In his pamphlet What is To Be Done, written in 1902, Lenin declared:

History has now placed before us an immediate task which is far more revolutionary than the immediate tasks of the proletariat of any other country. The completion of this task, the destruction of the strongest bulwark of European, and we may even say Asiatic, reaction would make of the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international proletarian revolution …

What Lenin meant by this challenging statement was that the Russian proletariat, by overthrowing Russian Tsarism, would open the path to proletarian revolution in the West. This idea, though unrealistic, as subsequent events were to prove (the overthrow of Tsarism did not produce the European revolution), is nevertheless. extremely important in world history. The adherence to it, however irrationally, on the part of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, provided a kind of world mission and supplied them with tremendous motivating energy even at times when conditions of life for the Party, not to mention chances for revolution in Russia, seemed at the lowest possible ebb.

The Meeting of the Foreign Association of Polish Socialists which took place in Paris in November, 1892, had in the minds of its organizers a twofold purpose. From an organizational point of view, it represented an attempt at unifying some feeble remnants of the working-class movement of Russian Poland, that had survived the mass arrests of 1891-1892. From an ideological angle, it was an attempt to bring about a synthesis between the cosmopolitan program of the “Proletariat” and the patriotic ideas of the “National Socialists,” to marry the Marxist doctrine to the national aspirations of Poland and thus to remedy the split which divided the Socialist labor movement. Both these purposes were achieved by the foundation of the Polish Socialist party (Polska Portia Socjalistyczna) called PPS for short.

The Emphasis which the Soviet Government places on the development of industrial cooperatives is a fact readily recognized by many foreign students of the USSR. Unfortunately, the information available on this interesting Soviet development is rather scant. Pertinent descriptive data published outside or the USSR leave so many distressing gaps that it is difficult to obtain a coherent picture of the cooperative system as a whole. Besides, the available data pertain mostly to the early thirties.

Eastern Orthodoxy, unlike Roman Catholicism, is organized on the principle of autocephalous national churches—each constituting an independent administrative entity. This fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Christianity causes the thinking Orthodox Christian to be confronted with a dilemma. He wants the Church to be close to the communicant and the clergy to teach him and pray in his own language, and yet if he desires that the whole Church be able to perpetuate itself and propagate the faith, he must grant to it a sufficiently centralized organization and at the same time combat all fissiparous tendencies. Thus, on the surface at least, there appears to be a conflict between Christ's injunction that there be “one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16) and the actual establishment of national churches which can easily render unto Caesar what may be correctly regarded as “things that are God's“ ( Matthew 22:21).

The very name of Rumania's most famous poet, Mihai Eminescu, is unknown to all but a very few in the English-speaking world. Here then, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, is an Englishman's tribute to his memory.

Eminescu was born in northern Moldavia in January, 1850, when the exiles of the 1848 revolution were beginning to return. The previous decade had seen the rapid spread of Western ideas among the boyar class of the Principalities, starting with the return from France of the “bonjourists” (a number of young boyars who had been sent to Paris for their education), and culminating in the revolutionary movement of 1848.

A government-drafted “Bill Concerning Regional Organs of Unified State Authority” was enacted into law by the Polish Parliament (Sejm Ustawodawczy—“Legislative Parliament“) on March 20, 1950. This legislation makes sweeping changes in Polish provincial and local government which have the effect of bringing the structure of government at those levels into nearly identical conformity with that of comparable levels in the Soviet Union. It also increases and consolidates the role of the Polish Council of State (Rada Państwa) as the dominant organ of the government of Poland.