To Westerners one of the most confusing aspects of the Soviet administrative system has been the role played by lower officials of the Communist Party. It has long been clear that the top policy decisions are made within the central Party organs, but the relationship between the lower Party officials and the governmental administrators has been obscured by a number of seeming ambiguities and inconsistencies in Soviet administrative theory. The Party apparatus has been assigned the duty of supervising and controlling the state administration, but the mandates and powers of the two hierarchies appear ill-defined and overlapping.

The origins of modern Moscow can be traced to the early nineteenth century, when smokestacks began to supplement church cupolas on the city's skyline and the forsaken palaces of boyars were being converted into factories or homes of wealthy merchants. Pushkin observed this process with a mixture of romantic nostalgia and patriotic optimism as early as 1834. The old Orthodox and national shrine of Russia was starting its evolution as a major industrial center of the Empire. Along with this, however, came a later chapter of Russian religious history. Moscow during this same period also became a center of the Old Believers; Raskolniki, scattered for over a century on the frontiers of Russia, began to flock back to the ancient capital.

In June 1964, when Mr. Patrick Gordon Walker, at that time “shadow” minister on the opposition benches, returned to Britain from a short visit to Rumania, he denned the new policies of the Rumanian Workers Party as “national communism.” This definition is generally accepted. The term, coined some seventeen years ago on the occasion of Titoist Yugoslavia's defiance of Stalinist Russia and serving ever since to describe the policies of any small Communist power in quest of national independence, corresponds almost perfectly to the twin objectives of the Rumanian Workers Party's new policies. As far as “communism” is concerned, its conception is essentially the triple dogma of speedy industrialization, total collectivization, and the full maintenance of the state and the functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat under the monolithic guidance of the party. But as far as the “national” side of the term is concerned, this previously servile party has distinguished itself by the bold and steady way it has progressively affirmed the desire of the Rumanian People's Republic for independence from any individual state or group of powers.

In view of the extraordinary popularity of many poets in Russia today, the sense of failure expressed by one of them seems surprising:

Boris Slutsky's malaise is not unjustified.

History sometimes has its simple moments, and it is tempting to draw the early struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Poles in terms of a clash between Red Russia and White Poland. Most Soviet and some Western historians see it only as a fragment of the general conflict between revolution and reaction. Closer scrutiny, however, belies the seeming simplicity of dialectics. The story is tortuous and involved; moves behind the scenes accompanied the fighting at the front. The gulf which separated the Bolsheviks from the Entente and from Poland did not preclude clandestine contacts, and Poland's leader Józef Piłsudski played his own game with the Soviet regime.

Personal consumption is usually viewed as the major factor determining the standard of living of a population. Furthermore, to borrow Janet Chapman's phrase, it is “one of the grand criteria on which the performance of [an] economy will be judged.” To facilitate such an evaluation of East European economies, which have been operating to the present on the principles of Soviet-type planning, we have assembled in this paper the results of a statistical investigation of personal consumption in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Following the principle that context and comparison alone bring out meaning, we have selected those aspects that lend themselves most naturally to international confrontation: rates of growth and absolute levels of per capita consumption, changes in the relative share of personal consumption in total output, and changes in the structure of consumption by major categories.

An examination of the second Turkish alliance as it developed in the late months of 1914 between Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey forces the rejection of two interpretations generally accepted by students of the First World War: that the Turkish government was in leading strings to the Central Powers from the time the war began and that Austria-Hungary pursued a diplomatic policy which merely reflected its subordination to German will. Materials available in the German and Austrian Foreign Ministry archives show that these two interpretations are largely incorrect. Turkey forced the Central Powers to accept an agreement which strengthened its own international position. Austria-Hungary maintained a policy which furthered its own interests. Secondary accounts dealing with the relationships between Turkey and the Central Powers consider the German-Turkish Alliance of August 2, 1914, but they either do not treat at all the second alliance, signed January 11, 1915, or mention it in only the most cursory manner. Yet the two alliances have a close relationship, and the attitudes and policies of the powers concerned cannot be fully understood unless the second alliance is examined.

Although the study of Ukrainian historiography is rather new, it can boast of three distinguished names: Dmytro Doroshenko, Oleksander Ohloblyn, and M. I. Marchenko. To Doroshenko goes credit for the first work on Ukrainian historical writing ever published. His study, the only comprehensive survey, covers the period from the eleventh century to 1920. Doroshenko's book was supplemented and updated to 1956 by another Ukrainian historian, Ohloblyn

In the course of the nineteenth century it became clear that the unfettered speculation obtaining in philosophy frequently could not be useful in science. However, in the Soviet Union it is asserted that natural science can draw its correct "theoretical conclusions" only by relying upon the philosophic and the methodological teachings of dialectical materialism. Certain Soviet Marxists have, on allegedly philosophic grounds, rejected Western genetics, the resonance theory of the chemical bond, the principle of uncertainty of quantum mechanics, relativist cosmology, the relativization of space, time, and matter, probability theory, and symbolic logic. The intriguing question then remains whether Soviet dialectical materialists determine the validity of scientific theories and accomplishments on the basis of a priori judgments derived from philosophic analysis or whether the Soviet attacks on Western scientific thought are, rather, political and ideological in nature.

Throughout its existence–barring a brief spell of uncharacteristic loquacity in its earliest years, quickly suppressed–the Soviet secret police has followed the policy of making public as little information as possible about its current activities. Terse communiques reporting the apprehension of malefactors, brief and studiously noninformative press releases concerning the punishment of enemies of the Soviet state and people–these have been the forms preferred by the secret police for its communications to the outside world.

If upon occasion in the past Nikita Khrushchev took an indulgent view of the Stalinist process of natural selection in the Party apparatus, it would hardly have been surprising. He was, after all, a most prominent product and beneficiary of it. Yet, without in any way criticizing the process as such, Khrushchev constantly manifested a nagging concern over its end results. In part this concern may be attributed, as it often has been, to a readiness to regard personnel changes as a panacea for difficulties in reality stemming from deep structural flaws in the Soviet economy and administrative system. And it can hardly be denied that in 1962 and 1963 Khrushchev was confronted with serious difficulties in agriculture and industry. But there is also little reason to doubt that he was genuinely worried about the effectiveness— and hence the quality—of Party cadres, or, furthermore, that there were grounds for his uneasiness.

In a society with virtually all phases of the economy subject to planning an interest in regional economic planning almost inevitably arises. Such an interest has been evident in the USSR since the early 1920s, although not always to the same degree. Out of this interest evolved the notion of the economic complex, broadly conceived as a regional grouping of integrated economic activities. Inasmuch as these complexes were frequently thought of as geographic entities, the expression “territorial-production complex” (territorial'no-proizvodstvennyi kompleks), as well as some essentially synonymous terms, came into use. Interpretations vary somewhat, but, to judge from the frequency of reference to the concept in the professional journals of the geographers, economists, and planners, the idea seems to be a basic one among those concerned with regional planning.

The changes of 1962 and 1963 in the Soviet economic system in the wake of the decisions of the March and November 1962 plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union constitute an important link in the chain of "permanent reforms" designed to cure the chronic malfunctioning of the Soviet planning and management system. These changes are especially interesting with respect to the perennial problem of economic regionalization.

Much valuable information on the dynamics of Poland's political life between the world wars is still to be uncovered in the records of national elections. Of particular interest are the contests of 1919, 1922, and 1928, since in all of these elections political parties were still allowed to participate directly (as they were not in 1935 and 1938), and governmental restraint and manipulation were not yet so massive as to cast doubt on the entire result (as in 1930).