Messrs. Campbell, Cohen, and Lewin have very usefully augmented my fragmentary efforts. It is good to have Dr. Lewin's informed judgment concerning the prospects for modest, steady growth in off-farm agricultural output during this period. He has sketched the direct link that Professor Campbell queries between the first plan's targets and the “waste, turbulence, sacrifice, and destruction” that gave rise to a whole new state system. Professor Cohen supplies illuminating detail on the relation of the Stalin-Bukharin struggle to the formulation of the First Five-Year Plan. His suggestion that regional leaders' efforts to get more projects for their regions had the effect of driving up the plan's investment (and therefore output) targets seems especially important. The proposition that Stalin's “socialism in one country,” having won out over Trotsky's stress on “permanent revolution” in the out-side world, should turn out to embody renewed domestic revolution (or civil war) is a major insight. Professor Campbell's eggs and bacon analogy is likely to become a permanent addition to our pedagogy, especially since this dietary problem still exists in the USSR.

In the two decades that followed the Crimean War the local police, always crucial elements of the tsarist system, assumed a new importance. Vested with special responsibility for maintaining law and order and occupying a key position in the bureaucratic hierarchy, they were cast in a major role in carrying out the Great Reforms of Alexander II. The task of fitting the police to assume this role was one of great concern to Russia's leaders and occupied their attention throughout the reign. This essay is a study of police reform in the area of Iaroslavl Province. It examines the background, nature, and success of government efforts to revitalize an essential branch of the Russian state system.

On the eve of the period of reforms the local police in Iaroslavl as in other Russian provinces were officials of enormous influence. They were the foundation stones of a giant bureaucratic pyramid, for in addition to their special superior—the Ministry of Internal Affairs—a host of ministries, councils, and other government agencies depended on them. Matters of finance and justice, the supervision of industry and commerce, the protection of life and property—all were the concern of the police.

The insurrection on February 27, 1917, totally annihilated the tsarist police system in Petrograd, the most important link tying the citizens to the government, thus throwing the capital into a state of anarchy. Quickly lawlessness crept into the streets, as drunken soldiers looted wine cellars to get even more drunk and criminals released from prisons easily acquired weapons. To the sober-minded, it was apparent that this intolerable disorder had to be stopped as quickly as possible. Yet, for the more committed revolutionaries, the insurrection was not yet finished; even on February 28 machine-gun shots were fired from rooftops and upper-floor windows of tall buildings—actions, people firmly believed, taken by the remnants of Protopopov's police or the counter-revolutionary officers. Whether for the restoration of law and order or for the defense of the revolution, Petrograd urgently needed an organized police force. Indeed, the future course of the revolution to a large extent depended on how the new police force would be organized. If a group which regarded the restoration of law and order as the most urgent task established an efficient police power in the streets, it would mean that the revolutionary process that had been set in motion would be halted. On the other hand, if the revolutionaries succeeded in arming the masses of insurgents for the defense of the revolution, that would surely mean the further intensification of the revolutionary process. An analysis of the formation of the militias in the February Revolution is, therefore, integrally related to the problem of power.

Traditionally in surveys of Soviet history, if Alexandra Kollontai is mentioned she is presented briefly as the advocate of the “glass of water theory of sex,” a woman who practiced free love as freely as she preached it. The lecturer then moves on to more serious concerns, having ignored the history of a tormented, perceptive woman intimately involved in the early Soviet experiment in female emancipation. Kollontai advocated far more than free love, and the role she played was far greater than that of mistress to Alexander Shliapnikov. From 1917 until her departure from the Soviet Union in 1923 she held positions of major importance in the young government and in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai worked first as an agitator in 1917, then took the post of commissar of state welfare from November 1917 to March 1918, when she resigned in protest against the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In 1921 she joined the Workers' Opposition, adding to Shliapnikov's proposals for trade-union reform her own call for party and government democratization and giving articulate voice to those demands in an often-cited pamphlet, The Workers' Opposition. Throughout the revolutionary years she was recognized as a major authority on the problems of women and child care. Since Kollontai did play an important role in the early period of Soviet history, her personality and ideology warrant study. That study in turn reveals a woman who perceived the problems of womanhood with clarity and who wrote about and sought a liberation beyond the comprehension of many of her contemporaries.

The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 offered Germany the first serious prospect of ending the two-front war dilemma. General Erich Ludendorff, anticipating resultant cessation of major military operations in the East, decided to seek a military victory in the West. But the ensuing peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks at Brest-Litovsk revealed basic policy differences within the German camp. Richard Kühlmann, state secretary of the Foreign Office, felt that the Bolshevik victory had sufficiently crippled Russia's armed might and had thereby eased the military burden in the East. Kühlmann as well as his successor, Admiral Paul von Hintze, successfully opposed all proposals to oust the Bolsheviks. Because they both believed that Bolshevik rule would assure long-term chaos in Russia, they sought a compromise peace in the East. The Foreign Office, through the first German ambassadors to Moscow, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach-Harff and Karl Helfferich, even extended financial aid to the Bolsheviks in order to keep them out of the Entente camp. In short, Germany's diplomats possessed a clear conception of their policies regarding the Bolsheviks and were consistent in them, desiring no armed conflict in the East but rather a concentration of military might in the West. The Army Supreme Command, and especially Ludendorff, rejected any compromise formula in the East, despite the decision of November 1917 to seek a military victory in the West. Ludendorff sought to end the war with either victory or defeat. Nonetheless, in the summer of 1918 he proved willing temporarily to accept the plan of the Foreign Office to cooperate with the Bolsheviks and “use” them to attain German goals, a decision that paralleled his original agreement in April 1917 to transport the Bolshevik leaders in Switzerland to Russia.

From the labyrinth of literary revaluations to which modern Czech literature has been subjected, the work of the gifted but unpredictable lyric poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900-1958) has emerged relatively unscathed. His literary career was a bewildering trail of shifting allegiances and paradoxical novelties —from Expressionist infantilism to elegant sophistication, from Dadaist anti-art to obsequious socialist realism: an anarchist in his youth, a surrealist in middle age, he ended as a laureate of the Czechoslovak Communist Establishment.

At the age of twenty Nezval came to Prague for university studies. Always a loner, he led a solitary life in the big city. His early poems are full of nostalgia for his Moravian home and lost childhood, sometimes recalled with more than a touch of childish nightmare. Prague in the early twenties was a place of tumbling pedestals and mushrooming social manifestoes: the newly silenced guns and the freshly inaugurated state seemed to be an earnest of a new start, and the end of a world discredited.