All her life Zinaida Gippius remembered how startled she was when as a young girl she was told that the Russian word predmet was devised and introduced into the language by Karamzin at the very end of the eighteenth century. The discovery left her wondering how the Russians who lived before that time could discuss all sorts of basic things without a word denoting “object” in the language. We may well be startled in a similar way when we stop to realize that the handy adjective “surrealistic” was coined only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the word did not initially mean what it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the French Surrealists during his trip to Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what their movement was about but from their behavior concluded that they must be the French equivalent of his own LEF group.

None of the many riddles in the reign of Tsar Alexander I is so intriguing as that of the position of the heir apparent, the Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. His secret renunciation of his right to the throne cast doubt on Nicholas I's succession and contributed to the opportunity of the Decembrist conspirators. Moreover, as commander of the armed forces in Poland he was the chief figure in its government. The uprising of November 1830 signified the failure of Alexander's Polish plans, but it was also a personal tragedy for Constantine, who had so thoroughly identified himself with the new kingdom. His role in history was important; by his own choice it had not become much greater, but neither his contemporaries nor historians have agreed as to his qualifications to rule an empire.

Accounts differ even as to his capacity to manage the Polish army, or indeed to govern himself. A British historian in the nineteenth century described him as “a savage prince whose conduct and character made him more like a brute than a man.” This opinion was an extreme version of a common view of Constantine in the last century; the attitude is reflected by some writers of our own age, although few have gone so far as one modern author who pictured the Tsesarevich as “that insane hyena.” Polish writers, to further their justification of the 1830 revolt, assigned much of the discontent in that country to Constantine's “despotic” conduct, but even Russian and other historians have agreed that his explosive temperament and dislike for the Polish Constitution contributed to the uprising.

On July 11, 1867, an imperial decree established the governor-generalship of Turkestan, inaugurating a significant experiment in Russian administration of Central Asia. On July 14 General Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman (1818-82) was appointed Turkestan’s first governor general. During the next fourteen years he rooted Russian colonial rule so firmly that subsequent incompetent governors could not overturn it. He began Turkestan’s modernization, but his regime aroused intense controversy in Russia. Colleagues eulogized Kaufman as a talented organizer who won the loyalty and respect of both Russians and natives. Numerous critics, led by General M. G. Cherniaev, his successor (1882-84), castigated his administration. Kaufman’s work was misrepresented by Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat. Soviet historians either vilified him as an instrument of tsarist imperialism or relegated him to obscurity.

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.

“We are Argonauts of peace.” Under this self-description a delegation of Russian socialists sailed to western Europe in the summer of 1917 to rally popular support for a great conference of world socialism to meet at Stockholm for the purpose of reuniting the International and ending the war. Of all the peace flurries of the war none other roused such hopes and fears as the “Stockholm Conference.” Its proposal caused sharp crises in the governments and in the socialist parties of all the belligerent powers. That it never met contributed mightily to the outcome of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks' coming to power.

The Stockholm Conference was the child of the Russian Revolution. There had been several abortive efforts during the war to reconvene the International, and now the Russian Revolution encouraged some neutral socialists to form a Dutch-Scandinavian Committee to make another effort. It met with a rebuff from the socialist parties of the belligerent powers. The intervention of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, however, drastically changed the situation. The Soviet took its first, tentative step into international affairs with the issuance on March 14/27 of a general appeal to the peoples of all countries to unite for peace. Soviet backing for an international socialist conference took more concrete form when the “Siberian Zimmerwaldists,” led by Irakli Tsereteli, returned to Petrograd in late March and asserted their control over the Soviet.

The recent resurgence of interest in the West in Karl Marx's thought has centered largely on his early writings, particularly the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published for the first time in 1932 in the original German), and on the role which the theme of alienation played in Marx's thought. Much of the literature stimulated by this renewed study of Marx has been concerned with the extent of continuity (or discontinuity) between the early and later views of Marx and the relevance of his concept of alienation to modern industrial societies. The fact that the young Marx's writings have provided intellectual support for various “revisionist” groups yearning for a “humanistic socialism” in European Communist countries has also undoubtedly focused attention on these works in the West.

During the Eastern Crisis of 1876-78, and the years preceding the victory of W. E. Gladstone and the British Liberal party in the Midlothian general election in April 1880, the renowned Slavophile and Croatian patriot Josip Juraj Strossmayer, Roman Catholic bishop of Diakovo, attempted with some success directly and indirectly to enlist Gladstone's support for South Slav nationalist aspirations. Bishop Strossmayer was an ardent advocate of the liberation of the South Slavs from Austrian, Magyar, and Turkish rule, a vocal partisan of South Slav unity, and, at times, a thorn in the side of the Vatican. As the long-time bishop of a large diocese which embraced Slavonia and parts of Bosnia and Serbia, he labored for over fifty years to advance the national traditions and culture of the South Slavs and to promote an awareness among the South Slavs of their common ethnic and cultural origins. Strossmayer achieved notoriety and won the close friendship of Lord Acton and Dr. Johann von Dollinger by his opposition to the Dogma of Papal Infallibility in the Vatican Council of 1869-70 and attracted the attention of Gladstone and many Anglican clerics by his efforts to effect the reconciliation and reunion of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. He was also interested in promoting the union of the Western and Eastern churches as a device to remove the religious rivalry which hindered the unification of the South Slavs and persevered in his endeavors to facilitate spiritual unity among the Balkan Slavs, even though these efforts alienated many of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic clergy.

Historians have little reason to believe that the so-called intelligentsia corresponded to any real group of men in Russian society. It is true that the term has been used very frequently in the past one hundred years, but it has been denned in so many ways and been the subject of such bitter partisan debate that it has lost any objective meaning. Historians in the West can hardly communicate on the subject any longer, for no two of them seem to give the term quite the same meaning. The confusion extends even to terminology. The Russian word intelligentsiia has passed directly into the English language as a collective noun. But what then is the term for the individual—intelligent or intellectual? Some historians carefully use the Russian noun; others accept the English noun as the approximate equivalent.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy direct taxes were levied on the basis of periodic fiscal surveys. The records of these surveys were called soshnye pis'ma, pistsovye knigi, and perepisnye knigi (sokha registers, cadastral books, and census books respectively). Extant copies, though often fragmentary and considerably fewer than the total number of books originally compiled, represent our best source of information about the socio-economic history and population of Muscovy. Statistical data from these books span the period from the 1480s to 1717 and bear directly on such problems as population size and movement, identification of topographic features, the social and economic composition of urban and rural society, taxation, trade and manufacture, and the peasant economy on church, private, and state lands. Two of the most useful kinds of information are the enumeration of the taxed population, in terms of households and male occupants, and the quantitative and qualitative description of taxable property.

One of the most interesting political anachronisms of this century was the Polish demand for colonies. The movement developed rapidly in size and intensity in the early 1930s and reached its climax in 1938-39. Ironically, the Poles clamored for colonies at a time when plans were being prepared to turn Poland herself into one of the first colonies of the Third Reich. In pursuing this course of action the Poles fell victim to the spirit of voluntarism, confusing the will to power with the precondition for greatpower status.

The origin of the Polish colonial movement may be dated October 1, 1918, when an organization called Polska Bandera (Polish Flag) was founded by a group of twenty-five men for the purpose of popularizing the importance of the sea to Poland’s national interest and encouraging Polish youth to participate in inland and maritime navigation.

The collection of Zemstvo Publications (Kollektsiia zemskikh izdanii) in Leningrad is undoubtedly the most important source of materials for the study of the zemstvo institutions which existed in Russia from 1864 to 1917. Because the work of these institutions touched every phase of Russian society, the collection is valuable for countless other topics as well. Containing approximately 100,000 volumes, it was formed in the 1950s from the library of the former Free Economic Society. It is little publicized and has not been utilized, even by Soviet scholars, to the degree it deserves. As of June 1966 the collection had been used, according to the staff, by only two American scholars, although access to it is granted to almost any scholar who has a card for the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, of which it is a branch.

The collection is one of the fonds which make up the Fondy Vol'nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva (Fonds of the Free Economic Society), which are housed in a room of the Fontanka Embankment Library at 36 Fontanka Embankment, Leningrad, approximately three blocks from the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. In the same building are the main library's newspaper collection and newspaper reading room and various other reading rooms for graduate and undergraduate students.

Pokrovskii never wrote the three final volumes of Russkaia istoriia s drevneishkikh vremen that were to carry his synthesis from the eve of 1905 to October 1917; and his postrevolutionary survey of Russian history failed to include the October Revolution. On the basis of his articles and lectures, however, it is possible to present a coherent picture of his ideas on the roots, significance, and prospects of the Russian Revolution. This article is concerned with the long-range issues involved in Pokrovskii's evaluation of the Revolution, though he also wrote a great deal on the immediate causes and the actual course of events between 1905 and 1917 and on the subsequent civil war.

Editor’s Note: In his covering letter for the following piece Mr. Hollander remarked that “sociologists rarely make themselves heard on the pages of the Slavic Review” and expressed the hope that other readers will also be “inclined to join the debate.” We should like to take the opportunity thus provided to invite all sociologists to raise their voices in our pages. We also join the author in his hope that others will enter the debate.

The symposium on “Comparative Politics and Communist Systems” (Slavic Review, March 1967) represents, I believe, a general consensus among social scientists in Slavic studies that the study of Communist countries should be integrated into developments in the social sciences in general. The question is how this should be accomplished. The symposium participants argued for immediate and direct integration through various models such as the developmental or bureaucratic model. Another group, represented by the Communist Studies Conference of the American Political Science Association and the recent Carnegie grant for comparative communism, proposes that comparative communism be considered a major subcategory of comparative analysis. At least in the initial stage, it is reasoned, the various Communist systems should be compared with one another. I would suggest, however, that before either scheme is accepted the net be cast wider for a broader, more flexible organizing device.

Though vigorously pursued since the turn of the century, Western studies of the Renaissance, including those in this country, have not hitherto encompassed eastern Europe. Therefore, the appearance of the first comprehensive assessment of Slavic literatures of the period, by I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov (Ital’ianskoe Vozrozhdenie i slavianskie literatury XV-XVI vekov, Moscow, 1963), should be welcomed by Slavicists and by students of the Renaissance and the Reformation as an event of considerable significance.

Despite a continuing interest in Moravian and Methodian studies little progress, if any, has been made with regard to some basic issues. There is still a diversity of scholarly opinion as to the very nature of Methodius's episcopal dignity, as well as to the location—or even the existence—of his episcopal see. Methodius has been considered by various scholars in turn to have been a bishop “at large“ without a permanent residence, a missionary bishop, a land-bishop (chorepiscopus), or, finally, a titular bishop of Sirmium on the River Sava who was active mainly in Prince Sventopolk's domain north of the Danube with a see either in Nitra, Velehrad, or elsewhere. Thus, on the one hand, we have differences of opinion on the nature of Methodius's episcopal dignity and, on the other, a general scholarly agreement that he had the function of archbishop of Moravia. The persistence of conflicting interpretations of the episcopal dignity of Methodius and the acceptance of the notion that he was archbishop of Moravia, a title for which there is no evidence in the sources, warrant a reexamination of the Methodian problem in an attempt to eliminate some of the contradictions.