One of the most important and most generally espoused interpretations in Russian history is the existence of a crisis in Russian agriculture toward the close of the nineteenth century. A discussion of this crisis or agrarian problem is found in contemporary, in Soviet, and in the Western scholarly works. Statements such as “the economic condition of the peasantry kept deteriorating,” or “famine conditions, epidemics, increased mortality, decrease in the number of livestock, … this is the spectacle of the growing destitution of a faminestricken Russian village,” are commonplace. In fact, “to numerous observers of Russian rural conditions, the growing destitution of the village seemed so evident that it required no special demonstration.” The purpose of this paper is to examine the indexes used to support the crisis interpretation, and to show that this interpretation is not only arguable, but probably fallacious.

Descartes argued that the initial operation in the solution of any complex problem must be its subdivision into a series of smaller, less intricate, and therefore, hopefully, more tractable problems. Following that strategy, this study will examine one particular aspect of the purges—the destruction of the Soviet diplomatic corps—in an attempt to shed more light on the general nature of the purges and to assess the relationship, if any, between the purges and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s. The central tasks, then, are to describe the impact of the "Great Terror" on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and its embassies, and to evaluate the significance of these developments for both domestic politics and foreign relations of the USSR.

To understand Stalin as a political thinker, we must see him as a man whose thinking was strongly influenced by perceived parallels between present and past. Unlike other Bolsheviks, he found a parallel between Russia’s internal situation in relatively tranquil 1925 and on the eve of the October upheaval of 1917. He thrice stated in party forums during 1925 that the present international situation resembled the prelude of the World War’s outbreak in 1914. And having come to think in Russian historical terms, he discerned a parallel between Muscovite Russia’s situation in earlier centuries and Soviet Russia’s now. In a party speech of 1928, for example, he found a cue for present policy in Peter the Great’s attempted revolutionary leap out of Russian backwardness; and in the often quoted speech to managers in 1931 he spoke of the beatings that Russia had suffered in history as punishment for her backwardness and declared that Soviet survival now depended on conquering that backwardness in ten years.

Tsar Paul I died at a critical moment in the affairs of Europe. During the last fifteen months of his life he had become estranged from Great Britain and Austria, his erstwhile allies, who were being hard pressed by their French enemy on several fronts. By the beginning of 1801 the tsar's government seemed on the verge of concluding an alliance with Napoleonic France. Russia's “cold war” with Britain heated up as the tsar ordered the confiscation of British merchant vessels in his ports and the incarceration of British seamen. A British fleet under Admirals Parker and Nelson was dispatched to the Baltic to deal with the new threat to British interests. Then, quite suddenly, the tsar was dead.

Perhaps the most mysterious and elusive figure in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is Afranius, a man who has been in Judea for fifteen years working in the Roman imperial service as chief of the procurator of Judea's secret police. He is present in all four Judean chapters of the novel (chapters 2, 16, 25, 26) as one of the myriad connecting links, though we really do not know who he is for certain until near the end of the third of these chapters, “How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Karioth.” We first meet him in chapter 2 (which is related by Woland and entitled “Pontius Pilate”) simply as “some man” (kakoi-to chelovek), face half-covered by a hood, in a darkened room in the palace of Herod the Great, having a brief whispered conversation with Pilate, who has just finished his fateful talk with Caiaphas (E, p. 39; R, pp. 50-51). Fourteen chapters later, in the chapter dreamed by Ivan Bezdomnyi and entitled “The Execution” (chapter 16), we meet him for the second time, now bringing up the rear of the convoy escorting the prisoners to Golgotha and identified only as “that same hooded man with whom Pilate had briefly conferred in a darkened room of the palace” (E, p. 170; R, p. 218). “The hooded man” attends the entire execution sitting in calm immobility on a three-legged stool, “occasionally out of boredom poking the sand with a stick” (E, p. 172; R, p. 220). When the Tribune of the Cohort arrives, presumably bearing Pilate's orders to terminate the execution, he (the Tribune) speaks first to Krysoboi (Muribellum), who goes to pass on the orders to the executioners, and then to “the man on the three-legged stool,” according to whose gestures the executioners arouse Yeshua from his stupor, offer him a drink which he avidly accepts, and then kill him by piercing him “gently” (tikhon'ko) through his heart with a spear.

On March 27, 1941 a coup d'état in Belgrade overthrew the Yugoslav government which only two days previously had signed the Tripartite Pact in Vienna. In its place was installed a new government headed by General Simović, chief of the Air Staff, while the regent, Prince Paul, was replaced by the young King Peter II. It was widely expected that the Simović government would renounce the Pact and align itself firmly with Britain against Germany. Although this expectation was to be disappointed, the anti-German and pro-British intent of the coup was accepted by both Churchill and Hitler. Churchill declared that the Yugoslav nation had “found its soul,” and in his postwar memoirs described the coup as “one tangible result of our desperate efforts to form an Allied front in the Balkans and prevent all falling piecemeal into Hitler’s power.” Hitler, convinced that Britain had “pulled the strings,” ordered the Yugoslav invasion for April 6.

During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of Western Europe was caught up in the phenomenon known as the witch craze. Before it finally ended in the early eighteenth century this mass hysteria had claimed a goodly number of victims, mostly women, who were seized, tortured, tried, and executed, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence, for alleged maleficia against their neighbors and heresy against the church.

Once the accusation of witchcraft was leveled against someone the judicial process, either formal or informal, was set in motion to determine whether the suspect was indeed a witch. On the Continent this was facilitated by torture and the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual of procedure compiled by the two German Dominicans Sprenger and Krämer and published in 1486.

Anyone familiar with Soviet history can identify A. I. Rykov: Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a major leader of Right Communism, a victim of Stalin’s purges. But this tells us very little. Because of Rykov’s predilection for practical as opposed to ideological-literary work, his relative colorlessness in comparison with the other Bolshevik luminaries, and a lack of material, he has not been attractive to scholars. Yet Rykov looms large within the Bolshevik movement; he was prominent long before the revolution as well as after 1917. Furthermore, the seeds of Rykov’s positions of the 1920s—which clearly had an impact on the policies and politics of those years—were definitely sown before 1917.

On April 24, 1445, János Vitéz of Zredna, a well-known Hungarian humanist bishop, wrote to a friend about conditions existing in his homeland:

This was not merely humanist rhetoric; Vitéz's perceptions accurately described the Hungarian situation, where the powerful barons had become the controllers of the machinery of the state.

The Hungarian province of Transylvania (see p. 26), “the Land beyond the Forests,” in which the drama of 1437-38 was enacted, experienced a parallel development. During the fourteenth century, the barons in that province (as in the rest of Hungary) established seigneurial control over the peasant population. A system of feudal dues and obligations was imposed on the peasantry, and free movement from one estate to another was effectively curtailed. The tensions that this situation created in Transylvania were heightened by conflicts that were peculiarly Transylvanian in character.

With Bismarck's dismissal as head of the German and Prussian governments in 1890, a number of policies bearing his personal stamp were called into question, including his Polish policy. The chancellorship of General von Caprivi (1890-94) saw a perceptible twist in the long history of relations between the Prussian/German governments and their Polish subjects, causing both contemporaries and historians to speak of an “era of reconciliation” (Versöhnungsära). During this period, Polish leaders supported government legislation and offered to work to strengthen the German Empire, while the Caprivi administration indicated its desire for better relations with the Poles and made a number of concessions to them. The Era of Reconciliation did not last long, however, not even as long as Caprivi's own tenure; its net results were meager, and after 1894 the idea of German-Polish cooperation faded away.

Although this period has attracted the interest of some scholars of German-Polish relations, it has not received (perhaps because of its aberrant character) its fair share of attention in general works on German-Polish relations. Quite fundamental questions—for example, what prompted the milder Polish policies and why did they turn out so disappointingly—remain without adequate answers. In considering these questions, it is important to keep in mind that the Era of Reconciliation was a two-way street: a merger of government policy under Caprivi with a parallel trend toward “loyalism” within the Polish leadership.

It is commonly reported in the West that the representation of women in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is far below their representation in the population at large, and that although there are slightly increasing rates of admission, continuation of the large disparity seems to constitute a relatively permanent feature of central recruitment policy and procedures. In 1970, for example, women formed 53.9 percent of the general population and 22.2 percent of the CPSU. However, that aggregate figure masks a considerable degree of regional variation. Publication of data from several regional party archives provides the opportunity to examine more closely the process of female mobility within the party and to advance more precise notions about determinants of that process than had previously been possible.

In examining the development of Tsvetaeva's lyric verse, it is possible to discern a recurrent thematic strain: a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role. I will try to show that Tsvetaeva, in the process of rejecting, via her poetry, this key ingredient in a person's self-concept—namely, the sex role as defined by society—along with a rejection of other limiting social norms, developed images of the self that transcend social roles. Moreover, the working out of this poetic identity is not continuous but falls into several chronological stages.

In discussing a poet's self, critical method prescribes that a distinction be maintained between the individual and the poetic persona. Without negating this methodological stricture, it is important to keep in mind that for some poets an adequate interpretation requires one to perceive that the persona is an elaborate poetic projection and mythologization of the individual.