Historians are generally agreed that during the first two years of World War I American feeling against Germany was far stronger and more intense than against Austria-Hungary. While relations between the Germanic and American peoples had not been truly friendly since the 1880s, attitudes in the United States toward Austria-Hungary were much less antagonistic. Historically there had been little direct contact between the latter two countries. It scarcely seemed necessary to Americans. The area was not only remote geographically but also remote from the national interest. As a result, there appeared to be no deep-rooted bitterness or resentment in the historic relationship between the two nations. Indeed, in the period immediately preceding the war, relations between Austria-Hungary and the United States had consisted largely of diplomatic formalities even though before the war, Austria-Hungary, next to Italy, had furnished the largest European immigration to the United States. Americans for the most part were unaware that Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire composed of many diverse ethnic groups. Few Americans knew of the vast numbers of immigrants who had come from Austria-Hungary from the areas of Slovakia and Bohemia.

Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev was long considered the real power behind the throne during the reigns of the last two emperors of Russia. He was said to have determined the reactionary policies of the 1880s and 1890s. Robert Byrnes has recently demonstrated that Pobedonostsev's influence was in fact considerably less than had been assumed. Byrnes quite properly maintains that Pobedonostsev had very little power under Nicholas II, that his importance for Alexander III began to decline after 1890, and that even at the height of his power Pobedonostsev could not always persuade Alexander to adopt his point of view. However, although Byrnes concludes that his influence was limited, he still attributes to Pobedonostsev considerable power in “his own special spheres of interest.“ Evidence exists, nevertheless, that even this assessment of Pobedonostsev's power needs to be reconsidered. An event occurred in March 1883 which demonstrates that he was not always in a position to determine policy at will even in matters of vital interest to him.

Over the last three years, the Polish United Workers’ Party has suffered a major crisis, the most substantial crisis of any Communist party in any Communist party state. The disintegration of the party was at least partly responsible for both the development of Solidarity in the summer of 1980 and the imposition of martial law in December 1981. The lack of trust in the party and its authoritarian and unrepresentative character led the workers to demand an institution more responsive to their own needs. But the growth of Solidarity during 1981 and the continuing disintegration and fragmentation of the party led the military to preempt the leading role of the party in 1982.

The collapse of the party in 1980 and 1981 was due to a number of factors. The party leadership had to bear the burden of the economic failures of the late 1970s and the consequent decline in the standard of living. The party itself had grown rapidly in size during that period, even though the influence of ordinary party members and local party organizations declined in the face of increasing tendencies toward centralization in the second half of the decade. This development led to problems of morale even within the party and to the growth of horizontal barriers between the membership and its leaders. The population at large was increasingly annoyed and disgusted with the failure of the party to improve the economic situation and to allow a more honest and open discussion of Poland's problems. The dissatisfaction was compounded by the widespread perception that the elite was increasingly looking after its own interests only and that benefits and privileges were accruing only to those in power.

In Brat'ia Karamazovy (The brothers Karamazov), Fedor Dostoevskii suggests the impossibility of earthly justice but compensates for this harsh truth through a vision of transcendent joy. His message of Christian belief, inexpressible in the indicative, infuses every word of the novel on a poetic level and becomes manifest in the unfolding of the plot.

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

This article develops the concept of “Soviet environmental subjectivity.” Taking a theoretical step toward comparative political ecology and neo-materialism, it makes the case that engagement with the natural environment comprised a potent, but underappreciated, determinant of Soviet subjectivity. To elaborate this argument, the article examines the life stories of three individuals who spent time in a common region in the far north: ornithologist Oleg Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, geologist Leonid Potemkin, and aspiring ballerina turned technician and prisoner Inna Tartakovskaia. Their lives reveal certain distinguishing features of Soviet environmental subjectivities, including a common desire to both exploit and protect the environment and a tendency for the state's punitive use of harsh natural conditions to alter subjective experiences. Furthermore, the very different paths of these individuals—one became an environmentalist, one defended the Soviet treatment of the natural world, and one did not actively engage in environmental politics—indicate the possible pervasiveness of environmental subjectivities in the Soviet Union.

The Russian Revolution has not yet achieved the status of the French Revolution as an academic preserve for battalions of professional historians, but few are likely to deny that its impact on the twentieth century is already more profound than that of the French upheaval on the nineteenth. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is now upon us, and it is a melancholy commentary on the uncertain intellectual climate of the Soviet Union that despite lavish funds, abundant trained personnel, and access to archives and primary sources unavailable in the West, Soviet historians have failed to produce a work of permanent importance on this crucial episode of modern Russian history. Yet the stifling orthodoxy of Stalinism has given way to the uncertain but relative freedom under his successors, and the auguries point to a further mellowing of the party line as Soviet society haltingly approaches the educational and living standards of the Western world.

The recent resurgence of interest in the West in Karl Marx's thought has centered largely on his early writings, particularly the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published for the first time in 1932 in the original German), and on the role which the theme of alienation played in Marx's thought. Much of the literature stimulated by this renewed study of Marx has been concerned with the extent of continuity (or discontinuity) between the early and later views of Marx and the relevance of his concept of alienation to modern industrial societies. The fact that the young Marx's writings have provided intellectual support for various “revisionist” groups yearning for a “humanistic socialism” in European Communist countries has also undoubtedly focused attention on these works in the West.

“We are Argonauts of peace.” Under this self-description a delegation of Russian socialists sailed to western Europe in the summer of 1917 to rally popular support for a great conference of world socialism to meet at Stockholm for the purpose of reuniting the International and ending the war. Of all the peace flurries of the war none other roused such hopes and fears as the “Stockholm Conference.” Its proposal caused sharp crises in the governments and in the socialist parties of all the belligerent powers. That it never met contributed mightily to the outcome of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks' coming to power.

The Stockholm Conference was the child of the Russian Revolution. There had been several abortive efforts during the war to reconvene the International, and now the Russian Revolution encouraged some neutral socialists to form a Dutch-Scandinavian Committee to make another effort. It met with a rebuff from the socialist parties of the belligerent powers. The intervention of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies, however, drastically changed the situation. The Soviet took its first, tentative step into international affairs with the issuance on March 14/27 of a general appeal to the peoples of all countries to unite for peace. Soviet backing for an international socialist conference took more concrete form when the “Siberian Zimmerwaldists,” led by Irakli Tsereteli, returned to Petrograd in late March and asserted their control over the Soviet.

The period of the 1930s has been called the time of the “Diplomatic War.“ During these years Nazi Germany seized the initiative in international affairs and tried to impose its will on the other states of Europe. The reaction of Britain and France to the threat of German expansion was appeasement until March 1939, when, with Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear that the Führer’s aims were not limited to the German-inhabited areas. Thus the states of East Central Europe found themselves in a highly vulnerable position: in the West they faced increasing political and economic pressure from the Reich; in the East there was the Soviet Union with its very exportable Communist ideology which would have undermined the political and social order of all these states. In this situation the East Central European states all sought some way of being independent from their two powerful neighbors.

The first months of Soviet power raise important questions about the ideology of the transition to socialism and about the nature of Bolshevik power. The destruction of the old state apparatus was accompanied by vigorous institution building; the “red guard attack against capital” was balanced by the emergence of potentially powerful Soviet economic apparatus. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed in March 1918 was followed by a period of state capitalism in which a strong socialist state was to supervise elements of capitalism in the economy. All stages were accompanied by vigorous debate within the party and, from March 1918, by the political alienation of a section of the working class. By the onset of full-scale civil war and the transition to war communism in late spring 1918 the Bolshevik party and the institutions of the new Soviet state dominated the political life of the country. Was there something in Marxist ideology that, when interpreted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, encouraged centralized and dirigiste forms of government regardless of actual conditions? A large body of literature now exists that examines this issue from various perspectives. This literature has recently been enriched by a number of studies that look at events from the perspective of lower-level participants and area case studies.

In the final diird of the nineteenth century, the Polish-Ruthenian (Ukrainian) borderland in the eastern Lublin and Siedlce gubernias of the Kingdom of Poland became a location of intense ethnic and religious rivalry, a situation not uncommon in numerous borderland regions throughout eastern Europe. At first, Russians and Poles competed for the nationally "malleable" population of the Chelm and Podlasie regions, as this territory was known. After the Russians were evicted from the Kingdom of Poland in 1915, Poles and nationally awakening Ukrainians saw not only distinct portions of the population but also the territory as "theirs."

Zbigniew Wojnowski explores Soviet popular responses to Solidarity during the early 1980s, focusing in particular on Ukraine and its western borderlands. Shifting emphasis from internal Soviet dynamics to transnational interactions in eastern Europe, Wojnowski challenges dominant narratives of late Soviet and Ukrainian history. Whereas Alexei Yurchak maintains that members of the “last Soviet generation” were essentially indifferent to the Soviet state and its ideology, popular responses to Solidarity suggest that, in some contexts at least, Soviet citizens still engaged with the state in active and meaningful ways during the early 1980s. Drawing on the rhetoric of Soviet patriotism in various public forums, many residents of Ukraine claimed the right to comment on official policies. In this sense, the types of citizenship that had developed in the USSR after 1945 survived into the early 1980s. Most surprisingly, perhaps, Soviet patriotism provided a crucial source of vitality for Leonid Brezhnev's regime even in Ukraine's western borderlands, which have often been seen as the “least Soviet” part of the USSR.

In “Muzhik Marei,” which appeared in the February issue of Dnevnik pisatelia for 1876, Fedor Dostoevskii “remembers” an experience from his time in Siberia. During Easter week the drunken carousing of his fellow convicts (which, he writes, “tormented me nearly to the point of illness” “do bolezni isterzalo menia”) had driven him out of the barracks into the yard. There he met the Polish prisoner, Miretskii, who said, “Je hais ces brigands” (22:46). These words drive Dostoevskii right back to the place from which, as he says, only fifteen minutes before, he had fled “kak bezumnyi.”

The advent of an industrial labor force posed a formidable and, as it turned out in 1917, a fatal array of problems to the government of Imperial Russia. It had to find answers to a number of crucial questions. How was it to reduce the tensions at the factory and carry out its mandate as guardian of order and justice and the protector of the poor? How was the peasant-worker to be fitted into the traditional structure of Russian society? What was the place of industrial labor in the “Witte system”? And how could the government prevent the discontent of the peasant-worker from turning against autocracy itself?

Yet even Witte, who was perhaps more perceptive than his colleagues in regard to the various problems caused by industrialization, viewed “the labor question” with complete confidence.

In 1955 the present writer examined the struggle being waged against the peasantry by the Communist Party in the USSR and came to the conclusion that the liquidation of the Soviet peasantry as a class is inescapable.

Since then, significant new legislation has been passed in the field of agriculture in the USSR.

All these new measures have the same tendency of bringing the peasant class in the USSR a few steps nearer to eradication and the kolkhozes nearer to the status of sovkhozes.

Two Kinds of Socialist Property: The Soviet Constitution (Section 5) recognizes two kinds of property: state property and cooperative property. Both are qualified as “socialist.”

In the study of politics, the concepts of nation and of class have received almost universal recognition as significant tools of analysis. The concept of generation, however, has remained, for students of politics, largely in the twilight zone of knowledge. This is remarkable, for historians and novelists have used it with considerable success, and more recently sociologists have emphasized its fundamental importance.