In February, 1848, just after news of the revolution in Paris reached St. Petersburg, Emperor Nicholas I was advised of the growth of a subversive periodical literature within Russia. His informants implied that the Chief Administration of Censorship and the Minister of Education, Count Sergej Uvarov, the supreme authorities in the censorship, had been lacking in vigilance or ability. The charges were grave because, if true, they revealed a fundamental threat to the security of the police regime that Nicholas had maintained since the beginning of his reign in 1825. The threat was not one of out-and-out sedition; what was at issue was the suggestion by his informants that periodical literature had evaded the close supervision of the censorship and assumed the role of an independent observer of contemporary Russia. Nicholas realized the gravity of the charges and immediately moved to appoint a special investigating group known as the Menshikov Committee.

The Bulgarian Socialist movement should prove interesting to the student of modern socialism for two reasons: the striking ideological parallel of the left and right wings of the Bulgarian party to their Russian and Western counterparts, and the manner in which the Bulgarian schism of 1903 anticipated both the Menshevik-Bolshevik split later that same year as well as the permanent rift between the Bolshevik and Western socialist parties on the outbreak of World War I.

The Bulgarian Socialist party was founded in 1891 by left-wing intellectuals who had studied abroad, most of them in Geneva, Russia, or England. Although the party split up within a year's time over the issue of political activity by the proletariat, it was revived in 1894 as a reaction to the repressive policies of the Bulgarian premier, Stefan Stambulov. Throughout the ensuing decade of its existence the party, like its Western counterparts, was plagued by the perennial issue of collaboration or non-collaboration with bourgeois groups.

After a long period of considerable discrimination and abuse neutrality has now regained a semblance of legitimacy as a valid principle of international law and international relations. This recent transfiguration of a concept, which only fourteen years ago was being reviled as morally reprehensible, can be credited to a wide variety of diplomatic developments, such as, for example, Cold War tensions, the newly won independence of former colonial possessions, and others. In great part, too, it can be explained by the strenuous sponsorship lately exerted on its behalf in world affairs by the leaders of the Soviet regime. In effect, the latter now take the initiative, at every possible opportunity, in generously lavishing praise and support on the neutrality of the so-called “bourgeois” nations in all its various manifestations.

Prior to the initiation of the recent cultural exchange program, the Soviet citizen derived the bulk of his information about the United States from scattered reports in the Soviet press, travelogues, literary works in which Americans appear, and translations of American works of fiction. For approximately twenty years the most important literary source was a volume entitled One-Storied America by Il'ja Il'f and Evgenij Petrov, an account of a tour of the United States in 1936. However, most Soviet materials gave a distorted and incomplete view of America, a view further safeguarded and reinforced by careful selection of works suitable for translation.

If the information Soviet citizens had on contemporary America was scanty, that dealing with Russian-American contacts in the more distant past was even scantier. Prior to 1934, Soviet novelists were generally discouraged from turning to historical subjects, and those who did write historical fiction preferred to deal first with the most spectacular and most important moments in Russian history, all of which had been treated by pre-Soviet writers, but which now had to be interpreted from the Soviet point of view.

Pushkin was a gambler all his life. He gambled at cards; he gambled on his creative genius to support an extravagant wife; he gambled his life in challenges to duels before dying of a duelist's bullet at thirty-seven. He was also a gambler much of the time when he wrote a poem, a drama, or a story, for the censor was ready to block or distort anything that might be unsuitable to an autocracy based on serfdom and fearful of criticism.

One of Pushkin's longest gambles—one which failed during his lifetime—was the attempt to rehabilitate the name of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev, author of the banned and destroyed Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a book which only in 1906 enjoyed reprinting in Russia in an edition not prohibitively expensive. Pushkin's attempt in two articles on Radishchev was beset with particular difficulties, for he not only had to damn Radishchev enough to get the article passed by the censor, but somehow to insinuate his own admiration for Radishchev.