In the past, newspaper accounts and many scholarly articles have made dire and sweeping predictions about the imminence of civil war or the collapse of the Yugoslav federal state following the death of President Tito. The substance for these apocalyptic visions generally stems from Yugoslavia's nationality tensions, regional inequalities, and external pressure from both the Eastern and Western blocs. The widely accepted forecast is that the three factors will reinforce each other and exacerbate existing societal cleavages, leading to chaos or strict military rule. But most of the “dismal school” analyses of post-Tito Yugoslavia ignore the profound changes that have occurred in the country since 1945 and assume that the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) is unwilling or unable to take steps toward increasing the probability of political stability after Tito's death. In this article I shall critically evaluate the societal changes that have occurred and the LCY's response to them.

The causes and effects of the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute of 1948 are too well known to need repeating here. Various historians, military strategists, economists, and specialists in Communist affairs have established the basic facts and correctly pointed out the importance of that first break in the Soviet-controlled bloc. Vladimir Dedijer even wrote (supposedly quoting Henry Wallace) that Tito could be compared, though in a different field, to Martin Luther. The independent brand of communism recently proclaimed by the Italian, French, and Spanish Communists (the so-called Euro-Communists) definitely has its precedent in the astounding and courageous example of the Yugoslavs.

I shall limit my analysis mostly to Yugoslav writers and describe how they reacted toward this discord in the “socialist” camp. They all basically defend the same point of view, but they differ in their approach and, above all, in literary quality. The older writers, for example, were intimately involved in the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute, and they display a passionate hostility toward Stalin. To varying degrees, they often combine an excessive reverence for Tito, the perennial Yugoslav leader, with boastful self-approval. Recent works, though duly emphasizing the tragedy for thousands of citizens, avoid cliches and journalistic reporting.

Throughout the post-World War II period, the prevailing paradigm of international politics among Western scholars has assumed that the major task confronting the decisionmakers of all states is achieving security in an anarchic state system. It follows from this assumption that relations between relatively equal superpowers constitute, in Arnold Wolfers's phrase, “the relationship of major tension” in the postwar world. In the 1970s, however, there has been a revival among Western scholars of an alternative perspective on world politics: the theory of economic imperialism, or, as it is usually labeled in the 1970s, “dependency theory.” It is a perspective which focuses on unequal relations between states. In that perspective, “the basic model of international politics [is] the imperialist system that was centered upon states of unequal economic development,“ where “the relationship of major tension was between the developed and underdeveloped economies.“

In the continuing debate among Western students of Soviet affairs about the direction in which the Soviet political system is moving, all participants agree that accurate analysis is imperative. How one interprets the evidence of change determines one's view of current Soviet reality and one's perception of the opportunities and threats involved in U.S.-Soviet relations. This crucial issue is addressed in the following pages by examining the current situation of an important, evolving institution, the USSR People's Control Committee (Komitet narodnogo kontrolia, or KNK). To a remarkable degree this organization, in its twelfth year of existence, demonstrates the continuing process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet polity.

Modern European historiography was nurtured in the school of Humanism, that attitude of mind, so characteristic of the Renaissance, which broke through the ecclesiastical “fixation” of medieval thought by a renewed appreciation of man and his role in this world. It accomplished this in part by reviving interest in the pagan culture of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanist men of letters looked to the literary and historical works of classical antiquity for their models of outlook and expression, and in these they found both a liberation from medieval modes and a new bondage. Humanism was also cosmopolitan: Humanist poets, scholars, and artists belonged to a Pan-European republic of arts and sciences with an official language of its own—a revived classical Latin. They traveled and mixed freely and lived in each others’ countries.

The title of this paper might suggest that it is intended to describe Chaadayev's philosophy. This is not so. An attempt will be made, rather, to argue the following points: first, that Chaadayev is chronologically the first philosopher of Russia because earlier persons to whom that distinction has been attributed do not really deserve it; second, that, unlike these so-called predecessors, Chaadayev in his writings provides a body of material which qualifies as a philosophy and which is presented as such; and third, that his philosophy is distinctively Russian, even though Chaadayev combines many Western philosophical characteristics with his native Russian outlook.

Among Soviet Central Asians who have achieved international attention, Bobodzhon Gafurovich Gafurov, the late director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stands out as a leading figure. Gafurov was politically the most prominent Tadzhik, if not Central Asian, in the Soviet Union. During the twenty-one years that he served as the Institute's director, he influenced and made decisions which have led to an overall increase in scholarly research and publication about West Asia, and about Soviet Central Asia in particular, emanating from the Soviet Union.

Six years ago Professor E. Keenan wrote a major study, refuting the authenticity of the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii. Keenan's book attracted great attention. In 1973 the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) published my book Correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii: Paradoxes of Edward Keenan. In the course of the discussion generated by the publication of Keenan's book, scholars of the most varied schools and tendencies have expressed their reaction to the subject of the controversy. Between 1972 and 1975 a series of articles summarizing the controversy were published, and the matter was thoroughly discussed. Edward Keenan's paradoxes have not received support among the scholarly community. Keenan's idea that, in view of the spuriousness of nearly all the writings of Ivan IV and several other significant compositions of that time, the history of Russia in the sixteenth century needed to be written anew might have served as a stimulus to an all-embracing discussion of a broad range of problems. In the absence of any serious proof of the fabrication, however, such a discussion did not take place. A number of works of Ivan IV and Kurbskii have been preserved to the present in copies indisputably compiled in the sixteenth century, and the controversy as to whether the persons in question were the writers goes by default.

Perhaps the most famous anecdote of the many connected with the reign of Tsar Nicholas I concerns the way in which he supposedly determined the route of the St. Petersburg-Moscow Railway. When asked by his officials the route along which it should be built, the tsar, on the spur of the moment, it is claimed, took a ruler, laid it on a map, and arbitrarily and hastily drew an absolutely straight line between the two capitals. The all-powerful despot had spoken, and his decision was carried out by his servile courtiers, regardless of consequences.

Not long ago Randolph Starn observed that the word “crisis” is a particularly ambiguous term which historians have not always used with the requisite care. “One historian's crisis lasts moments, another's decades, even eras; political, social, economic, mental, or moral crises are blurred by one historian's insistence on treating them discretely, while another lumps them together under the confusing rubric ‘general crisis.’ “ Starn's strictures about the abuse of common terminology and about the confusion resulting from such abuse deserve our attention, especially now that Professor James Y. Simms has asserted that Russian historians have been wrong in thinking that there was an agrarian crisis in the late nineteenth century.

Americans have paid relatively little attention to the history of higher education in the United States, and Russian specialists have neglected the history of their own field, even though our foundations strongly affect our qualities as scholarteachers and the circumstances in which we work. One of the most important founding fathers of Russian studies in the United States was Archibald Cary Coolidge, a member of the Department of History at Harvard University from 1893 until his death in 1928, who launched teaching and research concerning Russia and Eastern Europe at Harvard and in many other colleges and universities through those whom he helped train.

In responding to G. Hamburg's comment, it is necessary to reiterate briefly the argument that I presented in my article on the crisis in Russian agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century. I began with the premise that scholarly opinion—contemporary, Soviet, and especially Western—espouses the proposition that peasant husbandry was experiencing a deepening crisis as the last century came to a close. Scholars have argued that peasant well-being was declining steadily, especially in the 1890s relative to previous decades. After providing a definition of what the term “agricultural crisis” means, I proceeded to analyze what I considered to be the crucial indexes used to support the crisis hypothesis.