The secretaries of republic and regional party committees are the most important category of officials in the USSR after the supreme leadership. They formed 36 percent of the full members of the Central Committee chosen in 1976, while the next largest group, comprising members of the Council of Ministers, made up 24 percent. They are also the most important reserve from which members of the supreme leadership are co-opted. A study of the careers of Politburo members in 1971 showed that two-thirds of them had spent at least five years as regional or republic party first secretaries before being promoted to senior jobs at the center. The same applies to nine of the twelve present members of the Central Committee Secretariat.

This article focuses on the first secretaries of regional (oblast') and territorial (krai) party committees—the obkom and kraikom secretaries—of the Russian Republic (RSFSR). They make up almost two-thirds of all republic and regional party officials elected as full members of the present Central Committee, but their importance lies not only in their numerical weight within the political elite.

All economic systems have ways in which they determine how much their total trade with the world will be, what commodities will make up that total, and the destinations and sources of those commodities (the geographic composition of exports and imports). In Western economies, which rely heavily on markets, the values of these variables summarize the outcome of a myriad of private decisions, with some influence of governments primarily through tariffs and quotas. In Eastern economies, which rely heavily on central planning, the government itself through its planners directly determines the value of those same variables.

The concept of Most-Favored Nation (MFN) treatment evolved as a mechanism by which governments in market economies could agree mutually to limit interference in private decisions on trade, with the expected consequence being an increase in trade and welfare. When two market economy governments agree to accord MFN treatment to each other's commodities, it means (in its simplest form) that tariffs applied in each country to commodities imported from the other country shall be no higher than the lowest tariffs charged on imports of those commodities from any destination.

Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:

In 1770 Etienne Falconet notified Empress Catherine II that he preferred to carve only a brief inscription on the base of his monument to Peter the Great: Petro Primo/Catharina Secunda. The empress did not object, and when the statue was finally unveiled in 1782 it bore the sculptor's lapidary phrase on its gigantic granite foundation. Catherine is presumed to have relished the equation which the motto implied, that Peter had been Russia's first great modern ruler while she, although not descended from him, was the second. In the context of whatever it might mean to be an enlightened autocrat, it is often assumed that Catherine both represented and understood herself as Peter's only true heir, the continuer and completer of what he had begun.

But some of Catherine's friends, writing what they knew would please her, said differently. After observing, not altogether tongue in cheek, that brevity was a virtue which inscription writers should cultivate, Melchior Grimm suggested that the motto's appeal might be further enhanced by removing the numbers and leaving just two words, “Petro/Catharina,” a move which would also have dispensed with the pecking order which the numbers implied. And from the edge of Switzerland, Voltaire sent greetings in 1774 to his favorite Petersburg correspondent: “Meanwhile, Madam, allow me to kiss the statue of Peter the Great and the hem of the dress of Catherine the Greater.”

Russian liberals can easily be cast as weakhearted idealists, devoted to Western notions of fair play and moderation and naively optimistic of the chances of seeing those principles brought to life in their own country. As the opposing forces of the state and the revolution build toward their climax in 1917, the liberal Hamlets often appear incapable of seizing the moment. Yet consider the efforts of the “public organizations”—the War-Industry Committees, the Union of Zemstvos, and the Union of Towns, as well as the Progressive Bloc in the Duma—to take over the practical matter of running Russia's war effort during the First World War. Prince George Lvov, head of the Provisional Government until the July Days of 1917, seems to personify this stereotype of well-meaning yet tragically ineffective liberalism on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, but it was this same figure who energetically directed the Union of Zemstvos during the war.

The causes and effects of the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute of 1948 are too well known to need repeating here. Various historians, military strategists, economists, and specialists in Communist affairs have established the basic facts and correctly pointed out the importance of that first break in the Soviet-controlled bloc. Vladimir Dedijer even wrote (supposedly quoting Henry Wallace) that Tito could be compared, though in a different field, to Martin Luther. The independent brand of communism recently proclaimed by the Italian, French, and Spanish Communists (the so-called Euro-Communists) definitely has its precedent in the astounding and courageous example of the Yugoslavs.

I shall limit my analysis mostly to Yugoslav writers and describe how they reacted toward this discord in the “socialist” camp. They all basically defend the same point of view, but they differ in their approach and, above all, in literary quality. The older writers, for example, were intimately involved in the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute, and they display a passionate hostility toward Stalin. To varying degrees, they often combine an excessive reverence for Tito, the perennial Yugoslav leader, with boastful self-approval. Recent works, though duly emphasizing the tragedy for thousands of citizens, avoid cliches and journalistic reporting.

Six years ago Professor E. Keenan wrote a major study, refuting the authenticity of the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii. Keenan's book attracted great attention. In 1973 the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) published my book Correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii: Paradoxes of Edward Keenan. In the course of the discussion generated by the publication of Keenan's book, scholars of the most varied schools and tendencies have expressed their reaction to the subject of the controversy. Between 1972 and 1975 a series of articles summarizing the controversy were published, and the matter was thoroughly discussed. Edward Keenan's paradoxes have not received support among the scholarly community. Keenan's idea that, in view of the spuriousness of nearly all the writings of Ivan IV and several other significant compositions of that time, the history of Russia in the sixteenth century needed to be written anew might have served as a stimulus to an all-embracing discussion of a broad range of problems. In the absence of any serious proof of the fabrication, however, such a discussion did not take place. A number of works of Ivan IV and Kurbskii have been preserved to the present in copies indisputably compiled in the sixteenth century, and the controversy as to whether the persons in question were the writers goes by default.