In terms of ultimate consequences, history may well record the past two years as among the most significant for the future of Russia and the world. The following three quotations indicate a key to analysis:

But with the suppression of the political life throughout the land, the life of the Soviets also must grow more and more paralyzed. Without general elections, unrestricted freedom of the press and of assembly, free conflict of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, be-comes a mere semblance of life, in which the bureaucracy remains alone as the active element. No one can evade this law. The public life gradually falls asleep, a dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless idealism direct and govern. Among these, the actual leadership is exercised by a dozen pre-eminent brains, and a selected group of the workers is invited to meetings from time to time to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve by unanimous vote the resolutions laid before them.

Danegeld was the first general tax in our modern sense in Western Europe, since older Roman taxes had become the personal liabilities of members of municipal councils long before the vikings began to lay tributes on their conquered lands. In France and elsewhere along the shores of the North Sea and the English Channel tributes were occasionally levied by marauding vikings, but there was no regular assessment, nor did it become general. In England, however, its insular position, and the two foreign conquests by Danes and Normans within a half-century fastened upon the whole population a tax, universal in application and therefore generally hated.

In Russia during the ninth century, there existed two societies having their basis in trade. One was the kingdom of the Khazars utilizing the Baltic, Volga, Caspian route and the other the Varangian communities along the river routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was along this water road that the Varangians established their trade with Constantinople and controlled the cities that grew into the first Russian state.

In view of the fact that the Khazar state had existed for at least two centuries before the appearance of the Varangians and controlled a flourishing trade with the Slavs, the Persians, and the Arabs along the Don and Volga rivers, the question arises of why the Varangians and not the Khazars succeeded in establishing the Russian state and in controlling Russian trade.

The application of Marxist concepts to Russia has long served to obscure some of the main lines of Russian development, for there is probably no country in Europe in which Marxism has so little relevance as in Russia. Marxist studies of the labor problem in Russia are particularly subject to great confusion, since two of Marxism's fundamental tenets are directly contradicted by any realistic study of Russian labor. It has, for example, been no secret to specialists who have read something on Russian labor other than the works of Lenin and Stalin that Russia did not have a proletariat in the Western sense of the term. The workers in Russia were for the most part peasants who remained members of a village commune and possessors of allotment land. Driven to the city originally by the necessity of supplementing their inadequate earnings from the land, a part of them were seasonal workers, who came to seek work in the factories in the fall and winter, and regularly returned to their land in time for the harvest.

It is not Commonly Realized in Western society, where industries have grown by gradual stages, how painful and even subversive an influence industrialization has been in Russia (and other agricultural societies on the fringes of Europe or in the non-European world). When at the end of the nineteenth century Russian industries multiplied and brought in their train innumerable features of Western European urban-industrial life, they appeared to many Russians as a source of social, economic, and even political revolution. No wonder then that industrialization called forth vehement disputes among those concerned over the future of Russia. Such agitation reached a peak in the polemics between Narodniks and Marxists over the fate of capitalism in Russia, at a time when Russia experienced her first great spurt of industrial construction, from 1894–1899. This public debate—it was truly a “great debate,” touching the fundamentals of a people's creed—resembled, and indeed continued in modern terms, the controversy between the Slavophiles and Westernizers two generations earlier. But “while in their time the polemics between the Slavophiles and Westernizers were carried on between the four walls of a few salons in the midst of a select circle of advanced thinkers, the quarrel between the Narodniks and Marxists in the nineties gripped broad social groups and at one time, it can be said, absorbed almost completely the intellectual interests of the Russian people.”

The post-war soviet campaign to celebrate Russian inventive genius has been carried even into fields where native preëminence is itself only a Russian invention. But there remains one field where one might hope to see Soviet assertiveness become still bolder, and that is in the study of the development of Russian revolutionary thought. It is true that in recent years increased attention has been paid in the Soviet Union to the Russian precursors of Marx. But boldness in this direction is obviously inhibited by a reluctance to let national vanity show disrespect toward the authority of Marx and Engels.

One of the most noticeable features of the nineteenth century was that nationalism played a much more important role in the lives of Europeans than ever before. The underlying causes for the increased importance of nationalism are to be sought in the general economic, social, and cultural history of the time. In the present study the last of these factors will be discussed under the title of “Romantic Nationalism” as it applies to one country, Russia.

The words “romanticism” and “nationalism” tend to be vague and have been used in varying contexts. Here the expression “romantic nationalism” will have two connotations: i) a romantic-outlook with regard to life in general and specifically to nationalism as opposed to the rationalism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlighten-ment; 2) historicism as defined by Meinecke in his Entstehung des Historismus.

The romantic outlook is one which exalts intuition, passion, and spontaneity, and defends feeling and freedom in general against the demands of reason, society, and the standards of classical esthetic criticism.

Three times in the History of Europe the armed forces of Russia have appeared west of the Rhine. In 1799 a Russian expeditionary army arrived in Holland and participated with the British in an unsuccessful, hence forgotten, invasion of the Netherlands. From December 1813 to November 1818, with a relatively short intermission of one year, Russian armies fought in France during the final act of the Napoleonic drama and later contributed to a quadripartite occupation. Finally, in 1915–17 small Russian units were sent to the Western Front in the form of a token force to manifest Allied unity. Never did these events possess a significance beyond that of historical episodes: yet the appearance of the Russian soldier in Western Europe was generally connected with characteristic circumstances which may be of some interest to the student of Russo-European relations.

“Yesterday the Czar [sic] of Muscovy was brought from Greenwich in his majesties barge, and at present lyes incognito at a house joyning to the water-side in Norfolk Street.“ Thus simply a contemporary chronicler recorded the arrival in London of Peter I in January, 1698. What did the people amongst whom he was setting foot for the first and only time know of the country from which he had come?

Not unexpectedly, they knew very little about Russia, and few of them felt more than a superficial interest in events there.

The area officially declared in the twenties to be occupied by the northern minority nationalities comprises about half of the territory of the Soviet Union. Its southern boundary extends all the way from Kandalaksha through Kozhva, Tobol'sk, and Yeniseisk to Sovetskaya Gavan'. According to the census of 1926, its sparse population totaled some 645,000, of whom only 56 percent, or 366,000, were northern nomads. Administratively the northern territory excluding the Kola Peninsula, Kamchatka and some other regions, is divided at present into the Yakut and Komi Autonomous Republics and into the following seven national okrugs: the Nenets, Yamal-Nenets, Khanty-Mansi, Taimyr, Evenki, Chukchi, and Koryak.

By the Fundamental State Law of the Russian Empire, as revised in 1906, certain guarantees were defined concerning freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly. These were civil rights presumably to be applied without reference to such limitations as nationality or religion. However, sufficient loopholes were left for the Government, so that it is more to the point to speak of temporary concessions rather than rights, liberties, or freedoms. From time to time, and in varying degrees, the Government placed restrictions on their practice by both Russians and non-Russians, Orthodox and non-Orthodox. This was especially true during World War I. Russia's executive remained autocratic and arbitrary, regardless of the physiognomy of the constitutional mask. Many of the traditions of the Russia of the Romanov dynasty were in direct contradiction to the principles of Western European liberal thought which had been superimposed on the autocratic base in 1906 to form the so-called “constitutional” regime. Therefore, there were basic ideological conflicts inherent in the political structure as defined by the new Fundamental State Law.

That question has been recently answered affirmatively by Professor Oscar Halecki of Fordham University in an article entitled “Imperialism in Slavic and East European History” in the February 1952 issue of this journal. Mr. Halecki's charges necessitate a reexamination of underlying issues. The following article will state briefly the views of a few Russian and Polish historians and indicate how their views might affect any answer which might be made to the question; moreover, since the charge that Muscovite Russia was imperialistic is based mainly upon developments in the second half of the fifteenth century, discussion will focus upon that period.

Before examining the works of historians, it would be useful to indicate a little of the history of Muscovite Russia and Lithuania, the two states central to a discussion of this question, during a broader period, namely that from the fourteenth century through the sixteenth century. It would also be useful to take up the problem of defining imperialism.

Western work on the Soviet economy is producing two new academic subjects: the first, which for want of a better term may be called the study of the Soviet “political economy,” includes the second, which may be described as statistical work on the Soviet economy. By “political economy” we mean the study of the structure of the society concerned in its dynamic economic aspect; and by statistical work we mean the collection, testing, aggregation and experimental manipulation of economic statistics (for example, national income studies which exclude consideration of the social relationships involved or the causes and effects within the social structure of producing and distributing that income).

The purpose of this paper is to provide a) data on USSR nonagricultural employment and its distribution by broad sectors of the economy, b) “explanatory” comments on employment trends, and c) descriptions of USSR employment classifications and statistics.

At the Sixth Conference of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party held in Prague in January, 1912, the Bolsheviks, under Lenin's leadership, expelled the Mensheviks, arrogated the party name and organization to themselves and elected a Central Committee under their control. They also decided to publish a legal daily newspaper in Russia which was to be the chief vehicle for spreading Bolshevik propaganda among the workers and was intended to spearhead their campaign in the forthcoming Duma elections. When the paper appeared on the streets of St. Petersburg on April 22, 1912 (old style), it bore the name which has since become world-renowned: Pravda.

This first version of Pravda was published until July 8, 1914, when it was finally suppressed. At various times, its staff and contributors included Lenin, Ol'minskij, Molotov, Zinov'ev, Kamenev, Stalin, Bubnov, Sverdlov, Bukharin and many others who later became prominent in the Soviet Government. Lenin appears to have been the dominant figure on the paper. From Cracow, safe from the reaches of the Okhrana, he guided its destinies with an iron hand. His principal assistants were Zinov'ev and Kamenev, who left Paris to join him there.

A collection of two hundred and forty-one highly incriminating documents which expose Russian policy during the critical decade of the eighteen-eighties was originally published in Bulgaria in 1892 by D. Petkov under the title, The Occupation Fund. The documents are best known to Western scholars in the French and German translations of R. Leonoff, entitled Documents secrets de la politique russe en orient, 1881-1890, and Geheime Dokumente der russischen Orient-Politik, 1881-1890 respectively. Since they were allegedly stolen from the secret archives of the Russian consulates in Bulgaria and Rumania by a former Russian official, Mikhail Jakobson, the group is frequently referred to as the Jakobson collection. The Documents secrets created a great sensation in their day, were denounced as forgeries by the tsarist Government and historians, and have remained a controversial collection ever since their publication.

The October 1953 issue of The American Slavic and East European Review contains an article by Charles and Barbara Jelavich entitled “The Occupation Fund Documents: a Diplomatic Forgery.”

The recent pronouncements on Party agricultural policy (September-October, 1953) were accompanied by quite frank admission that all is not well on the Soviet farm. This melancholy story of low yields and stagnant output went far in substantiating what critical students of Soviet agriculture have long indicated—often in the face of rather astounding claims to general success. For example, they have pointed to the wide variations in prosperity and efficiency among kolkhozy (collective farms) in the same area, a fact only now admitted and subject to wide comment in the official press. Unfortunately, however, available materials have been far too scanty to allow a detailed assessment of agriculture in any one area; statistics which do exist purposely omit a great deal. While the fact of low peasant incomes in some areas is admitted (indeed Khrushchev spoke of migration of discontented peasants to the towns), the actual level of these incomes remains a state secret. What is more, the practice generally followed has been one of giving detailed descriptions, in glowing terms, of kolkhozy which are quite atypical of their particular area.

Mao Tse-tung's 1949 victory has frequently been credited to Mao's ability as an astute peasant revolutionary rather than to his standing as an orthodox Communist leader. The record suggests that Stalin's development of tactics for Mao had more influence on the course of events than is commonly supposed. It is the purpose of this study to indicate the influence upon the Chinese revolutionary leadership of Stalin's doctrines.

Propaganda in England on behalf of the Rumanian exiles of 1848 is chiefly associated with the name of Dumitru Brătianu. But the revolutionary politician and historical scholar, Nicolae Bălcescu, also played a part in it. His activities, which are here studied on the basis of the correspondence published by his friend, Ion Ghica (the first Ambassador of the Kingdom of Rumania in London), are especially interesting because they brought him into contact with Cobden and Palmerston.

Bălcescu had been one of the leaders of the 1848 revolution in Wallachia. After his mission to the Hungarian revolutionary government, he escaped from Transylvania and, coming by Pest and Vienna, reached Paris on October 16, 1849. Within a few days he had seen the other Rumanian émigrés there, and on October 26 he suggested to Ion Ghica, who was in exile at Constantinople, that he ask on his behalf for a post as an attache or secretary at the Turkish Embassy in London.

In the five years since the Yugoslav-Soviet split, the ideological, political, and economic complexion of Marshal Tito's Communist state has been altered in a number of basic respects. It is still too early to attempt to say how the new Yugoslav reforms will work out in practice. Particularly one does not know to what extent the new role of the Communist Party has in fact altered the balance of political power in Yugoslavia, or whether it has altered it at all. But the major reforms now seem to have been completed, at least on paper, and it is possible to summarize them and make some tentative, over-all conclusions.