A new approach to the study of national character is being developed out of principles and research methods drawn from psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology. This approach differs from its predecessors in that it seeks the key to an understanding of cultural and historical processes in the influences of early childhood upbringing upon the formation of adult personality. The work of Geoffrey Gorer illustrates, although in an extreme form, the principal lines of thought of this school. Thus, he has tried to explain some of the main features of American culture and history in terms of the child's rejection of the father. From severe toilet training he derives major clues to Japanese culture and history.

The American revolution and its leaders: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, stirred the imagination and hope of the entire freedom-loving world not only in the eighteenth century, but even later, especially when it became clear that the French Revolution, submerging its republican principles in the Napoleonic regime and in the Bourbon restoration, would not fulfill its initial commitments. America alone remained the embodiment of those democratic principles for which mankind had already proved its willingness to fight.

The transformation of the Soviet Union from a federation of theoretically autonomous republics and regions, each having the full “right of self-determination even to the point of separation” into a highly centralized state, is a complicated development. This steady growth in centralization is attributable to a number of factors, ranging from the ambivalence of Lenin's attitude towards centralism and self-determination to the overriding effect of such centralizing forces as economic planning; a highly centralized single Ail-Union Communist Party, whose constituent “national parties” soon became mere propaganda sections; a centralized All-Union police; and finally, a series of purges for “nationalist deviations.”

No nation succeeds fully in anticipating the effects of war. Certainly, this is true insofar as the recent war effected the housing law of the Soviet Union. When war came on June 22, 1941, there instantly arose the necessity of removing all manner of industrial plants and cultural institutions eastward away from the endangered areas. The employees of these factories and institutions were transported to the new sites. Numbers of key personnel, specialists, and highlyskilled workers were individually ordered eastward to work in the relocated plants. Moreover, numbers of individuals who played only a passive role in the war effort—housewives, families of workers and military personnel, invalids—were allowed and encouraged to travel away from the more active war areas. This mass migration of citizens produced unprecedented questions of housing rights.

The years 1933 to 1946 were disastrous for the study of Eastern Europe in Germany—more so than for most other fields of research. Hitler's attitude toward Russia and Eastern Europe as well as toward Jews led to the exodus of a number of scholars (among them Fritz Epstein, Viktor Frank, Herbert Freund, Waldemar Gurian, Sergius Yakobson, the brothers Kulischer, Wolfgang Leppmann, Leo Loewenson, G. Ostrogorskij, Richard Salomon, Alexander von Schelting, Leopold Silberstein).

Alexis N. Tolstoy sketched the enigmatic figure of his ancestor, Peter, in the vast canvas of a Muscovy changing into Russia, which he unrolled in his epic historical novel Peter I. After swapping sides and abandoning the conservative party of old Moscow for the camp of Tsar Peter's followers, Peter Tolstoy rose to become one of the leading statesmen and was rewarded with the title of Count. His numerous progeny included the towering giant Leo, the talented poet and dramatist Alexis K., and several minor writers. So Alexis N. Tolstoy belonged not only to a titled family of aristocrats, but to a literary dynasty as well.