For forty eventful years, ending with the outbreak of the First World War, the Young Czech Party waged an unremitting struggle on behalf of Czech national interests within the limited constitutional framework of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Political activity for such a span of time would be enough to insure the party a niche in history, but in addition it dominated Czech politics for sixteen of those years and enlisted politicians of the caliber of Kaizl, Kramář, Rašín, and briefly Masaryk under its banner in their quest for elective office. The intent of this article is to evaluate the party's contributions to the development of the modern Czech political system by outlining its history and general orientation and by comparing party platforms with achievements.

No culture enjoys a perfect integration or a static equilibrium of its component traits. The diffusion of features of culture is a constant and crucial dynamic process. Acculturation, as a process of change dominated by the mutual influence of different cultures in close contact, is especially suited to interdisciplinary scrutiny. The study of acculturation is equally challenging for the linguist, the ethnographer, the anthropologist, and the historian interested in investigating processes and forms of cultural change, cultural integration, and causes for the selective receptivity of cultures.

The multinational character of Soviet society against the background of its socioeconomic and ideological homogeneity renders a special quality to the dynamic tension between unity and diversity, especially with regard to culture, cultural change, and integration. Consequently, an investigation of acculturation as a component of the broader ethnic processes is not only justified, but imperative.

The student-led Russian working-class movement of the early 1870s, only lightly studied to date, is intimately connected with the beginnings of the famous “to the people” movement of 1874. The main purpose of this essay is to explore this connection. When radical students in the cities experienced unexpected limitations on their efforts to organize city workers, they reformulated their plan and eventually decided that direct contact with the peasantry was possible. Thus the populism of the movement “to the people,” generally considered a student phenomenon inspired by books alone, may in fact have been the result of practical work among city workers, characterized by much trial and error.

In this article, Dorothy Barenscott examines die dynamic interplay between modern urban development and world exhibition in the social imaginary of nation and empire, suggesting how Hungary's identity as imperial partner with Austria was increasingly tied to the multisensory experience of, and participation in, the growth of Budapest as the empire's second capital during preparations for Budapest's 1896 Millennial Exhibition. Whether a real or only perceived “world's fair,” this exhibition provided the perfect vehicle to further the goal of modern urban expansion and define what it would mean to be “Hungarian” to an international as well as a regional public. Guided by the Millennial Exhibition, a constellation of interconnected building projects arose within the urban fabric of Budapest: the construction and refinement of Andrássy Avenue, the Hungarian Parliament building, and Budapest's underground subway.

As a consequence of the 17 April 1905 law on religious freedom, hundreds of baptized Jews petitioned to return to Judaism. While the law paralleled the liberalization of the attitudes and values regarding religious differences that occurred in European societies between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, the reform also helped destabilize traditional social boundaries and religious identities in the empire. On one level, this essay examines the conflicts and problems authorities faced in categorizing a Jewish population that continually resisted conventional assumptions. In the context of rapid population movements, political and religious reforms, and increased acculturation, what it meant to be “Jewish” was redefined, and administrators needed to establish an acceptable criterion by which (baptized) Jews could be classified. On another level, this essay draws on individual petitions and government correspondence to analyze the personal choices and social dilemmas that baptized Jews faced when they attempted to return to Judaism.

Speaking recently about the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost’ on Russian culture, the exiled Russian scientist Zhores Medvedev expressed skepticism about the artistic benefits of the reforms, comparing them unfavorably to those ushered in by Khrushchev's liberalization: “Whereas Khrushchev's thaw brought many new names and new talents into literature, no new talents have emerged in the past two years.“' Medvedev's statement suggests that he has not been reading Soviet literary journals assiduously. Otherwise he would have noticed the emergence of at least one remarkably talented newcomer on the literary scene—Tat'iana Tolstaia, the most gifted young woman writing fiction in Russia today and arguably the most noteworthy prosaist of the young generation at large.

At the end of Dr. Zhivago, Zhivago's old friends sit overlooking Moscow and read together a collection of his writings, compiled through the efforts of his devoted and somewhat mysterious half-brother. For all the dark times depicted in the novel, it ends with a dual affirmation of the power of art and of the spirit to survive. Zhivago's writings endure not only by virtue of having been created and not only in the minds of those who know them, but on paper as well. In this respect Boris Pasternak's novel offers an intriguing contrast to one completed in a bleaker period, The Master and Margarita. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel the problem of preserving the protagonist's writing and conveying it to readers is neither as simple nor as successfully resolved, despite intervention of a more mysterious, even supernatural, sort.

In “Muzhik Marei,” which appeared in the February issue of Dnevnik pisatelia for 1876, Fedor Dostoevskii “remembers” an experience from his time in Siberia. During Easter week the drunken carousing of his fellow convicts (which, he writes, “tormented me nearly to the point of illness” “do bolezni isterzalo menia”) had driven him out of the barracks into the yard. There he met the Polish prisoner, Miretskii, who said, “Je hais ces brigands” (22:46). These words drive Dostoevskii right back to the place from which, as he says, only fifteen minutes before, he had fled “kak bezumnyi.”

The advent of an industrial labor force posed a formidable and, as it turned out in 1917, a fatal array of problems to the government of Imperial Russia. It had to find answers to a number of crucial questions. How was it to reduce the tensions at the factory and carry out its mandate as guardian of order and justice and the protector of the poor? How was the peasant-worker to be fitted into the traditional structure of Russian society? What was the place of industrial labor in the “Witte system”? And how could the government prevent the discontent of the peasant-worker from turning against autocracy itself?

Yet even Witte, who was perhaps more perceptive than his colleagues in regard to the various problems caused by industrialization, viewed “the labor question” with complete confidence.

In 1955 the present writer examined the struggle being waged against the peasantry by the Communist Party in the USSR and came to the conclusion that the liquidation of the Soviet peasantry as a class is inescapable.

Since then, significant new legislation has been passed in the field of agriculture in the USSR.

All these new measures have the same tendency of bringing the peasant class in the USSR a few steps nearer to eradication and the kolkhozes nearer to the status of sovkhozes.

Two Kinds of Socialist Property: The Soviet Constitution (Section 5) recognizes two kinds of property: state property and cooperative property. Both are qualified as “socialist.”

In the study of politics, the concepts of nation and of class have received almost universal recognition as significant tools of analysis. The concept of generation, however, has remained, for students of politics, largely in the twilight zone of knowledge. This is remarkable, for historians and novelists have used it with considerable success, and more recently sociologists have emphasized its fundamental importance.