Soviet reactions to Western writings on the Soviet Union are as old as the Soviet regime itself. They are handled in an organized manner, with targets, delivery vehicles and gradation of response carefully coordinated and measured.

Soviet response is, moreover, not solely connected to the perceived degree of offensiveness of the given Western work; in addition, such considerations as general relations between the USSR and the country from where the publication came, as well as political opportunities of the moment, are given even more importance than the committed “offense.”

This essay in political historiography aims to show how Professor Richard Pipes's monumental work on Soviet nationalities has been received by Soviet publications. It is more limited in scope than the main title connotes, since it does not deal with Soviet reactions to the totality of Pipes's scholarly work, only to an early but important part of his opus; nor is it concerned with Soviet attacks on Pipes's government service. The printed media surveyed include mostly articles in professional journals and books. Working through the Current Digest of the Soviet Press, this writer has tried to locate Soviet newspaper articles dealing with Pipes's work on nationalities, but has had no success. This is less of a shortcoming than it first appears, because even articles in Soviet scholarly journals, even books undergirded with an impressive scholarly apparatus, insofar as they deal with such a sensitive topic as the partial failure to solve the nationality problem, cannot but follow the party's policies of the moment. Apolitical historiography in the Soviet Union simply does not exist.

Many scholars have written on Soviet nationality policies, including language policies. This article does not aspire to add to the general literature of the subject. Rather, it is concerned with one particular decision of the Soviet leadership regarding the periodical press. All information presented here is derived from Soviet sources. Those sources include, first of all, a periodical that is not generally known in the West, which may explain why the decision in question was not noted by foreign observers when it was announced in that particular periodical.

The relationship between Islam and ethnicity has generally been studied almost exclusively from a theoretical (theological) and/or practical (historical) viewpoint of the Muslims themselves. If we observe this problem from another point of view, that of the Islamized natives, we discover that there exists a tacit consensus as to the three levels or degrees according to which Islamized peoples can be classified: (a) a maximum or even total confluence of Islam and ethnicity, as in the Arab lands and in Daghestan; (b) a partial distinction between Islam and ethnicity, stemming from a certain ‘ethnicization’ of Islam, as in Shia Iran; and (c) a somewhat vague decentralization between these two focal points, as in Turkestan, Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

After the outbreak of World War II, the Bulgarian government pursued a policy of non-alignment. In the fall of 1940 it rejected plans for a combined Italian-Bulgarian attack against Greece. And when Italy alone invaded Greece, Bulgaria facilitated Greek resistance by her own passivity. When Germany called on Bulgaria to enter the Tripartite Pact and make its territory available for a German attack against Greece, the Bulgarian leadership succeeded in retarding the talks. At the same time, the Soviet Union, Germany's Balkan rival, tried to entice Bulgaria into concluding a pact of mutual assistance by offering the whole of western and eastern Thrace at the expense of both Turkey and Greece. Bulgaria refused, and on 1 March 1941 joined the alliance with Germany in hope of territorial gains. It took this step only when it seemed unavoidable.

The Karaites are a schismatic Jewish sect which severed itself from the Babylonian Jewish community in the eighth century of the Common Era. The Karaites contended that the Rabbinites, the adherents to the Rabbinic tradition of Judaism, had perverted the Torah (Pentateuch) by superseding it with the Talmud (the compendium of the oral tradition of Jewish law). As a result of this theological argument, the Karaites adopted a fundamentalist approach to scriptural exegesis. The two groups differed in such areas as: observance of religious laws, the order of prayers, dietary laws and determining the dates of Jewish holidays.