1917. A revolution explodes, the most violent in history. Within a few weeks a society rids itself of all its leaders: the monarch and his lawyers, the police and the priests, the landowners and civil servants, the officers and employers. There is no citizen who does not feel free—free to make his own choices and decide his own future. Before long everyone has a plan in his pocket for remaking the country. As the bards of the revolution foretold, a new era in the history of man is beginning.

The existence of compulsory military service has become a major theme in recent attempts to explain the development of Lithuanian society and politics in the early sixteenth century. Much of the discussion has centered on the relationship between military service and feudalism. This article concentrates not on that question but on the nature of military service and the understanding it can provide of the structure and dynamics of the economy of Lithuania in the sixteenth century.

Contemporary political events in Poland provoke many questions concerning the old Polish intelligentsia. Has it survived the historical storms of the last thirty years? How potent is the value system of this stratum today? Has its dominating influence on the other strata remained, or does Poland now have a new value system derived from the goals and morals of a different class? The Polish intelligentsia can be analyzed from several standpoints–from the historical or the current perspective, in the light of its national function or its own structure, or as revealed in its aspirations and values. It is the conviction of the author that the value system determines the structure of both the spiritual and the material culture in every social class and stratum.

The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

The major ideological challenge faced by Russian revolutionists in the half century prior to 1917 was to find a way to adapt the principal tenets of West European socialism to Russia. The difficulty of answering this challenge lay in Russia's unique historical development and the consequent differences between Russia and the West. The proper adaptation of socialism required an understanding of these differences and their significance.

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.

Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are five in number, and four of them (“The Shot,” “The Blizzard,” “The Stationmaster,” and “The Lady-Peasant“) belong to the same literary species. The narrative features binding this quartet of stories together are, in the main, conventional. Each relates—among other things—the story of a young man who, having won the affections of a beautiful woman, overcomes some obstacle (or series of obstacles) which threatens their union, thereby paving the way to, or consolidating, a mariage d'amour at the end of the tale. All of which is to say that embedded in each is one of the oldest of all plots, the “successful courtship.“

Among the theories about the origin of the Russian heroic epic songs (byliny), the theory of their aristocratic origin has aroused the greatest controversy. This theory was advanced by the main representative of the so-called historical school, Vsevolod Miller, at the turn of this century. In the introduction to his Ekskursy he compared the byliny to grandiose ruins, in whose upper chambers and towers princes once lived, but in whose sheds that were still habitable some unpretentious Olonets peasants had finally settled. Miller dealt with this problem in greater detail in his Ocherki, stressing first that the byliny sang of princes and retainers and their military feats. He argued that “they were created and disseminated among the population that was, in its development and social standing, close to the princely court and retinue, belonging, according to contemporary notions, to the ‘intelligentsia.'” The byliny were, according to Miller, composed among the cream of the society, where the pulse of life throbbed more strongly, where there was affluence and leisure, and where there was a demand for songs.

General histories give little credence to the Utopian side of Lenin's revolutionary thought, especially in relation to his only formal Utopian work, State and Revolution. Most histories pass off that book as an “intellectual deviation” resulting from Lenin's “revolutionary fever” of 1917 or as a piece of political opportunism, while offering What Is To Be Done? as the statement of orthodox Leninism. In keeping with the tone of What Is To Be Done? Lenin is generally portrayed as the political realist par excellence, a pragmatist of the first order, a “hard-nosed” strategist confined by neither intellectual theories (not even Marxism) nor human emotions. This neat and simple formula is most convenient in attributing the success of the November Revolution to Lenin's talents for organization and political astuteness.

The history of Soviet espionage, by the party’s own admission, did not begin in earnest until 1927, when the tiny and previously ineffectual military espionage operation came under the direction of a Moscow-trained Latvian immigrant, Alfred Tiltin. Living in New York as a Canadian under the fictitious name of “Joseph Paquette,” the debonair new director of the Soviet Military Intelligence organization in the United States recruited arid began grooming a second-in-command who would assume control of the spy group Upon Tiltin’s recall to Moscow early in 1929. The man was Nicholas Dozenberg, an early member of the American Communist Party, the first editor of the Communist publication Labor’s Voice, which later became the Daily Worker, and a man whose dedication to the Comintern was above question.

The gestation period of Marxism in Bulgaria before a Marxist party came into existence in 1891 is one of the least studied periods in the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, where most of the work on BCP historiography has been done, attention has primarily, and understandably, gone to the activities of Dimitŭr Blagoev, the so-called father of Bulgarian Marxism, whose early career as propagandist and organizer of the new movement included a notable effort while he was a student at the University of St. Petersburg to form the first Marxist group in Russia. The story of the penetration and dissemination of Marxism in Bulgaria, however, is by no means exhausted with accounts of Blagoev's life to 1891. Yet, Bulgarian Marxist historians have done little to date to reconstruct this story in monographic investigations of the kind they have produced for other phases of their party's history. Of the general accounts they have produced, the best one, relatively speaking, is in the latest Istorita na Bŭlgarskata Komunisttcheska Partiia, which devotes fifteen pages (out of 699) to Blagoev's early activities and the party's prehistory, including the founding congress of 1891.

One of the critically important trends in the government and politics of the East European Communist states in recent years has been the quite steady and rapid development in Yugoslavia of some striking forms of pluralization and institutionalization of power, and of some concomitant fairly well enforced legal restrictions on power. The development is often called by the Yugoslavs their movement toward “constitutionalism and legality.” However, though Titoism has been much studied, this particular movement, one of the most far-reaching and fundamental of all of the Titoist innovations, has received little explicit examination in Western scholarship, even in such a colorful manifestation as the exercise by the new constitutional courts of the power of judicial review over major legislation approved by the party. This article deals with the nature and dynamics of the movement and with some implications it may have.

For seventy-five years a furiously controversial legend has hung over the name and reputation of the eighteenth-century Russian poet Vasilii Vasilievich Kapnist. It began at a meeting of the Polish Historical Association on December 7, 1895, when Professor Bronislaw Dembiński, of the University of Lwów, read a report about his discovery of a document in the Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv stating that a Ukrainian gentleman named Kapnist had secretly gone to Berlin in April 1791 and talked with the Prussian minister of state, Count Ewald-Friedrich Hertzberg, about the Ukrainians’ desire to get Prussian help in freeing themselves from Russia. Professor Dembinski's paper, published in 1896, was promptly brought to the attention of Ukrainian readers by the Ukrainian historian M. S. Hrushevsky, who expressed the opinion that the Kapnist who secretly visited Berlin was “undoubtedly none other than the well-known author of Chicanery [Kapnist's comedy Iabeda].“

On the evening of October 31, 1921, a special edition of Gazeta Lwowska reported the sensational news of the arrest of all the delegates to a “Communist congress” that had convened only a few hours earlier on the grounds of St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv (Lwów in the Polish version). According to the newspaper, “the congress had been in preparation for some time [and] was attended by various Communist organizations, although central leadership was in the hands of the Ruthenians.” On the following day the events in Lviv were reconstructed, rather loosely, by the leading newspapers in Poland. Cracow’s Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny—exclaiming that “the hajdamacy [Ukrainian bandits] have even turned over the church for Bolshevik purposes“—related that among those arrested were members of the secret Ukrainian organizations KUM and Volia.

It is a settled principle of Soviet constitutional law that the USSR Supreme Soviet is the supreme representative organ, the supreme legislative body, and the supreme executor of the people's sovereignty. The 1936 Constitution subordinates all other organs of government to the Supreme Soviet, and it alone, on the national level, has the right to form governments, pass laws, and amend the Constitution. The Constitution also stipulates, however, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is “the vanguard of the workers in their struggle for the construction of a communist society and constitutes the guiding core of all workers’ organizations, public as well as governmental.”

With some justification, the 1960s may be called the decade of dissent. This is true even with regard to the Soviet Union, where broad sectors of the population have resorted to increasingly vociferous expressions of dissatisfaction with present conditions. If, when the decade began, overt alienation from the system was a relatively unusual phenomenon, the past ten years have given rise to an increasing stream of dissent in the Soviet populace. Among the intelligentsia, almost every rank and profession has been involved in oral, written, and organizational protest. Considerable attention has been devoted to this development by Western scholarship and journalism, and rightly so, for the voices of dissent provide an immediate insight into the tensions and conflicts within the rapidly changing society. One area of dissent, however, has received rather less attention in the West. This paper will attempt to survey the religious portion of the Soviet population, in an endeavor to illustrate the degree to which religious dissatisfaction during the past decade has been consonant with the general current of dissent within Soviet society.

In February 1846 Polish-speaking peasants in the western districts of Galicia, the Austrian part of partitioned Poland, struck down a national uprising composed largely of Polish nobles (szlachta) and joined Austrian troops marching on the tiny Republic of Cracow, where a Polish National Government had been established. Between four hundred and five hundred manors were sacked and over a thousand Poles killed. This peasant revolt is’ the point at which the national and social problems cross most strikingly in Polish historiography. Every historian of these events must explain how Polish peasants could rise against Polish patriots seeking to free Poland from the foreign yoke.

Controversy began immediately, but for almost a century, until World War II, debate was confined within fairly narrow interpretive limits. All the major treatments were based on one or another version of an “outside agitator“ thesis.

Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov's letter of December 24, 1828 O.S. (January 5, 1829 N.S.) to his wife Nina has hitherto been considered his last extant piece of correspondence. The Manuscript Division of the University of Nottingham Library, however, has in its archives a copy of an unpublished Griboedov letter which now replaces the letter to Nina as his last surviving letter. It belongs to the final weeks of Griboedov's life, early February 1829. I found the letter among that portion of the Portland Papers which comprises the correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, governor general of India from 1828 to 1835. It was lying in a packet containing three other documents: a letter from Lieutenant Colonel John Macdonald, British envoy to Persia, to Sir John Malcolm, his brother-in-law and governor of Bombay; a letter from Sir John Malcolm to Lord William Bentinck; and an “Extract of Private Letter from Lt. Col. Macdonald to Sir John Malcolm.”

In the famous train ride scene of Anna Karenina, Anna reads “an English novel” and imagines herself the heroine—caring for a sick man, making speeches in Parliament, and riding to hounds (1:29). That she is reading about other people distresses her, because she wants to do all these things herself. She envisions herself joining “the hero of the novel [who] was about to attain the English notion of happiness—a baronetcy and an estate.” The English novel traditionally conveys a sense of orderliness, propriety, and happiness in marriage and home, and if we judge from appearances, Anna's daydreams of English happiness find fulfillment at Vozdvizhenskoe. There is a deliberate accumulation of things English on Vronsky's estate, as if these outward trappings might assure stability and well-being. When first we see Anna on the estate she is riding a “kob” (both the horse and the word are borrowed from the English). Vronsky has a racing stable and stud farm, and keeps an English trainer and jockey in his employ; his horses are clipped short in the English fashion. The nursery furnishings are all imported from England, including the head nurse.

The Seventh World Congress of Sociologists in Varna, Bulgaria, held in September 1970, marked a major stage in the development of social science, particularly sociology, in the one-party states of Eastern Europe. Taking place in the most orthodox country of an increasingly diverse bloc, the congress was characterized by the largest and best-organized participation to date of sociologists from Eastern Europe. One country in the area—Albania—did not participate at all; and Yugoslavia, which is probably the country with the most developed social science community and institutions, had a notably small delegation. Yet the fact is that for prestige reasons, if no other, the East European countries and the Soviet Union did their best to show the state of their current development of sociology. This was shown in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most delegates presented papers.