The late summer of 1914 demonstrated that for most European Social Democrats nationalism was far more powerful than Marxism in the event of a conflict between these ideologies. Some Social Democratic parties did not participate in this demonstration, however. Not until the late autumn of 1939 did it become apparent to all that Finnish Social Democrats, for example, were nationalists before they were Marxists. The fact that Finland was not a belligerent in World War I left this question open. Until the demands made by the Soviet Union in October-November, 1939, and the beginning of the Winter War (which included the abortive proclamation of a Soviet-sponsored Finnish Democratic Government), bourgeois Finns were uncertain about the response of Social Democrats to any serious Soviet challenge to continued Finnish independence. In view of the tragic Finnish Civil War of 1918, this uncertainty seemed grounded in historical fact. As the largest party in Finland (representing forty percent of the electorate in 1939), the Social Democrats' attitude would prove decisive in determining the strength of Finnish resistance to Soviet diplomatic and military pressure. Like other Finns, Social Democrats fought, sacrificed, and died to defend their nation. The visible symbol of the unity of this nation in the Winter War was the Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner. It was at this point that Tanner stepped into world politics. A Finnish scholar has concluded that in the Moscow negotiations of 1939 the two Finnish delegates, Tanner and J. K. Paasikivi, “ … held the fate of Finland in their hands.”

Probably no other writer in pre-Revolutionary Russian literature ever suffered so much at the hands of politically-minded critics as Nikolaj Leskov. He once said that the role of the writer is to struggle against the prevailing current of his time, and his own career illustrates both the application of that principle and its consequences. His independent attitude toward all intellectual fashions, whether nihilism in the 1860's or conservatism in the 1880's, led single-minded Russians of various political colors to suspect him of hypocrisy and duplicity. Doctrinaire Russian critics of the right and the left, accustomed to classifying all writers in such tidy categories as “religious reactionary” or “atheistic liberal,” were even more bewildered by Leskov's own kind of non-conformity than by the Christian anarchism of his great associate Tolstoy. Tolstoy, after all, had the virtue of pushing his convictions to their logical extreme, in the best tradition of Russian maximalism; whereas Leskov, though he acknowledged himself to be a devoted follower of Tolstoy, refused to become doctrinaire even in his Tolstoyanism.

A government-drafted “Bill Concerning Regional Organs of Unified State Authority” was enacted into law by the Polish Parliament (Sejm Ustawodawczy—“Legislative Parliament“) on March 20, 1950. This legislation makes sweeping changes in Polish provincial and local government which have the effect of bringing the structure of government at those levels into nearly identical conformity with that of comparable levels in the Soviet Union. It also increases and consolidates the role of the Polish Council of State (Rada Państwa) as the dominant organ of the government of Poland.

The formation of a Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was accomplished slowly, and as the result of the steady pressure and constant guidance of the Communist International between 1919 and 1921. When the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) was finally established in the latter year, this outcome represented a compromise between the extreme, doctrinaire policies of the Comintern and the more moderate Czechoslovak-oriented views of Bohumil Smeral, the party's first leader. Moreover the party was by no means the genuinely Bolshevik party anticipated by Lenin and the Comintern, and showed evidence of its deep roots in the social democratic movement and of its origin in a country of democratic traditions and intense national pride.

The first translations of Sigmund Freud's texts into Russian appeared in the early 1900s, and by the 1920s all important works were available; in Soviet Russia they stimulated wide discussion of various medical, pedagogical, and social problems as well as of developments in creative art. Alexei Kurbanovsky argues that “Freudianism” would have seemed very tempting to those early Soviet theorists who believed that they must appropriate the relevant discoveries of western psychology and adopt them for their own revolutionary ends: creating the “new communist man.” The application of Freudian techniques to the analysis of some classical Russian writers as well as painters is documented in writings from the 1920s by Ivan Ermakov; the artistic tendencies of the Russian avant-garde were quite often viewed as reflecting the latest achievements of science and technology. So aspiring Soviet critics might well have attempted psychoanalytical “readings“ of innovatory artifacts. Vladimir Tatlin stands as one of their possible model cases. Kurbanovsky argues that Tatlin's famous spiral tower could be psychoanalytically interpreted in reference to the Oedipal “refutation of father-figures.” Such an interpretation seems in tune with the general cultural climate where other phenomena (such as the October revolution) were seen as having a “hidden, Freudian aspect.” Examining the psychoanalytical underpinnings of the theory of Soviet avant-garde allows us to more fully appreciate its historical and cultural significance.

Recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction not only point in the creator's direction and thus to the realm beyond specific fiction, but they sometimes serve to set and mark local temporal and spatial conditions within the created universe. Invitation to a Beheading is probably the most convincing case in point. The novel's dimensions are defined almost exclusively through a thematic network, and even much of its plot is propelled by periodic devices, of which many are interlinked, and perhaps all are retroactive, if only because each serial occurrence must refer to its antecedent in order to keep the thematic circuit closed.

Stalin's little-known 1928 caper, the production and distribution of bogus hundred-dollar bills, was preceded by an even less known venture of the same sort. Specialists in East European history have left it unexplored during the decades which have passed since it occurred, and several aspects of the plot behind it, as well as some of its most powerful supporters, remain unknown. It happened in 1925, and involved a string of high-ranking Hungarian civilian and military personages, with a prince at one end and a bishop at the other.