The 1860s witnessed an important but somewhat neglected stage in the evolution of intelligentsia attitudes toward the peasantry and other lower strata of society. It is best represented by writers who devoted themselves to portrayals of the narod, urban and rural, and who were known collectively (although they were by no means a cohesive group) as the raznochintsy writers of the sixties. They included F. M. Reshetnikov, N. V. Uspensky, N. G. Pomialovsky, A. I. Levitov, N. A. Kushchevsky, and M. A. Voronov. The biographies of these men are remarkably similar. They were all from uneducated families of the lower classes. Caught up in the ferment of the sixties which penetrated even to the most backward and obscure areas of Russia (from which most of them came), they made their way to St. Petersburg, seeking to free themselves from the age-old restrictions which Russian society had imposed on people of their social origins.

The name of Solzhenitsyn so dominated the Soviet literary scene in the 1960s that the ordinary Western reader might be forgiven for supposing that in the writing of fiction he was the lone star in an otherwise featureless sky. This is far from being the case. Solzhenitsyn himself, in a recent interview with Western correspondents, pointed out that there are a number of other writers of major stature at work in Russia today, though understandably he was inhibited from naming any of them.1 In fact, in the return to the moral concern, insight, and compassion which are the great heritage of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Solzhenitsyn has been by no means alone. On the contrary, he is merely primus inter pares among a whole school of writers who have made it their aim to digest and reassess Russia’s apocalyptic recent past, and in the light of it to reflect on man’s moral nature.

In the first days of 1938, Kalman Kanya, Hungary’s foreign minister, privately expressed the opinion that there was nowhere in Europe a “will to war” and that, barring accidents, peace seemed assured for at least a year. In a technical sense Kanya’s prediction was borne out by events, but he clearly did not foresee the Central European upheavals that were only months away. In the crisis over the Austrian Anschluss, Hungary was to remain a powerless bystander, unable, and to a certain extent unwilling, to raise a voice of protest. The Czechoslovak crisis was an entirely different matter. Virtually all politically conscious Hungarians believed that Prague’s time of troubles should be exploited to obtain territorial revision and strengthen Hungary’s position in East Central Europe. But, as previous historians of this subject have indicated, Hungary’s course in the unfolding Czechoslovak crisis was hesitant and indecisive.

The period of the 1930s has been called the time of the “Diplomatic War.“ During these years Nazi Germany seized the initiative in international affairs and tried to impose its will on the other states of Europe. The reaction of Britain and France to the threat of German expansion was appeasement until March 1939, when, with Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear that the Führer’s aims were not limited to the German-inhabited areas. Thus the states of East Central Europe found themselves in a highly vulnerable position: in the West they faced increasing political and economic pressure from the Reich; in the East there was the Soviet Union with its very exportable Communist ideology which would have undermined the political and social order of all these states. In this situation the East Central European states all sought some way of being independent from their two powerful neighbors.

A decorative belt in the form of an indented frieze, which in Pskov is called a “runner” (begunok or begunets), surrounds the drums supporting the domes and graces the apses of Pskov churches to form one of their most distinguishing features. It consists of three bands, the two outer ones formed of quadrangles, while the inner one is made up of interlocking triangles whose apexes alternately point upward and downward (fig. 1). Above the begunki, on the drums, usually there are additional decorative “brows” formed by a series of indented arches. But these are not unique to Pskov and will not be dealt with in this paper. The ornamentation on the apses usually is composed solely of the Pskov begunok.

Western and Soviet scholars have generally maintained different interpretations of the period between 1905 and 1917 in Russia, describing it respectively as a time of amelioration or of immiseration for the masses. Both groups, however, have stressed the progress of capitalism in prerevolutionary Russia. Despite standard references to the agrarian problem, most of the attention given to socioeconomic development in this period has focused on industrialization and the urban sector. Yet 87 percent of the population was rural when revolution broke out in 1905, and 85 percent still rural when it erupted again in 1917.

During the interrevolutionary period the imperial government adopted a program that was intended to provide a take-off base for agriculture. Prime Minister Stolypin’s policy was aimed at the replacement of the archaic communal structure by a new order of individualized peasant landholdings that would give scope to personal initiative and technological innovation.