Russian imperialism under various regimes has often been denounced, and rarely praised. Even more seldom has it been defined. In fact, it is more difficult to define than to condemn. One difficulty lies in the fact that from the time, beginning in the 1450s, of the final unification of the principalities of central Russia around a single center of power—Moscow—the Muscovite state itself was constantly expanding through the settlement of Russian peasants across the Eastern European plain, while even in this earliest period various non-Russian peoples came under Muscovite rule. At what point does “expansion” end and “imperialism” begin?

The American and British periodical publications have devoted considerable attention to reporting the contents of Eugene S. Varga's Changes in the Economy of Capitalism as a Result of the Second World War and to the discussion and criticism in the Soviet Union centering on this work. The time is ripe for a more full account of this important development on what in Soviet terminology is called the “theoretical front” than brief journalistic treatments have been able to provide. The basic materials both for ideological and for political interpretation are now available. Further developments may, of course, occur, particularly in the sphere of administrative measures applied by the Party authorities to economists who hold erroneous and harmful views.

The close ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the government of the Tsar are well known, and need not be treated here. These bonds remained intact down to the Revolution of February (Old Style), 1917. Strangely enough, however, in spite of the ties between them, the central organization of the Church did nothing to help the government when its hour was come. Indeed, the Synod was very careful not to commit itself too far, for on February 27 it rejected the proposal of Raev, the Over Procurator, to condemn the “liberation movement.” According to a leading Church periodical, the Synod told Raev that “it is a moot question whether the treason comes from above or from below.”

Who that has read that inimitable book by George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, and been entertained by his pilgrimage through that country has not been struck by the sheer audacity with which a handful of English colporteurs set out to redeem the world by the distribution of one book—the Bible? To take the Bible into every cottage, to make its phrases familiar to all, and through this medium alone, without homilies or comment, to proselytize the civilized world was the simple but forbidding task to which the British and Foreign Bible Society had addressed itself since it was first organized in London in 1804. It had spread its agents over Europe and America, it had taken the Scriptures to the Protestant countries of the North and had braved the opposition of the Catholic hierarchy by invading Spain, Portugal, and other countries of the South.

The hundredth anniversary of Belinskij's death—now being widely celebrated in the Soviet Union—is perhaps a convenient occasion on which to review the significant published scholarly works which have been devoted to the great Russian critic since 1917. It should be said at the outset that Soviet scholarship on Belinskij is meager in comparison to what has been done on Russian writers of belles lettres such as Puškin and Tolstoj, but it compares more than favorably in volume and quality with the efforts expended on other Soviet favorites among the nineteenth-century Russian literary critics such as Černyševskij, Dobroljubov, and Pisarev.

The three-volume Soviet History of Diplomacy, published during the recent war, can properly claim to be the first attempt to survey the whole range of the diplomatic history of Europe from the Marxist point of view as it is currently understood in the Soviet Union. The problems which Soviet scholars have faced in rewriting history on the basis of the Marxist interpretation have been many, and a solution acceptable to the Communist party of the Soviet Union was reached only after considerable experimentation. While the broad lines of the interpretation had indeed been sketched by Marx and Engels, its practical application was a subject of long controversy. After an initial period during which historical research in the traditional sense was for various reasons largely neglected, a school of literal economic materialists was founded in the early 1920s by M. N. Pokrovskij (1868-1932), and its work found expression in the journals Krasnyj arkhiv and Istorik-marksist.