Before the 1917 Revolution, about one hundred and thirty thousand people of Finnish origin lived on Russian territory on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland—from the Narva River in the west to the Neva River in the east, and in the region north of St. Petersburg. Their numbers remained fairly constant during the 1920s and early 1930s, but, after the Second World War, a great decrease was evident in the total Finnish population of the region, with only about twentyfour thousand recorded in the 1970 Soviet census. This drop in population is attributable not only to the ravages of the war but also to movements of people, including deportations that took place during the 1930s and 1940s.

Change in the Stalinist system, and stubborn resistance to change, have been the central features of Soviet political life since Stalin's death in 1953. The rival forces of “innovation and tradition,” to use the language of the official press, have become “two poles” in Soviet politics and society, which are expressed through “sharp clashes between people standing on both sides of the psychological barrier.“

“Cadres decide everything,” Stalin proclaimed in 1935. The slogan is familiar, as is the image of Stalin as a politician skilled in the selection and deployment of personnel. But who were his cadres? The literature on the prewar Stalin period tells us little even about his closest political associates, let alone those one step down the political hierarchy—Central Committee members, people's commissars and their deputies, obkom secretaries—or in key industrial posts. Only the Old Bolsheviks and the military leaders seem to emerge as individuals. The rest are relegated to that servile and faceless bureaucracy about which Trotsky wrote from afar. Their very anonymity (which might also be described as our —and Trotsky's—ignorance) has become part of a sociological generalization.

The peculiar treatment of sex in Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry has been noted by a number of literary critics. Simon Karlinsky, for example, points out the “reversal of sex roles” of the main characters in the fairy tale Tsar'-Devitsa (The Tsar-Maiden) and comments on the “interesting and significant” nature of this phenomenon “when viewed within the whole of Tsvetaeva's work and in terms of her personal biography.“

Because Ihor Kalynets’ is a contemporary poet, whose poetry was almost immediately censured, it is not at all surprising that no critical articles have been written about him in the Soviet Ukraine. The situation is not much better in the West. Apart from a few brief biographical sketches, only two short essays have appeared, and they are introductions to two collections of Kalynet”s poetry: one by Roman Semkovych, which introduces Vidchynennia vertepu,and the other by Larissa Onyshkevych, introducing Vohon kupala.Both of these are more concerned with the poetry found in the given collection, however, than with anoverall appraisal of the poet’s work. Nonetheless, the articles point to the folkloreinspired origins of Kalynets”s verse and refer to the poet’s predilection for steeping his poetry in the linguistic and mythic heritage of the Ukraine.

The demographic development of the serf population in imperial Russia, particularly its rate of natural growth during the thirty years preceding the emancipation in 1861, has been the subject of considerable controversy. On the basis of data from the tax censuses (revizii), abolitionists sontended that the serf population was dying out, implying that the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Many Soviet historians and demographers have subsequently advanced this view, seeing a demographic crisis as one dimension of the collapse of the feudal serf system. A Western scholar, Professor Daniel Field, has recently lent his support to this interpretation. But was serfdom so socially oppressive or economically stifling as to affect natural population growth adversely? Other contemporary statisticians and later historians—either less opposed to serfdom or more skeptical about the accuracy of population data—have avoided the issue.

When Communist elites came to power in Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War, they attempted to create a new social and political order. As part of this process, efforts were made to improve the status of women and to incorporate them as full participants in a socialist society.

The reign of Alexander II witnessed an extraordinary expansion of women's medical education. The post-Crimean War regime saw the establishment of the first Russian medical courses which trained female physicians and the creation of a contingent of women doctors far outnumbering that of any contemporary European state. This remarkable advance of Russian women in the medical profession grew out of the experimental policies and the somewhat erratic nature of Alexander II's rule, which introduced sweeping, but often uncoordinated, domestic reforms and allowed favored statesmen to develop competing policies in their respective ministries. During the period 1855—81, the popular press, reveling in its recent release from Nicholas I's censorship, transformed the question of women's medical education into a major issue of public controversy.

If one examines the role of women in rural areas in different countries of the world, varying styles or patterns of development can be observed. A particular style found in socialist countries has been described as the “feminization of agriculture.” This pattern, prevalent in East European countries and especially in the Soviet Union, is largely a function of rapid industrialization and the demographic changes necessary to support development. In the Soviet case, for example, the absolute size of the rural population has been declining mainly because of rural-urban migration. Furthermore, this migration has been dominated by youth, a trend which, in combination with losses of males from the war years, has resulted in a rural population whose average age and proportion of women is rising.

In 1917, Ukrainian nationalists took advantage of the deterioration of central authority in the Russian Empire to make a bid for Ukrainian self-determination. The struggle for Ukrainian statehood continued under three successive national governments until 1920.The first year of the revolution, however, is crucial to understanding the evolution of the national movement in the Ukraine. In 1917, the Ukraine was as free of Russian interference and military occupation as it would be during the era of revolution and civil war. Ukrainian institutions and parties developed in freedom, democratic elections exposed the Ukrainian masses to nationalist agitation and measured their response, and the Russian government was forced to deal with the Ukraine as a distinct political entity.

Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union developed sophisticated and diversified criminological research. Well-trained lawyers, doctors, and social scientists obtained access to criminal statistics, research facilities, and funding and were unhampered by ideological limitations. The varieties of descriptive, statistical, and experimental research on crime conducted in criminological institutes by government agencies and independent researchers throughout the Soviet Union did much to advance criminologists’ understanding of the personality of the offender and the relationship between crime and social change.

On a midwinter day in Moscow at the very end of 1927, a package containing two kilograms of a substance, similar in color to “lime-flower honey,”1 which had been christened “Diolefin” by its makers was deposited with the scientific and technical council for the chemical industry of VSNKh. Just over four and a half years later, on a summer day in 1932 in laroslavl’ five hundred kilograms of this same material were removed from an autoclave in a newly built factory. These two events are seen as marking the beginning and end of the development and innovation of synthetic rubber, one of the success stories of the First Five- Year Plan; for the laroslavl’ plant, SK-1 (Sinteticheskii Kanchuk-l), with a design capacity of ten thousand metric tons, was the first large-scale plant to be built anywhere in the world.

The majority of nineteenth-century literary critics identified The Devils as an antinihilist novel. The basic theme of Dostoevsky's work, the journal in which it was published, and the author's own journalistic commentary on his novel all seemed to link Dostoevsky to such conservative writers as Pisemskii, Leskov, and Krestovskii. Modern critics, both Soviet and Western, are aware that The Devils has qualities which make it vastly superior to the antinihilist works of the writers mentioned above. But in stressing Dostoevsky's artistic superiority, there is a danger of underestimating the powerful influence of badly written conservative novels upon his desire to write The Devils.

In the labyrinthine world of Rumanian politics, it was easy enough to find striking examples of corruption in high places and low, year after year, both before and after World War I, and to dismiss the country's parliamentary form of M government as a sham or as an imitation of the West. But in 1919 many Rumanian had reason to expect the future to be brighter than the past. The approximate doubling of Rumanian territory and population and a happy ending, to the long-fought struggle for national unity seemed a most auspicious foundation for Rumania's new postwar life. Social justice and the exigencies of the modern world were being addressed by the advent of universal suffrage for men and the first stages of extensive land reform.

The student-led Russian working-class movement of the early 1870s, only lightly studied to date, is intimately connected with the beginnings of the famous “to the people” movement of 1874. The main purpose of this essay is to explore this connection. When radical students in the cities experienced unexpected limitations on their efforts to organize city workers, they reformulated their plan and eventually decided that direct contact with the peasantry was possible. Thus the populism of the movement “to the people,” generally considered a student phenomenon inspired by books alone, may in fact have been the result of practical work among city workers, characterized by much trial and error.

In recent years, a number of scholars have argued that the traditional negative image of Paul I is in need of substantial revision. Even Boris Nolde’s seminal history of the Russian Empire presents the emperor in an uncomplimentary light, as a man who was greedy for territory but not an astute analyst of the information available to guide his decisions. If no one has yet claimed that Paul was an exceptionally wise and able man, some historians, at least, have shown that he was neither as foolish nor as mad as the partisans of Catherine and Alexander would have him be. Hugh Ragsdale has argued that Paul was far more aware of Russia’s international interests and more assertive in policy making than is usually thought.