The application of Marxist concepts to Russia has long served to obscure some of the main lines of Russian development, for there is probably no country in Europe in which Marxism has so little relevance as in Russia. Marxist studies of the labor problem in Russia are particularly subject to great confusion, since two of Marxism's fundamental tenets are directly contradicted by any realistic study of Russian labor. It has, for example, been no secret to specialists who have read something on Russian labor other than the works of Lenin and Stalin that Russia did not have a proletariat in the Western sense of the term. The workers in Russia were for the most part peasants who remained members of a village commune and possessors of allotment land. Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings from the land, a part of them were seasonal workers, who came to seek work in the factories in the fall and winter, and regularly returned to their land in time for the harvest.

The post-war soviet campaign to celebrate Russian inventive genius has been carried even into fields where native preëminence is itself only a Russian invention. But there remains one field where one might hope to see Soviet assertiveness become still bolder, and that is in the study of the development of Russian revolutionary thought. It is true that in recent years increased attention has been paid in the Soviet Union to the Russian precursors of Marx. But boldness in this direction is obviously inhibited by a reluctance to let national vanity show disrespect toward the authority of Marx and Engels.

“Yesterday the Czar [sic] of Muscovy was brought from Greenwich in his majesties barge, and at present lyes incognito at a house joyning to the water-side in Norfolk Street.“ Thus simply a contemporary chronicler recorded the arrival in London of Peter I in January, 1698. What did the people amongst whom he was setting foot for the first and only time know of the country from which he had come?

Not unexpectedly, they knew very little about Russia, and few of them felt more than a superficial interest in events there.

Western work on the Soviet economy is producing two new academic subjects: the first, which for want of a better term may be called the study of the Soviet “political economy,” includes the second, which may be described as statistical work on the Soviet economy. By “political economy” we mean the study of the structure of the society concerned in its dynamic economic aspect; and by statistical work we mean the collection, testing, aggregation and experimental manipulation of economic statistics (for example, national income studies which exclude consideration of the social relationships involved or the causes and effects within the social structure of producing and distributing that income).

In the five years since the Yugoslav-Soviet split, the ideological, political, and economic complexion of Marshal Tito's Communist state has been altered in a number of basic respects. It is still too early to attempt to say how the new Yugoslav reforms will work out in practice. Particularly one does not know to what extent the new role of the Communist Party has in fact altered the balance of political power in Yugoslavia, or whether it has altered it at all. But the major reforms now seem to have been completed, at least on paper, and it is possible to summarize them and make some tentative, over-all conclusions.

Professor Lutosławski, Poland's greatest living authority on Plato and exponent of Polish Messianism, observed his ninetieth birthday June 6, 1953, confident of the ultimate triumph of unseen forces of the human spirit over the drift to world chaos and death. He has undergirded the hope of immortality and given a definitive form to Messianism.

An old Polish legend has it that an ancient king and his knights sleep on Mount Giewont. When the time is ripe, and the Polish people renewed in their chivalric faith, the king and knights will awaken and lead them to their own.