Among the enlightened despots of eighteenth-century Europe, Catherine II, Empress of Russia, occupies an outstanding place. In the voluminous literature devoted to her reign, some authors glorify her foreign policy, her wars and her conquests. Others praise her domestic rule and her administrative reorganization of Russia. There are many who laud her enlightenment, her relationship with the outstanding men of letters, and her contribution to and patronage of education. There are also those who condemn her treatment and extension of serfdom and who call her a “plagiarist and a hypocrite.” Finally, there are those who stress her questionable morals. And while there are numerous presentations of Catherine's economic policies, except for brief references, very few of the works on Catherine treat her economic ideas. These may be glimpsed in various of her writings but above all in her Nakaz or Instruction to the Legislative Commission of 1767-68.

The nurturing bed of russian intelligentsia ideas and values in the 1890's was the kruzhok. The one infallible earmark of intelligenty since the time of the Masonic Lodges of the eighteenth century was their instinctive propensity, in whatever situation they found themselves, to coagulate into small kruzhki. In these kruzhki literature was assembled, exchanged, and discussed, referaty containing theses were presented and heatedly debated, and sooner or later kruzhki became the spring-board for more organized activity of an illegal or conspiratorial nature. If an individual did not manifest this penchant for kruzhkovshchina, it was a sign that somehow he did not belong to the intelligentsia.

In February, 1848, just after news of the revolution in Paris reached St. Petersburg, Emperor Nicholas I was advised of the growth of a subversive periodical literature within Russia. His informants implied that the Chief Administration of Censorship and the Minister of Education, Count Sergej Uvarov, the supreme authorities in the censorship, had been lacking in vigilance or ability. The charges were grave because, if true, they revealed a fundamental threat to the security of the police regime that Nicholas had maintained since the beginning of his reign in 1825. The threat was not one of out-and-out sedition; what was at issue was the suggestion by his informants that periodical literature had evaded the close supervision of the censorship and assumed the role of an independent observer of contemporary Russia. Nicholas realized the gravity of the charges and immediately moved to appoint a special investigating group known as the Menshikov Committee.

One of the reasons for the debacle of Tsarism was its failure to counteract the elements of revolution by many methods more subtle than those of force. Not only were the radicals driven to revolution by the uncompromising policy of the government and not only was the landowning aristocracy alienated by being deprived of a share in the administration but, more important still, there was a complete failure on the part of the government to foster or to support the new antirevolutionary elements which had grown up among the intelligentsia as a reaction against the spread of terrorism. No effort was made to assist the body of social thought which grew up as a response to the extremism of the radicals during the second half of the nineteenth century.

According to Soviet writers, it was Lenin's “famous” letter to Stalin in May, 1922, which was responsible for the creation of the Soviet procuracy. This impression has grown through repeated statements so that the observer is led to believe that the form and content of the procuracy were set forth in this epistle and implemented with the passage of the first statute on the Soviet procuracy of May 28, 1922. The ineluctable conclusion reached is that the procuracy sprang fullblown from the head of Lenin. This article will seek to show to what extent this may be said to be true. It is the contention of this writer that although Lenin's letter was an exceedingly important factor in determining whether the procuracy would be resuscitated in 1922, its importance lay in the support which Lenin, the Party and government leader, gave to a faltering project and not in the weight of his arguments which merely repeated, for the most part, statements on the need for and desirability of the procuracy which had previously been made by others, notably N. V. Krylenko.

The Bulgarian Socialist movement should prove interesting to the student of modern socialism for two reasons: the striking ideological parallel of the left and right wings of the Bulgarian party to their Russian and Western counterparts, and the manner in which the Bulgarian schism of 1903 anticipated both the Menshevik-Bolshevik split later that same year as well as the permanent rift between the Bolshevik and Western socialist parties on the outbreak of World War I.

The Bulgarian Socialist party was founded in 1891 by left-wing intellectuals who had studied abroad, most of them in Geneva, Russia, or England. Although the party split up within a year's time over the issue of political activity by the proletariat, it was revived in 1894 as a reaction to the repressive policies of the Bulgarian premier, Stefan Stambulov. Throughout the ensuing decade of its existence the party, like its Western counterparts, was plagued by the perennial issue of collaboration or non-collaboration with bourgeois groups.

The advent of an industrial labor force posed a formidable and, as it turned out in 1917, a fatal array of problems to the government of Imperial Russia. It had to find answers to a number of crucial questions. How was it to reduce the tensions at the factory and carry out its mandate as guardian of order and justice and the protector of the poor? How was the peasant-worker to be fitted into the traditional structure of Russian society? What was the place of industrial labor in the “Witte system”? And how could the government prevent the discontent of the peasant-worker from turning against autocracy itself?

Yet even Witte, who was perhaps more perceptive than his colleagues in regard to the various problems caused by industrialization, viewed “the labor question” with complete confidence.

In 1955 the present writer examined the struggle being waged against the peasantry by the Communist Party in the USSR and came to the conclusion that the liquidation of the Soviet peasantry as a class is inescapable.

Since then, significant new legislation has been passed in the field of agriculture in the USSR.

All these new measures have the same tendency of bringing the peasant class in the USSR a few steps nearer to eradication and the kolkhozes nearer to the status of sovkhozes.

Two Kinds of Socialist Property: The Soviet Constitution (Section 5) recognizes two kinds of property: state property and cooperative property. Both are qualified as “socialist.”

In Russia, modern political thought made its appearance in the last third of the eighteenth century; the major stimulant for the debate was the “revolution” (Pushkin's definition) wrought by Peter the Great. Political thinking did not develop much earlier, except for an episodic manifestation in 1730, because it took educated Russian society almost half a century to assimilate the impact of Peter's reign. The “debate” of 1730 was not so much an expression of opposing ideas and concepts (there was an amazing degree of agreement on these), as an emotional reaction to a conflict in social interests. Of course, by the time of the last third of the eighteenth century, the “revolution” of Peter the Great had affected the entire country and created social and cultural conditions which in turn produced some very real problems that cried for solution.

The career of the Soviet historian, E. V. Tarle, bears testimony to both the methods and effectiveness of Soviet demands for conformity in historical writing. Unlike many of his colleagues, who confined their research to obscure topics or resorted to the editing of collections of documents, Tarle treated events in Russian history which carried important political implications. Outstanding among these were his works on the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Between 1936 and 1952 Tarle wrote three basically different interpretations of this invasion, each of which reflected the current trend in Soviet historiography at the time it was written. Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union bore an obvious resemblance to Napoleon's campaign in Russia, and Academician Tarle, under pressure, changed his story to conform to the changing “party line.“

Statistical Agencies Before the Revolution: Soviet government statistics inherited from Tsarist times almost a century of experience of organized statistical observation. The first government statistical agency in Russia was established in 1811—the Statistical Department of the Ministry of Police. Its objectives were to analyze reports of provincial governors on the social and political situation in their localities and to check on the mobility of population. In the government reorganization of 1827 this department was abolished, but by that time new statistical agencies, departments, and bureaus appeared within other ministries. In 1834, the Statistical Department of the Interior Ministry was established, and in the same year the Provincial Statistical Committees were set up.

After a long period of considerable discrimination and abuse neutrality has now regained a semblance of legitimacy as a valid principle of international law and international relations. This recent transfiguration of a concept, which only fourteen years ago was being reviled as morally reprehensible, can be credited to a wide variety of diplomatic developments, such as, for example, Cold War tensions, the newly won independence of former colonial possessions, and others. In great part, too, it can be explained by the strenuous sponsorship lately exerted on its behalf in world affairs by the leaders of the Soviet regime. In effect, the latter now take the initiative, at every possible opportunity, in generously lavishing praise and support on the neutrality of the so-called “bourgeois” nations in all its various manifestations.

Prior to the initiation of the recent cultural exchange program, the Soviet citizen derived the bulk of his information about the United States from scattered reports in the Soviet press, travelogues, literary works in which Americans appear, and translations of American works of fiction. For approximately twenty years the most important literary source was a volume entitled One-Storied America by Il'ja Il'f and Evgenij Petrov, an account of a tour of the United States in 1936. However, most Soviet materials gave a distorted and incomplete view of America, a view further safeguarded and reinforced by careful selection of works suitable for translation.

If the information Soviet citizens had on contemporary America was scanty, that dealing with Russian-American contacts in the more distant past was even scantier. Prior to 1934, Soviet novelists were generally discouraged from turning to historical subjects, and those who did write historical fiction preferred to deal first with the most spectacular and most important moments in Russian history, all of which had been treated by pre-Soviet writers, but which now had to be interpreted from the Soviet point of view.

One does not have to accept the Marxist claim to a unity of theory and practice to see that, as far as modern Communism is concerned, there is a striking degree of correlation. This does not mean that Communist politics invariably follow Communist theory in all its aspects. Nor does it mean that many Communist theories have not obtained primarily as rationalizations of situations occurring outside, or even contrary to, any theoretical framework. It does mean, however, that generally speaking ideology provides a binding orientation for the direction of society, a view of both tactical and strategic goals and a guide to the thinking of at least the leadership.

A case study of the Danube Commission is particularly interesting because the documentation on the Commission is more complete than for any other Soviet-controlled international organ and because within its operation have been reflected most of the basic political problems of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe. Beginning with the Soviet maneuvers to eliminate all Western influence in the area, the Danube Commission was involved in the feud between Stalin and Tito, the reduction of intersatellite relations to a minimum, except those dictated directly from Moscow, and the Soviet disinterest in the economic development of Eastern Europe. In the post-Stalin period it was in the Commission that the first signs of rapprochement with Tito and an interest in multilateral cooperation and long range development of the Soviet sphere became apparent. Finally the present operation of the Commission shows the current character of Soviet bloc relations with Tito, condemned as a revisionist.

The relatonship between wage and price levels is clearly an appropriate subject for study in a number of comparisons of relative wellbeing. In measuring real wage changes within any economy, for example, we must measure the relative changes in these two levels over a specified time period. If there has been no drastic change in the number of dependents per wage earner, the measure of real wage changes should ordinarily give us some indication of the change in the level of living. Likewise, a study of the relationship between wage and price levels in two economies as similar as those of the United States and Canada would also seem to produce meaningful results. But what happens when we attempt to compare price and wage levels for economies where the institutional differences are very considerable?

Originally scheduled for the end of 1957, but postponed several times, the Third Congress of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR—Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza) finally held its meetings on March 10-19, 1959, in Warsaw's palace of culture. A total of 1,431 delegates represented a rank-and-file membership of slightly over one million. Five years had passed since the previous gathering of this kind, and much had taken place during the interval. The so-called thaw of 1955-56 reached its culmination point in October, 1956, with the return to power of Wladyslaw Gomulka.

Faced with an imminent breakdown of PZPR authority throughout the country, Gomulka was forced to relax Communist pressure in three vital areas: freedom of speech; collectivization of agriculture, which had almost completely collapsed; and religion, in which the Catholic church hierarchy was again allowed to control its own appointments and resume the teaching of catechism in public schools.

Pushkin was a gambler all his life. He gambled at cards; he gambled on his creative genius to support an extravagant wife; he gambled his life in challenges to duels before dying of a duelist's bullet at thirty-seven. He was also a gambler much of the time when he wrote a poem, a drama, or a story, for the censor was ready to block or distort anything that might be unsuitable to an autocracy based on serfdom and fearful of criticism.

One of Pushkin's longest gambles—one which failed during his lifetime—was the attempt to rehabilitate the name of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev, author of the banned and destroyed Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), a book which only in 1906 enjoyed reprinting in Russia in an edition not prohibitively expensive. Pushkin's attempt in two articles on Radishchev was beset with particular difficulties, for he not only had to damn Radishchev enough to get the article passed by the censor, but somehow to insinuate his own admiration for Radishchev.

The Hungarian Communists placed great importance on higher education, especially in the years between 1948 and 1954. It was in the universities and other institutions of higher education that they hoped to train a new Communist intelligentsia and a body of technical experts. This group was to replace the old intelligentsia and play a key role in the building of socialism. Yet the university students took up arms against the regime in 1956. Does this imply a direct failure in Communist indoctrination or is it a more complex phenomenon?

Hungary has undergone a revolution in education in the past eleven years. After the nationalization of schools in 1948 and Communist control over the key university posts in the same year, the educational system became the servant of the state, or, more exactly, of the Communist Party.

The formation of a Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was accomplished slowly, and as the result of the steady pressure and constant guidance of the Communist International between 1919 and 1921. When the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) was finally established in the latter year, this outcome represented a compromise between the extreme, doctrinaire policies of the Comintern and the more moderate Czechoslovak-oriented views of Bohumil Smeral, the party's first leader. Moreover the party was by no means the genuinely Bolshevik party anticipated by Lenin and the Comintern, and showed evidence of its deep roots in the social democratic movement and of its origin in a country of democratic traditions and intense national pride.