In his great work on Russian social thought, Ivanov-Razumnik describes the 1880's as a period of transition: “before them stood narodnichestvo [Populism], after them stood Marxism, themselves they represented an ideological void …” The author, who was innocent of Marxian bias, thus implies that in the nineties Marxism was the most fashionable doctrine among the Russian radical intelligentsia. While it is impossible to corroborate such suppositions with statistical exactitude, the most cautious would grant that, in that decade, Marxism indeed became a conspicuous element in Russian social thought.

The persistent stress on the most extreme aspects of Russian history, in a search for the roots of Bolshevism, has led to a remodeling of the Russian past into patterns more consistent with the Soviet present. As one result of this bias, such tendencies as liberalism and moderate agrarian socialism have been, at best, summarily discussed, and Lenin's Tkachevist interpretation of Marxism has obscured the basically reformist character of Russian Marxism that persisted from Plekhanov's Organization of Labor group, through Legal Marxism and Economism into the Menshevik and Liquidator opposition to Bolshevik policies.

In the new Czechoslovakia a Communist Party did not exist in the early days. Such a party was created only in the fall of 1921, fully three years after the independence of Czechoslovakia had been effected. At the moment of liberation it is not an exaggeration to say that communism had hardly even a foothold among Czech and Slovak workers. A substantial wave of sympathy for the Russian Bolsheviks had swept over the country following the Revolution in 1917, and a radical mood, favorable to socialism, had spread widely among the Czech masses. These circumstances had not, however, encouraged even the beginning of organizing a communist movement among Czechs and Slovaks, or among the German minority.

The process whereby Soviet authors, whose works have been criticized, humbly admit their mistakes and promise to rectify them, is an all too familiar occurrence in a country where it is decreed that “writers are engineers of human souls.” Since it is essential that these engineers give the “correct” interpretation of a given phenomenon, we may assume that the work in question is revised before republication. As a rule, however, the reader is not told either by the author or by the publisher that the later edition differs in any way from the original.

There are, of course, some exceptions to this, one of the most striking being A. Fadeev's Stalin Prize novel, The Young Guard (1945), a novel which presumably had been based on most extensive documentation. The novel was suddenly criticized in Pravda on December 3, 1947.

Dostoevsky's characters made a deep impression on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nietzsche claimed that Dostoevsky was the only writer from whom he learned anything about psychology, Gide's view of the human personality was affected by Dostoevsky, and to enumerate all others who bear marks of the influence of Dostoevsky's psychology would mean listing a substantial portion of the outstanding authors of the last sixty or seventy years.

The importance of Dostoevsky's psychology to the generations which followed him causes great interest to be attached to the fact that he, in his turn, was so struck by a German psychological treatise that, together with his friend Baron Vrangel, he intended to translate it into Russian.

Officially the first Rumanian who came to the United States is considered to be George Pomutz from Transylvania. He took part in the American Civil War, settled down in Iowa, and became the American consul in St. Petersburg, Russia (February 16, 1866—September 30, 1870). Later he became the American consul general in St. Petersburg, Russia, and served the United States there from June 17, 1874, until his death on February 12, 1882.

There are, however, possible and strong indications of an earlier contact through another Rumanian from Transylvania as far back as the colonial times of North America. A reliable contemporary American source gives us a few details about the travels of a Transylvanian priest in the American colonies. This source is the famous American scholar, scientist and statesman, Benjamin Franklin.

In the December 1954 issue of The American Slavic and East European Review Paul W. Blackstock in an article entitled “The Occupation Fund Documents: a Reassessment of ‘a Crude and Ignorant Forgery’ ” replied to the present authors’ article, “The Occupation Fund Documents: a Diplomatic Forgery.” In his own words, Mr. Blackstock “examined and evaluated” the documents “as they might have been assessed by an intelligence analyst looking at them for the first time when the collection was acquired.” He also compared them with the Soviet publication, Adventures of Russian Tsarism in Bulgaria? Throughout his article he has applied the methods employed by government agencies to test the authenticity of contemporary documents of doubtful origin.