Danegeld was the first general tax in our modern sense in Western Europe, since older Roman taxes had become the personal liabilities of members of municipal councils long before the vikings began to lay tributes on their conquered lands. In France and elsewhere along the shores of the North Sea and the English Channel tributes were occasionally levied by marauding vikings, but there was no regular assessment, nor did it become general. In England, however, its insular position, and the two foreign conquests by Danes and Normans within a half-century fastened upon the whole population a tax, universal in application and therefore generally hated.

Three times in the History of Europe the armed forces of Russia have appeared west of the Rhine. In 1799 a Russian expeditionary army arrived in Holland and participated with the British in an unsuccessful, hence forgotten, invasion of the Netherlands. From December 1813 to November 1818, with a relatively short intermission of one year, Russian armies fought in France during the final act of the Napoleonic drama and later contributed to a quadripartite occupation. Finally, in 1915–17 small Russian units were sent to the Western Front in the form of a token force to manifest Allied unity. Never did these events possess a significance beyond that of historical episodes: yet the appearance of the Russian soldier in Western Europe was generally connected with characteristic circumstances which may be of some interest to the student of Russo-European relations.

The area officially declared in the twenties to be occupied by the northern minority nationalities comprises about half of the territory of the Soviet Union. Its southern boundary extends all the way from Kandalaksha through Kozhva, Tobol'sk, and Yeniseisk to Sovetskaya Gavan'. According to the census of 1926, its sparse population totaled some 645,000, of whom only 56 percent, or 366,000, were northern nomads. Administratively the northern territory excluding the Kola Peninsula, Kamchatka and some other regions, is divided at present into the Yakut and Komi Autonomous Republics and into the following seven national okrugs: the Nenets, Yamal-Nenets, Khanty-Mansi, Taimyr, Evenki, Chukchi, and Koryak.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a) data on USSR nonagricultural employment and its distribution by broad sectors of the economy, b) “explanatory” comments on employment trends, and c) descriptions of USSR employment classifications and statistics.

Mao Tse-tung's 1949 victory has frequently been credited to Mao's ability as an astute peasant revolutionary rather than to his standing as an orthodox Communist leader. The record suggests that Stalin's development of tactics for Mao had more influence on the course of events than is commonly supposed. It is the purpose of this study to indicate the influence upon the Chinese revolutionary leadership of Stalin's doctrines.

One of the most widespread and well-accepted assertions about Eastern Europe after World War II, was, and still is, that feudalistic vestiges had prevailed in this region as a whole until 1944, and that the “bold” new land reforms were aimed at sweeping aside these hampering pre-capitalist remnants. Actually, at the date considered, on the one hand, the structure of land tenure and ownership presented not a unique characteristic for the area as a whole, but a substantial diversity from one region (or country) to the next. On the other hand, the land reforms had quite different aims and impacts from one country to another.

The origin of the seventeenth-century Russian narrative poem, the Tale of Misery and III Fortune (Povest' o Gore i Zločastii) is one of the most vexing problems in the whole field of Old Russian literature. Though one ultimate source for the Tale can be found in the story of the prodigal son, for example, no immediate source has been discovered either in Old Russian written literature or in any foreign literature. More surprising (since the Tale may be a relatively original work, after all) is that the poem is unique in its own genre. Other Russian seventeenth-century tales are in prose, and are stylistically quite different.

During the middle ages, England and Hungary represented the two extreme ends of the Christian world, and the scholarly ties connecting the two countries were rather incidental for many centuries. At that time, the University of Paris was the furthest destination of Hungarian students and only a few of them crossed the Channel.

Humanists, however, enhanced the number and range of wandering scholars. They overcame many a geographical barrier and established connections between countries which heretofore had been isolated in the primitive conditions of medieval times.