In 1960, for the first time in the postwar period, the Central Statistical Office of the Rumanian People's Republic released data on the country's foreign trade in its official statistical yearbook.

The coverage of the statistics given out at this time was highly selective. It comprised only the total value of imports and exports in "foreign-currency lei" in 1958, index numbers linking these data to 1950 and 1955, a geographical breakdown of trade by countries for 1958, and the volume of imports and exports of the "principal commodities" traded in that year. From 1959 to 1963 these figures were each year brought up to date, but no additional information was given out. In the 1964 yearbook there appeared a breakdown of imports and exports by commodity groups (nine in all) covering the years 1950, 1955, and 1959 to 1963. While these published statistics were extremely valuable in themselves, they did not supply an adequate basis for an understanding of the most important trends in postwar trade, including the trade expansion associated with the first period of intensive industrialization from 1949 to 1953, the stagnation period that followed the introduction of the New Course in mid-1953, and the major restructuring after 1958 of Rumania's trade relations with its Comecon partners and with Western markets, which is only imperfectly reflected in the geographical distribution of imports and exports in recent years.

The origins of Russian factory legislation date essentially from the decade of the 1880s, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the economy and society of the Russian Empire. During the reign of Alexander II there had been a growing dissatisfaction with the poor working conditions in Russian factories. Desire on the part of certain officials to eliminate some of the worst abuses of the factory system led to the formation, beginning in 1859, of a number of commissions to study conditions in the factories and to make recommendations for their improvement. But, with the exception of a decree issued by the government in 1866 which sought the enforcement of more stringent sanitary measures, attempts to introduce legislation of the character recommended by these commissions were for a long time unsuccessful.

Iurii Olesha's Short Novel Envy (Zavist', 1927) has been greatly admired and even has some claim to be considered the “great Soviet novel.“Yet comparatively little has been written about Envy since the first flood of reviews and articles, many uncritical, appeared in the Soviet press between 1927 and 1933.

Envy is a complex novel, sometimes described as expressionistic, written in a variety of styles and with many planes of meaning. Elements of realist, romanticist, and symbolist styles are present. Dreams, fantasies, and lies are introduced, often as reality. It is a work in which the author's ideological intentions are far from clear or unambiguous, a work deeply hedged with irony. And it is a work that can yield much to discerning analysis.

Georgii V. Chicherin's conversion from Menshevism to Bolshevism exemplifies the intense political and ideological stress placed on Russian Social Democrats by World War I. The war split all of Europe's socialist parties, but none so deeply as the already faction-ridden Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Even after the initial shock had passed and most Russian Social Democrats found their way to one or another of the party's factions, not all members joined a recognizable group. For some the shock was too great, and much time and wandering were needed before they found their bearings. One of these wanderers was Lenin's future Foreign Commissar.

In recent years Poland's political life has produced a genuine and interesting revival of the Polish parliament, the Seym. It has been especially significant in the area of legislative committees, which not only grew in number but enlarged their sphere of activities and became more independent. The development had its sources in the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin in 1953 and culminated in Poland in the so-called “October Revolt” of 1956.

Historians have customarily treated two major periods of Russia's commercial relations with Western Europe (defined as Western Christendom) in the pre-Petrine period: (1) until 1494, the year in which Ivan III closed the Hanseatic establishment in Novgorod and which is generally viewed as the end of Hanseatic dominance in the Russian trade; and (2) from 1553, when the English first sailed around the North Cape to establish regular commercial relations with Russia via the northern route, or from 1558, when Ivan IV conquered the Baltic port of Narva (he then maintained direct trade with Western merchants there until he lost that port to the Swedes in 1581).

Whether Marx and Engels jointly or Engels alone originated dialectical materialism, there can be no doubt that only Engels should be credited with its codification. This was recognized implicitly by both Plekhanov and Lenin, for they based their accounts of what they regarded as the Marxian philosophy on the works of Engels, above all, Anti-Dühring and Ludwig Feuerbach. They adopted this course because they believed—and impressed this belief upon the world—that there was a complete identity of views between Marx and Engels on all philosophical matters. As far as the conception of materialism is concerned, this meant in fact the substitution of Engels’ views for those of Marx.

The Soviet Paradox of high mechanization and continuing intensive use of hand labor in agriculture has been commented upon many times. For its level of capital intensity, Soviet agriculture is easily the least productive in the world. The purpose of this paper is not to elaborate anew on these well-known oddities or their consequences for the current and prospective (short-run) supply of farm goods in the USSR. The problem here is: Given the collectivist ideology which found expression in the collective-farm and state-farm systems, what will mechanization ultimately do to the farm system? In countries with advanced farm mechanization and effective use of capital, such as the United States, the farm labor force tends to become rather small; a similar development is clearly under way also in western Europe.

At the end of 1932 Soviet agriculture was in an extremely perilous condition. After three years of forced collectivization, “dekulakization,” and confiscatory procurement policies, labor discipline and operational effectiveness were collapsing in the socialist enterprises in the village—the machinetractor stations (mashinno-traktornye stantsii—MTS), the kolkhozes, and the sovkhozes. Through neglect or outright sabotage the peasants had decimated the herds of cattle and essential draft animals. Finally, a growing famine, partially artificial in origin, was striking certain major regions of the country.

This article examines the relationship between the semantics of ideology and political practice under the pressure of socio-economic change in Hungary of the early 1960s, especially 1962-63. The events of 1956 forced the Communist Party elite to recognize the imperative need for internal social change and for control over its dynamics. Manipulation of social forces and ideological currents became a day-to-day concern as soon as it was realized that the political system must rely to an increasing extent upon the introduction of policies which induced support for the system itself—a need undoubtedly arising out of the social transformation that accompanies a developing and modernizing industrial society.