To many Englishmen, and to still more young Scots, Russia in the later eighteenth century seemed a land of opportunity, comparable to America in the scope it offered for the acquisition of wealth and the free exercise of talents. Samuel Greig, a shipowner's son of Inverkeithing in Fife, became the creator (after Peter I) of the Russian Navy. John Rogerson, an Edinburgh doctor, for four decades acted as personal physician to successive rulers of Russia. Careers such as these seemed to show what could be achieved in this great partly-known country by a young man of enterprise and ability. Of the considerable number of Englishmen who sought their fortunes in Russia during this period, Samuel Bentham was in many ways not typical. There is none, however, whose movements and impressions are easier to follow, since the British Museum possesses an extensive collection of his correspondence written during the years he spent there, and addressed mainly to his father, Jeremiah Bentham, and his famous brother, the political philosopher Jeremy.

A favorite method of estimating population for the Soviet Union among contemporary specialists is the method used by Theodore Shabad and Harry Schwartz, based on the reported number of election districts. Using the number of election districts reported for the 1950 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Union, Shabad arrives at a figure of 201,300,000 for the USSR post-war territory. Most subsequent estimates of Soviet population have used that figure as a base.

Further examination of election data suggests some corrections to this method. The 1950 estimate is based on a figure of 671 districts, the normal standard for elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Union being 300,000 inhabitants per district.

The post-Stalin (or, as it is generally referred to by Soviet citizens, post–Beria) regime has already made far–reaching concessions to popular dissatisfaction with the Stalinist system of law and justice, and is preparing still further reforms. To appreciate the significance of this movement, it is necessary to understand the place held by law in the daily lives of Soviet citizens and in the running of the economy. It is a popular misconception outside of the USSR that Soviet law, and especially Soviet courts, are only window dressing to conceal the fact that the Communist Party and the secret police run the country by command and by force.The truth is that although there are certain areas of Soviet life–particularly in top-level politics–where law does not penetrate, there are hosts of problems which are resolved in the judicial process according to general standards declared in statutes and codes.

Cotton cultivation may have come to Turkestan before the time of Christ. There is some evidence that it was brought from Persia to the valleys of the Amu Daria and the Syr Daria with Alexander of Macedon. Chinese travelers of the seventh century noted the cotton garments of the natives, while Arabs later reported the cultivation and processing of cotton and wool, both of which were stimulated by the opportunities for exchange with the steppe nomads after contact with these peoples had been made in the ninth and tenth centuries. These same nomads, however, blocked trade relations between Turkestan and the Slavs. At the same time, Indian and Egyptian cotton monopolized the markets to the south, and the development of maritime routes forestalled the entry of Turkestan cotton into Oriental markets. Production was, therefore, limited to domestic requirements and those of immediate neighbors down to the eighteenth century when trade relations, albeit at a low level, were established with Russia on a fairly regular basis.

The Political Bureau of the United Polish Workers’ Party (PZPR —Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) occupies the most powerful position in contemporary Communist Poland. It represents the summit of the Party and governmental pyramids, supplying the policies which determine the direction and rate of Poland's development and includes the highest level of such decision-making as Moscow leaves to the Polish Communist Party. The internal operations of this high command have been cloaked mostly in secrecy, although a few facts came to light in connection with the Gomułka controversy. No records of its deliberations, however, are accessible.

The unification of private law with the corrolary task of codifying it into a single code has proved to be everywhere a long, complicated and very difficult task. Two recent well-known examples are the unification of German law into the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch which lasted from 1874 until 1896; and of Swiss law extending over the period from 1874 to the codes of 1907 and 1911. The analogous work performed a century earlier in Austria extended from 1753 until 1811. The unification of French civil law lasted, in spite of revolutionary zeal, virtually from 1789 until 1804.

The most widely established principle concerning the use of foreign geographical names is that the original name-forms, current in the respective countries, should be used. This—in itself a sound principle—requires the transliteration of names which originally stand in alphabets other than Latin. The problems created by the application of this principle are not unsolvable and several adequate transliteration systems are currently in use. The present article, however, does not intend to discuss the respective merits or shortcomings of these different transliteration systems. Its purpose is rather to indicate some awkward results produced by a too rigid adherence to the rules for transliteration.

Between the formative years of the eighteenth century, when Russian literature was at school to Western Europe, and the decade of the 1840's, when the native genius achieved unequivocal expression, there lie three significant decades during which the Russian spirit strove to find itself. The weight of tradition lay with British and French literary models, the displacement of which is effected not by head-on revolt, but by the introduction of German literary models as a counterweight. It has long been recognized that the process was initiated by the poet V. A. Zhukovskij, tentatively and uncertainly at first, and then sustained by him with vigor, especially in the years 1815-18, when his translations from the poetry of Goedie and Schiller appeared in profusion.

Since the Russian language until lately has been neglected far more than Western European languages, one might expect publishers to exercise more than usual care with translations of Russian works otherwise widely inaccessible. Unfortunately, unusual care was not exercised in the preparation of the English version of Mikhail Sholokhov's Silent Don. Published originally by Putnam and Company in England and reprinted without alteration in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel appeared between 1934 and 1941. (In the Soviet Union it appeared serially and in four separate volumes between 1928 and 1940.) Evidently with the approval of Sholokhov's agents in Moscow, the English editor omitted over a hundred pages of Russian text, altered the sequence of the narrative, and introduced new chapter, section, and paragraph divisions. Presumably this was done with no thought for politics or ideology but solely on the basis of aesthetic or practical considerations, the aim being to make the novel less expensive and to improve it by rejecting superfluous descriptions and characters.