In his Ispoved' (Confession), Tolstoy gives us a painful picture of a man who, in his search for a solution to the problems of human existence, experiences the same feelings as a man lost in a dense wood:

He comes to an open plain, climbs up a tree, and sees around him endless space, but nowhere a house—he sees darkness, but again no house. Thus I lost my way in the wood of human knowledge, in the twilight of mathematical and experimental science, which opened before me a clear and distant horizon in the direction of which there could be no house, and in the darkness of philosophy, plunging me into a greater gloom with every step I took, until I was at last persuaded that there was, and could be, no way out. When I followed what seemed the bright light of learning, I saw that I had only turned aside from the real question.

Shamil's activities in this period [1834-45] were directed not only against Tsarism, but against the local feudal lords, and were of a democratic, progressive character.

The mountain peoples' movement, led by Shamil, was not a national-liberation and democratic movement, but was a reactionary and nationalistic movement, which came into the service of British capitalism and the Turkish Sultan.

These quotations from two successive editions of one of the most popular Soviet history textbooks point up an issue that has engaged Soviet historians for the last decade. Numerous quotations might be added to show still further reversals of opinion reached by Soviet historians since the party called for a radical revision of the role of Shamil and his movement in 1950. Recent conferences have expressed dissatisfaction with the findings and have called for more thorough research to establish a “scientific Marxist” version of the subject.

Konstantin Leont'ev is not a well-known Russian writer. For some Russian and non-Russian readers Leont'ev is the most conservative and even reactionary of all Russian ideologists of the nineteenth century— the man who used to say: We have to freeze Russia in order to prevent any kind of progress which might endanger the very existence of the Russian monarchy.

Critics who know Leont'ev better will give a more appropriate characterization of him. They know that his approach to history is based on an aesthetic principle. His main reality is beauty, and nothing else. But what is beauty, and what is beautiful? According to Leont'ev's tastes and principles, the beautiful is life in an underdeveloped societv in a primary stage of civilization.

Like other aspects of Soviet life, economics has been revivified by Stalin's death. The most visible part of its reawakening has been an extensive discussion of, and experimentation with, institutional arrangements, though even questions of strategy and basic policy have also been exposed to an unwonted amount of free discussion. The real measure of this freedom, however, is that the search for theoretical clarification, which inevitably accompanies discussion of practical issues, has been allowed to develop in a way not permitted since the late twenties. One aspect of this dramatic change is the controversy which has developed around the use of mathematics in economics. After long aversion to any introduction of mathematical reasoning into analysis of economic relationships, the Russians are now thinking about the possible usefulness of input-output techniques in balancing supply and demand and in price planning and about the application of linear programming to enterprise planning, and have begun to resort to mathematical models to explore the abstract essence of practical problems.

Among the things the Russians like to boast about is publishing. Their presses are now producing about 64,000 books (in over a billion copies), nearly 640 million copies of magazines, and nearly 13 billion copies of newspapers each year. Although they define a book as any publication five pages or more in length and their average newspaper consists of four pages or less, the figures are still impressive. Most of their books do contain far more than five pages, their magazines seem to contain, on the average, as much textual material as those outside Russia, and their newspapers are almost devoid of advertisements and many of the other space fillers that make American newspapers so bulky. What the text of the Soviet newspapers has to do with the day's news is, of course, another matter.

The prevailing interpretation of recent Soviet foreign policy emphasizes Stalin's death as the great watershed event, from which is charted the shift toward a more flexible and differentiated policy, broadly known by the term “peaceful coexistence.” While this emphasis properly draws attention to the new departures of the more recent period and to the dynamic character of Soviet policy, it gives insufficient attention to significant changes in the Soviet outlook and in Soviet behavior abroad which began to be manifested before the death of Stalin. The issue is not merely one of correctly dating the beginning of a trend in Soviet policy, but, more significantly, of deepening our understanding of the forces which shape Soviet foreign policy. The purpose of this essay is to examine some of the significant implications of these developments in Soviet policy prior to the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952.

The outstanding role of the intellectual in modern Russian history is beyond dispute. Among non-Communist historians there is a well-established consensus concerning the nature of the Russian intelligentsia and the distinctive part it played in bringing on the revolution. The nineteenth-century Russian intellectual was detached from practical affairs, committed to some abstract doctrine, and morally alienated by autocracy and class privilege. This reaction resulted from the cultural precociousness of Russia's westernized upper class, as contrasted with the frustrating backwardness of the government and the economy. Educated and sensitive Russians had nowhere to turn except to theory.

The cultural cleavage between this theorizing elite and the toiling masses has left traces even today—for example, in the official classification of the Soviet population into workers, peasants, and “toiling intelligentsia,” and in the remarkable prestige enjoyed by academic pursuits in Russia.

The late summer of 1914 demonstrated that for most European Social Democrats nationalism was far more powerful than Marxism in the event of a conflict between these ideologies. Some Social Democratic parties did not participate in this demonstration, however. Not until the late autumn of 1939 did it become apparent to all that Finnish Social Democrats, for example, were nationalists before they were Marxists. The fact that Finland was not a belligerent in World War I left this question open. Until the demands made by the Soviet Union in October-November, 1939, and the beginning of the Winter War (which included the abortive proclamation of a Soviet-sponsored Finnish Democratic Government), bourgeois Finns were uncertain about the response of Social Democrats to any serious Soviet challenge to continued Finnish independence. In view of the tragic Finnish Civil War of 1918, this uncertainty seemed grounded in historical fact. As the largest party in Finland (representing forty percent of the electorate in 1939), the Social Democrats' attitude would prove decisive in determining the strength of Finnish resistance to Soviet diplomatic and military pressure. Like other Finns, Social Democrats fought, sacrificed, and died to defend their nation. The visible symbol of the unity of this nation in the Winter War was the Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner. It was at this point that Tanner stepped into world politics. A Finnish scholar has concluded that in the Moscow negotiations of 1939 the two Finnish delegates, Tanner and J. K. Paasikivi, “ … held the fate of Finland in their hands.”

The diplomatic entanglements of Bulgaria and the Great Powers in the period 1894-1914 are well known. Political instability in the Balkans and in Bulgaria itself discouraged extensive and sustained German economic penetration of the region until after 1894. Apart from political difficulties in Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Germany frequently found themselves in competition in Bulgaria. Although bound by the Dual Alliance of 1879 and allegedly pursuing a Drang nach Osten, those two great powers frequently worked at cross-purposes both in policies and practices in Bulgaria.

German economic interests in Bulgaria may be observed by examining (a) banking and financial activity and (b) tariff and trade relations. Industrial development including railroad promotions in Bulgaria assumed relatively less significance. German long-term capital investments in 1914 in the entire Balkan area amounted to about one and three-quarter billion marks, a figure that does not appear outstanding in comparison with German investments elsewhere.

By turning to the Central Committee in June, 1957, to defeat the temporary majority in the Presidium, Khrushchev had not only wrecked the concept of collective leadership; he had corrected the optical illusion of a meaningful separation of “powers” in the allocation of the top party-state posts within the Presidium of the Central Committee. In institutional terms, the ouster of four of the five first deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers (plus Malenkov, a deputy chairman) from the Presidium and the packing of that body with the entire1 membership of the enlarged Secretariat and some regional party secretaries represented the absolute subordination of the policy making organ of the CC to its nominally executive arm, the Secretariat. Carried to its logical conclusion by the First Secretary's assumption of Bulganin's office as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in March, 1958, this ”coup d'etat” was not formally submitted for approval to the extraordinary Congress which left the leading party organs unchanged.

During the twenty years between the wars, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was forged as the instrument of eventual Communist rule in that country. In the first decade of its history the CPC was racked with inner crises, often provoked by Comintern intervention in party affairs, and always settled in accordance with the decisions of the Comintern organs of authority.

In 1929 the fate of the CPC was entrusted to Klement Gottwald. Ten years later the Czechoslovak party faithfully mirrored, in leadership and in policy, the desires of the Soviet Union and the International. Gottwald undoubtedly deserves most of the credit for this achievement and for thus molding a movement capable of undertaking the rule of postwar Czechoslovakia. After he had achieved mastery of the party, Gottwald maintained his authority almost unchallenged by serious rivals. Wherever deviations did occur, he was able to dissociate himself from direct responsibility and to overcome the opposition.

In 1956 the Soviet Union commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. His re-entry on the Soviet literary scene was marked by the publication of his Collected Works in an imposing ten-volume edition of 300,000 copies. Concurrently, biographical and critical studies began appearing once again, most of them, to be sure, of only secondary significance, but their sheer number is impressive compared to the drought years 1935-56. Little has appeared, however, which bears comparison with the wealth of critical literature and memoir materials that characterized the immediate postrevolutionary period to 1935, particularly that connected with the names of A. S. Dolinin and L. P. Grossman. These two scholars are still active today, and both participated in the preparation of the ten-volume edition.

It was not surprising that after the death of Stalin, early in 1953, the new regime should take another look at the condition of Soviet agriculture. While agricultural output had probably reached prewar levels, the needs of the state had risen, too, especially since the urban population had continued to grow steadily. Responding to the problem of insufficient supply, the regime introduced a number of projects and reforms designed, if not to solve, at least to alleviate some of its aspects. Millions of acres of little used or unused land were plowed and cultivated; there were attempts to improve the livestock feed base through the wider cultivation of corn; the Machine and Tractor Stations were abolished and the system of procurements was changed; and further efforts were made to increase yields per acre through improved methods of land utilization. Still more comprehensive in its scope was the call for a national inventory of both the natural and economic conditions of crop cultivation and livestock raising, whose objective was the establishment of a more “scientific” scheme of agricultural regionalization of the country in order to ensure more effective planning than had hitherto taken place.

The broad education of the prerevolutionary Russian intellectual was primarily a result of the humanistic and philological culture which permeated the secondary schools of the period. In all types of secondary schools established after the reform of 1864, linguistic training formed the basis of education. Following the reform, three categories of secondary schools were established: (1) classical gymnasia in which one modern foreign language and two classical languages were taught, (2) gymnasia in which one modern foreign language and one classical language were taught, (3) real-gymnasia in which two modern foreign languages and no classical languages were taught. A study of the curricula of these schools shows the dominant position held by the classical languages over the greater part of the nineteenth century; it also gives evidence of their gradual decline and the strengthening of the status of the modern foreign languages.

In view of the impressive rate of Soviet economic growth during the past three decades, it seems likely that the Soviet leaders may make good their promise “to catch up with and surpass” the United States' level of production. Although estimates vary, most analysts agree that in recent decades the rate of Soviet industrial growth has been two to three times as rapid as that of the United States. The present Seven-Year Plan, to be concluded in 1965, aims at approaching American economic output in all sectors. Even in the troubled area of agriculture, the achievements of recent years appear to have been considerable.

In January, 1888, when Chekhov was working on his first long story, “The Steppe,” he wrote to his friend, the poet Pleshcheev, at whose instigation he was writing that story for the review The Northern Messenger:

All through January I have been working away at my steppe, not writing anything else, and am therefore absolutely ruined. If the Steppe is published later than March I shall howl like a wolf. I'll mail it to you by February 1st. If you foresee that there will be no room for it in the March issue, let me know, my dear man: I shan't hurry with the Steppe and shall write something for the New Times and the Petersburg Gazette for the sake of an honorarium. To write long things is most boring and much more difficult than to write trifles.

In recent years information has appeared in various Soviet publications which has enabled students of the Soviet economy to compute the average wage of Soviet workers and employees with a considerable degree of confidence. Generally the data provided have been in the form of percentage increases in the average wage above a base year for which the average wage is known or has been reliably estimated. Much of this information has been summarized in an article by Holzman, and he presents there an index of the rise in the average Soviet wage since 1928. This development very likely also contributes to increased accuracy in estimates of the wage bill, as figures are readily available on the size of the nonagricultural labor force for these years. But gaps still exist in our knowledge. Statistics of the type used by Holzman and others in calculating the average wage have not been published for some of the years prior to 1950.

It is generally agreed that Hegel and his younger and somewhat leftist followers contributed to shaping the philosophical and economic views of Marx. Not so generally recognized is the impact of a Polish writer, August von Ciezkowski, whose influence is the subject of our query. This note is not intended to be an original contribution on the subject but a brief restatement of an interesting proposition concerning Marx's intellectual origins by a German professor of philosophy, Reinhard Lauth. To the best of my knowledge Professor Lauth's proposition has not been discussed as yet on this side of the Atlantic.

The eleventh thesis of Marx on Feuerbach, appended to his Deutsche Ideologie (1845-46) reads: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern. Its meaning is well known and the alteration from interpretation to change, from theoretical to practical philosophy, has been stressed sufficiently.