The problem of criteria and methods of historical source criticism has rarely been the subject of special study. It is most often set forth in textbooks of historical method or in general introductions to historical study. And yet a number of extremely complex and important problems are related to source criticism: principles of evidence in historical study, the relation between deduction and induction, between synthesis and analysis, and so on.

For historians of medieval Russia, as for medievalists in general, these problems are of particular significance. In this field we constantly encounter the situation when one or another fact is attested by a small number of sources, sometimes a single one. The paucity of sources, their far from complete information, and their frequent tendentiousness—all this confronts scholars with the necessity of studying them with intensity and with extreme caution.

The image of the “Terrible Tsar” struck the imagination of his contemporaries with such force that it continued to tower in Russian consciousness until quite recent times. In chronicles and tales, folk songs and stories, and in historiography from Karamzin on, Ivan IV remained alive, more vivid even than Peter the Great. And the impact was not restricted to Russians; beginning with the Dutch, English, Italians, Danes, and Germans—adventurers, diplomats, merchants, prisoners, mercenaries— who visited the Russia of Ivan IV, the Tsar left an impression in West European minds such that today men who know nothing about Russia or its history will know the name of Ivan the Terrible.

The sheer size of the Russian foreign debt in 1917 has profoundly affected our view of the influence of foreign capital on tsarist diplomacy. It has been argued by both Western and Soviet historians that Russian foreign relations were in good part influenced by, or even determined by, Russia’s debtor status to France and—to a lesser degree—to Great Britain. Thus a Western historian argued recently that in the last years of tsarist rule “foreign credit became a tool of power politics and a limitation on Russian sovereignty in general. … Between 1887 and 1917 Russian policy was tied to French policy, inasmuch as French investments were controlled, to a large extent, by the French Government.” Recently published Soviet works, while revising Stalin’s judgment that Russia was economically a semicolony of Western capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the Entente countries pushed tsarist Russia into a military alliance with them.”

The Purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the magnitude and direction of the appreciable internal migration that occurred in Russia during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first part of the article is a description of regional migration patterns, the second part an analysis of these patterns, primarily in terms of economic differentials.

Migration is a complex phenomenon. The supply of migrants to an area is related to such factors as income, distance, size of population, distribution of information, social and cultural amenities, location of resources, and government policy. Some factors may influence potential migrants more than others at a particular stage of economic development. Economic factors seem to be crucial, especially in the early stages of economic development. A useful way to interpret economic data is to compare income differences between areas. Specifically, we shall analyze the relationship between migration by guberniia and differences in indicators of income as inferred from socioeconomic data.

Czechoslovak foreign trade is of special interest for several reasons: First, Czechoslovakia is the East European country most active in trade in terms of per capita exports and imports of goods and, with a few exceptions (for instance, Bulgaria), also in terms of the ratio of visible trade to national product. In 1965 exports per inhabitant amounted to $189, compared with $181 in East Germany, $150 in Hungary, $144 in Bulgaria, $71 in Poland, $58 in Rumania, and $35 in the USSR. In the same year per capita imports were $188 in Czechoslovakia, $151 in Hungary, $ 149 in East Germany, $144 in Bulgaria, and $35 in the USSR. As in other Communist countries (with the exception of Yugoslavia), the ratio of foreign trade to national product is difficult to determine, mainly because of the almost complete divorce between domestic and foreign trade prices. One can only very roughly estimate that in 1966 Czechoslovakia’s ratio of visible exports to gross national product, in terms of approximative factor cost, was one fifth and the ratio of imports to GNP only slightly less than one fifth. Thus, Czechoslovak economy is again as dependent on foreign trade as it was in 1937.

One of the greatest failures of Communist systems everywhere has been in agricultural productivity. In the Soviet Union some thirty-five years of collectivized agriculture have brought but modest increases in yields and gross production of many crops and livestock; growth of agricultural output per capita since even before the Revolution has been even less impressive. Among the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, although collectivization is much more recent, the pattern has been much the same; yields remain low, and gross production as well as per capita increases has been small.

Although some areas of Eastern Europe and large parts of the USSR can be classified as physically marginal for agriculture, the low levels of agricultural productivity are primarily attributable to defective organization and operation. There have been years when crop failure in this or that area was the direct result of drought, flood, or other natural cause, but these catastrophes cannot be blamed for the low yields which characterize the longer run. The major obstacles to production gains lie within the collectivized system.

The Revival of criminology as a formal discipline in the Soviet Union is raising anew the old Marxist problem of the effect of the environment on the individual. For thirty years following the abolition of the OGPU's Institute for Studying Crime and the Criminal there had been no research facility devoted to studying the causes of crime. Then in 1964 the USSR Public Prosecutor's Office transformed its existing crime-detection research center into the All-Union Institute for Studying the Causes of Crime and Developing Crime-Prevention Methods (hereafter called the Institute for Crime Prevention). Because of its sponsorship it is rather likely that the Institute's senior researchers have access to at least part of the country's largely unpublished crime statistics, hence that they can speak with greater authority than Soviet crime specialists working in the universities and under the Academy of Sciences. It was also in the same year that criminology began to be offered as a subject at Moscow University Law School, and other Soviet law schools have followed suit.

In a society whose ideology asserts that the effect of the environment on the individual is largely known, the effort to isolate particular effects should be of some interest. The assumption that Soviet crime is a product of elements of the capitalist past surviving in the present is strongly reaffirmed by the Institute's director, Igor I. Karpets, and his deputy, Vladimir N. Kudriavtsev. Since by any Soviet definition of “environment” the Soviet citizen is exposed to the socialist present far more than to remnants of the prerevolutionary period, the problem of identifying the “survivals” is coupled with the problem of lack of positive response to the socialist environment by some persons. Karpets seeks these phenomena first of all in the human mind.

Discussions of Catherine II as an “enlightened despot” usually emphasize her attempts to reform the social and political bases of the Russian Empire and to gain the active support of the nobility and gentry in governmental activity. Catherine denned enlightened government as wellordered government, achieving its policy and programs through bureaucratic and political means rather than with the sheer force that many of her predecessors had used.

The term “Russification” is seldom used with reference to the period of Catherine II, even though it was in her reign that the Cossack Sech was abolished, the special privileges granted by Peter I to the Baltic provinces abrogated, and the first successful assimilation of Russia’s Muslim subjects into the Russian state accomplished.

Although his poetry enjoyed considerable contemporary popularity, Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin belonged to the generation of poets characterized by Ivan Rozanov as “interesting precisely for its attempts and strivings: we find almost no attainments here.” Despite the curious fact that Karamzin's verse has been reprinted in the present century more frequently than his prose, its interest for the modern reader is of an essentially historical nature. Professor Iurii M. Lotman, editor of the recent authoritative and complete collection of Karamzin's poetry, has stressed in his excellent introduction that “it is impossible to understand Karamzin the prose writer and ignore Karamzin the poet,” but his ultimate conclusion that “his poetic gift, perhaps, manifested itself with even greater force in his prose” reestablishes the primacy of the prose. Karamzin in his poetry was a stikhotvorets rather than a poet—a conscious craftsman who introduced new themes, brought a fresh approach to traditional subjects and genres, and experimented with language, form, and meter.

The first part of Mikhail Chulkov’s short novel The Comely Cook was published in 1770 and appears to have enjoyed a considerable success with the Russian reading public of the eighteenth century, including the great military hero Alexander Suvorov. The work soon became a bibliographical rarity, and it was not until this century that it was reprinted. Given the embryonic state of the prose genres in Russia at the time Chulkov’s novel appeared, it is not surprising to find that much attention has been paid to the possible sources upon which he might have drawn. Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a tendency to stress West European influences on Chulkov. In the Soviet period several Russian scholars have played down these influences and have sought to demonstrate that the novel was essentially a home-grown product written by a raznochinets in opposition to the neoclassical theories of noble writers.

In Any Multinational State the language and content of elementary and secondary education are liable to become controversial political issues. The dedicated nationalist will be concerned about safeguarding the purity of his people's heritage. On the other hand, many parents want their children to achieve responsible positions that call for higher education. Equal access to universities and technical institutes by students of all nationalities then becomes the touchstone of equitable educational policy. This essay seeks to evaluate briefly Soviet educational policy toward the non-Russian peoples that together make up nearly one half of the total population of the USSR (454 percent in 1959).

The problem of educating constituent peoples and ethnic, cultural, or racial minorities equitably is, of course, not limited to the Soviet Union. The classic example of a genuinely multilingual state, with four official languages, is Switzerland. But even in that country, higher education is available only in French and German. Nonetheless, despite their linguistic differences the Swiss remain exceptionally attached to their little country, which was founded in 1291. Not so united is Belgium, a creation of the nineteenth century. In February 1968, for the first time in that country's history, the long-smoldering language dispute brought down a government: the division of the country into Wallonia and Flanders, with a theoretically bilingual Brussels enclave, has not worked out smoothly, nor has the division of Louvain University into French- and Dutch-speaking sections.

Men whom Hegel defines as world-historical figures because they shape the lives of generations by establishing systems of rule, law, or belief are sometimes called educators of their times. In such a general and figurative use of the term, the title educator is of course honorific and not bestowed for achievements specifically educational. This has happened to Lenin. When a historian attributes to him “an enormous pedagogical success,” he really means that Lenin managed to impose upon his party a style of rule in which expedient action is supported by ideological justification. The educator in this case is a master political strategist and might seem to be a more suitable subject of inquiry for the political scientist than for the historian of education. The metaphor, however, conceals a part of reality. It is true that Lenin wrote no treatise on education.

It is difficult to think of any writer of any century who has displayed such a wide range of verbal talent as Vladimir Nabokov. His flashing prose has earned him an important place both in American and in Russian literature. Original prose and poetry, translations of prose and poetry, meticulous scholarly criticism and commentary, devastating literary polemic—everything seems within his range. But Nabokov’s chameleonic transformations from Russian into English and English into Russian are particularly fascinating to watch. He has translated (or helped translate) his own Russian novels, including Priglashenie na kazn’, Zashchita Luzhina, and Dar, into English; he has translated English works including Pnin, Speak, Memory, and, most recently, Lolita into Russian. The metamorphosis of Otchaianie into Despair is a special case, because while translating the novel Nabokov made certain revisions.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Russian government brooded over the part it should play in education. On the one hand, no great power could now maintain itself without a literate, well-trained population; on the other, schools provided the intellectual equipment, and sometimes even the stimulus, to criticize the social and political structure of Russia. Thus, the more the autocracy encouraged the spread of education essential to the well-being of the state, the more it contributed to the growth of antistate elements. This paper will analyze the efforts of Count Dmitrii Tolstoi, Minister of Education 1866-80, to resolve this problem in the field of elementary education.

The interwar period in Poland between 1919 and 1939 was punctuated by three significant crises in ethnic relations: the presidential succession of 1922, the Pilsudski coup of 1926, and the “pacification” of the Ukraine in 1930. This article is an attempt to sketch certain aspects of these crises based primarily on records of parliamentary debates. Within the walls of Parliament ethnic conflicts were aired and articulated openly. Here the claimants spoke to and with one another, rather than solely to their own particular clienteles.

The number of non-Polish inhabitants within the frontiers of post-Versailles Poland has been variously estimated at between 30 and 45 percent of the total population, depending on the source, time, and method of classification used in the estimate.

In this Article I shall examine the visual form or appearance (shape, size, and other visible qualities) of Soviet socially produced things (excluding any detailed consideration of trends in the fine arts or of individual craftsmanship) in relation to forces in Soviet ideology which seem to have influenced this form or appearance. (I do not attempt to describe all influences which bear on Soviet design, which would require a much more complex approach and a more extended treatment.) My definition of Soviet “ideology” would be the same as Professor Meyer's: the body of doctrine that is taught by the Communist Party to all Soviet citizens. Whether or not this doctrine is true, or thought to be true, as well as why it is propagated, or whether this would be a complete definition—these questions are considered to be irrelevant in the present context.

One of the most pressing problems facing the Soviet government in the 1920s was how to recruit the technical intelligentsia and professional classes behind the new regime. Just as the officer corps of the Imperial government was a necessary adjunct to the Red Army during the Civil War, so the businessman, the doctor, and the bureaucrat were essential to the functioning of orderly social and political institutions under the New Economic Policy. The story of the economic concessions made to revive the dormant links between city and countryside is well known. But the recruitment of trained personnel involved not only economic concession but also ideological conversion. Beginning in 1921 the Soviet leaders took great pains to legitimize their rule by portraying themselves as heirs to Russian national traditions and defenders of Russian soil against foreign intervention.

The collapse of the Russian monarchy in February and the overthrow of the Provisional Government in October 1917 confronted Rumanian leaders with the prospect of a violent change in their own country. Rumania’s participation in the First World War on the side of the Entente had by February 1917 resulted in a succession of military defeats and the occupation of two-thirds of the country, including Bucharest, by German and Austro-Hungarian forces. The court and most of the leading politicians had taken refuge in Iasi, the chief city of Moldavia, located only a few miles from the Russian border. A Russian army of about a million men and a reorganized Rumanian field army of some eighteen divisions manned a newly stabilized front which stretched from Bukovina in the north along the eastern slopes of the Carpathians to southern Moldavia