After Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, it soon became apparent that his successors were in no hurry to dismantle his handiwork in the field of defense policy or to introduce major military policy innovations of their own. One may surmise that this tendency to mark time was the natural product of succession politics within the new collective leadership arrangement. As in most other major policy areas, Brezhnev and Kosygin no doubt felt the need for a breathing spell while in the process of consolidating their new regime.

Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.

Let Peary seek his Arctic goal;
His countrymen prefer a Pole
Less brumal and uncertain;
And Roe and Howells the prolix
Must bow to Henry Sienkiewicz,
Democratized by Curtin.
Anonymous, "Columbus Sienkiewicz,"
The Outlook, New York,
March 12, 1898

The subject of Henryk Sienkiewicz and America is hardly exhausted with the acknowledgment of the enormous popularity of Quo Vadis in the United States. Sienkiewicz himself visited America in 1876, in fact traveled extensively through the country and recorded his impressions at some length in his Listy z Ameryki (Letters from America), a large part of which was translated into English and published in 1959. Sienkiewicz's relations with Helena Modrzejewska (Modjeska) and her debut in the American theater at the time of his visit add to the interest of his sojourn in the United States. Another phase of Sienkiewicz's relations with this country embraces the fascinating career of his American translator, Jeremiah Curtin, whose name remains as intimately linked with translations from Polish literature, particularly the works of Sienkiewicz, as Constance Garnett's has been with English renditions of the Russian masters of the nineteenth century.

Today, no less than in the days of Lomonosov and Schlozer, the question of the ethnic identity of the early Kievan rulers is a controversial one. The late Adolf Stender-Petersen's criticism of the Normanist school, “that it replaced a real, well-founded historical view of the course of things by an a priori plan, in which things were arranged as well as possible,” also applies—mutatis mutandis, of course—to the historical-sociological method of the contemporary Soviet anti-Normanist school. What is needed in the field are good editions, with detailed, objective commentary, of all the sources known to us. Eventually these may lead to the “comprehensive edition of all the sources from which we can acquire knowledge as regards the Varangian problem” envisaged by Stender-Petersen. The edition of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio by Gyula Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins and the commentary edited by the latter may be cited as an important step toward this goal.