The search for a Russian liberal tradition may not appear rewarding if one thinks in terms of that aspect of Western liberalism which stood for maximum individual freedom and minimum state interference. Russian liberals admired rather than imitated Bentham or Mill; Adam Smith, for example, had an influence on Russian economists and politicians which was rather vague and transitory in nature. The stage of liberalism which postulated absolute natural rights, inviolability of private property, and economic laisser faire was simply bypassed in Russia. “Liberalism in Russia,” writes Miljukov, “connoted the idea of state intervention,” and since no Russian “liberal” thought had existed in laisser-faire days, it was free to become “more democratic, without being inconsistent with a former tradition.“

Why the paradox of a revolt against the Communist regime in Russia in a place which had been a Bolshevik stronghold at the time of the October Revolution? Like many paradoxes, this one, when understood, leads to valuable insights. The effort to comprehend the causes and aims of the Kronstadt revolt sheds much additional light on the contemporary nature of the Soviet regime, the crisis which it was then experiencing, and the trend of its evolution. Conversely, the Kronstadt movement itself becomes much more intelligible when viewed in this broader context.

The revolt did not actually begin as such, but rather as a mass movement of protest, which was symptomatic of the general state of internal crisis in Soviet Russia. Military Communism had reached an impasse; violent intervention by the State into all aspects of economic life, particularly the requisitions from, the peasantry, together with the unemployment and shortages resulting from the general collapse of the nation's economy, had in many places brought large segments of the population to the verge of open revolt against the Soviet regime. In some instances, armed peasant uprisings had broken out, notably in Tambov gubernija.

The difficulties facing the student of contemporary Soviet conditions in his search for reliable evidence on detail are well known. Court cases, so far as reported, have obvious advantages in comparison, let us say, with the literary productions of authors, who aim at illustrating the direction in which Soviet society is supposed to move, as well as in comparison with the published reports of refugees. These reports may be supposed not to reflect the outlook of the typical Soviet citizen. Further, the refugees’ experiences are subject to processes of selection and editing, which are to a greater or lesser extent conditioned by the state of international relations and of public opinion in the country of publication. The court case, in contrast, represents facts established by the authorities under conditions in which maximum precision is desired, and it is published not only because of its propagandist but (and mainly) for its legal interest.

In his pamphlet What is To Be Done, written in 1902, Lenin declared:

History has now placed before us an immediate task which is far more revolutionary than the immediate tasks of the proletariat of any other country. The completion of this task, the destruction of the strongest bulwark of European, and we may even say Asiatic, reaction would make of the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international proletarian revolution …

What Lenin meant by this challenging statement was that the Russian proletariat, by overthrowing Russian Tsarism, would open the path to proletarian revolution in the West. This idea, though unrealistic, as subsequent events were to prove (the overthrow of Tsarism did not produce the European revolution), is nevertheless. extremely important in world history. The adherence to it, however irrationally, on the part of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, provided a kind of world mission and supplied them with tremendous motivating energy even at times when conditions of life for the Party, not to mention chances for revolution in Russia, seemed at the lowest possible ebb.

The Meeting of the Foreign Association of Polish Socialists which took place in Paris in November, 1892, had in the minds of its organizers a twofold purpose. From an organizational point of view, it represented an attempt at unifying some feeble remnants of the working-class movement of Russian Poland, that had survived the mass arrests of 1891-1892. From an ideological angle, it was an attempt to bring about a synthesis between the cosmopolitan program of the “Proletariat” and the patriotic ideas of the “National Socialists,” to marry the Marxist doctrine to the national aspirations of Poland and thus to remedy the split which divided the Socialist labor movement. Both these purposes were achieved by the foundation of the Polish Socialist party (Polska Portia Socjalistyczna) called PPS for short.

The almost continuous conflict between the interests of the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire in the Near and Middle East, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, gave rise to several attempts on the part of Pan-Slavs and some Slavophiles to win the English over to the Russian point of view. It was the opinion not only of such a prominent Slavophile as Ivan Aksakov, and the militant independent, Mikhail Katkov, but also of certain officials, that a “great understanding” with England would be more advantageous to Russia than “a great war.” Many, even before 1878, sought to woo England by interpreting to the English public Russian objectives in the Balkans and Central Asia. With the aid of sympathetic English journalists and encouragement from leaders of the Liberal Opposition, these Russian groups sought to explain Russia's past sins and honest motives. It was, in effect, a strange alliance of the anti-imperialist and democratic Western Liberals and the imperialist Pan-Slavs and a small group of reactionary Slavophiles, united by a common desire for peace.

For foreign students seeking the facts on the Russian economy, even small items of information in Russian sources may be noteworthy. Given the established Soviet secrecy policy, such items often clarify important but otherwise obscure aspects.

In reference to various Soviet issues, particularly the recurring question of inequality, the figures below on the royalty incomes of creative workers (authors, playwrights, composers, etc.) in the Soviet Russian Republic perhaps are properly considered a case in point:

In 1889 the head of the Railway Department of the Russian Ministry of Finance published a brochure entitled Concerning Nationalism: National Economy and Friedrich List, which is a brief exposition of List's book on The National System of Political Economy. The same man, who had arrived at his position the hard way, had written on economic subjects before. In 1883 he had published a technical volume on the structure of railway tariffs, in which he liberally included his comments on current economic theory and a special recommendation for a Russian type of socialism sponsored by the Orthodox Church.

The Emphasis which the Soviet Government places on the development of industrial cooperatives is a fact readily recognized by many foreign students of the USSR. Unfortunately, the information available on this interesting Soviet development is rather scant. Pertinent descriptive data published outside or the USSR leave so many distressing gaps that it is difficult to obtain a coherent picture of the cooperative system as a whole. Besides, the available data pertain mostly to the early thirties.

In the United States, there is widespread acceptance of a stereotype of Soviet industry according to which all initiative and ideas stem from the top. The formulation and enforcement of the national Plans are conceived of as leaving little room for independent action by such lower officials as those in the managements of individual plants. From this stereotype, two conclusions are commonly drawn: one, that industry is operated as a gigantic bureaucracy with rigid centralization and stifling red tape; two, that the entire industrial potential of the country is single-mindedly geared to the precise goals set by the top authorities.

At the end of 1948, after supplying the United States steel industry in the course of the year with an exceptionally heavy volume of manganese ore, in response to a strong and rising market demand, the Soviet Government decided to reduce the shipments of this vital, steel-conditioning mineral to minimum quantities short of an outright embargo. This decision was conveyed to the principal importing firms in the United States in December, 1948, in a brief business communication from the appropriate Government export corporation (Sojuzpromexport) to the effect that owing to increased domestic demand only small, token shipments of manganese ore would be available for export to American markets, during the following year. The reduction in shipments was quite drastic. Only ten manganese cargoes arrived in United States ports during 1949, unloading a total of 73,000 long tons of ore, as compared with 385,000 tons, or 34 per cent of total United States imports brought in from that country during 1948. In one year, therefore, the USSR abandoned its role of major supplier of manganese to the United States to become a minor source, supplying only 5 per cent of total imports in 1949 and less than 3 per cent in 1950.

On October 4, 1946, Klement Gottwald, leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, and at that time Prime Minister of the Czechoslovak Republic, declared that the experience of Czechoslovakia had shown “what had been foreseen theoretically by Marxist classics, namely, that there exists another path to socialism than by way of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the soviet state system. Going by this path are Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, and also Czechoslovakia.” So ran the report of his speech in the collection of his articles and speeches, Ten Years, published in 1947. Only two years later, the same speech was included in a new collection of Gottwald's works, with, however, the phrase “a dictatorship of the proletariat” deleted, and the country, Yugoslavia, omitted. This editorial modification of an authoritative statement puts into sharp relief the change of view which had occurred in the interval in the interpretation placed on the people's democracy by Czechoslovak Communists.

In no other country of twentieth-century Europe have matters of local government played more havoc both with domestic peace and external security than in Czechoslovakia. Nor does modern history offer a more frustrating story than the process by which an honest, though slow and hesitant, endeavor to meet claims for more local self-government was cunningly and ruthlessly exploited for the very opposite, i.e., for crushing liberty and establishing a rigid totalitarian centralism.

The birth of the Republic itself was met with the bitter opposition of the bulk of its German minority, whose desire, however unrealistic, was to join the new Austrian state. The majority of the Sudeten Germans had scarcely begun to show a change of heart, leaders of their major parties had scarcely begun actively to cooperate with the Czechoslovak Government, when Hitler came to power in Germany, and the Nazi acid quickly corroded the delicate fabric of the fresh Czech-German cooperation.

The premature death of Waclaw Borowy in October, 1950, is a great loss for Polish literary scholarship and for Polish culture in general. By common consent Borowy was the most outstanding literary historian and critic of his generation. In his work he blended the best traditions of philological study with a modern approach to literature. He was a man of huge reading both in Polish literature and in foreign literatures and he was well versed in history, philology, and the arts. His thorough knowledge of foreign languages (French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian) enabled him to present Polish authors and Polish literary trends against a broad comparative background and to evaluate them in an objective fashion. Finally, Borowy was a master of Polish literary style, uniting perfect clarity and conciseness with charming elegance, subtle humor, and fine irony. Nothing written by him was ever dull, not even his bibliographical surveys!

When the first Russian State Duma convened in the Winter Palace, on April 27, 1906, one of the basic questions which confronted both the new representative assembly and the bureaucracy of the Tsar was whether there would be a head-on clash between them or whether some form of mutual tolerance or even cooperation would emerge from their encounter. Because this encounter ended two months later in the dissolution of the Duma by the Tsar, too little attention has been paid to an alternative solution—the formation of a ministry supported by the Duma and approved by the Tsar. Yet, as it happened, this solution was explored in some detail by members of the bureaucracy and court and by leaders of the parties which dominated the Duma. These negotiations and their failure help to explain the basic political struggle between the bureaucracy, which was unwilling to relinquish its traditional privilege of governing in the name of the Tsar, and the Kadet party, which strove for the immediate introduction of responsibility of the executive to parliament, on the British model.

Eastern Orthodoxy, unlike Roman Catholicism, is organized on the principle of autocephalous national churches—each constituting an independent administrative entity. This fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Christianity causes the thinking Orthodox Christian to be confronted with a dilemma. He wants the Church to be close to the communicant and the clergy to teach him and pray in his own language, and yet if he desires that the whole Church be able to perpetuate itself and propagate the faith, he must grant to it a sufficiently centralized organization and at the same time combat all fissiparous tendencies. Thus, on the surface at least, there appears to be a conflict between Christ's injunction that there be “one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16) and the actual establishment of national churches which can easily render unto Caesar what may be correctly regarded as “things that are God's“ ( Matthew 22:21).

The crimean peninsula has been occupied by many races, nationalities, and religious groups in the course of history. In 114 B.C. it was placed under the protection of Mithridates, King of Pontus, who is supposed to have settled Jewish colonists from Asia Minor there. From inscriptions it is known that Hellenized Jews lived there as early as the first century A.D.

Gradually the settlements of the Crimea came under the political and cultural influence of Byzantium. The Khazars established themselves in large numbers in the Eastern Crimea in the vicinity of the straits of Kerch. The conversion of the Khazar royal house and part of the nobility to Judaism (about 740) disposed them to be friendly toward their co-religionists who sought shelter from Byzantine oppression in those regions of the Crimea which were controlled by the Khazars.

This essay seeks to establish the line of semantic cleavage between itti and ekhat' and between nesti and vezti both for old literary Russian and for contemporary literary Russian. It does not attempt to treat the problem of the relationship between the so-called determined and the so-called undetermined groups (e.g., the difference between itti and khodit)' though significant differences in usage have also taken place here in the two periods.

In pre-Petrine Russian, that is, in the literary Russian from the tenth or eleventh century through the seventeenth century, the distinction between itti and ekhat' (whether in simple or compounded forms) seems to be not unlike the difference between the English go and ride.

Many literary works would never have existed if there had not been tragedy in the lives of their authors. In moments of extreme unhappiness in the life of a man or nation, art often blossoms and gives inspiration for the fight against fate. The arts, especially poetry, then sometimes reach heights unattainable under normal conditions.

In Poland, in periods of war and occupation, literature has always helped to keep alive the patriotism and fighting-spirit of the people. When war has forced a great number of Poles to live in exile, Polish literature, too, has divided into two currents. Writers in exile have created inspired and profound works, especially in poetry. Works written by those who stayed at home were, in general, of less artistic value and more realistic: they were pictures of hard and bitter life.

The very name of Rumania's most famous poet, Mihai Eminescu, is unknown to all but a very few in the English-speaking world. Here then, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, is an Englishman's tribute to his memory.

Eminescu was born in northern Moldavia in January, 1850, when the exiles of the 1848 revolution were beginning to return. The previous decade had seen the rapid spread of Western ideas among the boyar class of the Principalities, starting with the return from France of the “bonjourists” (a number of young boyars who had been sent to Paris for their education), and culminating in the revolutionary movement of 1848.