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.

A new approach to the study of national character is being developed out of principles and research methods drawn from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This approach differs from its predecessors in that it seeks the key to an understanding of cultural and historical processes in the influences of early childhood upbringing upon the formation of adult personality. The work of Geoffrey Gorer illustrates, although in an extreme form, the principal lines of thought of this school. Thus, he has tried to explain some of the main features of American culture and history in terms of the child's rejection of the father. From severe toilet training he derives major clues to Japanese culture and history.

The first ten articles of the Constitution of the USSR establish the social ownership of the means of production as the political and economic basis of the Soviet state. Article Eleven sets forth the second distinguishing feature of the Soviet economy: “The economic life of the USSR is determined by the state national economic plan.“

The extent and efficiency of Soviet planning is a subject of absorbing interest to students of the Soviet economy. Interest is heightened by the effusive writings of Soviet economists, which depict the plan as an all-embracing, tightly knit system of relationships and controls which leaves little or no room for errors or misallocation of resources. The plan reaches down to the most minute elements of the economy.

Count M. M. Speranskij, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant statesmen tsarist Russia has ever produced, wrote in the Introduction to the Code of Laws of 1809, that the “Russian constitution will owe its existence not to the excitement of passions and the exigency of circumstances, but to the blessed inspiration of the Supreme Power…”. He was wrong. The “blessed” Supreme Power granted reforms to the Russian people only reluctantly and, with few exceptions, always under pressure of revolutionary impact.

The American revolution and its leaders: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, stirred the imagination and hope of the entire freedom-loving world not only in the eighteenth century, but even later, especially when it became clear that the French Revolution, submerging its republican principles in the Napoleonic regime and in the Bourbon restoration, would not fulfill its initial commitments. America alone remained the embodiment of those democratic principles for which mankind had already proved its willingness to fight.

Timothy Granovskij's opinions of and attitudes towards the United States have never been investigated in any adequate way. The fact is that, in company with many outstanding figures of the Russian intelligentsia of those times, the distinguished professor at Moscow University did display a marked interest in American affairs. He never presented such full and well-rounded views as did Herzen or Ĉernysevŝkij a little later, but sparse as were Granovskij's comments upon American life and institutions, they are of significance to us today. From the eyes of this enlightened Russian, we may derive fruitful perspectives upon certain aspects of the American past.

Near the end of 1925, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was rocked at its foundations by one of the most intense and profound ideological controversies in its history. The ruling “Troika“ of Zinov'ev, Kamenev and Stalin was torn asunder over a series of crucial problems which largely turned on the question of “socialism in one country,” formulated by Stalin in the latter part of 1924. To its opponents, the theory smacked of “national narrowness” and a fatal revision of Marxist orthodoxy.

It was G. E. Zinov'ev, gifted agitator, long-time friend of Lenin, and member of the powerful Politburo of the Party, who assumed the initiative in attacking Stalin's theory and splitting the Party wide open. Having organized the “New Opposition” in October, 1925, he officially opened the attack at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December.

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.

A central fact of modern living is the knowledge that in the sphere of social relations and institutions “natural law” does not control and “natural rights” do not exist. Man's culture is what he makes it, and rights are the product of social action. Planned change on a culture-wide scale lies ready to our hand. If the course of institutional change is uneven and, in the main, slow, this is not due to the fact that present institutional forms are either functionally adequate or founded on “higher” laws, or that human beings are “naturally” averse to change.

Actually, human behavior is vastly malleable; but at the same time man also exhibits huge patience in wearing inherited institutional hair shirts.

The transformation of the Soviet Union from a federation of theoretically autonomous republics and regions, each having the full “right of self-determination even to the point of separation” into a highly centralized state, is a complicated development. This steady growth in centralization is attributable to a number of factors, ranging from the ambivalence of Lenin's attitude towards centralism and self-determination to the overriding effect of such centralizing forces as economic planning; a highly centralized single Ail-Union Communist Party, whose constituent “national parties” soon became mere propaganda sections; a centralized All-Union police; and finally, a series of purges for “nationalist deviations.”

Relatively little primary source material has been published about the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and the uncanny political relationship between Berlin and the “independent” Ukraine recognised at Brest-Litovsk. The volume of secret German documents, which appeared as a Soviet publication in 1936, has every indication of authenticity. But since the work was primarily published as a weapon in the Nazi-Soviet propaganda war at a time when Hitler was obviously eyeing the Ukraine, it is apparent that the documents were selected (1) to emphasize particularly German military domination and interference in civilian life, requisitioning of food and raw materials, and commercial rapacity, and (2) to castigate all those Ukrainians who did not resist the Central Powers or who participated in non-Communist activity for Ukrainian independence.

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.

Since then, you absent, I have turned slow pages—
“Fire of Life,” “Windlands,” “Childbirth,” “Only Dreamscape,“
Down to the veined complexity of “Stray Leaves,“
Critics find baffling.
Rapt and plumed splendour of the risen spirit,
Staking its all on foreign revolution;
Blackest eclipse of promised land in exile,—
So run the rhythms.
White love and pangs of birth in ancient symbols,
Impulses, probings of the years of anguish,
Last, the terse wisdom, grateful for survival,
Knowing no conquest.
W. K. Matthews, “Candles.“

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.

No nation succeeds fully in anticipating the effects of war. Certainly, this is true insofar as the recent war effected the housing law of the Soviet Union. When war came on June 22, 1941, there instantly arose the necessity of removing all manner of industrial plants and cultural institutions eastward away from the endangered areas. The employees of these factories and institutions were transported to the new sites. Numbers of key personnel, specialists, and highlyskilled workers were individually ordered eastward to work in the relocated plants. Moreover, numbers of individuals who played only a passive role in the war effort—housewives, families of workers and military personnel, invalids—were allowed and encouraged to travel away from the more active war areas. This mass migration of citizens produced unprecedented questions of housing rights.

The Russo-Japanese War, which had begun in February, 1904, as a result of friction between these two countries in Manchuria and northern Korea, was one long military disaster for the Russian army. The Japanese army moved from victory to victory, proving its superiority in the battles of Liao-Yang and Sha-ho in August and October, 1904, the fall of Port Arthur in January, 1905, and the battle of Mukden in February and March. On May 27, the Japanese navy proved itself by virtually destroying the Russian fleet in the battle of Tsushima.

In spite of what seemed to be great good fortune, however, all was not well with the Japanese.

The years 1933 to 1946 were disastrous for the study of Eastern Europe in Germany—more so than for most other fields of research. Hitler's attitude toward Russia and Eastern Europe as well as toward Jews led to the exodus of a number of scholars (among them Fritz Epstein, Viktor Frank, Herbert Freund, Waldemar Gurian, Sergius Yakobson, the brothers Kulischer, Wolfgang Leppmann, Leo Loewenson, G. Ostrogorskij, Richard Salomon, Alexander von Schelting, Leopold Silberstein).

Most present-day American readers of Leo Tolstoy, though profoundly impressed by his works of fiction, are likely to ignore his religious and social treatises. They forget that Tolstoy's social ideas contributed to the stream of serious thought in the United States and impressed deeply such moulders of public opinion as Edward Everett Hale, Ernest Crosby, Brand Whitlock, and Clarence Darrow. The most eminent American admirer of Tolstoy was the novelist and essayist, William Dean Howells. Several writers have mentioned the intellectual bond between these two men. However, the profound impact and the lastingly detailed influence of Tolstoy's ideas on the thought of Howells have been seriously underestimated.