A state's power, indeed its very survival, is closely related to the adequacy of its military organization to meet foreign policy needs. Not only is this adequacy dependent upon manpower and other economic resources, plus efficiency, training, and morale factors; it is also greatly affected by weapons technology.

Alexander Gerschenkron has noted that the requirements of external war compelled Russia to seek the most advanced military techniques even though it lacked a comparable level of economic and technological development. Russia's attempts to meet these needs deeply involved the government in the country's economic development, with the result, Gerschenkron argues, that this development was “peculiarly jerky,” because the government's intervention in the economy fluctuated according to military exigencies. During periods of great military need the government would place heavy burdens on the population; then, when the emergency passed, the government would relax its intervention in the economy, leaving the country disorganized and exhausted.

It is easy to ignore the career of Vasilii Nazarevich Karazin, and, indeed, most treatments of imperial Russia do so. When Karazin is mentioned, he is usually described as a rather ridiculous figure, the putative “Marquis Posa“ of Alexander I who had a spectacularly short public career, or simply as that “harebrained Ukrainian.“ Yet Karazin is hardly unknown; he is almost universally credited with being the founder of Kharkov University and is the subject of a number of works that picture him as an able, active public figure. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to argue Karazin's importance or to decide whether or not he was “harebrained” but to explore his role in the foundation of Kharkov University as a useful case study of the relationship between the autocracy and the gentry in the early nineteenth century.

The revaluation of the literary past was a central preoccupation of the Russian symbolists. Some of these reassessments (Gogol and Dostoevsky in particular come to mind) have remained surprisingly fresh and valid after the passage of more than half a century. It is all the more ironic, then, that for decades the work of the Russian symbolists has been shamefully neglected by the critics. In Russia itself most of these fine poets are hardly mentioned, while a few, such as Blok and Briusov, are presented in such a fashion as to be unrecognizable. Outside Russia there have been valuable contributions to our knowledge of this period (by Mochulsky, Makovsky, Stepun, Tschižewskij, and Setschkarev, as well as Holthusen and other German scholars), but even here there is sometimes undue reliance on doubtful opinions which were formed fifty years ago; Mochulsky, for example, is guilty of this.

The selection of a successor to Archbishop Dinder of the Poseń-Gnesen (Poznań-Gniezno) archdiocese resulted in one of the more interesting episodes in German-Polish relations. Coming as it did, just after the fall of the Iron Chancellor, the process of selection revealed with the utmost clarity the perceptions and priorities of the participating Germans and Poles.

The history of the Posen-Gnesen archbishopric gave significance to the question, for in the German Empire, as both German and Pole knew, only the Posen-Gnesen archdiocese had customarily had a Polish archbishop. This churchman tended to be the Polish community's most prominent spokesman and its visible head. He symbolized a unique and worthy tradition. In his person, until 1886, Polonia lived. Then, in that year, the Vatican and Bismarck dealt a severe blow to the Polish community by agreeing on the German Dinder to succeed the Pole Ledóchowski who had been forced to surrender his position.

In March 1921 Lenin predicted, “If there is a harvest, everybody will hunger a little and the government will be saved. Otherwise, since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means to satisfy their own hunger, the government will perish.“ By early summer, Russia was in the grip of one of the worst famines in its history. Lenin's gloomy forecast, however, was never put to the test. At almost the last moment, substantial help in the form of food, clothing, and medical supplies arrived from a most unexpected source —U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

Hoover undertook the relief of Soviet Russia not as an official representative of the United States government but as the head of a private agency —the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.).