Perhaps more than any other assembly in Soviet history, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in Moscow on February 14-25, 1956, is destined to play an important role for years and decades to come. Certainly in its impact at home and abroad it has been the most sensational and most controversial of all the Moscow meetings to date.

The main reason for this is, of course, the speech delivered in a closed session during the last two days of the Congress by Nikita Khrushchev, the Party's first secretary and the country's "first among the equal" within the collective leadership succeeding the late dictator, Josef Stalin.

Most historians consider the reign of Anna Ioannovna (1730-40) one of the saddest epochs in Russian history. It is the purpose of this article to examine the chief accusations levelled against Anna Ioannovna's government, with a view to determining to what extent they are justified.

The severe condemnation of Anna's era by two outstanding historians, Professors S. F. Platonov and V. O. Kljuchevskij, is typical for the views generally held of her reign.

The strenuous effort to indoctrinate Komsomol and Soviet youth which has been witnessed in the past decade may be traced in origin to the months immediately preceding V-E Day. In January, 1945, a plenary session of the Komsomol Central Committee opened a discussion on the need to "assist youth in the formation of a communist world outlook, in mastery of all the riches of knowledge accumulated by mankind, to nurture youth from the earliest years in conscious and disciplined toil, to temper it physically, to work out organizational traits in youth, to develop its creative forces and abilities."

Many basic features of Marxist ideology have an idealistic and equalitarian content. The Soviet Union, while certainly influenced by Marxist ideology, has steered a fairly pragmatic course in its economic policies. True, when faced with alternative methods of achieving an objective, the planners are more likely to choose, all other things being equal, that method which conforms more closely to accepted ideology. Should the alternatives differ substantially in potential effectiveness in achieving the given ends, however, the more effective is likely to be chosen even if it happens to be less acceptable in terms of ideology.

With peace coming to the continent in 1871, Europe settled down to the practical application of the slogan "liberty, equality, and fraternity;" that is, as it was interpreted by the bourgeoisie. Gone was the despotic king, except, of course, in the more backward countries, and the privileged aristocracy had been superseded by, or merged with, the middle class, whose most energetic member, the entrepreneur, had made the discovery that the theory of individual liberty was very useful in handling the new economic conditions arising out of the industrial revolution.

In addition to being the father of Russian Marxism, Georgij Valentinovich Plekhanov was the founder of Marxian esthetics. On the basis of the slender and fleeting hints in the works of Marx and Engels, he did more than any of his Marxist contemporaries to build a systematic Marxian esthetic.

So great was the influence of his esthetic legacy upon Soviet theoreticians that by 1928 Valer'jan Poljanskij could claim that "all contemporary art and literary science are built upon the work which was left to us by Plekhanov."