Nowhere has semiotics emerged as a scientific discipline with such vigor and sweeping theoretical ambition as it has in the Soviet Union in the last two decades. The developments in structural linguistics in the 1950s, in particular work on machine translation and the application of mathematical models to language, were an important prelude to the emergence of the movement, discussed in detail in the previous literature.² The genealogy of Russian semiotics, which is vital for an understanding of what D. M. Segal terms the "essential hetereogeneity and freedom of scholarly approach" of the movement,³ is examined in Section II of the present survey. As an introduction to the subject I shall briefly sketch the main features of the movement's external history and its key members.