Can Fiction be considered a serious source of information on modern economic history? In a recent article on English novels in the 1840s, William O. Aydelotte points out that information of such nature as contained in the works of the four most important social novelists of that decade (Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell) “is highly suspect for the scholar's purpose” because “it is spotty, impressionistic, and inaccurate.“ This is a harsh verdict. Yet, in a somewhat milder form, it may well prove generally valid. The truth probably is that the economic historian of modern times does not need the aid of contemporaneous novels or plays. The social historian may indeed be greatly interested in inquiring as to why certain novels were written and why they were read. But this is a different matter.

Wages Provide the Soviet retail employee with the direct incentive to work. There are, however, many things which money alone cannot buy. Apart from his direct monetary earnings, the Soviet worker may find that what he is able to get out of life depends to an equally large extent upon where he works, how he works and what is thought of him as a citizen, as well as an employee, by the Party, the labor union, the management, and other active arms of official government policy.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was national as well as political in character. The official policy of repressing national minorities had aroused discontent; the force of nationalism had made itself felt among the submerged nationalities in Russia, promoting both the desire to throw off legal disabilities and the hope of gaining national rights within the Russian Empire. The Jews, subject to the most onerous restrictions, had begun to join nationalistic organizations in the hope that they could influence in some measure their destiny.

The Cultural Tightening of the screws which has been going on in Russia since the end of the war received its most dramatic expression in the condemnation of the Leningrad writers in August, 1946, and has since extended itself to other fields of culture, notably philosophy, economics, music, biology and physics. In the field of literary criticism, a minor storm arose over the head of Dostoevski], battering many unfortunates who were engaged in the game of trying to fit this large and complex literary figure in among the spiritual ancestors of the Revolution.