To the Editors

December 17, 1999

It was with great pleasure that I received the Winter 2000 issue of Kritika, the first journal to appear under that name since the original Kritika ceased publication 16 years ago. As the founder of the prototype, I would like to share some recollections with your readers.

I conceived the idea of a graduate student publication in early 1964. At the time, I supervised the work of some 12–15 graduate students in the history of Imperial Russia, and it seemed to me that bringing out a scholarly journal devoted to reviews of current Soviet literature on Russian history which they would edit and to which they would contribute had much merit. For one, it would give them an opportunity to acquire a bibliography which would prove helpful when they applied for teaching positions. Secondly, it would apprise the historical profession of worthy monographs published in the USSR to which scholarly journals at the time paid little, if any, attention.

Kritika was launched in the fall of 1964 with a small grant from the Russian Research Center. We published three times a year; subscriptions cost $2.00 per annum. I appeared on the masthead as "Advisor." Typically, there were three editors per issue and 12–15 contributors. Each review was discussed at meetings of the entire staff, which gave the members valuable editorial experience. They were primarily students enrolled at Harvard's History Department, but as time went on, we increasingly turned also to outsiders for contributions.

With the Winter 1975 issue, Kritika became a biannual publication: the issues became longer, however, and added was a new feature, "Book Notices," which in a sentence or two summarized the contents of books not chosen for review. Shortly before, as Kritika entered its tenth year of publication (Spring 1974), Professor Edward L. Keenan joined as Co-Advisor.

The journal suspended publication with Volume XX, No. 1 in the winter of 1984. The principal reason for the suspension was the sharp decline in the number of students, following the decision of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to cut back severely on admissions. By the early 1980s only three or four students attended the editorial meetings, compared to a dozen or more in the 1960s and 1970s. This necessitated going to outsiders for reviews and comments.

During its existence, Kritika reviewed over 250 historical monographs. The last issue justly described Kritika as a "unique scholarly publication: a professional journal edited entirely and written primarily by graduate students and published on a financially self-supporting basis." It was a remarkable endeavor.

May its namesake fare equally well.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Pipes
Baird Research Professor of History
Department of History
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA

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I would like to extend my congratulations and thanks for your enterprising a rejuvenated Kritika. I was particularly pleased to see David Saunders' long and thoughtful consideration in the first issue of the memorial volume for P. A. Zaionchkovskii. I would like to comment briefly on one or two points of Saunders' review.

Saunders is quite right to opine that P.A.Z's choice of the Kirillo-Methodian Society as the subject of his first dissertation is a rather problematical issue in his scholarly biography. The circumstances were never quite clear to me, in any case. Saunders may be off the mark, however, in concluding that the choice of topic suggests that the influence of Iu. V. Got'e on Zaionchkovskii may have been an ex post facto construct. First of all, it should be pointed out that Zaionchkovskii's dissertation advisor was not Got'e, but Sedov, the historian of "revoliutsionnoe narodnichestvo." (Sedov was actually younger than his student, whose higher education had been long delayed by the strictures against admitting "former people" to higher education that were in effect until the mid-1930s). The choice as dissertation advisor of Sedov rather than Got'e, who had been Zaionchkovskii's teacher when the latter was a "zaochnik" undergraduate at MIFLI, was a political choice of the late 1930s. It is my understanding that Got'e's...