The year 1928 was a turning point not only for Soviet cultural policy but for policy in all fields. It was the beginning of a new revolution which overturned everything but the Stalinist leadership, an upheaval so violent that it seemed that the ruling party had revolted simultaneously against the society it governed and its own governing institutions. Among these institutions was the Commissariat of Enlightenment, headed by A. V. Lunacharsky and responsible for implementing policy in the sphere of education and the arts. In 1928 the Commissariat was accused of “softness” in its dealings with the intelligentsia, lack of “Communist vigilance,” and failure to understand the significance of “class war on the cultural front.” This “softness” was not peculiar to the Commissariat, except in degree. Right deviation in the party, it was said, had led a bureaucratized government apparat in retreat from true communism to liberalism; and the essence of this retreat was conciliation of the bourgeois peasantry and intelligentsia.

Historians are generally agreed that during the first two years of World War I American feeling against Germany was far stronger and more intense than against Austria-Hungary. While relations between the Germanic and American peoples had not been truly friendly since the 1880s, attitudes in the United States toward Austria-Hungary were much less antagonistic. Historically there had been little direct contact between the latter two countries. It scarcely seemed necessary to Americans. The area was not only remote geographically but also remote from the national interest. As a result, there appeared to be no deep-rooted bitterness or resentment in the historic relationship between the two nations. Indeed, in the period immediately preceding the war, relations between Austria-Hungary and the United States had consisted largely of diplomatic formalities even though before the war, Austria-Hungary, next to Italy, had furnished the largest European immigration to the United States. Americans for the most part were unaware that Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire composed of many diverse ethnic groups. Few Americans knew of the vast numbers of immigrants who had come from Austria-Hungary from the areas of Slovakia and Bohemia.

Czechoslovakia has undergone revolutionary changes in its political and institutional structure several times in the twentieth century. In 1918 the leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks decided to sever their political umbilical cords to Vienna and Budapest, giving birth to the Czechoslovak Republic, a democratic state that differed considerably from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had emerged. In 1938 this democracy gave way to a semiauthoritarian regime, the so-called Second Republic. The Second Republic existed for a few months at Hitler's sufferance, only to be divided into two parts, both controlled by the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. In 1948, after a three-year attempt to harmonize Communist and non-Communist parties in a left-leaning National Front government, Czechoslovakia became for twenty years an autocratic Communist state. During these two decades the methods of rule varied from totalitarian (1948-53) to what might be called moderately authoritarian (1963-67).

A previously untapped source of evidence about the Beseda circle, a seminal institution in the development of the Russian opposition movement on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, has come to the author's attention since the appearance of his article on Beseda in the Slavic Review (“The Beseda Circle, 1899-1905,“ September 1973, pp. 461-90). This is the unpublished personal notes of Prince D. I. Shakhovskoy, a member of the circle throughout its existence. Although Shakhovskoy's transcriptions of the circle's discussions are much less systematic and detailed than those preserved in the circle's papers in the Maklakov archive which served as the basis for the Slavic Review article, his notes are of considerable value because they are devoted precisely to those early years of the circle's existence (1899-1903) which are poorly represented in the Maklakov papers. (The transcripts of only two meetings prior to 1904 are preserved there.)

On Sunday, February 24, 1852, the epilogue to the tragicomedy which was N. V. Gogol's life was played out in the University Chapel in Moscow. Curiosity seekers, government officials, members of high society—“people who had not wanted to know Gogol during his lifetime,” Khomiakov bitterly remarked later—thronged the final rites performed over the writer’s emaciated body. Among the crowd in the chapel was Gogol's old acquaintance, N. F. Pavlov (1803-64), a former serf, actor, university student, law clerk, and journalist who had made his way into Moscow’s beau monde and had married a wealthy heiress.

Stalin's little-known 1928 caper, the production and distribution of bogus hundred-dollar bills, was preceded by an even less known venture of the same sort. Specialists in East European history have left it unexplored during the decades which have passed since it occurred, and several aspects of the plot behind it, as well as some of its most powerful supporters, remain unknown. It happened in 1925, and involved a string of high-ranking Hungarian civilian and military personages, with a prince at one end and a bishop at the other.

In 1896 Hungarians celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of their conquest of the Central European Plains. Intoxicated with the heady wine of nationalism, they seemed almost to believe that their millennium prefigured the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in the book of Revelation. Public officials loudly proclaimed Hungary to be the best of all possible worlds and extolled the virtues of patriotism in the most extravagant terms. Publicists eulogized the Hungarian national genius and lamented that all of Eastern Europe was not ruled by Magyars. The most enthusiastic patriots confidently predicted yet another thousand years of national glory.

An historian of early Russian history faces many methodological problems, not the least of which is the paucity of sources for the Kievan and Mongol periods. Because of the dearth of material, historians of the medieval Russian town, such as M. N. Tikhomirov and A. M. Sakharov, have generally presented a static conceptualization of urban society, thereby obscuring the dynamic processes and nuances of historical development. Despite the many studies of Novgorod, one can fairly state that historians have often described fourteenth and fifteenth-century Novgorod as though it were virtually unchanged since 1136, when the town declared its independence from Kiev. While recognizing the importance of the Sovet gospod (Council of Lords) and posadnik (mayor), some historians have nevertheless insisted that the veche (assembly) was the sovereign body of the republic. Its meetings were open to the town's citizens, and though the veche at times degenerated into brawls, no prince or posadnik could effectively govern without its concurrence. Indeed, George Vernadsky characterized Novgorod as a democratic republic, somewhat reminiscent of the Greek polis, while Tikhomirov viewed Novgorod's political traditions as similar to those of the urban communes of medieval Europe.

The Soviet statistical authorities first published an input-output table (for 1959) in their statistical yearbook of 1960; they had recommenced issuing their general abstracts in 1956—a direct consequence of, and only a few weeks after, the Twentieth Party Congress—following a lapse of nearly two decades. The input-output table as published was incomplete, and the coverage of the annual abstracts has only modestly increased since it reached its present size in 1958. The lacunae have presented a challenge to Western economists in three respects. The first difficulty is in reconstructing a series only part of which has been officially published. The best example of this lies in the reconstruction of input-output tables described below. The second challenge is to estimate aggregates (including the filling in of time series) which the statistical authorities of the USSR choose either not to make public or to publish in nontabular form.

Explanations of the success of Soviet rapid industrialization during the 1930s, whether put forward by Western or Soviet scholars, have generally presupposed the “extraction” of a substantial net contribution from the agricultural sector. According to this view the rapid pace of industrialization, especially during the early years of the campaign, demanded an agricultural contribution well in excess of what might have been obtained by relying on the voluntary acquiescence of the peasantry. Forced mass collectivization, by replacing private (peasant) discretion over the amount, composition, and marketed share of agricultural output with centralized administrative coercion, has been supposed to have ensured the necessary increased flow of agricultural products to industry and urban centers and to have severed the potentially constraining link between the pace of industrialization and peasant willingness to expand output and particularly, marketings in the face of increasingly adverse terms of exchange.