Finland's Position as a neighbor of the Soviet Union and yet at the same time a member of the free world presents an interesting challenge to the historian of postwar events. It is unfortunate that no comprehensive analysis of postwar Finnish-Soviet relations has appeared, because certainly this is a topic of considerable interest to those interested in Soviet foreign policy or Scandinavian politics. In spite of Finland's proximity to the Soviet Union she has been able to keep her independence, and she occupies a unique position with respect to Soviet relations with other countries.

Studies of Russian culture in the eighteenth century concentrate on the era of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, with some attention paid to the reign of Elizabeth. They deal only scantily with the reign of Anna Ioannovna, except to point out the dismal aspects of this period of German misrule. A closer examination, however, reveals that during Anna's reign, separated by five years from that of Peter the Great, the Westernization of Russian culture not only continued but in some areas assumed new forms and new directions.

Count Sergej Witte claims that the Holy Brotherhood (Svjashchennaja Druzhina) was his idea and he explains it in the following way. On the morrow of the assassination of Alexander II, he wrote a letter to his uncle Fadeev in which he expressed the opinion that the only way to vanquish terrorism was to appeal to counter-terrorism by means of a secret society. Witte at that time was in Kiev in charge of the Southwestern Railroad. In his answer Fadeev told his nephew that his letter was on the tsar's table and that Witte would soon be called to St. Petersburg. Indeed, a few days later Witte received the invitation to come and meet Count I. Voroncov-Dashkov, commander of the bodyguards of the Emperor in Gatchina.

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.

Some years ago, Robert V. Daniels, in his analysis of the Communist theory of state, concluded that, according to Marxist theory, the oppressive function of the state is a secondary consideration and only explains the origin of the state, but not its continued existence; that although the state originates only in class struggle, in order to ensure its continued existence, the state creates order, modifies the class struggle, and serves the common interests of society; that when the class struggle is terminated by the proletarian revolution, the state as such does not wither away, but only its oppressive functions so wither.

While the intrinsic worth of Nikolaj Mikailovich Karamzin's work still may be debated, his importance in Russian history has become clear. Karamzin popularized Russian history for his own day and through history gave form and content to Russian conservatism. Even his sharpest critics recognized these contributions, and Alexandre Koyré referred in a cutting note to Karamzin's arguments which appeared with monotonous regularity throughout the nineteenth century.

Much attention has Been Paid to Lenin's attack on Stalin in the last months of 1922 and early 1923, and rightly so, for this episode was critical in the career of Stalin, and, possibly, in the history of Russia. To a major extent the non-Bolshevik observer was until 1956 dependent on the testimony of Leon Trotsky for knowledge of this hidden struggle. This was only a limited disadvantage, for Trotsky was a first-rate writer, and the documents that he produced have proven reliable without exception. But Trotsky did not have in his possession a number of important documents pertaining to the affair, nor did he, and other scholars, exhaust the resources of his archives in this connection.

In a free market economy, with the absence of rent control, the cost of housing, as of all other goods, is determined by supply and demand. Characteristic of the USSR and the result of its economic system, which abolished private ownership of land and nationalized two-thirds of all urban housing, is the absence of a free market in the field of housing relations.

The role of the state, as the owner and operator of urban housing, continues to increase. As the largest and, in fact, the only builder of large scale housing, the state also assumed the function of distributing the dwelling space among the different groups of the population, as well as the function of regulating all questions brought out through its involvement in the housing problems of its citizens.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1941, evoked a variety of responses among the millions of Soviet subjects who found themselves under German rule. Where the individual was in a position to make a choice, these attitudes—ranging from hope for a better tomorrow to fanatical hatred of the invaders—found expression either in collaboration with the Germans or in identification with the Soviet partisan movement behind the German lines. The ensuing battle between the Germans and the partisans was fought not only for highways, railroads, and economic spoils, but also for the minds of men—and here the Germans rapidly lost by default.

The years 1878-1887 form a definite period in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. It was a period when terrorism was the favorite weapon of the revolutionaries, though it also saw the first large-scale strikes in St. Petersburg and the emergence of the first Russian Marxist group.

In the vast literature on the revolutionary movement of that period, little use has been made of an important source, La Chronique du Mouvement Socialiste en Russie 1878-1887, of which a confidential limited edition of a hundred copies was published in French by the Ministry of the Interior in 1890 (St. Petersburg, 718 pp.).

A Russian journey which the writer was privileged to take in the summer of 1958 as a member of the traveling party of Governor Adlai Stevenson afforded a rather unusual wealth of opportunities to meet and talk with local Soviet officials. While it was not a "field trip" in the research sense, it did yield a miscellany of observations on local governmental institutions, practices and personalities, some of which may be of interest to students of Soviet government and politics. The term "local" government is taken here to cover all levels up to and including the union-republic governments.

The recent successes achieved by Khrushchev in concentrating in his hands the instruments of power over the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union point once more to the decisive role played by the Party apparatus in the process of consolidation. While the attention of students of Soviet affairs had been focused on the basic component of the Party machine, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, headed by Khrushchev, it is, nevertheless, of interest to recall the existence of a rather obscure but important unit of the Party bureaucracy, namely, the Party Control Committee.

Had German socialism in 1918 returned to its pre-war Marxian opposition to the nation-state, Lenin could probably have built his immense political cantilever to span Eurasia from the French border to the Pacific. But the German pier was never erected. A majority of the German Socialists proved hostile to the Russian Communist program. For most of them fears of Communism (i.e., Russia) and devotion to the heritage of Bach, Beethoven, Blücher, Bismarck, and Bebel were obverse and reverse of the same nationalist coin.

The literature on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has generally ignored the part played by the peasantry. The present article is an attempt to fill that gap, first by examining the activities of the peasantry during the revolution itself, and secondly by attempting to give an account of the forces at work during the preceding years which caused the peasants to support the urban rebellion when it broke out.

Though Western and Soviet political scientists seldom see eye to eye, especially insofar as the study of Soviet institutions is concerned, there is, however, at least one point of common agreement: the uniqueness of the nature and functions of the Soviet procuracy, and, particularly, of its task of "general supervision."

For it must be noted that the Soviet system concentrates in the Procurator-General's office not only the duty of state prosecutor, as is usual in the West, but also the tasks of general supervision and of supervision over the organs of preliminary investigation, an arrangement generally regarded by Soviet jurists as a vast improvement over the Western practice.

There are times in the life of a Totalitarian Party when it may feel the need for stock-taking and a readjustment in the direction of freedom and democracy; what course the party takes at such a moment may be crucial in determining how the system itself will evolve in the future. In recent years the Polish and Hungarian parties have provided two dramatic examples of this occurrence within Communist totalitarian states. Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to the fact that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia also passed through such a phase after its break with the Soviet Union.

Americans who have emigrated from Eastern European countries often provide for testamentary legacies to relatives still residing in the "old country." Foreign residents are sometimes the legal heirs when Americans die without leaving wills. Since it is common knowledge that money sent to Eastern Europe, to Communist-controlled countries, can not be fully and freely used by the beneficiaries, American courts are frequently required to decide what to do with the legacy. They must recognize that it was the intention of the deceased Americans that their beneficiaries receive a fair share of an estate, often earned in the United States through lifelong hard work by the former emigrees, a share corresponding to the true purchasing power of the dollar, yet they have to recognize the situation that may occur if the legacies are transmitted abroad.

Traveling in Yugoslavia one is struck by the great contrasts and variety of its cultural and physical landscape. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in agriculture and in the rural life and economy. The importance of agriculture and the peasantry in the total economy can easily be seen since roughly 56 per cent of the population derives its sole or principal income from agricultural production, and agriculture contributes close to 30 per cent of the country's national income. Before 1945 Yugoslavia was predominantly a land of peasant subsistence farming, using primitive methods of production.

Works that deal with Russian social history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries use the word raznochinets, raznochintsy in several different meanings, which are seldom sharply defined. As a historiographic concept it was given wide circulation by Mikhailovsky and by the populist historians of the intelligentsia who followed his usage, and by Marxist social historians, notably by Lenin. Their usage, however, often obscured the precise meanings the term had had in earlier tsarist legal and educational usage.

The actual rules governing the organization of the Comintern and affiliation with it were promulgated by the Second World Congress held in Leningrad and Moscow in the summer of 1920. The constitution, statutes and theses of the Comintern, adopted by the Second Congress, testify to the Bolshevik character of the organization. The manipulation of representation from the Sections of the International demonstrate the method and indicate the extent of control over the organization that was exercised by the Soviet party.