The division of the Slavic nations into catholic and orthodox is the main reason usually given for their mutual distrust and sometimes bitter hatred. Though this is, unfortunately, the general case, there are, nevertheless, exceptions. The Croats, a Catholic nation, have had a great admiration for, and a deep attachment to, the Orthodox Russians since the sixteenth century. What is most surprising is that this unmotivated, decidedly emotional relationship with “mother” (matuška) Russia was furthered by some of the most prominent members of the Catholic clergy: for example, Juraj Križanić, Antun Kanižlić Andrija Kačić Miošić, Franjo Rački, and Josip J. Strossmayer.

I do not intend in this paper to discuss this fascinating trend within the ranks of the Croatian spiritual elite which, while remaining unshaken in its ancestral faith, nevertheless looked toward “the third Rome” and sincerely hoped that one day, under the auspices of the Tsar, all Slavic nations would enjoy freedom and even religious unity.

“If the mind is obligated to obey the word of command, it can at any rate feel that it is not free. But if it has been so manipulated beforehand that it obeys without even waiting for the word of command, it loses even the consciousness of enslavement.” All modern societies involve mass manipulation, especially now since the masses have become economically and politically important. Whether it is an election or merely a matter of consumption, the crucial factor is the behavior of the activated mass. Motivation research and public opinion polls are a way of gauging the anticipated reaction of the consumer and the voter. The asymmetry in decision-making between the masses and the businessman or the politician is thus diminished.

How does one go about describing briefly a large and complex society in the process of rapid change? The problems involved are not only of space but also of conceptualization. To be comprehensive yet succinct one must fall back on generalizations, which always run the danger of concealing the very nuances that make up the richness and diversity of a culture. Moreover, the nature and direction of change in modern societies is a matter of continuing controversy, and a common basis of theory and terminology cannot be taken for granted. No society in modern times has been more subject to conflicting assumptions and interpretations than that of Russia. Under these circumstances, perhaps the best solution is to adopt an approach sufficiently general to do justice to the complexities involved and at the same time definite enough in its point of view to offer a consistent interpretation—as well as a reasonably clear basis for controversy.

Few major decisions of Soviet history can be ranked in importance with the decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress of December, 1927, to collectivize agriculture. Not only did it have tremendous consequences for the Soviet peasantry (and ultimately the peasantry of other Communist states), forcing them to leave individual for collective farming in a struggle that cost millions of lives, but it also created a form of agricultural organization which has become an unchallengeable element of Communist organizational orthodoxy. Only Yugoslavia amongst Communist states has dared to reject this orthodoxy, though there is abundant evidence that most of the peasants of Communist countries would reject it if they could.

In view of the immense importance of the decision to collectivize, it is indeed surprising that so little critical examination of its background has been undertaken by non-Soviet scholars, and that the Stalinist rationalization of the decision, doubtful though its validity is, is widely employed in Western scholarly studies.

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.

To summarize the nature of an entire social system in one brief article is a truly forbidding task; but to criticize such an effort is equally difficult. There is much in Zbigniew Brzezinski's essay with which I agree; and for the article as a whole I am inclined to express admiration. There are some statements with which I do not agree, some that I would express differently, and some things which I think are essential enough to have been added. In order to make it easier for me to state my views systematically, I propose to begin by indicating how I would have written an outline sketch of the Soviet social system. We shall then see where major disagreements or shifts of emphasis are located.

My own approach to this subject is very much the same as Professor Black's. Imperial Russia, it seems to me, was the prototype of the “underdeveloped society” whose problems are so familiar a theme in our own age. The study of nineteenth-century Russia is the study of a society in process of modernization, and probably the most useful service which non-Russian historians can render is to try to regard this process as a whole, and particularly to differentiate between those aspects of Russia's modernization process which are common to several known historical cases and those which are peculiar to Russia. The following comments on Professor Black's article are offered from this point of view.

The physical setting, rightly stressed by Professor Black at the outset, may be regarded as a peculiarly Russian aspect. Here human and physical geography are closely interrelated.

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.

In the period between the 20th and 21st Party Congresses, thirteen plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were held, although only twelve can be documented from official sources. These meetings of the CC elected at the February, 1956, meeting, more numerous than for any comparable time interval in party history, not only provided the background for the first extraordinary (vneocherednoj) Congress in more than four decades; they also furnished the forums and tribunals at which all the important issues subsequently referred to the Congress for formal post facto approval had been initially presented and, for for the most part, resolved. Nevertheless, as M. Suslov pointed out, the January 27-February 5 meeting was “not a regular Party Congress, which explains why no Central Committee report was heard.” Yet despite A. Mikoyan's reminder that the delegates had "assembled … to discuss the single question on the agenda—the control figures" of the seven-year plan, Khrushchev's 67,000-word, seven-hour long address and the eighty-five shorter contributions dealt with developments of the intervening three years and prospects for the future.

Professor Black's analysis of imperial Russian society places him unmistakably with those scholars who treat Russia essentially as an underdeveloped country and its modern history as an attempt, successful or tragic, to catch up with the West, or, in any case, to “develop.” To use the author's own words:

The interpretation suggested here is one which sees die world as composed of well over one hundred politically organized societies, each with its own deep-seated traditional institutions, undergoing at different stages a process of change which has certain universally common features. This process of change, which can be traced to the revolutionary expansion of knowledge originating in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, tends to affect in one degree or another all aspects of human activity….

Russia is one of these societies, differing from others in her traditional culture as others differ from each other, but also undergoing like them the characteristic interaction of the traditional and the modern.

Professor Brzezinski's paper moves along a number of planes of discourse. Some of it is describable as general theory of modern dictatorship, some as analysis of a particular political order, that of Russia, and some as discussion of current Russian political affairs and tendencies. In these necessarily rather brief remarks, I shall be concerned chiefly with issues that arise under the first two headings.

In Section I, where the notion of totalitarianism is expounded as a comprehensive conceptual key to the nature of the Soviet and other like systems (presumably both Communist and Fascist), Professor Brzezinski stresses the difference in kind between “traditional” or “old-fashioned” dictatorship and modern totalitarian dictatorship.

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.

Czechoslovakia has become a socialist republic. On July 11, 1960, the recently elected (June 12) Czechoslovak National Assembly approved a new socialist constitution replacing the previously existing, though already unobserved, “people's democratic” constitution of May, 1948.1 The new official name of the state is the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR), and its coat of arms incorporates the Soviet-styled Red Star as “the symbol of the victory of socialism.” The Czechoslovak Communists proudly boast that Czechoslovakia is the first country in the world after the Soviet Union to achieve socialist production relations and to root its achievements in a socialist constitution. As they see it, the document is both a summary of gains already achieved—socialism, and a program for the transition from socialism to communism. The socialist production relations are further developing, and the country is “passing over to the building of an advanced socialist society and is mustering its forces for the transition to communism.”

The uniquely Russian form of primary social organization in the countryside known as the peasant household dates from the earliest history of the Slavic peoples. Although some details of its origin have been disputed by scholars, there is no doubt that family households existed during the Kievan period of Russian history, having evolved from an earlier form of clan organization. Commonly uniting three generations of a family under one roof, the household was governed by customary law, which held that its members comprised a joint subject of ownership rights and a joint object of legal obligations. The household was represented by its head, whose authority, however, was circumscribed by the other members, who contributed their labor and earnings to the “common kettle” and took their meals from the “common bowl.“ In short, the household was both a large family and a sort of labor co-operative.

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.

Boarding schools of various types have long existed within the framework of the Soviet Russian educational system; homes for orphans, delinquents, handicapped or artistically gifted children, and the military and naval academies, to cite just a few examples, are an integral and accepted part of life in the USSR. Nevertheless, when Nikita S. Khrushchev, speaking at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, called for the immediate establishment of a wide system of boarding schools for Soviet children, foreign observers realized at once that this was an entirely new and far more important type of school—one that represented a reversal of many of the educational theories, methods, and even purposes of the preceding two decades. The actual nature and goals of the new boarding schools, however, were not understood immediately.

Any discussion of the Council of Florence and the reception of its decisions in Moscow can hardly be construed as breaking new historical ground. At best, it can be described as still another visit to a well-worked excavation. The problem is too central to have suffered neglect, and a continuing stream of studies ranging from articles to monographs and general histories has touched upon the subject. Within recent years Father Joseph Gill has produced an excellent study on the Council and has appended an epilogue dealing with the reactions in eastern Europe. In his most recent monograph, Oscar Halecki devoted a substantial section to the immediate impacts and consequences in the Slavic East. In a memorable session of the 1954 meeting of the American Historical Association, three panelists devoted their attention to the Council and its aftermath in eastern Europe. One paper focused directly upon the reaction in Muscovy.