One of those organs of tsarist government that apparently broadened its responsibilities and competencies during the nineteenth century was the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). At the turn of the century the Ministry's authority extended over political and civil police, local agrarian affairs, licensing of physicians and veterinarians, gathering of statistical data for the empire (including censuses), postal and telegraphic services, press licensing and censorship, civil engineering, as well as other, equally diverse, areas. The publicly announced rationale for this vast range of competencies was that these functions all were directly related to the public welfare. As a government document written for Western consumption in the 1890s put it, the Ministry was “allotted the very extensive task of caring for the universal welfare of the people, the peace, quiet, and good order of the whole Empire.”

The history and development of social services for families and children in the Soviet Union prior to 1967 have been studied quite extensively.1 Soviet writings published since that time, more critical and probing than most earlier materials, as well as a field trip in October 1971 by this writer, make it possible to update our knowledge and to suggest what the future Soviet policy will be in this increasingly important area.

By the summer of 1971 Leonid Brezhnev had apparently become effective head of state of the Soviet Union and its spokesman. When Chancellor Brandt visited the Soviet Union in September he conferred with no one else, and Pravda reported (September 19) that “responsible members of the Secretariat of the General Secretary” participated in the conversations. One is reminded of the power obscurely exercised by Stalin’s personal secretariat, especially the mysterious Poskrebyshev during the later years of his rule, and of the role of Hitler’s secretariat, headed by Martin Bormann. Yet Brezhnev is certainly not the despot implied by these analogies. Officially, he has assumed no new powers. More important, no one has been ousted from the top circle since 1965, when the regime seemed to be truly a plural leadership in which no individual was clearly dominant. Yet it is practically the first task of a new tyrant to replace with his dependents those who were formerly his equals or at least potential rivals.

Encumbered by an accumulation of rhetorical devices, the panegyric ode seemed an unlikely vehicle for poetic innovation. Yet when Gavriil Derzhavin, after more than a decade of literary activity, turned once again to the celebration of that most illustrious of subjects, the Empress Catherine, he was rewarded with the immediate recognition of both his fellow writers and the monarch herself for his impressive success in the genre. Although odes previously written had given evidence of the poet's competency in working with this form, it was with “Felitsa” and “A Mirza's Vision” that he demonstrated his capacity for transcending its limitations. While seeming to accept the conventions of established genres, he subtly subverted them through recombinations which stressed the importance of a more subjective poetic vision.

Of particular significance was Derzhavin's introduction of both thematic and stylistic elements from the “oriental tale,” a prose genre which enjoyed considerable popularity throughout much of the eighteenth century. In terms of narrative stance, this provided the poet with an alternative to the traditionally anonymous role of the panegyrist. Clad in the disguise of the oriental moralist or mirza, he could address his sovereign in direct and uninhibited fashion and simultaneously create an impression of his own worth as a poet. In both odes it was the relationship between mirza and mistress or, more specifically, the poet's conception of his role in the service of the empress which lent much of the freshness to these works.

The intellectual debate which was taking place in Russia during the reign of Alexander I included a polemic which, although little known today, involved the most important Russian and Polish historians of the time, Karamzin and Lelewel, as well as other historians, writers, and journalists. Among the latter, the transplanted Pole, Tadeusz Bulharyn (Faddei V. Bulgarin), played a crucial part. The polemic developed into a controversy touching on the leading issues of the day, and it produced a sensation commanding the interest of the highest official and intellectual circles, including, reportedly, Alexander I himself. The polemic was largely provoked by the political views of Karamzin.

According to Marc Raeff, the political ideas of Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766-1826) are a subject by themselves—still needs investigation. A writer of immensely popular sentimental stories, an innovator in the area of the Russian language, and a member of the progressive literary circle “Arzamas,” Karamzin nevertheless had become the spokesman of the old-fashioned, conservative, serf-owning nobility. It seems that Karamzin's first conservative leanings were a reaction to the later, more radical, phase of the French Revolution. They were voiced, subsequently, in his historical novels. Later, the Napoleonic Wars on the one hand and Alexander's liberal aspirations on the other further strengthened Karamzin's conservative feelings, which were finally provoked, under the influence of the Grand Duchess Catherine, Alexander's ambitious sister, by current projects for the reorganization of Russia.

From the demise of Poland-Lithuania in 1795 until their emergence as two independent states in 1918, Lithuania was an integral part of the Russian Empire. At the close of the nineteenth century the Lithuanian provinces of that empire had a total population of approximately 2.6 million. Ethnic Lithuanians, 63 percent of the total number of inhabitants, lived mainly in rural regions and were engaged in farming; the rest were members of other ethnic groups, mostly Jews and Poles, who resided in towns and depended for their livelihood on the urban economy. The dominant agricultural hinterland possessed a considerable degree of ethnic unity. The urban centers were multinational. The influx of Russian military and civilian personnel, if small in relation to the total population, contributed to this intermixture of nationalities.

Classical Marxism, in contrast to various forms of Utopian socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism, treated anti-Semitism with utter contempt. The German Social Democratic leader August Bebel summed up the prevailing attitude of classical Marxism when he dubbed anti-Semitism the “socialism of fools.” Lenin was even sharper in his denunciation: “Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews,” he cried in March 1919. Yet fifty-five years after the Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Union has become the principal exemplar of the “socialism of fools,” with anti-Jewish discrimination practiced in various areas of politics and employment and in the ethnic-cultural field. Especially disquieting is the massive anti-Zionist propaganda campaign which incorporates the traditional negative stereotypes of Jews.

The Russian government had at various times subsidized the French press before 1904 but not for any long period or on such a large scale as was attempted from 1904 to 1906. During these critical two years the tsarist government appropriated over two and a half million francs for the French press. The French government acted as the catalyst by demanding that Russia “subsidize” the French press every time disturbing news reached Paris.

The Franco-Russian alliance suffered serious stresses and strains from 1904 to 1906, mainly because of divergent foreign policy objectives. French policy directed by Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé aimed at the preservation of the European balance of power and the advancement of French imperial interests in the Mediterranean.

Since the establishment of socialist governments in Eastern Europe following World War II , Svetozar Marković has become the most celebrated figure of nineteenth-century Yugoslav history. Not only was Marković the first important socialist in the Balkans, but he received his education in Russian populism at its source in St. Petersburg, participated in the activities of the Russian Section of the First International in Switzerland, organized the first consumers' and workers' collectives in the Balkans, and edited Serbia's first socialist newspaper. An incisive critic of the Serbian bureaucracy, Marković hoped to avoid the pitfalls of modernization in Serbia by establishing a democratic system of local administration based on the traditional peasant commune. Even though he was not successful, his vigorous analyses of social problems, his faith in science, and his uncompromising idealism exerted a strong influence on his contemporaries, turning the politically inclined among them from liberalism to radicalism and the artistically inclined from romanticism to realism. Little wonder, therefore, that since World War II this unusual and brilliant man has become a cultural hero in Yugoslavia.

One of the “Great Debates” among Soviet specialists in the social sciences today concerns the applicability of interest group theory to the study of Soviet politics. Though a large number of specialists have accepted the notion that interest groups do indeed play a certain kind of role in the Soviet system, there are still those who hold to the opinion, once taken for granted but in recent years challenged, that interest group theory simply does not apply to the Soviet Union. The strength of the latter argument lies in the fact that in the USSR interest groups do not operate publicly and openly, as they do in the United States; therefore, interest group theory as developed to fit the American context cannot describe or explain the dynamic processes of policymaking in Russia.

Every effort is being made to retain in the literature programs of the Soviet schools and universities all the best work of the Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century. There is even a trend in Soviet scholarship to place the best literary work of the Soviet period in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Russian classics. Lenin repeated time and again that it was necessary “to assimilate critically all that is valuable from the preceding culture.” Some Soviet scholars go even further and claim that socialist realism and its best representatives are continuing the literary traditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. Konstantin Fedin is thought of as one who continues Turgenev's “traditions of intellectualism” and shares his ability to be “a chronicler of his epoch, a creator of unforgettable women characters,” and Sholokhov is regarded as a writer who further develops Tolstoy's style. Some Soviet critics even complain because there is no visible link in the educational programs to connect Mayakovsky with Pushkin and Lermontov.

In 1962 a gathering of Soviet historians at the Academy of Sciences chose the fiftieth anniversary of Pravda’s founding to call attention to certain shortcomings in Soviet scholarship concerning V. I. Lenin’s leadership of the famous Bolshevik daily. It was noted that although a considerable amount had been written on Lenin’s literary contributions to the paper, insufficient attention had been paid to the problem of its political leadership during the crucial two years before the war. This observation heralded the publication of several detailed studies which predictably found that Stalin, Molotov, and certain other “conciliatory elements” within Pravda’s editorial board had hindered Lenin’s efforts to complete the work of the Prague Conference in equating the Bolshevik faction with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

In the economic literature one finds a plethora of propositions about the macro-economic determinants of the distribution of labor incomes. One of the theories is that as the level of economic development rises, labor incomes are bound to become more equalized. Another view is that the larger the nation, the greater will be the separation of labor markets and the greater the inequality of labor income. Unfortunately there is relatively little speculation in the West about the impact of the economic system on the distribution of labor incomes, and those propositions that can be found are quite contradictory. Some have argued that labor incomes should become more equal under socialism because of the more equal distribution of education and because the government is able to reduce the power of noncompeting labor groups to raise their incomes far above those of the average workers. Others have suggested that the government's power to manipulate wages between industrial sectors and branches in order to attract workers to priority sectors could lead to greater inequalities in labor incomes. Since all of these arguments are based on what a socialist government “could” or “should” do, rather than what they actually are doing, their validity can be established only through empirical investigation.

Confronted with the enigma of revolutionary Russia, Imperial Germany vacillated between a policy of official cooperation and one of counterrevolutionary intervention after the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In search of the reasons for this ambivalence, Western scholars have explored the ironies of the “unholy alliance” between Kaiser and commissar. Somewhat embarrassed for owing their survival to German autocracy, Soviet writers have praised Lenin’s cleverness in exploiting the contradictions within the imperialist camp. In West Germany, after decades of complacent anticommunism, Fritz Fischer in his Griff nach der Weltmacht has charged that rapacious Wilhelmian war aims “found their logical fulfillment in Brest-Litovsk and its supplementary treaties”.