The Recent Publication by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR of the third and final volume of documents covering the famous trial of the Petraševcy is an important event for students of Russian history. Although the volume contains little that is novel and nothing that is surprising, it will probably remain the last collection of primary sources to throw light on M. V. Butaševič-Petraševskij and his circle. Unless some of the lost materials of the trial are found, or unless some other relevant documents unexpectedly turn up, our stock of basic information about the Petraševcy is not likely to increase appreciably, and our final judgment of this group will have to be based on the present limited number of sources.

Indeed such a final judgment has already been made in Soviet historical literature, both in the introduction to the third volume of the trial documents and especially in a review article by N. Sladkevič occasioned by the appearance of the volume.

When, in 1766, Catherine II summoned the Legislative Commission to convene in Petersburg, there were among the deputies representing the various provinces of the Russian empire delegates sent by the Moslem population of the Volga and Ural regions. In the memoranda which these delegates presented to the Commission and in the instructions received by them from their electors, there were embodied the main grievances of the Tatar people. These complaints concerned the difficult religious and economic situation of the Tatars, who, since conquest of the Kazan khanate by Ivan the Terrible, had been subjected to permanent persecution for there faith and had become severely restricted in their rights. The Tatar delegates asked for recognition of their faith, for the removal of limitations on their trade activity, and for restitution of the rights of the Tatar nobility.

The first broadcast in Russian to the Soviet Union was sent out by the Voice of America on February 17, 1947. Following a surprising silence of almost two months, the first quasi-official public reaction of the Soviet regime came in the form of an article by Ilya Ehrenburg under the title "A False Voice," appearing significantly enough in Culture and Life, the newspaper of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Since that date there has been a modest but steady output of comments on the Voice of America in Soviet press and radio communications, and a survey of selected Soviet sources for the four-year period April 1, 1947, through March 31, 1951, yielded almost 1,000 references. This body of material provides a basis for analyzing the pattern of the Soviet reaction to the challenge posed by the Voice of America. Thus, it holds out the possibility of further insight into Soviet communications policy. In addition, the data provide a basis for a case study of international propaganda warfare, a phenomenon of growing importance in the relations of national states in modern times.

In the summer of 1892 the Bulgarian newspaper Svoboda (Freedom) published a large number of highly incriminating documents purporting to expose Russian policy in the Balkans, especially in Bulgaria, in the crucial decade of the eighteen-eighties. Subsequently, these and additional documents appeared in book form in the Russian language under the title Okkupacionnyj Fond (The Occupation Fund). In 1893 the collection was republished in Berlin in French translation by R. Leonoff and entitled, Documents secrets de la politique russe en orient, 1881–1890. The documents dealt primarily with the conspiratorial tactics employed by Russian representatives in the Balkans to carry through Russian foreign policy aims. Many episodes were covered, as, for example, the Russian role in the Bosnia-Hercegovina revolt of 1881–1882; the efforts to overthrow Alexander of Battenberg in 1884–1885; General Kaul'bar's mission of 1886, which sought to prevent the election of a successor to Alexander of Battenberg; the Russian plans for the occupation of Bulgarian ports in 1887; and the Novikov plot of 1887–1888, which aimed at the overthrow of Ferdinand of Coburg.

At an “International economic conference” held in Moscow in April, 1952, speakers from Soviet bloc countries presented summary figures on the volume of East-West trade which, as they claimed, could be achieved within the next two or three years on condition that “artificial barriers” (i.e., mainly Western security export controls) were removed. These figures were intended to document the contention that, in the absence of such barriers, the Soviet bloc would welcome expansion of East-West trade to a level high enough to produce most far-reaching and beneficial effects in the West in respect of relieving the dollar shortage, improving living standards, reducing unemployment, assisting the development of backward economies, and so on.

It has often been stated that Gogol, the great writer, was an utter failure as a historian. But one must differentiate between a writer and teacher of history and a person endowed with the real qualities of a historian. Gogol was never a “trained” historian. He never attended any specifically devised history courses. But he read a great deal about history through secondary accounts, and he examined many original historical sources, although among these he was less attracted by chronicles and official accounts than by the oral tradition and folk-lore. To him, for instance, the songs and legends of the Ukraine were worth more than volumes of historical accounts about the land of his birth. Nevertheless, he had a true concept of history and of its implications for the life of man individually or in a community, and we cannot possibly discount him as a historian unless we can (or dare to) discount another great historian— Thomas Carlyle—who, I am happy to notice, is coming back into recognition.

Surely we may reckon as remarkable the English cultism for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which reached a high level before traditionalism reasserted itself; but fully as remarkable were the ambassadors, now largely forgotten, who mediated between Russian and English cultures, and who, in part, were responsible for the popularity of several Russian novelists in Victorian England. As a footnote to history, this review of their accomplishments can be brief, but I believe it deserves to be appended somewhere in the still-continuing story of the assessment of values in comparative literature. In the belief that we may see best their mode of operation in terms of a specific individual, I have chosen a figure about whom relatively little has been written by English or American scholars during the last two decades: Maxim Gorky.

August 23, 1952 … To me it has a haunting sound, for it marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Michael Fokine, the last of those glorious masters of ballet—Noverre, Didelot, Perrot, St. Leon, Petipa—whose works created an era in the art of the dance far beyond the boundaries of the countries of their origin.

It was first as a thrilled spectator and later as an executive with the former Imperial Theaters of Petrograd that I witnessed all of Fokine's productions in the beautiful Maryinsky Theater. And since this brilliant period of the Russian ballet is gradually growing dim and soon may be completely forgotten, it is to this phase of Fokine's career that I dedicate these fragmentary memories, blended with a few excerpts from some of the letters he wrote me, which have no longer merely a personal but a public interest, now that he is gone.