The Battle of Athens represents a turning point in contemporary Greek history. This battle ended technically with the armistice of January 11 and the Varkiza peace agreement of February 12, but in actuality the civil war has continued with few interruptions to the present day. Neither did the foreign intervention that accompanied the Battle of Athens end with the Varkiza pact. Rather it has increased steadily, culminating in the bitter debates in the United Nations Security Council and in the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine. Prior to the Battle of Athens there was at least the possibility of a peaceful postwar political evolution in Greece. The battle ended this possibility and set in motion the chain reaction that has devastated Greece and imperiled world peace. The question of the origins of the Athens strife is, therefore, of more than academic interest.

The turn of the fifteenth century was a period of cultural and political crisis, not only in Western Europe, but in Russia as well. The nations of both East and West were confronted with choices which were to determine their cultural and political history for the next few generations.

In Russia, the reigns of Ivan III (1462-1505) and Basil III (1505-1533) were particularly remarkable for the number and variety of issues the country had to face. In the political domain, it was the end of the process of the gathering of Russian lands by Moscow; socially, it was the first act in the breaking down of the position of the old Moscow boyar class. It was also a time of great cultural fermentation marked by a struggle between rigid traditionalism and a serious effort to introduce an esprit critique, into the intellectual life of Russia. In Russia—a country where intellectual activity was limited almost exclusively to the religious sphere—this cultural fermentation had its most important repercussions in the ecclesiastical domain.

Constantinople—“the Imperial City” (Tsargrad), as the Russians used to call it—with its riches and splendor, its churches and palaces, fired the imagination of many a “Barbaric people of the North,” and following in the wake of the Huns, the Avars, and the Bulgars, the Russians in their turn were eventually attracted by her. Out of their wars and commerce with the Byzantines there gradually developed a deeper cultural intercourse between the two nations, and it is the Byzantine form of Christianity which became the foundation of the Russian Church.

The first Russian attack on Constantinople took place in 860. Both the fact itself and the date are firmly established by evidence available in which Patriarch Photius's two homilies occupy a prominent place.

Russian peasants do not appear to welcome children with particular enthusiasm, but once a child is born it is protected to the greatest possible extent from hunger and cold, often at the cost of considerable parental sacrifice. The infant and young child is fed by its mother generously and frequently, and for a very long period, often up to two years; if the mother is absent, a crying baby is given a comforter made of chewed and sweetened bread tied up in a rag by the person looking after it, typically a woman of a generation older than the parents—a babuška—though sometimes its older brothers and sisters have this duty.

At the beginning of December 1944, a mere six weeks after the return of a “liberation” government to Greece, fighting broke out in Athens between British troops and the principal guerrilla force which had resisted the Germans. This sudden turn of affairs created general bewilderment at the time, both in Athens and elsewhere; and not a little indignation arose at the sight of erstwhile allies fighting against one another at a time when Germany, the common enemy, was not yet overthrown. The passage of time, and the publication of a number of books, now permit a more adequate understanding of the events which gave so decisive a turn to postwar Greek life.

The kolkhozy are rural associations based on the principles of coöperative management, public ownership of the principal means of production, collective labor, annual planning of production, and remuneration for labor based upon the socialist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” They are now in the second phase of their development. During the first phase, which ended approximately in 1939-40, the Soviet authorities were concerned primarily with grouping individual peasants into coöperative enterprises. Eighteen and a half million peasant families were united into 242,000 agricultural coöperatives (artels) comprising a total of 488,000,000 hectares (1,205,000,000 acres) of land.

When John Hay thus eulogized the economic progress the United States had seen under the leadership of the late President McKinley, the nation was, in fact, a debtor to European capital. Yet the farsighted statesman had interpreted correctly the world financial trend.

Between 1900 and 1914 foreign investments of the United States advanced from an estimated $700,000,000 to well over $1,000,000,-000. By 1920 American commercial investments—those in trading and industrial enterprises—in foreign countries amounted to nearly $4,000,000,000.

Any analysis of European economy in the seventeenth century must inevitably take into account the wide prevalence and frequency of war. War was the norm in Europe of that century, and the years in which the continent saw no wars numbered less than a decade. While Western Europe in the latter part of the century repeatedly mobilized and fought to forestall the designs of Louis XIV, Eastern Europe found itself no less frequently shaken by devastating wars which at one time or another taxed the resources of the German Emperor, Sweden, Poland, Turkey and Russia. The ascending scale of warfare and the increasing size of armies weighed heavily on European economy, and particularly so on the Russian state, whose Treasury could ill afford large military enterprises.

The activities of secret revolutionary societies in the Russian Army towards the close of the reign of Alexander I, the abortive mutiny of December, 1825, and the subsequent collapse and repression of the movement, are among the best-known episodes of modern Russian history. Although a great deal has been written about the conspiracy itself, considerably less is known about its effect on the course of Russian diplomacy and the impression which it made upon foreign observers at the time. Therefore, it may not be without interest to read the reports, most of them hitherto unpublished, of a British diplomat, who witnessed the uprising and its consequences in Russian internal and foreign policy.

The 1860s ushered a new era into Imperial Russia. In the Baltic Provinces, however, the development of capital and industry by far surpassed the progress made in Russia proper. Among the Lettish people, three major sociological trends can be said to have begun about this time. These were (1) the rising from the peasantry of a rural bourgeoisie; (2) the flow of peasants into the cities and their consequent forming into a Lettish urban bourgeoisie and a Lettish urban proletariat; and (3) a cultural and national awakening which, based on almost universal literacy, spread rapidly among the masses.

The cultural awakening was pioneered by a group of Lettish intellectuals among whom were men of letters, such as Christian Valdemar, Andreis Spagis, and K. Baron.

Gogol was little known in England before the Crimean War. Earlier there had been only one criticism of his works, and that an incompetent one (1841); a sketchy, erroneous mention of him in a table of Russian literature published in a periodical (1842); and the first translation of one of his supernatural tales, “Viy” (1847). Then the Crimean War brought forth a malicious forgery of his masterpiece of social satire, Dead Souls (1854), which occasioned three long articles, two of them exposing it for what it was, and a third simply exploiting it to suit the propaganda needs of the hour. On the more constructive side of the wartime interest in Gogol, first translations of two of his tales, with prefatory critical comments, were published in periodicals. Excepting a scattered handful of lost translations and one pioneering critical study, there was no further English interest in Gogol until the 1880s.

The manuscript of Gumilëv's verse play, The Poisoned Tunic, now in the possession of Professor Gleb Struve, was presented to him by Boris Anrep, mosaic artist and one-time contributor to the well-known Russian literary and art magazine Apollon, together with a number of papers, notebooks, and other belongings of the late Nikolaj Gumilëv. Gumilëv left these things with Anrep in London before his return to Russia in 1918.

In 1917 Gumilëv, then an officer of the Aleksandrijskij Hussar Regiment, had been sent to Paris for later assignment to the Salonika front. He was detained in Paris from the summer of 1917 to January, 1918, at which time he went to London, where he wanted to join the British Army in the hope of being sent to Mesopotamia. He stayed in England until April and saw Anrep frequently before returning to Russia.

John Wilson, when middle-aged, once set out his achievements for De Quincey to consider. “In The City of the Plague,” he wrote, “there ought to be something of the sublime. Is there?” Modern critics have not thought so: Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, while not stinting praise for the mature Wilson, the “Christopher North” who was the mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine and virtual creator of the Noctes Ambrosianae, dismiss the poetry of his early career as imitative and unimportant. His “poems, The Isle of Palms (1812) and The City of the Plague (1816), merely show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets.” The City of the Plague, as Wilson first conceived it, was to be “awful and wild, solemn.”

Today in several of the countries of Europe where the capitalist economic system still prevails and where Communist parties are not in control of the government, one of the principal means by which the Communists exert their influence is through trade unions. News analysts predict that when and if the Communists in France and Italy attempt to seize power, they will first paralyze these countries through general strikes conducted by the trade unions. In Czechoslovakia the rise to power of-the Communist Party was greatly facilitated by Communist control of the trade-union movement.

On the other hand, in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Germany, the non-Communist trade union movement has acted as one of the most important bulwarks against the growth of Communist parties.

The Neuri (Neuroi) and Aesti of classical scholarship are the earliest names which recent research has attempted to gloss as Baltic (K. Būga's “Aestic”), but since nothing beyond conjecture, unsubstantiated by linguistic evidence, can establish the equation, it is better to begin more soberly with names about which there can be less doubt. The oldest known authority on these is Ptolemy (c. 100-78), who says in his De geographia “Ypo men tous Ouenedas, [Tacitus's Vencti, Wends, Slavs] Palin Galindai, [or Galindanoi, Calindians] kai Loudinoi, [or Loudênoi, Sudinians, Sudavians].” After a lapse of more than a millennium Peter von Dusburg (i.e., Duisburg) numbers these tribes among the Prussians, and two centuries later (1545), Meletius, archipresbyter Ecclesie Liccensis in Prussia, offers meager and obviously corrupt fragments of Sudavian or Yatvingian speech (e.g., moy ’,my,‘ cf. Pr. fem.

In December, 1945, fifteen freight cars left for Moscow with material from the Russian Historical Archive in the capital of Czechoslovakia.

Before the second World War the Russian Archive had become the outstanding collection in Europe on recent Russian history outside of the Soviet Union. Specializing particularly in the revolutionary period of 1917-21 and the “White” emigration, its only equal outside of Russia was in the United States: the Hoover War Library of Stanford University.

Ever since 1945, recurrent reports in the United States have spoken of the complete removal and dissolution of the great collection. During a visit to Prague in the summer of 1948 I endeavored to gather all available facts.

In a society whose leadership demands that all man's life and works be brought within the compass of a single Weltanschauung one would expect considerable attention to be devoted to the problem of art and its position in the social complex, for art, and in particular literature, is one of the most direct and effective means for influencing the political, social, and philosophical ideas and attitudes of the mass of individuals of which the society is composed. In post-revolutionary Russia the role art was to play in a society based on Marxian socialism at once became the subject of intense discussion, but fifteen years were to elapse before any final “official” solution of the problem was reached. It was not until 1932 that the formula of “socialist realism” received the endorsement of State and Party, whereupon its principles became incumbent upon the members of the various unions of writers, artists, and composers.

A. A. Ždanov's reference to the Serapion Brothers in his famous 1946 speech recalls a lively chapter in the early history of Soviet literature. Mikhail Zoščenko, who bore the brunt of Ždanov's attack, and the poet Tikhonov, who got off with a scolding and the loss of his position as president of the Union of Soviet Writers, were both among the twelve young writers who formed the Serapion Brotherhood in 1921.

They were a remarkable group. When their first meeting was held on February 1, 1921, all but one of their number were under the age of thirty, and three were not yet out of their teens. One of the youngest was their unofficial leader, Lev Lunc, whose death in 1924, just one week after his twenty-third birthday, cut short the career of the man whom Gor'kij considered to be the most promising dramatist in Russia.