Soviet law is the law of a society of a new type. That society is an ideocracy, or a society allegedly ruled not by men, but by an idea, the idea in question being, of course, Marxism in its Leninist-Stalinist interpretation. An ideocracy seems, however, to require as much enforcement as any other type of society. Nobody questions the fact that, in the Soviet Union, coercion, both on the legal and extralegal level, reaches high levels of intensity.

In so far as Soviet law expresses the ideocratic nature of Soviet society, it must be, and actually is, unique. But not all is unique in that law; there are also many elements in which Soviet law differs only slightly from pre-Revolutionary Russian law. Since Imperial Russian law belonged to the family of Western law (in contradistinction to the Chinese, Hindu, Islamic and other families of law) and more exactly, to the class called “civil law” (in contradistinction to the common law of the Anglo-Saxon countries), European jurists and even American jurists, though not so easily, can find in that law many traits with which they are familiar.

In the symphony that is Russian history, the muted trumpet of irony is often sounded. Russian Marxists have long argued that Russia entered upon the capitalist phase of its development with the emancipation reforms of the 1860's. Since the Bolshevik Revolution and the nationalization of Russian industry followed the reforms only by some fifty to sixty years, it would appear that, compared with other major European states, Russia experienced only a short period of capitalism. However, in the nineteenth century, it was not the Russian Marxists, but their antagonists, the Narodniks, who had contended that capitalism was alien to Russia and could not strike deep root there. In the first two decades of its existence (the last two decades of the nineteenth century), the Russian Marxist movement expended a major part of its energy in attacks upon and efforts to undermine the Narodnik outlook which for some time had held sway among the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia.

Hardly was the stain of parricide cleansed from the hands of Alexander I when he wrote Prince Czartoryski to return posthaste from Italy to Russia. Scion of one of Poland's most distinguished noble families, Prince Adam George Czartoryski had been summoned as a hostage to the Russian Court following the last partition of Poland. Here the handsome, young, and cultured Polish nobleman became a friend and confidant of the impressionable Alexander, who was still only in his teens. The Prince's relations with the Grand Duchess Elizabeth were even more intimate and when she gave birth to a daughter bearing striking resemblance to the dark Polish nobleman, Emperor Paul ordered Czartoryski to leave the country immediately to serve as ambassador to the throneless King of Sardinia. The murder of Paul and the accession of Alexander brought to an end the brief diplomatic exile of Prince Adam, who returned from Italy to become one of the closest advisers of the new Tsar.

All modern countries are familiar with the practice of governmental or royal awards to military personnel for distinguished action. Traditionally, these awards have been of an honorary rather than a material nature, in keeping with the concept that such actions are not assessable in money terms and cannot be rewarded in them.

Moreover in a number of countries analogous procedures have developed in the civilian sphere, whereby grateful governments reward those who have rendered some signal service of a political, economic, scientific, or artistic nature. Great Britain has long had such a system, though it is only since the beginning of this century that its scope has been extended to more than a small segment of society; now there are honorary awards for coal miners as well as cabinet ministers, conferred personally by the sovereign.

The cult of heroism in the USSR today lies at the very heart of the ideological patterns of justification, instruction, and inspiration advanced by the governors of that society. The model behavior of the new Soviet hero, as it is presented in literature, in the classroom, or in the press, is designed to drive men to the fulfillment of their public tasks and to regulate, as well, the organization of their private lives. The concept of the exemplary hero, taken as a quintessential and idealized statement of the Soviet view of human nature, touches on many currents of thought, most directly on the junction point of ethical and psychological theory, but beyond that, upon all the disciplines concerned with the condition of the Soviet individual in his society.

Probably no other writer in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature ever suffered so much at the hands of politically-minded critics as Nikolaj Leskov. He once said that the role of the writer is to struggle against the prevailing current of his time, and his own career illustrates both the application of that principle and its consequences. His independent attitude toward all intellectual fashions, whether nihilism in the 1860's or conservatism in the 1880's, led single-minded Russians of various political colors to suspect him of hypocrisy and duplicity. Doctrinaire Russian critics of the right and the left, accustomed to classifying all writers in such tidy categories as “religious reactionary” or “atheistic liberal,” were even more bewildered by Leskov's own kind of non-conformity than by the Christian anarchism of his great associate Tolstoy. Tolstoy, after all, had the virtue of pushing his convictions to their logical extreme, in the best tradition of Russian maximalism; whereas Leskov, though he acknowledged himself to be a devoted follower of Tolstoy, refused to become doctrinaire even in his Tolstoyanism.

The splendid growth of Polish Romantic poetry in the second quarter of the nineteenth century almost overshadowed concurrent achievements in artistic prose, which are considerable and diverse.

It is true that the prose fiction of the period did not especially flourish. Nevertheless, Polish Romanticism brought forth one interesting and original prose genre, that of gawęda. Gawęda is a kind of short story which has as narrator an old, rather simple man, telling in a loose way and in colloquial language stories from old Polish life. It is true, the genre quickly degenerated into a stale traditionalism, but at its peak gawęda could boast a volume as noteworthy as Rzewuski's The Memoirs of Soplica. The realism of detail, vivid local color, humor, and raciness of this work command a high position for it in the history of Polish fiction.

The present article is intended to serve as an overview of the current holdings, facilities, and activities of the Library of Congress in the Slavic and East European area. It is offered in the hope that it will be of assistance to scholars specializing in this region, particularly those who have not had the opportunity of familiarizing themselves with the offerings of the Library at first hand. The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented expansion of Slavic and East European activities at the Library of Congress, culminating in the broad and varied program described in the following lines.

A description of the holdings of the Library in the area considered here is difficult and can only be attempted in the most general terms. It may, however, be affirmed that the Slavic collection, with over 300,000 volumes, represents the largest single collection of the Library of Congress, followed by the Chinese with more than 240,000 volumes, and the Hispanic collection with over 100,000 volumes. It is at the same time believed to be the largest collection of Russian books anywhere in the world outside the Soviet Union itself.