The Book under review is a commendable scholarly undertaking, both in its purpose and in the way it is carried out. The publication offers to the American reader a good English translation of four well-chosen basic documents of Russian law and Russian history from the period prior to the rise of Muscovite tsardom, and the promulgation of the first judicial code of the Grand Duke of Moscow in 1497. Many legal documents of this epoch are extant, but the reviewer feels strongly that Professor George Vernadsky, the translator, is right in making the following statement:

Of all the various Russian codes, charters and statutes prior to 1497 we have elected for translation in this volume the four most outstanding. They are the Russian law (Russkaia Pravda) in both short and expanded version and the charters of the city of Pskov (1397–1467), of Novgorod (1471), and of Dvina Land (1397). Taken together they illuminate the main trends in Russian legal history of the pre-Muscovite epoch. But more than that, they contain much material illustrating the general historical background of Medieval Russia.

The isolated character of the Hungarian language is one reason why Hungary seems in political, psychological and cultural contrast with other European countries. Therefore it is quite important for the Hungarian nation to reach the outside world through a language of universal appeal. It was a wise choice of Hungarian publicists, scholars and writers to have their works printed in the English language.

During the period of its publication, the Krasnyi Arkhiv (Red Archives) was the most important historical journal in Soviet Russia. By June, 1941, when Hitler's invasion ended its publication, 106 volumes of this periodical had appeared.

The Krasnyi Arkhiv was the child of the Soviet historian Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky, the “organizer” of the Central Archive Department, who, among the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of the cold and hungry days of the civil war, collected and saved tons of documents from their most deadly foes: “fire, water and the curious.”

Among the archive depositories of the tsarist regime which came under the jurisdiction of the Central Archive Department were the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior, the Police Department, private archives of the former nobility, etc. Among all these, the archives of the Foreign Ministry were the most “sacred.”

Although events since the end of the last war have brought the problem of understanding Russia into sharp projection, the problem itself is not new nor is it confined to the period of the Soviet dictatorship. From the time of Possevinus' and Herberstein's accounts of Moscovite Russia under Tsar Ivan IV, called the Terrible, to contemporary reports on Soviet Russia, the Russian state and the Russian people seem to have been to the Western mind something from a different world. Therefore, from the earliest time of contacts with Russia in the so-called modern and contemporary periods of history, the Western world set up different standards from its own in order to try to understand this vast country.