Writing some ten years ago about the changing political situation in the Soviet Union, Allen Kassof made the astute observation, “Although liberalization tells something about where the Soviet system has come from, it does not say very much about where it is going. To say that the system is being liberalized is like walking away backward from a receding reference point, a procedure that gives too little information about what lies on the road ahead.” It is clear that this statement applies with even greater force to Eastern Europe—even if we were to substitute “change” for “liberalization.” Anyone reckless enough to write about the prospects for change in Eastern Europe is faced with an almost impossible task, certainly a more difficult one than for the Soviet Union, or for that matter China, where at least there is, or was, a single reference point—be it Stalinism or Maoism, totalitarianism or the “administered society.”

Not so many years ago, when “de-Stalinization” and “de-satellization” seemed to be the order of things, the horizons of change in Eastern Europe appeared virtually unlimited. Indeed, one elaborate political science treatise, published in 1967, purported to discern two “irreversible trends” throughout the area, an increase in pluralization within individual countries and the tendency of the European Communist states to become more European and less Communist. Nowadays, in the continued aftermath of the massive Soviet intervention to reverse the changes actually undertaken during 1968 in Czechoslovakia, such certainties have all but disappeared. Yet, as Professor Korbonski’s timely and stimulating discussion reminds us, there is no logical reason to suppose that Communist societies are immune to change. With respect to Eastern Europe, however, as Professor Korbonski also notes, the hazards of forecasting are truly, formidable.

Professor Korbonski has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay with which I find myself largely in disagreement, in general and in detail. I hope that the following brief comments will indicate with what, and why, I disagree. But in spite of my disagreements I think that Professor Korbonski’s effort was well worth making. Indeed, I share his view that the study of East European politics can well profit from the study of political development and comparative politics, and indeed already has, for example, from his and Professor Janos’s work.

The year 1071 was a particularly difficult one for the relatively young Christian church in Kievan Rus. In a lengthy entry the Primary Chronicle details the activities during 1071 of the volkhvy (pagan priests or magicians), who seem to have embarked upon an intense, widespread campaign of subversion and active opposition to the new faith. Appearing in such major cities as Kiev and Novgorod, they sowed confusion and discord among the people, many of whom, at least momentarily, turned against their ecclesiastical authorities to side with their former spiritual leaders.

The year 1928 was a turning point not only for Soviet cultural policy but for policy in all fields. It was the beginning of a new revolution which overturned everything but the Stalinist leadership, an upheaval so violent that it seemed that the ruling party had revolted simultaneously against the society it governed and its own governing institutions. Among these institutions was the Commissariat of Enlightenment, headed by A. V. Lunacharsky and responsible for implementing policy in the sphere of education and the arts. In 1928 the Commissariat was accused of “softness” in its dealings with the intelligentsia, lack of “Communist vigilance,” and failure to understand the significance of “class war on the cultural front.” This “softness” was not peculiar to the Commissariat, except in degree. Right deviation in the party, it was said, had led a bureaucratized government apparat in retreat from true communism to liberalism; and the essence of this retreat was conciliation of the bourgeois peasantry and intelligentsia.

On Sunday, February 24, 1852, the epilogue to the tragicomedy which was N. V. Gogol's life was played out in the University Chapel in Moscow. Curiosity seekers, government officials, members of high society—“people who had not wanted to know Gogol during his lifetime,” Khomiakov bitterly remarked later—thronged the final rites performed over the writer’s emaciated body. Among the crowd in the chapel was Gogol's old acquaintance, N. F. Pavlov (1803-64), a former serf, actor, university student, law clerk, and journalist who had made his way into Moscow’s beau monde and had married a wealthy heiress.

In 1896 Hungarians celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of their conquest of the Central European Plains. Intoxicated with the heady wine of nationalism, they seemed almost to believe that their millennium prefigured the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in the book of Revelation. Public officials loudly proclaimed Hungary to be the best of all possible worlds and extolled the virtues of patriotism in the most extravagant terms. Publicists eulogized the Hungarian national genius and lamented that all of Eastern Europe was not ruled by Magyars. The most enthusiastic patriots confidently predicted yet another thousand years of national glory.