that focus on individuals and fail to recognize the inescapable embeddedness of culture in the politics of the period. As the authors insist in their preface:We are not dealing with independent artists creating in a vacuum, nor even with theater folk responding to the tastes of an audience. Art for art's sake plays no role here. In the USSR, almost from the first, the theater is, in one way or another, a reflection of the government's mood. How theater is to serve society is dictated from above: one may oppose that diktat or find idiosyncratic ways to serve it, but it cannot be avoided, (xi)In the introduction, they reiterate the fact that between 1917 and 1992 politics infused all theatres, "traditional or experimental, Party dictated or dissenting, amateur or professional"; yet, astonishingly, many "extraordinary accomplishments saw the light of day" (6).Written with verve and wit, the introduction lays out in a clear, lucid, and concise manner the histoiy of theatre in Russia, beginning with its late arrival in the nineteenth century, its hierarchical structure, and - most significantly - its ardent embrace of moral-ethical imperatives. More than just an entertainment, theatre was to offer moral and spiritual sustenance. This tradition of theatre as a "service" industry was adopted in the Soviet period, when its arsenal was, above all, to be deployed in serving the ends of socialism and communism. Other carryovers from the tsarist period were the systems of control and censorship, honed and perfected into efficiency by the Bolsheviks. Not simply prohibiting what was "harmful", as did their tsarist forebears, the Bolsheviks also went further by prescribing what was "wholesome for the community" (7).The book is logically divided into 11 chapters corresponding to the generally accepted periodization of Soviet history, each prefaced by a succinct and incisive mini introduction: The Revolution, 1917-1919; The Civil War, 1919-1921; The New Economic Policy, 1921-1926; Stalin Consolidates Power, 1926-1927; The First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932; The Second Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror, 1933-1938; The Great Patriotic War, 1939-1945; The Cold War Begins, 1946-1953; The So-called Thaw and the Refrigeration, 1954-1963; Innovation within Stagnation, 1964-1984; Glasnost' and Perestroika, 1985-1992. …

Andrei Sinyavsky. The Russian Intelligentsia. (The Harriman Lectures). Translated by Lynn Visson. Foreword by Mark von Hagen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xiv, 98 pp. Notes. Index. $19.95, cloth. Masha Gessen. Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. London and New York: Verso, 1997. xii, 211 pp. Selected Bibliography. Index. $18.60, paper. The role of the Russian intelligentsia has been constantly debated during every crisis in Russia's stormy history over the last century. As many as seventy years ago, the philosopher G.P. Fedotov used the word "fateful" to describe the subject because he believed that an understanding of the Russian intelligentsia was key to an understanding of the country and of its future.' Depending on one's point of view, this small fragment of Russia's population has been cast in a kaleidoscope of roles that range from "demon" to "prophet" to "victim." Even among those who believe themselves to be members of the Russian intelligentsia, there are no two individuals who would agree on what the intelligentsia is. The two books under review provide no exception to this rule. Serious, sincere and even passionate, both describe the Russian intelligentsia's current predicament and both offer an excellent opportunity for comparison. The two books present two divergent views of the core of the intelligentsia phenomenon and of its role in the swiftly-changing Russian reality after the disintegration of the Soviet system. The disparities in their views arise not only from the authors' dissimilar ages, experiences and backgrounds, but also from the different perspectives they bring to their work. Sinyavsky searches the past to shed light on the present, while Gessen's standpoint is that of the new generation looking into the future. Sinyavsky's style is accusatory, whereas Gessen uses ridicule to make her case. Sinyavsky's reasoning is generalized and based on published material, while Gessen pieces together encounters and interviews with a variety of her contemporaries. Both authors deem the intelligentsia's role to be crucial to the transition from the Soviet system to freedom and democracy. They also share a propensity to blame the intelligentsia for society's failure to avoid the many political and economic pitfalls along this difficult path. Before going further into a discussion of the contents of each of the books, it is worth paying some attention to their cover designs, which appear to be expressive of the authors' ideas. The cover jacket of Sinyavsky's book features the contours of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, one of the best known masterpieces of Russian architecture and a symbol of unattainable perfection of the distant past. The dominant colour is red, redolent of blood and symbolic of Communist ideas. In the title, also red, the letter R in the word RUSSIAN is reversed so that it turns into X (the pronoun I in Russian) symbolizing the egocentric inclinations of the Russian intelligentsia. The colour of the title of Gessen's book is also red. A kitchen knife pierces a book that has been put on top of a glass jar, typical of the jars one sees in a kitchen. Blood drips into the jar from the cut in the book. The kitchen is the place where, according to the tradition, the intelligentsia "speak speeches," so these objects are closely related to the subject. But the full meaning of the design becomes clear when one manages to decipher the title of the bleeding book, L'homme qui assassina by Claude Farrere. This conveys the scene of the intelligentsia's violent death, whether by murder or suicide. The cover seems to suggest: You realize now that the victim himself was a murderer,2 so read on and there shall be no pity in you. The personality of Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) is inseparable from the history of the Russian intelligentsia. His life and work contributed to the emergence of a very special part of the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union-the dissident, or human rights, movement born as the opposition to his and Yuli Daniel's arrest in 1965 and to their joint trial the next year. …

This is the twelfth annual bibliography of works pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to the peoples of those countries settled in Canada, published by Canadian scholars. The primary purpose of the bibliography is to provide an up-to-date research tool for persons working in the area. It is also hoped that it will make known the range of activities and areas of expertise of Canadian scholars. The bibliography notes more than 450 monographs, articles, review articles, identifiable sections of books, signed encyclopedia entries, and published occasional papers, as well as seventeen doctoral dissertations accepted by Canadian universities. Reviews, newspaper articles, mimeographed papers, and belles-lettres have been excluded. For the purpose of this bibliography, "Soviet and East European" refers to all Slavic areas and the remaining territory of the Soviet Union, Finland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and East Germany (after 1945), but not to Turkey, Austria, Greece, China, or international communism outside the bloc. Scholarly material pertaining to Canadian immigrants from the area of coverage is also listed. The bibliography is for 1987 and covers imprints and journal issues bearing that date. Items dated prior to, but actually published in 1987, as well as items omitted from previous editions of this bibliography, have also been included. (For journals, 1987 is the year of publication unless otherwise indicated.) This bibliography has been compiled primarily from submissions of members of the Canadian Association of Slavists. Scanning of current books and periodicals in the humanities and social sciences has provided additional entries. The compiler thanks all those who submitted listings, and Mary Stevens in particular for checking items not held at U.B.C. In a few instances, recent issues could not be consulted because they were late in production. Readers are urged to bring any omissions to the attention of the compiler and to submit lists of their 1988 and 1989 publications to the journal's offices.

The transformation or foundation of new museum institutions in Central and Eastern Europe in recent years is often linked with four subjects: World War II, the communist period, Jewish heritage, an...

In 1947 the Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest. Sixty-four memoirs were submitted, and most of them are still preserved in Oseredok’s archives. All extant submissions were examined in order to determine what they had to say about the Holocaust. Altogether twenty-five memoirs concerned World War II, and of these fourteen made at least some mention of the Holocaust. This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behavior towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The ma...

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)......1August 1991 saw the stunning collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid disintegration of the Communist party and all its institutions including those that controlled literature. Twenty years later in 2011, the market drives Russian book publication and Russian publishers systematically employ advertisement agencies and PR firms to promote their products. The Soviet claim to being the most "reading country" in the world has re -emerged in post-Soviet Russia as the countiy that consumes the most television programming. It is heavily ironic that since the fall of the Soviet Union, reading has become an almost irrelevant activity; prior to 1 99 1 , the act of reading was of tremendous significance since reading samizdat or tamizdat, or even difficult-to-obtain Soviet publications of fiction and poetiy, often represented cogent private and individual acts of opposition to the prevalent ideology. Twenty years ago, there were about 10,000 members in the bloated Union of Soviet Writers and the literaiy profession was profitable, prestigious, and privileged. Today, many writers are not closely affiliated with any union or association and most writers in Russia have to actively supplement their income since it is very difficult, just as in the West, to make a living solely through creative writing. For example, those writers whose works have been translated into various languages receive foreign royalties and invitations from abroad to lecture or make guest appearances. Others have worked for considerable periods and decent salaries at foreign universities (e.g., Tat'iana Tolstaia in the United States, Anatolii Kim in South Korea) before returning to Russia. Many writers work industiy jobs in editorial offices, some engage in ghost-writing, and some noted authors, for example Dmitry Bykov and Mikhail Shishkin, write works of serious literature alongside works of mass appeal that occupy what critic Sergei Chuprinin termed in 2004, the space of "middle literature."2 In 1991, as a result of glasnost', Russian writing was just emerging from the rigours of Soviet-era censorship. Twenty years on, many writers lament the censorship imposed by the market economy and the whims of the marketplace in which literature has become just another commodity. Rosalind Marsh acknowledges this concern, but also nuances it, observing that: "While 'economic censorship' has had a profound effect on the choice of manuscripts which have been published and reviewed in Russia since the fall of communism, neither fiction nor literary criticism has been subjected to official political censorship [. . .]."3 Possible reasons why control over literature is absent in Russia today, while control over radio, television, and the press is very much present, will be suggested below.While Russian literature is hardly dead, as Viktor Erofeev pronounced it in his celebrated and oft-referenced article of 1991, "Pominki po sovetskoi literature" [A Wake for Soviet Literature],4 it is transformed - indeed is constantly transforming - in an ongoing search for its place within Russia' s new consumerist and entrepreneurial reality. Russian literature twenty years after the Soviet Union collapsed is very much a living organism moving and stretching in multiple directions, in a state of constant motion, and changing even as this overview is being written. Authors are writing, competing for prizes, and, in every way, trying to adapt to a still-new political, economic, and cultural environment. While this state of change and diversity is seen as destabilizing by some cultural commentators, exhilarating by others, what is certain is that such continuous change is exceptional in a nation in which for centuries, literature stood at the centre of cultural life and was expected to play the role of prophet and omniscient commentator, and give effective expression to national ideals and identity. Two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, in which literature played the aforementioned roles in highly significant ways, it no longer bears this burden so obviously or so willingly. …

This volume is the latest in Yale University Press’s excellent “Annals of Communism” series. It comprises 177 documents culled from hitherto top secret Russian archives, primarily the Presidential ...

When, in the words of Winston Churchill, an Iron Curtain descended on Europe, it was akin to a heavy printer's ruler placed to mark the last chapter of history this century; even later, minor wars and struggles between power blocs seemed no more than ripples as the world became compressed into two hostile camps, immobile and apparently unchanging. Even the most energetic dissidents in the former Soviet Union had little hope of substantial change in what for them was an "empire of evil." Yet months, then weeks, and finally days of accelerating change in Eastern Europe culminated in the decline and downfall of the "bulwark of Communism" the USSR. Its collapse struck down the image of a frozen political landscape, rendered obsolete all assessments based upon such a model, and specifically made virtually every historical textbook written in the Soviet Union within the rigid confines of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism quaintly outdated. Historians were faced with the task of reexamining historical events, and a new world was opened up to many raised in Soviet conventional terms. Moreover, many dedicated historians in the West, dealing with the history of the Eastern Slavs the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians became aware that they too had been influenced by accepted patterns of the old Russian imperial school and the modified versions of Soviet historiography, all well concealed within the framework of Marxist economic determinism.

On 27 September 1938, on the eve of his departure for Munich, Neville Chamberlain contemptuously discounted the importance of Czechoslovakia in world affairs. He thought it incredible and fantastic that Britain might find itself entangled in "... a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!" A year later Poland was overrun and France and Britain were at war with Germany. World War n was under way. Ten years later, the developments in Czechoslovakia once again marked a turning point in world politics. The communist coup in Prague brought a swift response in the West. Within a month's time the Western European Union came into being, and in a little more than a year the North Atlantic Treaty was signed. The movement towards the formation of a West German State and its inclusion in the western de

The Conrad centenary poses a problem for the English speaker who, like myself, does not know the Polish language. Conrad was born and raised a Pole and his Polish heritage was always important to him both in and out of his fiction. Clearly, on an occasion such as this, his Polish background should be covered, and I shall refer to it myself in a moment; but it can be properly honoured only by someone who knows at least the language, and this task I leave to Dr. Rose. This is not to say, of course, that we should look on Conrad as some sort of freak. As far as we are concerned, he stands or falls as a writer of English prose fiction; and, indeed, he is of special interest to Poles only because he made himself outstanding in English. And unequivocally in English. He did not, like such other expatriates as the Hungarian Koestler, or the Irishman Beckett, publish in more than one language, did not even attempt to translate any of his works into another language, though both Polish and French were available to him, and, as one would expect, he was invited, and urged, to write for Polish journals. It was his single-minded adoption of English, and his rapid success in itastonishing, I should say, since at the age of twenty-one he knew only a few words of the languagethat made Conrad a figure of some controversy in Poland as early as 1899, when he was cited on the one hand as proof of the services that a talented emigre can render his native country indirectly, and cited on the other hand as an instance of the emigre who betrays his country.2 But forty-five years later the controversy had been resolved. Conrad, it appears, was a moving spirit behind the Warsaw insurrection. Writing of that unhappy time just behind us, Czeslaw Milosz identifies Conrad as a main source of the gratuitous loyalty displayed by "Alpha" and many other young Polish writers. "Communism," he sums up, "was fighting Fascism; and the