For long years Russia’s legal history has intrigued the scholars of Eastern Europe, and some in the West, but little attention has been devoted in English to the most ancient sources, those to be found in the chronicles and the Russkaia Pravda. Although Russian legal history offers little of the continuity of institutions to be found in Anglo-Saxon law, its earliest documents are matters of concern even to Soviet legal historians in an effort to understand a heritage that has left its impact upon contemporary developments. In order to sketch a part of that heritage conveniently for English-language readers, this brief article has been prepared.

Numerous sources, both secular and ecclesiastical, attest to the widespread popularity in Kievan Rus' and Muscovite Russia of the professional minstrelentertainers known as skomorokhi. To the folklorist these curious jacks-of all- trades, reminiscent of the French jongleurs and German Spielmänner, have become identified primarily with the singing, composing, and eventual transmission to the peasants of the north of heroic tales and historical songs (byliny and istoricheskie pesni). To the sociocultural historian the skomorokhi represent both a preliminary or formative stage in the evolution of the Russian theater and an important chapter in the early history of secular music in Russia. But whether one views them through the eyes of the folklorist or the historian there is little doubt that these veselye liudi or veselye molodtsy, as they were sometimes referred to, played an important role in the social and cultural life of the Eastern Slavs from the eleventh through the seventeenth century.

By the summer of 1971 Leonid Brezhnev had apparently become effective head of state of the Soviet Union and its spokesman. When Chancellor Brandt visited the Soviet Union in September he conferred with no one else, and Pravda reported (September 19) that “responsible members of the Secretariat of the General Secretary” participated in the conversations. One is reminded of the power obscurely exercised by Stalin’s personal secretariat, especially the mysterious Poskrebyshev during the later years of his rule, and of the role of Hitler’s secretariat, headed by Martin Bormann. Yet Brezhnev is certainly not the despot implied by these analogies. Officially, he has assumed no new powers. More important, no one has been ousted from the top circle since 1965, when the regime seemed to be truly a plural leadership in which no individual was clearly dominant. Yet it is practically the first task of a new tyrant to replace with his dependents those who were formerly his equals or at least potential rivals.

From the demise of Poland-Lithuania in 1795 until their emergence as two independent states in 1918, Lithuania was an integral part of the Russian Empire. At the close of the nineteenth century the Lithuanian provinces of that empire had a total population of approximately 2.6 million. Ethnic Lithuanians, 63 percent of the total number of inhabitants, lived mainly in rural regions and were engaged in farming; the rest were members of other ethnic groups, mostly Jews and Poles, who resided in towns and depended for their livelihood on the urban economy. The dominant agricultural hinterland possessed a considerable degree of ethnic unity. The urban centers were multinational. The influx of Russian military and civilian personnel, if small in relation to the total population, contributed to this intermixture of nationalities.

The Russian government had at various times subsidized the French press before 1904 but not for any long period or on such a large scale as was attempted from 1904 to 1906. During these critical two years the tsarist government appropriated over two and a half million francs for the French press. The French government acted as the catalyst by demanding that Russia “subsidize” the French press every time disturbing news reached Paris.

The Franco-Russian alliance suffered serious stresses and strains from 1904 to 1906, mainly because of divergent foreign policy objectives. French policy directed by Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé aimed at the preservation of the European balance of power and the advancement of French imperial interests in the Mediterranean.

In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda’s founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin’s leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin’s literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies which predictably found that Stalin, Molotov, and certain other “conciliatory elements” within Pravda’s editorial board had hindered Lenin’s efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

Confronted with the enigma of revolutionary Russia, Imperial Germany vacillated between a policy of official cooperation and one of counterrevolutionary intervention after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In search of the reasons for this ambivalence, Western scholars have explored the ironies of the “unholy alliance” between Kaiser and commissar. Somewhat embarrassed for owing their survival to German autocracy, Soviet writers have praised Lenin’s cleverness in exploiting the contradictions within the imperialist camp. In West Germany, after decades of complacent anticommunism, Fritz Fischer in his Griff nach der Weltmacht has charged that rapacious Wilhelmian war aims “found their logical fulfillment in Brest-Litovsk and its supplementary treaties”.

“Truth, Beauty, Good, Evil: ethical imperatives,” runs the line that Innokentii Volodin finds in his mother’s papers on the day of his arrest. As ever, these are the aims to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn aspires in his latest novel. His account of the events in East Prussia as World War I begins is more than an extensive compilation of historical facts, more than their transmutation into fictional form. It is an attempt to capture the truth about certain elusive laws governing the movement and development of human society, best observed in times of crisis. In War and Peace Tolstoy attempted to expound and test a philosophy of history. Solzhenitsyn’s purpose in August 1914 is substantially the same. Some comparison of the two works is inevitable.