The eleven-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of a Byzantine Mission in Moravia (863) revived the interest of Slavic historians and philologists in the history of SS. Cyril and Methodius and served to reopen discussions concerning the significance of their activity in Moravia for the development of the Slavs.

It was widely believed that their mission had a profoundly religious character—the conversion of the Moravian pagans to Christianity. This interpretation is not quite correct. The words which the author of Cyril’s biography lets the Moravian ruler Rastislav address to the Emperor Michael should make us cautious about the real character of the Byzantine mission in Moravia. Rastislav is supposed to have declared that his people had already rejected paganism and were observing Christian rules. Some saw in this declaration an exaggeration and attributed it to Rastislav or to the biographer. Recent archaeological discoveries made in Moravia, however, confirm the correctness of Rastislav’s declaration. Thus far the foundations of sixteen stone churches have been discovered, and at least five of them were erected before the arrival of the Byzantine mission.

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.

Very few books and studies on Dostoevsky appeared in the first two decades after his death. The year 1900 may be chosen as the turning point, for after that date the number of publications, first in Russian, then in other languages, increased steadily. By the middle of our century the canon of Dostoevsky scholarship was well established, so that hardly any new departures seemed to be possible. Today, whether our attention is focused on Dostoevsky's opinions or on the stylistic devices and structures of his novels, we note that practically every method of approach has already been tried by at least one of our predecessors. Thus Dostoevsky, not unlike Nietzsche, was discovered and appropriated by the first half of the twentieth century. It was then that he grew to the stature he now possesses, and it was then that he was recognized as a forerunner of new trends in European literature and philosophy.

Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov's letter of December 24, 1828 O.S. (January 5, 1829 N.S.) to his wife Nina has hitherto been considered his last extant piece of correspondence. The Manuscript Division of the University of Nottingham Library, however, has in its archives a copy of an unpublished Griboedov letter which now replaces the letter to Nina as his last surviving letter. It belongs to the final weeks of Griboedov's life, early February 1829. I found the letter among that portion of the Portland Papers which comprises the correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, governor general of India from 1828 to 1835. It was lying in a packet containing three other documents: a letter from Lieutenant Colonel John Macdonald, British envoy to Persia, to Sir John Malcolm, his brother-in-law and governor of Bombay; a letter from Sir John Malcolm to Lord William Bentinck; and an “Extract of Private Letter from Lt. Col. Macdonald to Sir John Malcolm.”

The merchant is a shadowy if not invisible figure in the accounts of the political and economic life of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. Apart from a few exceptional cases, very little is known of his commercial dealings. His political-administrative activities rarely appear in discussions of the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and his immediate successors. Because few sources survive that permit an investigation of the merchant's place in the Russian economy, some scholars have concluded that the part the merchant played was minor.

The Kazan Square demonstration of December 6, 1876 was one of a number of attempts by revolutionary intelligenty to forge an alliance with the common people. Two striking features of this demonstration have often been noted. First, participants in the demonstration included not only members of the radical intelligentsia but also urban workers, an unusual feature for the first socialist street demonstration in Russia. Second, fewer workers took part than the radical intelligentsia had hoped, given their active propagandizing among factory workers. Some critics have found fault with the “abstract” nature of the propaganda, to use Georgii Plekhanov's later term. He and others blamed the limited worker participation on the failure of the populists to express concretely the real, immediate interests of the workers. Plekhanov later wrote that the workers of St. Petersburg could only have been drawn to the demonstration because it was a “new spectacle, not seen before.” The workers had no tangible reason for active participation in it. “For this reason they did not go to it.”

In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda’s founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin’s leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin’s literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies which predictably found that Stalin, Molotov, and certain other “conciliatory elements” within Pravda’s editorial board had hindered Lenin’s efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

This essay argues that what is at stake in debates about the difference between eastern and western Europe in the context of migration and asylum politics is the definition of a politically- and ethically-acceptable threshold of “too many,” which takes on concrete contours in relation to historically-formed understandings of coherent selves and viable polities. The argument derives from placing analysis of the alleged political and ethical failures of eastern Europe alongside those limits of refugee/migrant intake that are considered politically legitimate and ethically justifiable from the mainstream liberal democratic perspective. The essay proposes that in order to understand the European political landscape in relation to migration, it is necessary to undertake relational analysis of the different configurations of the Europe-wide tension between inclusion and exclusion, as well as analysis of the modes of power that differentiate between these configurations of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds.

Russians have long been preoccupied with surnames, particularly a distinction between so-called "good" and "bad" surnames, in ways that may be hard to understand by a nation of immigrants whose ancestral names were often mutilated by immigration authorities or anglicized by their bearers with a stroke of the pen. In the Russian Empire, such changes required the personal permission of the ruler and were exceedingly rare until the end of the nineteenth century.

Some of the few moments of comic relief to be found in Muscovite historical texts are provided in Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin's description of the Muscovite government. Kotoshikhin was an undersecretary (pod'iachii) of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Posol'skii prikaz) who defected to Sweden and in 1666-1667 wrote an account of Muscovy's court and administration. He is the source of the dubious assertion that the tsar's daughters (tsarevny) were not married outside the country because they were stupid and illiterate and would bring shame on the tsar's family. Kotoshikhin also relates a comical episode in which a leading boyar refused to sit at a banquet next to a man he considered his social inferior. The protesting boyar was forcibly held at his assigned place while he kicked and screamed and finally wriggled out of the grasp of the tsar's attendants and slid under the table, rather than sit by a demeaning dinner partner.

One book, one article, and a series of archaeological finds have contributed the largest part to the progress of Cyrillo-Methodian studies in the past thirty years. The book was by Father Dvornik: Once and forever its author established the reliability of the Vitae of the Slavic Apostles—our two principal sources for their mission—by carefully fitting them into the framework of Byzantium’s history in the ninth century. The article was by Fathers Meyvaert and Devos: In a few pages it demonstrated more mathematico what many foremost scholars had already suspected—that the Vita of Constantine–Cyril was in existence by 882 (before Methodius’ death), and that, by this time, it existed in Slavic. The latter demonstration was a hard pill for Byzantinists to swallow. The archaeological finds were made in Southern Moravia. By unearthing several ninth-century towns, archaeologists were able to provide an explanation for the strength of the Great Moravian state; by discovering a number of early churches, they were able to demonstrate how well established Christianity was in Great Moravia even before the Cyrillo-Methodian mission had arrived.

Despite the fact that the relationship between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church had an important influence on the course of events in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, no monographic study has been devoted to the subject. Works dealing with church history, the nationality question, or the Kulturkampf have given a certain amount of attention to the problem, but without elaboration of the issues involved and as a rule with limited reliance on primary source material. This article may well be the first attempt to grapple with the problem during the period 1871 to 1914. In addition to the standard published works on the subject, numerous archival sources have been consulted, especially those of the Prussian state and the German Empire.

Georgii V. Chicherin's conversion from Menshevism to Bolshevism exemplifies the intense political and ideological stress placed on Russian Social Democrats by World War I. The war split all of Europe's socialist parties, but none so deeply as the already faction-ridden Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Even after the initial shock had passed and most Russian Social Democrats found their way to one or another of the party's factions, not all members joined a recognizable group. For some the shock was too great, and much time and wandering were needed before they found their bearings. One of these wanderers was Lenin's future Foreign Commissar.

To map out a convincing genealogy of the Russian revolutionary Marxist movement (and, from 1903, of its Bolshevik wing) was always a concern of its leaders. Revolutionary Marxism made its Russian debut with Plekhanov's booklet Socialism and the Political Struggle only in 1883, some thirty-five years after the Communist Manifesto and almost sixty years after the Decembrist uprising. It was thus a latecomer both to European Marxism and to the Russian revolutionary movement. How was it to define its own relationship to these forerunners? To emphasize only the Marxist heritage meant to isolate the young movement from the formidable tradition of revolt already built up in Russia. But to identify the emergent Marxist movement too fully with this tradition would undermine its claim to be possessed of a new message, to be the prophet of a new age.

The novel is the only major literary genre whose origins and development we have been able to watch in detail. It also seems to be the only genre whose development depended more on the customers than on the makers. Richardson, who wrote Pamela because he noticed how popular a continuous story in the form of letters could be; Fielding, who exploited Richardson's success in his parodistic Joseph Andrews; Scott, who produced innumerable historical romances, gamely trying to match demand with supply; Dickens, who accidentally struck a gold mine with the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers; Dostoevsky, who made extensive use of the conventions of popular, sensational novels—all are typical of the way the novel evolved. In other literary forms the discrepancy between merits and rewards, creativeness and popular expectations, and originality and response has been so frequent as to become proverbial. But this is not true of the nineteenth-century novel, where it is unusual to find a writer like Stendhal, who gained his reputation only after his death.

The post-Stalin (or, as it is generally referred to by Soviet citizens, post–Beria) regime has already made far–reaching concessions to popular dissatisfaction with the Stalinist system of law and justice, and is preparing still further reforms. To appreciate the significance of this movement, it is necessary to understand the place held by law in the daily lives of Soviet citizens and in the running of the economy. It is a popular misconception outside of the USSR that Soviet law, and especially Soviet courts, are only window dressing to conceal the fact that the Communist Party and the secret police run the country by command and by force.The truth is that although there are certain areas of Soviet life–particularly in top-level politics–where law does not penetrate, there are hosts of problems which are resolved in the judicial process according to general standards declared in statutes and codes.