For more than 135 years the “Will” of Peter the Great has flitted across the stage of history at moments of tension between Russia and her Western neighbors. Recently it turned up at a business luncheon in New York in a speech delivered before a large audience; it is being discussed by “displaced persons” in their camps throughout Central Europe; and it was circulated among the armed forces of a European nation. Anonymous and parentless as a ghost, it appears, gains credence, and then vanishes again into its forgotten grave.

Here is the text as it appears today:

1. The Russian nation must be constantly on a war footing to keep the soldiers warlike and in good condition. No rest must be allowed, except for the purpose of relieving the state finances, recruiting the Army, or biding the Favorable moment for attack. By this means peace is made subservient to war, and war to peace, in the interest of aggrandizement and increasing prosperity of Russia.

The world-wide struggle over petroleum that was carried on in the period between the first World War and the second World War occupies a significant place in the chronicle of Soviet-Western relations. Soviet oil was a prize as well as a contestant in this struggle and was deeply involved in the controversies over control of oil resources and markets that created so deep a rift in international relations in the interwar years. The facts in the case provide a striking illustration of the power of oil as a source of international friction. The quarrels which are here resurrected were composed in due time, and differences were reconciled. But the old struggle over oil has been revived in a new setting and is again contributing its share of suspicion to the troubled international scene.

The first World War and its aftermath saw a fundamental change in the world petroleum situation. Oil had emerged as a vital factor in military strategy and an eagerly sought-after fuel, demanded in ever greater quantities by a motorized world. As a result, the international oil groups redoubled their efforts to acquire control over the most promising foreign sources of production.

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?

Nicholas I (1825-55) gained the reputation of being the most reactionary tsar the Russian Empire ever had. The eminent historian S. M. Solov'ëv called him “the new Nebuchadnezzar.”

The ugly features of a government which oppressed the people and systematically suppressed all enlightenment and free thought became particularly evident under the autocratic “stick” of this sovereign. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people were still tied to the land, either as State and Imperial Crown peasants, or as private serfs; the latter, especially, living under the most miserable economic conditions, deprived of personal liberty, were degraded almost to the level of chattels.

Against such a background of despotism and serfdom there could develop only a system of justice representing a monstrous abuse of equity; and indeed the courts and their members at the time of Nicholas were in complete harmony with the epoch.

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 question before us is to what stage of social and economic development—or, to borrow a term from geology, to what socio-political formation—Kievan Russia belongs.

Chronologically, as we know, the Kievan period included the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Those three centuries witnessed the rise and blossoming of feudal institutions in western and central Europe; they represent what may be called the feudal age par excellence. It seems only natural that one should be inclined to place Kievan Russia in the same category and characterize its sociopolitical regime as feudal. Yet until recently Russian historians have been reluctant to do so. They did not raise any definite objections to the study of feudalism in Russia: they simply ignored the problem.

The massacre of the Russian Mission at Teheran in 1829 by an infuriated and fanatical mob cut short the career of one of Russia's finest dramatists and nearly plunged Persia into another war with her powerful neighbor. The circumstances of Griboedov's death, the events which led up to it, and its international repercussions are among the most strange and tragic episodes in the history of the Near East.

Aleksander Sergeevič Griboedov was born in 1795 of a prominent Moscow family. He distinguished himself at a phenomenally early age at Moscow University and took part in the 1812 campaign when only seventeen. In 1815 he retired from the army and began his career at St. Petersburg, where his first comedy, The Young Couple, was produced in the same year. Two years later he was given a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from that time he was regularly employed in diplomatic work in Persia and the Caucasus. Griboedov's first visit to Persia was in 1819. He rapidly mastered Persian and Arabic and acquired a high reputation as a shrewd and reliable diplomat. In 1822 he became diplomatic secretary to General Ermolov, the commander-in-chief at Tiflis.

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.”

The Character of Mickiewicz's poetical world is determined, as that of every writer, by two factors, the epoch which furnished the material for his imagination along with the general literary style prevailing in this epoch, and his poetic personality, which formed and transformed this material. His epoch was that of romanticism, hence his world is basically romantic with a definitely, sometimes exclusively Polish flavor; his poetic (and human) personality was one of the most powerful, hence it expressed itself both in romantic and extraromantic forms in a highly individual manner, uniting national and universal elements.

This world embraced vast and various regions, extended—according to the general romantic spirit and the prologue to Faust—“vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle.” Heaven and hell were represented, both by an absolute faith in the supernatural world and by literary accessories, for instance by employing good and evil spirits, ghosts, witches, mermaids, and so on, as symbols of strong, mysterious forces, not only mingling with the human world, but directly influencing human fate.

One of the problems confronting early Bolshevist theory was that of minority nationalism in the Russian Empire. If the Bolsheviks were to be the champions of downtrodden workers everywhere, then certainly they had to stand up for the rights of the man oppressed, not only for class reasons, but also for national reasons. It was precisely because of this twofold oppression within the Russian Empire after the 1880s that so many revolutionists came from among national minority groups. The Bolsheviks had no desire to disassociate themselves from this powerful revolutionary current. Discontent from whatever working-class quarter of the imperial structure was grist for Lenin's mill. The problem lay in how to reconcile the nationalist revolutionary sentiment, which, in the final analysis, meant the break-up of Russia into independent and nationally minded (bourgeois) states, with the Marxian slogan: “Workers of the world—unite” (i.e., one great working class state or social order).

On January 18, 1948, the Gosplan, the supreme planning authority of the USSR, published its annual report on the economic results of the past year. The following comments are presented on that portion of the report which deals with the development of Russian industry during 1947. The report follows the exasperating practice of its predecessors in that the information given refers almost exclusively to percentage changes from unspecified magnitudes, and thus with-holds absolute data on the growth of industrial output. The present report contains, however, an interesting indirect disclosure with respect to the total value of industrial output.

Soviet jurists are engaged in the task of drafting new codes of law for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Constitution of the U.S.S.R., adopted in 1936, initiated the activity. It altered the principle incorporated in the first Constitution of the U.S.S.R. that codes of law were the concern of the constituent Republics. The federal government's powers were limited by the first Constitution of the U.S.S.R. to “establishing principles of judicature and legal procedure as well as principles of civil and criminal legislation for the Union;” “enacting basic labor laws” and “establishing general principles for the development and use of the soil as well as the exploitation of the mineral deposits, forests, and bodies of water throughout the entire territory of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Puškin's interest in folklore has long been noted in scholarly Puškin literature. Like all great writers, Puškin turned to the sources of the people's creative genius, from which he drew a wealth of inexhaustible material for his inspiration. His first poem, “Ruslan and Ljudmila,” based on Russian folk tales, struck a severe blow to Russian classicism and provoked a polemic of major proportions in the Russian literary world. The critics did not spare the young poet but attacked him mercilessly. Puškin, however, never deviated from his chosen path, and throughout his stormy life he carried with him his interest in the people's creative genius, to all the places to which his “unfriendly fate” flung him.

One such place, the scene of Puškin's exile for his freedom-loving ideas, for his “Ode to Freedom,” and for his satire on General Arakčeev, was Bessarabia, which only eight years before had been annexed to Russia and therefore still retained all its national oriental color.

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.

It is a more or less accepted truth that the last hundred years of European poetry have been marked by a process of radical change in the structure of the poetic phrase. The logical or “understandable” sequence of words has proved to be less and less in favor with the poets, and a new aesthetics based upon the purely emotional appeal of words has emerged. That process reached its peak in Dada and surrealist movements, and seems to be parallel with the antirationalist trends in philosophy.

To pronounce such a judgment does not mean dismissing modern poetry as modest in its achievements or deprived of meaning. Nevertheless, living in a changing world, we are compelled to evaluate the present developments in the name of the future, or of what we imagine the future of poetry will be. We can assume that the serious setback suffered lately by surrealism and kindred literary schools in Europe signifies the poets' desire to trim the overgrown garden of words. There is undoubtedly a tendency to revise once more the past, and to accept the usefulness of some older techniques scorned by the followers of Father Brémond's poésie pure.

In 1845 Dostoevski] made his debut with Poor Folk, a novel in letters. The two correspondents are a very poor government clerk, Makar Alekseevič Devuškin, and the very much younger, impoverished orphan, Varvara Aleksevna Dobroselova. Devuškin, who is a distant relative of the girl, loves her in a disinterested, fatherly fashion in which, nevertheless, there is a slight trace of shy infatuation. He wants to see his Varinka every day. This is possible since they live in neighboring houses. Devuškin fears, however, that his too frequent visits may compromise Varinka in the eyes of her neighbors. Thus he limits his personal visits to a minimum and uses letters as a substitute. This is the motivation for the letter form and the content of the letters. As they are to be a compensation for personal conversations and chats, the letters are not written in a formal style but rather in an unconstrained, conversational manner.

Mickiewicz's poetry assumed a new interest and value among Polish people during the second World War. The poet M. Jastrun, in his preface to a new edition of Pan Tadeusz, stressed the significance and importance of the poem for those Poles who were compelled to spend the war in the Soviet Union or in the West. Another poet, J. Przyboś, stated in his article, “The Final Word” (“Słowo ostateczne,” Twórczość, No. 4, 1945), that in these cruel times Mickiewicz has become more “contemporary” than ever. The Polish Government decided, as early as May, 1945, to sponsor a full national edition of Mickiewicz's works. Finally, in a poll organized by the periodical Kuźnica in 1947, the Polish public voted first place to a new edition of the works of Mickiewicz. However, in this period (until July, 1948), there were more articles than books published about Mickiewicz, due partly to publishing difficulties.

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.

A letter from I. I. Panaev dated February 10, 1847, brought to Turgenev, then in Berlin, much literary gossip and some news concerning the Contemporary. Panaev, together with Nekrasov, had recently taken over the magazine. The January and February issues included the first short stories by Turgenev. They were well received, wrote Panaev. He thought that the third issue also, then in preparation, “would not be too bad.” It would include, among other contributions, the first part of a novel by Gončarov. “Gončarov,” added Panaev, “beams and quivers with delight while reading the proofs, but tries very hard to look indifferent.” The novel was Gončarov's first published work, The Usual Story. According to Belinskij's testimony, the novel had an “unprecedented success” and “made a sensation in Petersburg.”