Halfway between the publication of Széchenyi's Credit (Hitel, 1830) and the revolutionary year 1848, the Diet of 1839-40 stands out as an interesting episode of the Hungarian Reform Age. The importance of this period is generally recognized, but its interpretation is still problematic. Pre-World War I liberal historiographers tended to blame the “government of Vienna” for all the blunders committed before 1848. The conservative Szekfű school, more charitable to Metternich and Austria, was no less nationalistic in its approach to the non-Magyar minorities of Hungary, maintaining the myth of Magyar “spiritual supremacy” between the two world wars. Today, Marxist Hungarian historians try to be fair in their writings about the nationality problem but frown upon analyses of Austro-Hungarian cooperation, considering them apologies for the Habsburg Gesamtmonarchie. Modern Western historians, too, differ in their evaluation of nineteenth-century Hungarian reform and its leaders.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, arguments over Russian social structure played a central role in discussions of eating establishments. The Russian state controlled these establishments in part through legislation that kept social groups apart; it focused particularly on the extremes of the social hierarchy, showing little interest in the middling groups. In more narrative descriptions of eating establishments, however, the middling groups—or their absence—seemed remarkably important. Foreign observers generally felt that Russia lacked both a middle class and middling eating establishments. Russians in part agreed, but by the middle of the century they were more likely to locate a middle class among one particular group: Moscow's merchants.

In my paper critiquing the analysis of Brym and Degtyarev, I argued that little could be gained from their analysis and indeed that their paper contributed mainly to misunderstanding anti-Semitism in Russia. In this article, I present some new survey results on anti-Semitism as a means of advancing our knowledge on this important topic. In particular, I address four questions: 1) is anti-Semitism in Russia particularly widespread? 2) are prejudiced attitudes focused specifically on Jews or are they more diffuse? 3) does a "don't know" response to survey questions mask anti-Semitic attitudes? and 4) most importantly, what are the political implications of anti-Semitism for Russian Jews?

In recent years Poland's political life has produced a genuine and interesting revival of the Polish parliament, the Seym. It has been especially significant in the area of legislative committees, which not only grew in number but enlarged their sphere of activities and became more independent. The development had its sources in the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin in 1953 and culminated in Poland in the so-called “October Revolt” of 1956.

On the eve of the World War I, members of the Russian right deeply differed in their visions of the status quo and the means of its proper reconstruction. The war further differentiated the Right. The rightists, regardless of the ideological nuances, perceived the war as a chance for political revival. The outburst of patriotism in July and August 1914 became the most serious argument in favor of political reform. Their opponents, on the contrary, saw in it a chance to get rid of democratic institutions and practices. While the more moderate rightists leaned towards consensus, with liberals looking at political dialogue as the most effective instrument for securing social stability, the extreme ones concluded that strict control from above was a more adequate instrument for achieving this goal. All this aggravated the pre-war conflicts within the Right and led to its disintegration on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.

The status of sociology and philosophy in the Soviet Union is radically different from that of the physical and mathematical sciences. The sociologists and philosophers are still regarded by the government as ideologists, whereas the mathematicians and physicists are considered scientists; and the ideologist is in low repute in the Soviet intellectual community. Thirty years ago, Nikolai Bukharin observed in a remarkable essay that the cultural style of the current Soviet period would be technicism, and that the humanities and historical sciences would be relegated to the background. He believed that this “one-sidedness“ was founded on the economic requirements of the time. Probably, however, the hollowness in the life of the Soviet ideologist is equally responsible for his low estate. The sociologists and philosophers are not regarded as independent thinkers; their job as ideological workers is to provide a documentation and footnoted commentary on the decisions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Young men of ability consequently tend to avoid choosing a life work in the social sciences and philosophy. Why, they say, should they sacrifice their intellectual independence at the outset of their lives?

Dezso Kosztolanyi, the Hungarian poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic and translator, played a prominent part in the cultural life of his native land, and for a time he was the center of heated controversies. His works are translated into English, Italian, French, German and other languages. His artistic consciousness determined his relationship to the Hungarian literary scene. Kosztolanyi was extremely word-conscious. He said that to play with words is to play with destiny. As a purifier of the Hungarian language, he emphasized the coordination of the nation's morality with the integrity of words. In his university years he was influenced by Professor Laszlo Negyesy's canons of Hungarian philology; and when Negyesy, at the age of seventy-two, renewed his campaign for linguistic purity, Kosztolanyi, then a recognized poet, joined this movement and added greatly to its success. He was not against neologisms, but against the corruption of the language.

During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of Western Europe was caught up in the phenomenon known as the witch craze. Before it finally ended in the early eighteenth century this mass hysteria had claimed a goodly number of victims, mostly women, who were seized, tortured, tried, and executed, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence, for alleged maleficia against their neighbors and heresy against the church.

Once the accusation of witchcraft was leveled against someone the judicial process, either formal or informal, was set in motion to determine whether the suspect was indeed a witch. On the Continent this was facilitated by torture and the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual of procedure compiled by the two German Dominicans Sprenger and Krämer and published in 1486.

In his 1913 guide to the city, Grigorii Moskvich wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessan” was to strike it rich and immediately acquire a house, a carriage, and everything else he needed in order to “transform himself (by appearance, of course) into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the remade Odessan was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés, on the boulevard or in the park,” the Odessan was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.” “Odessans are proud of themselves (not without foundation), flaunting their ability to dress as well as any purebred Parisian or Viennese.” Women, too, were always well turned out, “no husband carrying the expenses of his wife's toilette as uncomplainingly as the Odessan… . This passion for fashion, the desire to impress by external appearances, penetrates all of Odessa society, from the counts to the cooks,” the writer declared.

The KGB and the rest of the Soviet intelligence and policing apparatus are commonly portrayed as having been among the staunchest of conservative opponents to the reform process in the Soviet Union during the latter half of the 1980s. But while key leaders of the August 1991 effort to oust General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, did come from the security services, this characterization obscures how the KGB rank-and-file responded to and participated in the reforms. This article uses their own words and experiences, recorded in the KGB΄s top-secret in-house journal, Sbornik KGB SSSR, to examine how everyday KGB officers navigated liberalizing reforms in which they in fact played an active and evolving role implementing and shaping. In these firsthand accounts, which cover topics from nationalism to environmentalism, a sense of loss of control is clear, both over events unfolding in the Soviet Union and over their own leading role and privileged position within it.