When Jesus confronts the man possessed by demons in the eighth chapter of Luke, a collective, alien voice issues from the familiar human form: "And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him" (Luke 8:30). Dostoevskii's novel The Devils (Besy, 1871-1873), to which the continuation of this passage serves as epigraph, makes use of the rich metaphor of possession in many aspects: as madness, as ideological enslavement, as national destiny.

Practically every single work of the young Dostoevsky may be interpreted as what Jules Janin called a parodie sérieuse. What the young Dostoevsky seems to be doing is essentially the following: He presents a romantic or sentimental theme, but with the characters and setting of the natural'naia shkola, and seeks to find a form that would fit such a synthesis. As a result, his heroes are “miscast,” that is, they have to play roles for which they are not fit. The timid, middle-aged, baldish Devushkin in Poor Folk is cast in the role of a sentimental lover; the thoroughly prosaic, “ordinary,” trivial Goliadkin in The Double develops a Doppelgänger complex; the semiliterate, brutish miser Prokharchin in the story “Mr. Prokharchin” comes to stand for the idea of supreme individualism—and so on.

One of the reasons for the debacle of Tsarism was its failure to counteract the elements of revolution by many methods more subtle than those of force. Not only were the radicals driven to revolution by the uncompromising policy of the government and not only was the landowning aristocracy alienated by being deprived of a share in the administration but, more important still, there was a complete failure on the part of the government to foster or to support the new antirevolutionary elements which had grown up among the intelligentsia as a reaction against the spread of terrorism. No effort was made to assist the body of social thought which grew up as a response to the extremism of the radicals during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Russian imperialism under various regimes has often been denounced, and rarely praised. Even more seldom has it been defined. In fact, it is more difficult to define than to condemn. One difficulty lies in the fact that from the time, beginning in the 1450s, of the final unification of the principalities of central Russia around a single center of power—Moscow—the Muscovite state itself was constantly expanding through the settlement of Russian peasants across the Eastern European plain, while even in this earliest period various non-Russian peoples came under Muscovite rule. At what point does “expansion” end and “imperialism” begin?

On January 21, 1920, a man named Ernst Barth stood up in Germany's Supreme Court at Leipzig to hear sentence passed upon him. The charge was “Attempted Treason”; the verdict, guilty; his punishment to be three years’ detention in a fortress. A tragic and now all but forgotten episode, the effort made to secure national rights for the Lusatian Sorbs at the Paris Peace Conference, had ended, in a German courtroom.

Tragic this episode surely was. In postwar years a small Slavic community in Germany found itself the object of bitter suspicion which had not existed before. “Die wendische Gefahr“—“The Wendish Danger“—found a place among the less felicitous journalistic cliches employed in the Weimar Republic. For more than a few Germans after 1918 the word “Wend” summoned up an image of treacherous men conspiring to tear yet another province from the prostrate Reich.

A Russian journey which the writer was privileged to take in the summer of 1958 as a member of the traveling party of Governor Adlai Stevenson afforded a rather unusual wealth of opportunities to meet and talk with local Soviet officials. While it was not a "field trip" in the research sense, it did yield a miscellany of observations on local governmental institutions, practices and personalities, some of which may be of interest to students of Soviet government and politics. The term "local" government is taken here to cover all levels up to and including the union-republic governments.

Count Sergej Witte claims that the Holy Brotherhood (Svjashchennaja Druzhina) was his idea and he explains it in the following way. On the morrow of the assassination of Alexander II, he wrote a letter to his uncle Fadeev in which he expressed the opinion that the only way to vanquish terrorism was to appeal to counter-terrorism by means of a secret society. Witte at that time was in Kiev in charge of the Southwestern Railroad. In his answer Fadeev told his nephew that his letter was on the tsar's table and that Witte would soon be called to St. Petersburg. Indeed, a few days later Witte received the invitation to come and meet Count I. Voroncov-Dashkov, commander of the bodyguards of the Emperor in Gatchina.

Although comprehensive economic data on the Russian economy during the period of the Crimean War are not available, there are some surprisingly complete series of data on prices in both internal and foreign trade. The implications that can be drawn from a study of changes in the price level cover a wide area, especially when they are studied in the light of earlier work on the monetary and fiscal problems of the period.

The kolkhozy are rural associations based on the principles of coöperative management, public ownership of the principal means of production, collective labor, annual planning of production, and remuneration for labor based upon the socialist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” They are now in the second phase of their development. During the first phase, which ended approximately in 1939-40, the Soviet authorities were concerned primarily with grouping individual peasants into coöperative enterprises. Eighteen and a half million peasant families were united into 242,000 agricultural coöperatives (artels) comprising a total of 488,000,000 hectares (1,205,000,000 acres) of land.

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.