Between 1898 and 1917 a massive surge of creative activity transformed the Russian cultural scene. Experimentation in all the arts was accompanied by a revival of interest in philosophy and religion. This is the era of Diaghilev and the Russian ballet, of the painters Chagall and Kandinsky, the composers Stravinsky and Skriabin, and scores of lesser-known artists and writers. Poetry, dormant since the 1840s, revived and flourished, and literature explored new themes and techniques.

The eighteenth century marked a crucial new period in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Muscovy the church had been an institution of paramount importance: it possessed enormous wealth, exercised considerable influence on the theocratic politics of Muscovy, and held a virtual monopoly over culture and art. During the eighteenth century, however, this awesome power and wealth all but vanished. The secularized state wrought fundamental changes in the church: it replaced the patriarch with a more tractable Synod, gradually exploited and finally sequestered the church's lands and peasants, and in general transformed the church into an “integral part of the Russian state structure and administration.” The church's ascendancy was correspondingly weakened in both society and culture. The ecclesiastical leadership made little headway against the abiding problems of superstition and paganism, and it failed to stem the spread of the Old Belief and of secular culture throughout the population.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.

Writing some ten years ago about the changing political situation in the Soviet Union, Allen Kassof made the astute observation, “Although liberalization tells something about where the Soviet system has come from, it does not say very much about where it is going. To say that the system is being liberalized is like walking away backward from a receding reference point, a procedure that gives too little information about what lies on the road ahead.” It is clear that this statement applies with even greater force to Eastern Europe—even if we were to substitute “change” for “liberalization.” Anyone reckless enough to write about the prospects for change in Eastern Europe is faced with an almost impossible task, certainly a more difficult one than for the Soviet Union, or for that matter China, where at least there is, or was, a single reference point—be it Stalinism or Maoism, totalitarianism or the “administered society.”

My objective in this article is to examine the purpose and the performance of the Progressive Bloc, the wartime majority coalition of Russia’s Fourth State Duma. My analysis, in turn, should promote a more sophisticated understanding of the political behavior of Russia’s moderates, and in particular of Russia’s liberals, during the final years of crisis for the tsarist regime.

At the death of the Orthodox Metropolitan Pavel Nenadović in 1768, the educational level of the great majority of his Serbian and Rumanian coreligionists was still very low. In the seventy-year period since the regions in which they lived had again come under Habsburg rule, only feeble and shortlived initiatives had been made to improve their lot. Literacy rates were minuscule, printed matter rare, and schools of any sort so few and so scattered as to make formal education a distinct oddity. This was true even of the Serbs, whose settlements in southern Hungary included a relatively large number of well-off merchants and peasants, and whose statutory position as leaders of the Orthodox minorities was thereby reinforced. Still worse off were the Rumanians, many of whom were just emerging from a pastoral economy and extreme cultural backwardness. Even among the lower Orthodox clergy, the ability to read and write in any language was deemed extraordinary. The literacy problem was complicated by the fact that both Serbs and Rumanians used variants of Church Slavonic instead of their own vernaculars as their literary vehicles.

Not so many years ago, when “de-Stalinization” and “de-satellization” seemed to be the order of things, the horizons of change in Eastern Europe appeared virtually unlimited. Indeed, one elaborate political science treatise, published in 1967, purported to discern two “irreversible trends” throughout the area, an increase in pluralization within individual countries and the tendency of the European Communist states to become more European and less Communist. Nowadays, in the continued aftermath of the massive Soviet intervention to reverse the changes actually undertaken during 1968 in Czechoslovakia, such certainties have all but disappeared. Yet, as Professor Korbonski’s timely and stimulating discussion reminds us, there is no logical reason to suppose that Communist societies are immune to change. With respect to Eastern Europe, however, as Professor Korbonski also notes, the hazards of forecasting are truly, formidable.

For over a century scholars have been intrigued by one of history's most famous apocryphal works, the “Political Testament of Peter the Great.“The central theme—a warning of the danger Russia represents to all her neighbors —has always been a relevant topic for discussion. However, a satisfactory explanation of the document's genesis is yet to be given. One thing is clear: the “testament” is a forgery, an attempt to “frame” Peter I. But who is the culprit? The question has aroused the instincts of the detective in many historians and set them on the miscreant's trail.

Suspects were not lacking. Initially, circumstantial evidence pointed to Napoleon as the author or inspirer of the fabrication, since it was in 1812 in France that the first published version of this document appeared. Soon, however, suspicion fell on C. L. Lesur, one of the emperor's propagandists and the author of the work which contained the published text.

The nineteenth-century Russian writer Melnikov-Pechersky is not well known in the West. Yet this contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is a major literary figure who produced a series of fascinating sketches, stories, and tales about Russian provincial life as well as two epic-length novels concerned with Old Believers, In the Forests (V lesakh) and On the Hills (Na gorakh). How does one account for the relative obscurity of so important a writer outside his native land? First of all, very few translations of his works (no English ones whatsoever) have appeared in the West. Thus little biographical and critical material on Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who signed all his mature fiction “Andrei Pechersky,” is available in languages other than Russian. Second, in the USSR, as in prerevolutionary Russia, both general and scholarly assessments of Melnikov are frequently clouded by extraliterary considerations. In other words, the reception traditionally accorded him has been ambiguous, or at best lukewarm.

Enclosed in a letter, written in September 1815 by William David Lewis (1792-1881) to the United States minister in Sweden, Jonathan Russell (1771-1832), is an interesting and unique example of an American's effort to compose verse in the Russian language. Though only a curiosity of Russian literature, “Yankee Doodle” illustrates the degree of facility gained by one of the first American students of Russian after more than a year of study. Of additional interest is the pronunciation guide which Lewis furnished Russell—rare evidence on how Russian was actually spoken in the early nineteenth century.

In hope it began; in perplexity it ended. The twenty-three-year presence of the American Young Men’s Christian Association in Russia that began in 1900 and reached a peak between 1917 and 1920, when more than 440 YMCA staffers served in that country and the Association spent almost eight million dollars for its operation, was over in 1923. In fact, the Association was required to curtail certain of its activities between 1917 and 1920 by both the conservative Kolchak movement in Siberia and the radical Bolshevik government, and eventually, like other groups, it was forced out.

Professor Korbonski has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay with which I find myself largely in disagreement, in general and in detail. I hope that the following brief comments will indicate with what, and why, I disagree. But in spite of my disagreements I think that Professor Korbonski’s effort was well worth making. Indeed, I share his view that the study of East European politics can well profit from the study of political development and comparative politics, and indeed already has, for example, from his and Professor Janos’s work.

Beginning with Catherine II's Municipal Charter of April 21, 1785, Russia's statesmen made repeated efforts to improve the ineffective and antiquated manner in which urban affairs were administered in the Russian Empire. By the beginning of the 1840s, however, the problem of modernizing the administration of Russia's cities was no nearer to a practical solution than it had been a half-century earlier. The growing number of administrative duties which fell upon the shoulders of city authorities sometimes made urban officeholding nearly a full-time responsibility, and Russia's urban classes were understandably reluctant to serve in elective offices which took so much time away from their personal business affairs and offered so little prospect of reward.

The First Congress of the Peoples of the East was held in. the city of Baku from September 1 to 8, 1920. It has tended, on the whole, to attract attention rather more because of the colorful Oriental pageantry which surrounded it than because of the importance of its debates and resolutions. The first account to become available in the West, for instance, was that of H. G. Wells, who had been in Russia when the Congress was taking place. He reported that Zinoviev and his associates had "held a congress at Baku, at which they gathered together a quite wonderful accumulation of white, black, brown, and yellow people, Asiatic costumes and astonishing weapons.

Modernist prose forms often present the reader with the paradox of cerebral, structurally complex works which express an irrational or antirational content. These works seek an almost geometric perfection of form while simultaneously rejecting intellect as a totally inadequate means of conceiving contemporary experience. Strikingly often it is a witch of a rather special breed who provides the essential thematic and narrative elements without which the intellectual pattern of the novel could not crystallize out. That voyantes and sorceresses should people the prose of Western surrealists such as Andre Breton is not too surprising, but it is surely a nice problem that two of the most self-consciously modernist Soviet novels, Fedin's Cities and Years and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, should depend for both their compositional and moral energies on witches.

The year 1071 was a particularly difficult one for the relatively young Christian church in Kievan Rus. In a lengthy entry the Primary Chronicle details the activities during 1071 of the volkhvy (pagan priests or magicians), who seem to have embarked upon an intense, widespread campaign of subversion and active opposition to the new faith. Appearing in such major cities as Kiev and Novgorod, they sowed confusion and discord among the people, many of whom, at least momentarily, turned against their ecclesiastical authorities to side with their former spiritual leaders.

When this study was originally prepared nearly thirty years ago, it was part of a larger government memorandum. As such it was written within a framework of exploring problems of economic relations with the USSR after the war, with the expectation of a large and mutually beneficial trade in mind. At the time, I presented a general analysis of these problems in a longish pamphlet. I was unable, however, in that publication to touch upon the problem of Soviet policies on, and relations with, international cartels, because the government document in question was classified as “secret,” as was the information I had obtained in the course of preparing it. The recent declassification of that document by both the Department of State and the Department of Justice (from whose Antitrust Division a large body of valuable information had been received) has caused me to consider publication of the material on the four case studies of Soviet participation in international cartels—to wit, the cases concerning matches, phosphates, potash, and platinum. I feel that such publication is warranted essentially for two reasons.

The Russian puppet theater (kukol'nyi teatr or Petrushka) is not well known in the West. There are passing references to it in general histories of puppetry and the like, but unfortunately these are more often confusing than enlightening. One learns, for example, that the Old Russian version of the Polish marionette theater, the szopka, was the “bertep [sic] meaning Bethlehem,“ or that the first known description of a Russian puppet show appears in “Adam O'Leary's [sic] Travels in Russia and Persia.” Perhaps even more unfortunate, Petrushka has been neglected by native scholars as well. Their failure to deal seriously with the origins of the Russian puppet theater has been particularly glaring, and they have also largely ignored its early history. Most have, in fact, been content to view the entire period before the 1630s, when Adam Olearius appeared with his famous illustrated description of a performing Russian puppeteer, as terra incognita.

In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic “dialects”: Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs’ neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: “When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue.”