Under the secret agreement on the Balkans which Churchill and Stalin concluded in the Kremlin on October 9, 1944, the British share of responsibility in Greek affairs was defined as 90 per cent. The United States took part neither in this particular deal nor in the talks as a whole. Harriman attended them only as an observer. President Roosevelt, however, made clear to both the Prime Minister and the Generalissimo that the United States would not be bound by any decisions taken by the two, that he reserved his rights in any of the matters that might be discussed, and that America, not only militarily but also politically, had interests that were world-wide.

During the three-power diplomatic exchanges that preceded the conclusion of this arrangement, both the British and the Soviet governments became fully aware that the United States government acquiesced in it on the understanding that the agreement defined merely respective spheres of military operations in the Balkans and therefore would be of strictly wartime duration.

Interparliamentary contacts form a modest but underestimated part of the post-Stalin innovations in the conduct of Soviet foreign policy. The USSR Supreme Soviet became more than a mere ceremonial setting for Soviet policy declarations in 1955, when Khrushchev was showing already an un-Stalinist penchant for foreign travel, while carefully controlled cultural exchanges and economic aid were increasing. New channels for foreign relations were opening up outside the existing diplomatic and Communist party linkages.

Early in 1955, the USSR Supreme Soviet (bicameral national legislature) passed a resolution inviting all parliaments in the face of existing world tensions to exchange parliamentary delegations with the USSR and to do all that was possible to reduce the tensions. Deputies to the Supreme Soviet have helped since then to promote the more personal touch in the international relations of the Soviet state. In the next three years, parliamentary delegations from over thirty countries visited the Soviet Union and were feted by Soviet deputies, who paid reciprocal visits to twenty-three countries.

From the onset of World War I British intellectuals actively concerned with European problems engaged in a lively and searching debate on the treatment to be meted out to multi-nationality Austria-Hungary if and when the Entente achieved victory. During the first years of the struggle British partisans of the preservation of the Monarchy—largely if not wholly as it existed before 1914—effectively counteracted the advocates of national fulfillment and of dismemberment, but emphases and arguments set in motion by the latter school anticipated a more vehement campaign for the destruction of the venerable realm on the Danube in the second half of the war.

This instructive and revealing controversy in unofficial circles stands in sharp contrast to the comparative indifference of the British cabinet, Winston Churchill alone excepted—that judgment at any rate is warranted by the scanty evidence presently available.

The historical figure and author Sergej Mikhajlovich Stepniak-Kravchinskij, one of the foremost participants in Russian political émigré circles during the final two decades of the last century, has been little studied in the West although rather more attention has been given him in Russia and the Soviet Union. This article makes no attempt to fill the gap in biographical studies of Kravchinskij in Western languages but rather is designed to dwell in some detail on two aspects of his life which can be illuminated through hitherto little-known or unknown materials to be found outside the Soviet Union. More specifically, I plan to speak of his most outstanding, although still minor, novel The Career of a Nihilist in connection with a previously unpublished letter of his containing a lengthy discussion of the book; and of his lecture tour of the United States in the years 1890-91, relying in large part on newspaper sources and manuscript materials to be found in this country.

In his Ispoved' (Confession), Tolstoy gives us a painful picture of a man who, in his search for a solution to the problems of human existence, experiences the same feelings as a man lost in a dense wood:

He comes to an open plain, climbs up a tree, and sees around him endless space, but nowhere a house—he sees darkness, but again no house. Thus I lost my way in the wood of human knowledge, in the twilight of mathematical and experimental science, which opened before me a clear and distant horizon in the direction of which there could be no house, and in the darkness of philosophy, plunging me into a greater gloom with every step I took, until I was at last persuaded that there was, and could be, no way out. When I followed what seemed the bright light of learning, I saw that I had only turned aside from the real question.

The late summer of 1914 demonstrated that for most European Social Democrats nationalism was far more powerful than Marxism in the event of a conflict between these ideologies. Some Social Democratic parties did not participate in this demonstration, however. Not until the late autumn of 1939 did it become apparent to all that Finnish Social Democrats, for example, were nationalists before they were Marxists. The fact that Finland was not a belligerent in World War I left this question open. Until the demands made by the Soviet Union in October-November, 1939, and the beginning of the Winter War (which included the abortive proclamation of a Soviet-sponsored Finnish Democratic Government), bourgeois Finns were uncertain about the response of Social Democrats to any serious Soviet challenge to continued Finnish independence. In view of the tragic Finnish Civil War of 1918, this uncertainty seemed grounded in historical fact. As the largest party in Finland (representing forty percent of the electorate in 1939), the Social Democrats' attitude would prove decisive in determining the strength of Finnish resistance to Soviet diplomatic and military pressure. Like other Finns, Social Democrats fought, sacrificed, and died to defend their nation. The visible symbol of the unity of this nation in the Winter War was the Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner. It was at this point that Tanner stepped into world politics. A Finnish scholar has concluded that in the Moscow negotiations of 1939 the two Finnish delegates, Tanner and J. K. Paasikivi, “ … held the fate of Finland in their hands.”

The diplomatic entanglements of Bulgaria and the Great Powers in the period 1894-1914 are well known. Political instability in the Balkans and in Bulgaria itself discouraged extensive and sustained German economic penetration of the region until after 1894. Apart from political difficulties in Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Germany frequently found themselves in competition in Bulgaria. Although bound by the Dual Alliance of 1879 and allegedly pursuing a Drang nach Osten, those two great powers frequently worked at cross-purposes both in policies and practices in Bulgaria.

German economic interests in Bulgaria may be observed by examining (a) banking and financial activity and (b) tariff and trade relations. Industrial development including railroad promotions in Bulgaria assumed relatively less significance. German long-term capital investments in 1914 in the entire Balkan area amounted to about one and three-quarter billion marks, a figure that does not appear outstanding in comparison with German investments elsewhere.

The broad education of the prerevolutionary Russian intellectual was primarily a result of the humanistic and philological culture which permeated the secondary schools of the period. In all types of secondary schools established after the reform of 1864, linguistic training formed the basis of education. Following the reform, three categories of secondary schools were established: (1) classical gymnasia in which one modern foreign language and two classical languages were taught, (2) gymnasia in which one modern foreign language and one classical language were taught, (3) real-gymnasia in which two modern foreign languages and no classical languages were taught. A study of the curricula of these schools shows the dominant position held by the classical languages over the greater part of the nineteenth century; it also gives evidence of their gradual decline and the strengthening of the status of the modern foreign languages.

It is generally agreed that Hegel and his younger and somewhat leftist followers contributed to shaping the philosophical and economic views of Marx. Not so generally recognized is the impact of a Polish writer, August von Ciezkowski, whose influence is the subject of our query. This note is not intended to be an original contribution on the subject but a brief restatement of an interesting proposition concerning Marx's intellectual origins by a German professor of philosophy, Reinhard Lauth. To the best of my knowledge Professor Lauth's proposition has not been discussed as yet on this side of the Atlantic.

The eleventh thesis of Marx on Feuerbach, appended to his Deutsche Ideologie (1845-46) reads: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern. Its meaning is well known and the alteration from interpretation to change, from theoretical to practical philosophy, has been stressed sufficiently.

It is particularly difficult to discover in the Soviet philosophic doctrine a precise formulation of a “philosophy of science” or a “philosophy of nature.” The reason is threefold. First, there is the ambiguity found in the Marxist classics, especially in the writings of Engels who, more than anyone, was responsible for the construction of a doctrina naturae from the insights of Marx and himself. Second, is the inherent necessity of dialectical materialism or any materialistic position to identify its philosophy of nature with its ontology, despite the loud outcry of the Soviet philosophic camp against any attempt to identify its position with that nauseous word “metaphysics.” Finally, there is a condition of flux in the positions of contemporary Soviet philosophers on several important facets of a current philosophical problem—the relation of philosophy to the natural sciences.