During the first half of the 1870s the character of the revolutionary movement in Russia changed considerably. At this time the movement spread its base of operation and its organizational effectiveness beyond the confines of St. Petersburg. The idea of a widespread revolutionary movement led by radical circles operating in several large cities was not a new conception in the 1870s. The efforts of Zemlia i Volia, Velikoruss, Ishutin, Karakozov, and Nechaev are all testimony to the emergence of a permanent underground opposition aimed against the ruling tsarist regime. Between 1869 and 1874, however, this process reached a new level with the activities of the Chaikovsky Circle, which managed to survive for five years under various names and in spite of even more various ideological approaches to the problem of revolution. This circle succeeded in building a truly nationwide network of affiliated groups which provided the initial revolutionary experience and loyalty to radicalism for many later members of the second Zemlia i Volia, Narodnaia Volia's executive committee, and the growing ranks of young Russian Marxists in the 1880s.

Interest in Peter Tkachev, the angry young man of the Russian revolutionary movement in the 1860s and 870s, has generally been focused on his role as a “forerunner of Lenin.” Indeed, that is what Professor Michael Karpovich called him in an article published several decades ago. More recently Professor Albert L. Weeks has gone so far as to dub Tkachev “the first Bolshevik.” In his Tkachev biography Professor Weeks has included a study of similar Soviet opinions, that is, of the great debate in the early 1920s centering on the relationship of Lenin, Tkachev, and Auguste Blanqui, from whom Tkachev drew much of his inspiration.

The mention of “gastronomy and Gogol” may immediately make us think of the good-natured pair in Old-Fashioned Landowners, who, if they were not eating, were sure to be sleeping. Or perhaps what comes to mind is that remarkable five-by-five figure of Peter Petrovich Petukh, whom Gogol appropriately described as a “round watermelon.” And who can forget how Sobakevich ever so quietly and “innocently” alone dispatched that noble sturgeon at the breakfast party given by the chief of police, or how the thoroughly tipsy Khlestakov bragged about the “dream of a soup” that was delivered to him in St. Petersburg from no other gastronomic paradise than Paris itself. Nor can we forget Khlestakov's other soup—the one more like the River Nile (with feathers)—which was so ill-received and yet eaten with such alacrity by the starving braggart. Perhaps only Vladimir Nabokov did not laugh at Puzatyi Paciuk and his ingenious way of transporting varenyky to his mouth without moving an inch—and he first had to dip them into a dish of sour cream that was placed on a low barrel in front of him. And what about that pan of fried eggs that was rushed onto the stage in Meyerhold's production of Gogol's The Marriage, in which one of the suitors for the hand of the merchant's daughter—much to the confusion of the others—is called “Fried Eggs.”

Shrouded behind a veil of semisecrecy, the making of policy decisions in the Soviet Union has been a fertile source of endless speculation and research. From time to time, happily, it becomes possible to penetrate rather deeply into the arcana of the process and turn up some illuminating materials. The decision to cultivate the virgin lands is a good case in point, and now the older Western analyses of the politics surrounding that event can be expanded substantially on the basis of information published in recent years.

Interest in Finnish communism has been high in recent years and seems to be, at least in part, a reflection of two facts. First, the Finnish party, like the Communist parties of Italy and France, has been able to poll at least 20 percent of the popular vote in parliamentary elections. Second, the father of Finnish communism, Otto Kuusinen, was from 1957 until his death in 1964 a member of the Secretariat and Presidium (Politburo) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The reader should, however, keep in mind that Finnish communism has a long and dramatic history dating back to the formation of the party in 1918. This history falls logically into three periods: 1918-30, when the party was in theory legal but in practice illegal; 1930-44, when the party was formally proscribed; and 1944 to the present, a period during which the party has been able to act in the open as a registered, legal organization.