Note: This article summarizes the result of a part of the author's research in the economic history of the Serbian lands and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The work was begun in Yugoslavia in 1938 and then continued, with interruptions, in England and the United States. It is the special aim of the author to investigate documents and reconstruct the commercial history of Ragusa during the period of the Commercial Revolution, principally the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in connection with the discoveries and the colonization of America. It is almost unknown that Ragusa was one of the principal commercial and naval powers in the period 1510–1667 and that it played an important role in the history of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the West Indies in general. The same goes for England, the Netherlands, Spain, and other regions. The author will center his work around three regions in which the role of Ragusan commerce and navigation was of extreme importance: (a) Spain and America, (b) England and the Netherlands, and (c) the Levant and the East Indies.

Among Soviet Central Asians who have achieved international attention, Bobodzhon Gafurovich Gafurov, the late director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stands out as a leading figure. Gafurov was politically the most prominent Tadzhik, if not Central Asian, in the Soviet Union. During the twenty-one years that he served as the Institute's director, he influenced and made decisions which have led to an overall increase in scholarly research and publication about West Asia, and about Soviet Central Asia in particular, emanating from the Soviet Union.

The Character of Mickiewicz's poetical world is determined, as that of every writer, by two factors, the epoch which furnished the material for his imagination along with the general literary style prevailing in this epoch, and his poetic personality, which formed and transformed this material. His epoch was that of romanticism, hence his world is basically romantic with a definitely, sometimes exclusively Polish flavor; his poetic (and human) personality was one of the most powerful, hence it expressed itself both in romantic and extraromantic forms in a highly individual manner, uniting national and universal elements.

This world embraced vast and various regions, extended—according to the general romantic spirit and the prologue to Faust—“vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle.” Heaven and hell were represented, both by an absolute faith in the supernatural world and by literary accessories, for instance by employing good and evil spirits, ghosts, witches, mermaids, and so on, as symbols of strong, mysterious forces, not only mingling with the human world, but directly influencing human fate.

The article examines the de-Stalinization of war veterans’ organizations in Czechoslovakia. Building on testimonies and journalistic works concerning the victims of Stalinist purges and persecution and the attempts to rehabilitate them, the author elaborates her argument with the case study of the prominent war victims’ organization “Association of Antifascist Fighters”. During Stalinism, all veterans who had not fought side by side with the Soviet Union were treated with suspicion and often expelled from the veterans’ association. In the framework of the reform socialist experiment of the 1960s, the country's Stalinist heritage of violence was largely rejected. What made the Czechoslovak reform socialist approach unique was its distancing from the Soviet influence on Czechoslovak communist tradition. In this way, Stalinism, and the violence that accompanied it, was turned into a Soviet matter, while the national communist tradition was to be cured of the effects of this influence.

National deviation or, in Soviet parlance, “bourgeois nationalism” has figured prominently in the party literature since the establishment of the Stalinist regime. It is a conveniently generic heresy and has been applied to national groups which had hardly any bourgeoisie worthy of the name prior to the Revolution. It is a label which is applied to real or imagined, to actual or potential non-Russian opponents of the regime within the country in an effort to discredit them by associating them with real or imagined external enemies. In the pre-war period, as well as to a certain extent since the war, “bourgeois nationalists” were linked with the revolutionary national non-Russian governments of the 1917–1920 period which unsuccessfully resisted the Bolshevik onslaught. Those who were charged with national deviation in the 1930's were accused of having aided foreign intelligence services in an attempt to facilitate the return of the old order and of wanting to turn the Soviet Union into a colony of the capitalist states.