The significance of the reign of Alexander III as a turning point in the history of Russian Jewry is beyond dispute. This reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in the Jews’ economic, social, and political condition. Jewish hopes for emancipation from the prevailing discriminatory legislation were dashed. Instead of emancipation, the Jews were presented with new restrictions, on their residence rights, educational opportunities, economic and professional pursuits, and participation in the institutions of local government. Faced with starvation, many thousands of Jews chose to leave the Russian Empire. Others chose to convert to Christianity in order to throw off the yoke of persecution. Moving in the opposite direction, many Jewish intellectuals who had previously believed in the beneficial results to be achieved by assimilation began to question this assumption. Some began to turn to Zionism. Others turned to active Jewish self-defense.

In November 1917, the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia with a foreign policy based on “proletarian internationalism” and the aim of spreading the socialist revolution to all parts of Europe. Developed by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky this policy sought to take advantage of the disruption of European society caused by World War I to transform that conflict of state against state into a vast international civil war of class against class. Believing that the peoples of Europe were weary of war and ripe for revolution the Bolsheviks called for the negotiation of a “just and democratic peace” based on the principles of no annexations, no indemnifications and the liberation of all colonial, dependent and oppressed nations. The Bolsheviks hoped that bourgeois governments would be unable to accept these principles and that their failure to do so would generate sufficient popular unrest to ignite revolution everywhere in Europe.

The haphazard unearthing of Osip Mandelstam’s late poetry and the bio-graphical data of his (all too literal) struggle for existence produces the effect of a mosaic gradually and painstakingly pieced together by several hands. One mysterious piece, long thought lost, was the poem allegedly written in praise of Stalin sometime in the 1930s. For many Western readers at least, the first mention of the poet’s tribute to the dictator was in Anna Akhmatova’s memoirs of Mandelstam published in the emigre miscellany Vozdushnye puti, vol. 4 (1965): ” … he maintained that poems are written only as the result of strong emotional shocks, joyful as well as tragic ones. Concerning his own poem in praise of Stalin—‘I’d like to say not Stalin, but Dzhugashvili’ (1935) —he said to me: ‘Now I understand that it was a sickness.’ “

The substantive portion of this paper is intended to be incorporated later into a comprehensive study of time horizon in economic history. Hence an elucidation of the concept and of its main aspects should precede the presentation and interpretation of the relevant material that has been drawn from a scrutiny of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, that is to say, from novels and plays. In this connection, it will have to be explained why belleslettres can and should be regarded as one of the sources of insights into the problems involved.

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership succeeded in gaining control over the chaotic city of Petrograd. Undoubtedly it was a great triumph for what early in 1917 had been a small, isolated group whose leaders were in exile either abroad or in Siberia. In analyzing the October Revolution, both participants and historians have given major credit to Lenin's brilliant planning and the disciplined, centralized party he had insisted upon as early as 1902. Thus those who opposed Lenin in October 1917 have usually been •branded as weak and indecisive with no positive program and no understanding of the real condition of Russia in 1917. As is often the case with the defeated, the opposition's program has received much criticism but little study. One of the revolutionaries so treated is Grigorii Zinoviev.

Prior to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1933, American military intelligence on the Red Army was limited to what it could glean from foreign military sources and travelers who had observed the Red Army inside the Soviet state. Thus, from 1920, the end of the period of Russian Civil War and Allied Intervention, to 1933, information on the Soviet military establishment was gathered by American military attachés from European diplomatic and military officials in Riga, Berlin, and Warsaw. To a lesser extent, intelligence on the Red Army was also available in London, Paris, Vienna, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Peking. American military intelligence dispatches and reports during the period reflected the heavy reliance upon secondary and indirect sources, although the information was often remarkably accurate. But with the American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union and the opening of an American embassy in Moscow, American military intelligence gained the opportunity to supplement information received from foreign military sources with data received directly from the American military attaché.

The freeing of the serfs occurred in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. Although it ended the personal subjection of the peasantry and abolished the feudal obligations of deliveries in kind and services, bringing to a close the feudal and clearing the way for the capitalist form of landholding, this transformation allowed the ex-feudal lords to retain those lands that they had administered themselves in the past by converting into peasant holdings only the so-called rustical lands that had previously been cultivated on their own account by the serfs. The demesne lands, which the feudal owners had managed themselves, were for the greater part cultivated by robot (corvée) labor, and to a lesser extent by those who worked for wages, although some parts were worked by landless peasants to whom they were rented out in exchange for a great variety of obligations. These people received no land when the serfs were freed. The most serious socioeconomic problem of the capitalist century in Eastern Europe was the misery of the masses of landless .peasants as well as of the small and dwarf holders who lived in the shadow of the large estates whose origin was feudal and on which they worked as wage laborers. For this reason it is quite understandable that the origin of the land-tenure system that followed the freeing of the serfs had to become, sooner or later, one of the focal points of historical research.

Soviet authorities have always maintained that their national theater is a truly popular form of art, enjoyed by broad masses of the people. This view has been expressed or implied in every official statement on the medium for many years. “Soviet theatrical art,” according to a 1958 Central Committee statement, “has become a truly popular art, close and comprehensible to the broad masses of the toilers…. Our theater, by carrying the most progressive ideas of socialism, peace, and democracy to the masses, has rightly earned widespread recognition, and become an important factor in the development of all progressive art… “

The concessions embodied in the Manifesto of October 30, 1905 were wrung from the Russian autocracy by an opposition united as it had never been before. For once all the forces of Russian society which stood for change were focused on a common goal, the acquisition of a constitution and political rights. This remarkable consensus was largely the achievement of a group of Russian liberals, the osvobozhdentsy or “liberationists” inspired by the émigré newspaper Osvobozhdenie and guided by the Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] inside Russia. The idea of a national front against autocracy did not, however, originate with the “liberationists.” Tendencies towards union within the ranks of the Russian opposition can be perceived over a decade before the appearance of the first issue of Osvobozhdenie. In the 1890s these tendencies were strengthened and national front tactics popularized by the work of the Russian Free Press Fund [Fond Vol'noi Russkoi Pressy] in London.

“Serfdom” is one of those conventions of historical nomenclature which, like “feudal” or “medieval,” are intended to bring together in concept a number of similar elements for common consideration. Very often we are inclined to forget that the elements composing the whole may bear many marks of dissimilarity as well as marks of likeness. We should be on guard, then, not to allow the convenience of conventional terms to blind us to the great variety of characteristics and variations in quality to be found in the thing named. “Serfdom,” just like “feudalism,” means different things at different times and places, and it is well for us from time to time to examine more closely the several manifestations of it to determine if there may be important differences distinguishing one type from the other, even though they all seem to sail under the same colors.

There can be little doubt that the name Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) would be near the top of any list of important twentieth-century Russian writers neglected both in and outside their homeland. Even though he was regarded as an original and major poet by writers as diverse as Briusov, Blok, Gumilev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, Kuzmin still awaits rehabilitation in the Soviet Union and rediscovery in the West. There are some signs of a partial rehabilitation in Soviet Russia today, but the chances for a full rehabilitation—a major publication of his works—are slight. Obstacles to a Western rediscovery exist as well. Clichés die hard and perhaps no harder than in literary history. Kuzmin himself must share part of the blame for the major one. By writing the article “On Beautiful Clarity” he unwittingly gave critics and literary historians the tag for comments on his verse. That the article is about prose and that Kuzmin chose not to republish it in his one volume of collected essays is ignored.

“The attitude toward the national question always constituted in Czechoslovakia the touchstone for political understanding of the defense of revolutionary positions,” the Czech-German-Jewish historian of communism in Czechoslovakia, Paul Reimann, wrote in 1931. In these few words Reimann expressed the dilemma of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. And to this dilemma my study is also devoted.

The peace treaties concluded after the First World War buried the multinational empire and created in its place a multinational republic. The Communists in Czechoslovakia labored hard to define their stand in relation to the national question. The purpose of this paper is to describe closely the policies of Communists toward Slovakia. We shall argue that confusion, inconsistency, ideological perplexities, and opportunism characterized the party's dealings with problems of nationalism and nationalities in that country.

The purpose of the present article is neither to examine in detail the state of research regarding demesne-robot farming and the “neo-serfdom” or “second serfdom” in Poland-Lithuania nor to attempt a definitive explanation of these phenomena. Rather, the author has set out to show the inadequacy of conventional views by reiterating a series of important points already raised by various Polish historians.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those ivho favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Robert Frost

The acceptance of prerevolutionary cultural values in the Soviet Union has been constrained by the development of official interpretation of Marxist-Leninist dogma and its application to the changing historical and political conditions and issues of the day. The evolution of the official Soviet approach to nineteenth-century Russian classical writers thus has been a process influenced by ideological and political considerations. At each stage of development of the Soviet state, Soviet officials devise the necessary literary policy and literary theory with which the values most pertinent to Soviet society at a given stage of its historical development can be extracted from a work of art created in a bourgeois society by an artist alien to the cause of the revolution.

Studies of political reform in the Russian Empire during the first decade of Alexander I's rule have focused largely on the emperor and his most prominent advisers: the unofficial committee of four close friends who counseled him in secret during the first two years of his reign; powerful court factions, particularly those nobles who sought to augment the status and political power of the Senate; and, finally, high state officials such as Michael Speransky. The nature of reformist thought emanating from sources less directly involved in the actual preparation of legislation has been unduly neglected. There were, for instance, a number of minor writers who sought to influence state policy by submitting their ideas to Alexander. A study of the kind of society they hoped to create and the ways in which they thought social change achievable can enhance our appreciation of the variety of reformist thought in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In May 1972, Petr Efimovich Shelest, first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, was demoted and transferred to Moscow in the shadowy post of deputy premier. He continued to hold his seat in the Politburo in a kind of lame duck existence, until he was prematurely pensioned off eleven months later. No official charges were placed against him immediately, and most foreign observers attributed his fall to his hard-line views on foreign policy at the moment of budding detente. He was reported to have argued heatedly in the Politburo against the Nixon visit, and his removal on the eve of that occasion was seen as a means of getting him out of the way as the President’s host in Kiev. It was also recognized that Shelest was in trouble for his failures in party administration and his inability to stem the tide of intellectual dissent in the largest non-Russian republic. But the official charges that were eventually brought against him were of a different magnitude. He was accused not only of failing to maintain the norms of Leninist nationality policy, but of actively fostering the intensification of divisive Ukrainian nationalism.

In the particular case of Hungary, neo-serfdom is to be seen as an economic, political, and social evolution in which the political power of the nobility, especially that of the gentry, grew considerably; the demesne lands of the lords disproportionately increased at the expense of the serfs' rustical lands; the lords' seigneurial jurisdiction over their peasants increased; and the lords' management of their economy shifted from receiving rents to producing for markets. It was a system of social stagnation in which the evolution of cities and an urban middle class, a potential counterbalance to the nobility, was made impossible, and the serfs had no way out of their degrading environment and status. These conditions developed rapidly after the suppression of the Dózsa revolt of 1514, the greatest peasant movement of discontent in Hungary. As a result, the peasants were bound to the soil. The national Diet of 1547, however, enacted the serfs' right of migration, a freedom which was re enacted several times more.

One frequently discussed problem in Western approaches to postrevolutionary Russian literature has been the temptation to identify “rebels against the system” and to praise their work out of proportion to its merits. Writers attacked in the Soviet Union for their heretical views have a good chance of being lionized in the West. A strange and notable exception to this pattern is Viktor Shklovsky, one of the earliest and most outspoken defenders of creative freedom in the Soviet Union. Though his books and articles were viciously attacked by the Marxist critics throughout the twenties, Western critics, viewing those same books and articles from the distance imposed by time and place, have seen them as a series of surrenders which hastened or even precipitated the collapse of the Formalist movement.