The Kadet daily Riech’ (1906-18) was a product of the revolution of 1905, which brought Russian political parties into the open. Launched in St. Petersburg in February, 1906, the paper shared the stage with a multitude of opposition organs. Unlike most of these, however, it lived on, and could pride itself on, what was in Russia an unusually long career of frank liberalism. In 1906 alone some three hundred newspapers and journals either were quashed by the censor or died for lack of financial support. Riech’ survived, thanks to its relatively moderate tone, its stable economic organization, and the fact that it was not dependent on political reporting alone. The paper was at its best, not when it stressed politics, as in 1906-7 and 1917, but in the less agitated prewar years, when its cultural columns were second to none.

A number of studies of income distribution have suggested that income inequality in the United States showed some tendency to decline during the 1930's and the war years. Although the extent and timing of the decline may be in dispute among specialists in this area, and some recent studies suggest that no significant changes in income shares have occurred since 1944, the American Income Revolution has nonetheless been widely accepted and acclaimed. All the more reason, it would seem, that studies of changes in income inequality in Soviet Russia should prove of great interest. If income inequality has been reduced in the world's major capitalist economy, what has been happening to income distribution in the Soviet Union?

The idea and practice of democracy antedates the Industrial Revolution. It has usually flourished, however, in an urban setting, and it was industrialization that was mainly responsible for its vast upsurge over the last century and a half. Its extension, too, into the field of social reform has been one of the accompaniments of the rise of an urban proletariat.

The Palestine war of 1947-48, which resulted in the defeat of the combined armies of several Arab states and led to the establishment of the state of Israel, set in motion a process of political, economic, and social change in the Arab East the end of which is not yet in sight. This fermentation brought with it frequent outbursts of passion and violence—witness the chronic instability of Syrian politics, the Egyptian revolution (1952), upheavals in Lebanon (1958), Iraq (1958 and 1963), Yemen (1962), and numerous abortive attempts to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein. Nourishing the fermentation and gripping the entire area was a fever of intense nationalism that held the Western powers responsible for the emergence of Israel and demanded immediate and unconditional termination of Western interference in Arab affairs.