To map out a convincing genealogy of the Russian revolutionary Marxist movement (and, from 1903, of its Bolshevik wing) was always a concern of its leaders. Revolutionary Marxism made its Russian debut with Plekhanov's booklet Socialism and the Political Struggle only in 1883, some thirty-five years after the Communist Manifesto and almost sixty years after the Decembrist uprising. It was thus a latecomer both to European Marxism and to the Russian revolutionary movement. How was it to define its own relationship to these forerunners? To emphasize only the Marxist heritage meant to isolate the young movement from the formidable tradition of revolt already built up in Russia. But to identify the emergent Marxist movement too fully with this tradition would undermine its claim to be possessed of a new message, to be the prophet of a new age.

It is difficult to decide what is of the greatest Importance in all the vast mass of diaries, reminiscences, biographies, and other books about Tolstoi—the fantastic drama of his life, his extraordinary character, the effect of this character upon his magnificent art, or the projection of his prodigious mind on his philosophy and belief. The fact that Tolstoi himself was a living contradiction of the separateness of experiences and ideas is a sufficient reason for not attempting to isolate any one of them from all the rest. But, whether because his understanding of himself fell short of that of other human beings or because he was forced by the very power of his understanding to turn about and attend to his other task—that of understanding how to live with himself and with his fellow men—Tolstoi chose to divide his life into independent periods. The fourth and last one, in which, he said, he “hoped to die,” enlarged (or, as some would have it, narrowed) his understanding until it became prophecy, or religion, or a huge moral ax which he leveled against himself and the surrounding world.

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.

Following its political break with Stalin's Russia, Yugoslavia has, since the early 1950s, increasingly turned away from the centralized socialist planning that characterizes the Soviet economic system. The main impulse for the gradual elaboration of a distinctive national system came from two directions. First, the Yugoslav conception of federalism was based on the association of six regions (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro) with very distinct national, historical, and social traditions and in different stages of economic development. This meant balancing central economic direction with concern for regional needs and interests. Second, the break with Stalinist Russia in 1948 no doubt stimulated a desire to develop, together with political and ideological independence, a distinctive national economic philosophy of communism in contrast to the overcentralized planning bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.

The origins of Russian factory legislation date essentially from the decade of the 1880s, when the Industrial Revolution began to affect the economy and society of the Russian Empire. During the reign of Alexander II there had been a growing dissatisfaction with the poor working conditions in Russian factories. Desire on the part of certain officials to eliminate some of the worst abuses of the factory system led to the formation, beginning in 1859, of a number of commissions to study conditions in the factories and to make recommendations for their improvement. But, with the exception of a decree issued by the government in 1866 which sought the enforcement of more stringent sanitary measures, attempts to introduce legislation of the character recommended by these commissions were for a long time unsuccessful.

Georgii V. Chicherin's conversion from Menshevism to Bolshevism exemplifies the intense political and ideological stress placed on Russian Social Democrats by World War I. The war split all of Europe's socialist parties, but none so deeply as the already faction-ridden Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Even after the initial shock had passed and most Russian Social Democrats found their way to one or another of the party's factions, not all members joined a recognizable group. For some the shock was too great, and much time and wandering were needed before they found their bearings. One of these wanderers was Lenin's future Foreign Commissar.