In Russia the exit of an autocrat, whether voluntary or involuntary,is traditionally a signal for a popular sentiment that “it is time for a change” in other ways, too—a change for the better, of course. And sometimes such hopes have been at least partially realized, as when a hundred years ago the accession to the throne of Alexander II (1855-81), in the midst of the disastrous Crimean War, eventually brought about such important liberal reforms, despite all their shortcomings, as the eagerly awaited emancipation of the peasantry from the hateful serfdom, the judicial and other reforms. More often, however, such popular aspirations have proved to be what the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), called “senseless dreams” when at the beginning of his reign he scoffed at modest suggestions for establishing a representative government. Yet, despite many disappointments, the tradition that a basic change accompanies a new regime has persisted.

Whatever comfort Catherine II derived from her husband's murder in 1762 was hardly enduring. Peter III's apparition was to rise again and again to plague his ambitious wife. Kremnev, Bogomolov, Khanin, and–above all–dread Pugačëv, were all possessed by the vengeful demon of Peter III. Catherine was forced to exorcise her spouse's ghost even outside of the realm which she had usurped–in little Montenegro! At first a source of vexation to the Russian Empress, this false Peter III became curiously involved in Russian plans in the Balkans during Catherine's first war with the Turks.

The most outstanding statesman during the reign of Nicholas II of Russia was Peter Arkad'evič Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911. It is generally recognized that Stolypin, like his revolutionary opponents including Lenin, took serious account of the course of the Revolution of 1905, and especially of the fact that the peasantry had stood aside from the struggle in the cities, coming to the aid of neither the revolutionaries nor the Government, and conducting their own rural struggle more or less independently. It was, therefore, the objective of both Government and revolutionaries during the period from 1906 to 1917 to win the political support of the peasants, whom both had assumed to be on their side.

Stolypin described his agrarian policy, which he regarded as fundamental to all of his objectives, as “a wager, not on the wretched and drunken, but on the sound and strong.”

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.

For purposes of appraising recent Soviet economic developments an important datum is the level of average money wages in the Soviet Union. This information is needed if we are to disclose successfully changes in Soviet real wages and to construct national economic accounts for the Soviet economy. In addition, a reasonably reliable picture of changes in the Soviet money wage level would reveal something about the considerations that have guided Soviet wage policy in this period. However, no official figures have been released on actual average earnings nor the actual, as distinct from the planned, wage bill for any year following 1940. This circumstance has led Western observers to attempt estimates of the Soviet wage level on the basis of admittedly inadequate data. A controversy has developed which is reflected in the rather wide range of estimates which have been advanced.

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.

For a number of years the dynamics of money wages in the Soviet Union have caused controversy among Western students of the economic and social development of the Soviet Union. The divergences among the authors who have dealt with this problem are very considerable, and thus far it has been impossible to reconcile them. The differences in the estimates of the level of money wages in the Soviet Union in recent years are caused primarily by disagreement on two questions. These are: first, the question of the average level of earnings of workers and employees in the first half of 1946, after the transition of the entire national economy to the eight-hour work day (instead of the ten- and eleven-hour work days of the wartime period); and second, the question of whether the average level of earnings of workers and employees continued to rise after 1948, when the Soviet Government adopted the policy of systematic price reductions.

The nature of tsarist policies toward the Moslem population of the Russian empire has long remained a particularly neglected aspect of Russian history. While Russian expansion in Asia has attracted the interest of many scholars, the subsequent development of the Eastern provinces and the Russian Government's attitude toward the conquered national groups have been little examined by both Russian and Western historians. In the present study an investigation is made of pre-Revolutionary Russia's cultural policies in Central Asia and of the Kulturkampf which arose in the early twentieth century between imperial authorities, conservative groups of the Moslem population, and progressive young native elements.

Russian conquest of Central Asia was achieved in a relatively short period of time with but a small number of troops. In 1864, encirclement of the Kazakh frontier was completed when in Čikment the Siberian, or eastern, military line joined its western counterpart, the Orenburg line, preparing the way for Russia's further push toward the south.

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 first half of the twentieth century in Russia has been characterized by a sharp decline in the influence of religion. At the same time there has been an exceptionally rapid growth of industrialization and urbanization. The concomitance of these two processes favors the conclusion that urbanization has been, if not the exclusive, at least the major cause of religious decline. Relative to the majority of countries showing the same concomitance of processes, no serious doubt arises. The relationship between urbanization and decline of religion may be well understood, and no other major factor working in the same direction seems to be present. But, relative to Russia, the situation is different. Since the days of the Communist revolution, there has been another major force working in the same direction as urbanization, that is the systematic antireligious activity of the Government. The decline of religion in Russia, consequently, may be imputed to two concomitant causes.

One of the fundamental demands of the nationality policy of the Soviet Government in its early years was the participation of native populations in the political structure of their respective administrative areas. This principle was particularly emphasized in areas such as Kazakhstan, where Russians had manned the governmental structure before the revolution of 1917. The present paper attempts through statistical evidence to describe the extent to which this was achieved in the first decade of existence of the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, then a part of the R.S.F.S.R. The agencies of government so examined are the soviet system, the administrative apparatus, and the Party.

Upon the outbreak of World War I in August, 1914, the Russian Imperial Government rightly suspected that for reasons both of geography and of political climate, the Grand Duchy of Finland posed a great danger on its northern flank. This was hardly surprising. Since 1899, that Government had done all it could to destroy die effective autonomy which Finland had enjoyed within the Russian Empire during the nineteenth century.

“Russification” of Finland took place in two stages. General Nikolai A. Bobrikov, Governor-General from 1898 to 1904, reduced the Finnish Diet to a consultative assembly, suppressed newspapers, and introduced the Russian language into the Finnish Senate and civil service. In 1901, he dissolved the Finnish army, which had existed since 1877, and sought unsuccessfully to conscript Finns into the Russian army. To be sure, after Bobrikov's assassination and the Russian revolution of 1905, Tsar Nicholas II agreed to exempt Finns from Russian army service, and, in 1906, permitted the modernization of the Diet and the introduction of universal suffrage.

The transition in economic doctrine from the Age of Mercantilism to that of the physiocrats has had strong appeal for economic historians. The views of such writers as Melon, Boisguillebert, Locke, Pufendorf, and others on the wealth and power of the state have been carefully studied in terms of principles identified with mercantilism, kameralism, and “physiocracy.” That the transition in the economic outlook of Europe between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was “revolutionary” in nature and not limited to Western Europe alone has been widely recognized, but the remarkable parallelism that existed in the outlook of economic theorists of Eastern and Western Europe has not been so well understood. An example of this has been the ambiguity that persists in evaluating the economic views of the Russian reformer, Ivan Pososhkov.

The Slavic peoples of the Austrian Empire developed a labor movement which owed its character to two elements: the common problems of all workmen in their relationship to the dynasty, the aristocracy, the Church and the predominant German minority on the one hand, and the national aspirations of the Slavs on the other. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the influence of these two elements up to dismemberment of the Empire following the defeat of the Imperial armies in World War I.

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.

In the eighties and early nineties of the last century Vladimir Solovëv, the Russian philosopher and religious thinker, was engaged in an extensive journalistic polemic against nationalism in general and Slavophilism in particular. One of his main targets was the philosophy of history of Nicholas Danilevskij, the Panslavist theoretician. In the light of the doctrines of world Christian unity enunciated by Solovëv, his strong reaction to Danilevskij's denial of the possibility of an ultimate world historical synthesis and to his espousal of a kind of cyclical interpretation of history is entirely understandable.

Solovëv addressed himself especially to Danilevskij's division of history into mutually independent civilizations or “cultural-historical types.” In particular, he criticized Danilevskij's claim that Slavdom constituted a cultural-historical type separate from “Europe.”

The Problem of land tenure has long been of topmost significance throughout the rural areas of Eastern and South Central Europe. From serfdom to very recent times the land ownership pattern was characterized by large estates intermingled with small peasant holdings. Land reforms were begun but thirty-five years ago under the stress of economic and political considerations. In most areas they had resulted in the concentration of the agricultural population on small low income farms.

Since the end of the last war the process of Sovietization has brought a reversal of the trend with the introduction of the collective farm. Yet, even with the vigorous support of the Russian masters this policy has been hard to carry through.

In the heroic epos of the old times—Iranian, Greek, German, Russian—the personal element is closely interwoven with the national. The hero is a man with his own feelings, joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds. Collectively, however, all of these heroes represent their native land. Spiritually and physically, they personify the highest ideals of their respective peoples. Defense of their land against foreign intruders is their main task. And to them belongs the glory of the faraway campaigns against foreign enemies. In time of peace, former enemies may turn to friends, and the knights of both sides who formerly had fought against each other would now revel together. It may be said that the epos of any given people reflects not only the history of that particular people but also the history of its relations with its neighbors as well as the mentality of each side.

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.

If Old Russian literature had a typical hero, he was a superman. Whatever the field of his activity, he was able to surmount all obstacles with ease. Either he was described as predestined to success, or as so strong that his success was inevitable. This was as true of religious ascetics and martyrs, whose death was only a sign of their final triumph, as it was of princes or military leaders.

Examples of literary heroes who were not so victorious are rare, almost nonexistent until the seventeenth century. One thinks, however, of the hero of the Igor Tale (Slovo o polku Igoreve), or of the heroes of the chronicle tales which depict Russian resistance to the Tartar invaders. But, though defeated, these historical figures are still characterized as heroes in the grand style, unusual men whose tragic fate is in strange contrast to their superior strength.