For over a century scholars have been intrigued by one of history's most famous apocryphal works, the “Political Testament of Peter the Great.“The central theme—a warning of the danger Russia represents to all her neighbors —has always been a relevant topic for discussion. However, a satisfactory explanation of the document's genesis is yet to be given. One thing is clear: the “testament” is a forgery, an attempt to “frame” Peter I. But who is the culprit? The question has aroused the instincts of the detective in many historians and set them on the miscreant's trail.

Suspects were not lacking. Initially, circumstantial evidence pointed to Napoleon as the author or inspirer of the fabrication, since it was in 1812 in France that the first published version of this document appeared. Soon, however, suspicion fell on C. L. Lesur, one of the emperor's propagandists and the author of the work which contained the published text.

Lenin's last writings have given rise to a surprising range of interpretations. Despite this diversity, consensus holds that in these articles Lenin was striking new ground, extending his critique of war communism, and deepening his conception of the New Economic Policy. Another widely held view is that Nikolai Bukharin, inspired by the last articles, went further down the path opened by Lenin. Few agree about the content of Lenin's new direction, although one may note the following coincidence: Lenin is always seen as rejecting whatever the author in question does not like about original Bolshevism.

Little attention has been paid in Yugoslav historiography to the relationship between social structure and the character of the national movements of the various Yugoslav peoples. Enough data are available, however, to compile a list of the problems that should be studied in any systematic comparison of these national movements. The purpose of this paper is to examine some aspects of the interaction of social structures and national movements among the Yugoslav peoples for the twenty-year period before the First World War. The paper is primarily focused on urban society, which took the leading role in national movements

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.

The “psychoprophylactic method” of preventing or minimizing pain in childbirth was developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s by Il'ia Zakharevich Vel'vovskii, a neurologist working at the Ministry of Transport's Central Psychoneurological Hospital for Southern Railroad Workers in Khar'kov. In 1951 the Ministry of Health adopted Vel'vovskii's method as standard procedure for normal births in all obstetrical institutions in the USSR and undertook a large-scale program to provide the facilities and trained personnel for its implementation. This decision was based on more than simple recognition of a successful medical innovation, particularly since Soviet obstetricians were far from giving it unqualified approval. It owed more to the political and ideological imperatives of Stalin's regime which were then intruding deeply into the work of Soviet scientists and physicians.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

Since the Russian language until lately has been neglected far more than Western European languages, one might expect publishers to exercise more than usual care with translations of Russian works otherwise widely inaccessible. Unfortunately, unusual care was not exercised in the preparation of the English version of Mikhail Sholokhov's Silent Don. Published originally by Putnam and Company in England and reprinted without alteration in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel appeared between 1934 and 1941. (In the Soviet Union it appeared serially and in four separate volumes between 1928 and 1940.) Evidently with the approval of Sholokhov's agents in Moscow, the English editor omitted over a hundred pages of Russian text, altered the sequence of the narrative, and introduced new chapter, section, and paragraph divisions. Presumably this was done with no thought for politics or ideology but solely on the basis of aesthetic or practical considerations, the aim being to make the novel less expensive and to improve it by rejecting superfluous descriptions and characters.

The relationship between Pushkin and his critics has been a subject of considerable interest and discussion since the poet's own time. Belinsky made it the focus of the introduction to his series of essays on Pushkin. The early biographers provided some further information, and scholarly attention dates from the 1889 monograph by S. S. Trubachev, Pushkin v russkoi kritike, 1820-1880, which appeared shortly after V. A. Zelinsky had published, between 1887 and 1889, his extremely useful anthology of Pushkin criticism. The monograph is little more than a pedestrian rehearsal of reviews, digressing only to promulgate such myths as Pushkin's “aristocratic” attitude toward critics, but it remains valuable as a catalogue of criticism. Thereafter, both before the Revolution and during the Soviet period, the relevant published material becomes too extensive to list here. Recent comprehensive treatments of the subject may be found in N. I. Mordovchenko's Russkaia kritika pervoi chetverti XIX veka (1959) and in the Academy publication Pushkin: Itogi i problemy izucheniia (1966).

The Romanov dynasty came to the throne in 1613 after fifteen years of pretenders, peasant revolts, and foreign interventions, but the establishment of Romanov legitimacy would require time. In this article, Russell E. Martin explores how the wedding ritual of Tsar Mikhail Romanov was carefully constructed on the basis of previous royal weddings so as to appear fully consistent with previous Muscovite tradition. But Martin also shows that many elements of the wedding ritual were choreographed anew to create the image of the Romanovs as the legitimate heirs of the old Riurikid dynasty that had died out in 1598. Viewed in light of other efforts to legitimate their rule, the evidence from the weddings of the first Romanov tsar suggests how tenuous the new dynasty's hold on power was in its first decades on the throne and the ways that symbol and ritual were exploited to help establish the new regime.

On the morning of 11 May 1876, a young seamstress pushed her stepdaughter out the window of their Petersburg apartment. The apparent reason for this attempted infanticide (miraculously, the child survived her four-story plunge) was Ekaterina Kornilova's anger at her husband and jealousy of his deceased first wife. The case would seem undistinguished in its sordidness were it not for Fedor Dostoevskii's adoption of the affair as a cause celebre. Although he originally attacked Kornilova's defenders, Dostoevskii later defended her as well when he learned that Kornilova had been pregnant at the time of the attempted murder.

This paper explores fertility management practices in state-socialist Poland and investigates post-war demographic change through the lenses of gender and modernization. Using personal narratives from oral histories and memoirs, we examine reproductive decision-making processes from the 1940s to the 1980s, focusing on motivations, norms, and the means employed to achieve desired family size. Our analysis reveals the ambiguous nature of both modernization and women's emancipation in regard to reproduction. We argue that acceptance of the two-child model and the need to effectively manage fertility increased in Poland through the second half of the twentieth century, but was highly dependent on levels of spousal communication and equality. Personal narratives demonstrate how social pressure shaped women's reproductive choices, and how at times these choices were considerably limited by male violence and domination. As our analysis shows, gender relations in marriage and the modernization of fertility management in state-socialist Poland were deeply interrelated.

Polish-Russian relations have from their very beginning been characterized by intense political rivalry and military confrontation. This is no surprise, since after the Polish-Lithuanian union (1386, 1569), Poland was drawn into the conflict between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the great Muscovite principality over hegemony in Eastern Europe. Struggles between Lithuania and Muscovy were thus transformed into wars between the Russian state and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the reigns of Polish kings Stefan Batory (1576–86), Zygmunt III (1587–1632), and Wladyslaw IV (1632–48), the commonwealth gained a military advantage over its eastern neighbor. This was especially evident during the Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia), when the Polish army occupied Moscow (1610–12) and when Wladyslaw IV defeated the Russians in the War of Smolensk (1632–34).

Because it is a “most favored” nation, and one sensitive to distress in parent lands of the many population strands woven into its life pattern, the United States has a firmly established reputation for international philanthropy.

This tradition for world-wide generosity is well maintained today. The President's War Relief Control Board has a war relief agency registered for virtually every one of our fighting or Axis-occupied allies, and even for one erstwhile enemy, Italy. Other organizations cut across national lines to aid the refugees, war prisoners and other dislocated groups of the entire continent of Europe.

In his 1876 Writer’s Diary, novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii wrote a series of three journalistic articles parodying both the contemporary movement of modern spiritualism and its principal critic in St. Petersburg, noted chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev. This article explores Dostoevskii’s views on spiritualism and examines the rhetorical strategy he developed to help persuade Russians away from what he perceived as a dangerous mystical fad. Mendeleev had similar goals, but the two differed on the urgency of the problem—and hence the proper rhetoric for the task—and thus both spent as much time fighting the other as the movement they deplored. This article endeavors both to analyze a Russian scientific text alongside works traditionally considered more “rhetorical“ and to explore in detail the specific involvement of Dostoevskii the journalist with contemporary issues in Russian culture.

In a recent article in Voprosy istorii KPSS entitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.

Grigorii Soroka was a serf, one of millions in prereform Russia. He was not particularly set apart by his artistic talent, for many peasants revealed their individual expressive gifts in carved decoration, ceramics, toy making, and other crafts. Soroka was unusual, however, in that he received instruction from Aleksei Venetsianov, a retired bureaucrat, small-property owner, and renowned painter. Soroka, despite his refined talents, remained a serf, for his owner, N. P. Miliukov, unheeding of Venetsianov’s pleas, refused to manumit his “serf artist.” When the Emancipation came, then, Soroka led his villagers in drawing up a petition protesting the terms that Miliukov sought to impose. The petition, addressed to the tsar, was returned to the provincial office for peasant affairs and shown to Miliukov who, enraged, then drew up his own complaint against the peasants. Soroka was summoned to the volost offices, arrested, held for three days, and then sentenced to a flogging for “obstreperous behavior and for spreading false rumors.” On 10 April 1864 Grigorii Soroka was seen wandering distractedly about the village, and the next day his wife found his body hanging from the rafters in a cold storage building.