Russian Eastward expansion, which played a major role in shaping the destinies of the Russian people and in creating the largest contiguous land empire in the world, began at the dawn of Russian history. The great Asiatic expansion of the Muscovite period which brought the Russians to the shore of the Pacific Ocean was preceded by centuries of eastward advance in European Russia. In the beginning of Russian history, two Russian principalities, Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal, were engaged in exploring, conquering, exploiting, and colonizing the area west of the Ural Mountains. A study of their colonial activities not only furnishes some of the background of later spectacular Asiatic expansion, but also throws light on the relations between these two early states within the framework of medieval Russia.

The Novgorodian colonial expansion was directed toward the northeastern corner of European Russia, into the vast region stretching from Lake Onega to the Ural Mountains and from the northern tributaries of the Volga to the Arctic Ocean. Among the Russians, the Novgorodians were the first to penetrate this region. Anxious to obtain commodities which they could use in their trade with Western Europe, they were aided in their quest by the northern system of rivers and portages.

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802) was one of the most versatile and talented figures of his age. He retains to this day an honored place in the history of Russian philosophy, biography, poetry, political and economic thought. In 1766 Catherine the Great sent him with a group of Russian students to study at Leipzig University. One of his teachers there was the renowned jurist Karl Ferdinand Hommel (1722–81) who did so much to popularize the theories of Beccaria in Germany. Radishchev at this time became interested in such works as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably's Droit public de l'Europe (1748), Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des lois, and Rousseau's Du Contrat social, all of which exercised an important influence on his political outlook.

On his return to Russia he held for a short time a minor post in the Senate, a body invested at this period with preponderantly judicial powers, without any effective voice in politics and legislation. The Senate was interested neither in Western theories of reform nor, as contemporary records show, in efficient and impartial administration of justice, and Radishchev soon resigned. Subsequently, he became an official in the Commerce Collegium and rose to the responsible position of director of the St. Petersburg Customs House. This work, however, could not satisfy his reformist zeal.

The Lookout at the citadel perched above Trieste had trained a long telescope on the squadron of ships beating up the bay under full sail. Despite the clear light of the Adriatic summer morning, the lookout's practiced eye was unable to make out as yet the design and the colors of the flags flying from the gaffs of the large frigates he was observing. But even at that distance he could clearly see the prominent steeving of their bowsprits, and that the masts were set at nearly equal distances. He gave another look to the small squadron, and went to make his report to the corporal on duty.

Soon the rigid arms of the citadel's telegraph began to wigwag jerkily to the batteries on the mole the message that three Russian frigates of Count Voinovitch's squadron were making for the harbor. These ships were well known at Trieste, as they had refitted there during the stormy months of the preceding winter of 1799–1800. The squadron was then assigned to the task of blockading from the sea the fortress of Ancona, occupied by a French garrison. It also helped the raw Italian levies, which besieged Ancona from land, under the command of general Lahoz, whose troops were reinforced by a few hundred Russian and Turkish marines and seamen.

One Might say of Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski that he was the architect of the ideological structure of Russian radicalism in the 1860s. “Chernyshevski was the founder of the new period, the preceptor of the younger generation.” This is not to imply that he was a bloodless ratiocinator. Though a more balanced individual in many ways, he was a worthy successor to the passionate Belinski as leader of the intelligentsia. But Chernyshevski was both erudite and systematic. More than the other radicals of this period, except for Lavrov, Chernyshevski was a thinker. Not a thinker of the Kantian type, but one who realized the necessity for popularization and practical application of ideas in his backward Russia. To a large degree, the other leading “nihilists,” Pisarev and Dobroliubov, owed their significance to the fact that they popularized Chernyshevski's outlook. It is to them, with their superior stylistic gifts, that we must turn for the warmth and color and atmosphere of the movement; in Pisarev, of course, there are very significant differences from Chernyshevski; but one could certainly not understand Pisarev without a considerable acquaintance with Chernyshevski's thought. Chernyshevski the nihilist, of course, and not Chernyshevski the socialist or revolutionary, or Chernyshevski as economist—for he was all these—will interest us here.

Any Survey of Russian economic history has two serious barriers to surmount. The first is a tendency to assume that this history either began or ended in 1917; the second is a tendency, induced in part by the remoteness of the country and in part by the difficulty of pronouncing Russian geographical names, to assume that the Soviet Union is a homogeneous steppe evenly populated throughout. This article will survey the growth of the Russian railroad network on the assumption that there is a considerable measure of continuity in Russian economic development, and that regional factors are very important in explaining the course of that development.

Problems of ownership and control are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but it may be helpful to the general reader to have some idea of the history of the ownership of the Russian railroad network. Ownership and construction of railroads in nineteenth-century Russia were handled in various ways.

In 1659 a Roman Catholic priest of Croatian birth, Juraj Križanić, came to the Muscovy of Tsar Alexis under an assumed identity. His secret mission was to lay the groundwork for the unification of the Slavs under the patronage of the Monomakh crown and papal tiara. For reasons Križanić himself never knew, or never chose to tell, he was exiled to Siberia where he spent nearly all the rest of his life. During those fifteen years he wrote some nine works on religion, philosophy, and politics in a Slavic language of his own invention. These manuscripts were read by practically nobody for two centuries.

Probably Križanić would have long remained unknown had his ideas not engaged the special interest of certain Russian scholars who were inspired largely by the tenets of late nineteenth-century pan-Slavism. The plea of this seventeenth-century Croat for Slavic unity under the aegis of the Great Russian people was well suited to the purposes of Russian Slavophilism. Thanks to these scholars who saw in Križanić an early precursor of pan-Slavism, this remarkable Slav's life and works were slowly retrieved, beginning in the 1850s, from the darkness of the past.

A Hundred Years ago the main tendencies of European poetry before 1848 were summed up in a Polish poem published under the title “Before Dawn.” It was written in the Polish language (Przedświt). There is hardly any poem in any language in which the belief in national renaissance and national freedom has found a stronger expression. The poem appeared at a time when the elite of the European Continent was struggling against the rule of Metternich, and when the elite of Polish youth had again been forced, for more than a decade, to wander through Europe and the world in order to preach the gospel of Poland's approaching leadership.

But there is one feature which signally distinguishes this poem from other prophetic or pseudo-prophetic hymns of its own time and, still more, of future times. It is the respect which its author has for the creative power of the spirit. He even identifies this respect with his very delight in life. The sorrows of a man who has lost his country are transmuted into the sorrows of a whole nation. These sorrows, however, lose their sting because their spiritualization, with the help of love, has led the author to experiencing the preciousness of a future order in a real and happy Europe, which is guided by spirit and not by power.

The Improbable adventures of this charming story are so extraordinarily improbable that we are ready to justify the very possibility of the events related by Pushkin, either by the romantic imagination of the poet, or by the particular conditions of Russian life where the miraculous and eccentric always reigned. Outside Russia, outside that boite à surprises, which Russia has never ceased to be in the eyes of the dazzled, astonished, or scandalized European, we cannot, it seems, imagine this event.

According to the evidence found in historical records, the first influences of the Byzantine Christian mission had reached the Magyars prior to the conquest of present Hungary while they were still on the shores of the Black Sea. As I have proved in detail in an earlier treatise, we must surmise that, when they took possession of their present land, the Magyar people had brought with them a knowledge of Christianity.

However, the Byzantine mission was not the sole factor in preparing the Magyars for their acceptance of the new faith. This acceptance was influenced also by the earlier Christian traditions of the new land which ultimately became their country. From Roman times (ancient Christian relics of which are being excavated in increasing numbers) to the appearance of the Magyars, Christianity had existed without interruption in Hungarian territory.

The Book under review is a commendable scholarly undertaking, both in its purpose and in the way it is carried out. The publication offers to the American reader a good English translation of four well-chosen basic documents of Russian law and Russian history from the period prior to the rise of Muscovite tsardom, and the promulgation of the first judicial code of the Grand Duke of Moscow in 1497. Many legal documents of this epoch are extant, but the reviewer feels strongly that Professor George Vernadsky, the translator, is right in making the following statement:

Of all the various Russian codes, charters and statutes prior to 1497 we have elected for translation in this volume the four most outstanding. They are the Russian law (Russkaia Pravda) in both short and expanded version and the charters of the city of Pskov (1397–1467), of Novgorod (1471), and of Dvina Land (1397). Taken together they illuminate the main trends in Russian legal history of the pre-Muscovite epoch. But more than that, they contain much material illustrating the general historical background of Medieval Russia.

During the period of its publication, the Krasnyi Arkhiv (Red Archives) was the most important historical journal in Soviet Russia. By June, 1941, when Hitler's invasion ended its publication, 106 volumes of this periodical had appeared.

The Krasnyi Arkhiv was the child of the Soviet historian Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky, the “organizer” of the Central Archive Department, who, among the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of the cold and hungry days of the civil war, collected and saved tons of documents from their most deadly foes: “fire, water and the curious.”

Among the archive depositories of the tsarist regime which came under the jurisdiction of the Central Archive Department were the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, the Police Department, private archives of the former nobility, etc. Among all these, the archives of the Foreign Ministry were the most “sacred.”