Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.

Today, no less than in the days of Lomonosov and Schlozer, the question of the ethnic identity of the early Kievan rulers is a controversial one. The late Adolf Stender-Petersen's criticism of the Normanist school, “that it replaced a real, well-founded historical view of the course of things by an a priori plan, in which things were arranged as well as possible,” also applies—mutatis mutandis, of course—to the historical-sociological method of the contemporary Soviet anti-Normanist school. What is needed in the field are good editions, with detailed, objective commentary, of all the sources known to us. Eventually these may lead to the “comprehensive edition of all the sources from which we can acquire knowledge as regards the Varangian problem” envisaged by Stender-Petersen. The edition of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio by Gyula Moravcsik and R. J. H. Jenkins and the commentary edited by the latter may be cited as an important step toward this goal.

The origins of modern Moscow can be traced to the early nineteenth century, when smokestacks began to supplement church cupolas on the city's skyline and the forsaken palaces of boyars were being converted into factories or homes of wealthy merchants. Pushkin observed this process with a mixture of romantic nostalgia and patriotic optimism as early as 1834. The old Orthodox and national shrine of Russia was starting its evolution as a major industrial center of the Empire. Along with this, however, came a later chapter of Russian religious history. Moscow during this same period also became a center of the Old Believers; Raskolniki, scattered for over a century on the frontiers of Russia, began to flock back to the ancient capital.

History sometimes has its simple moments, and it is tempting to draw the early struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Poles in terms of a clash between Red Russia and White Poland. Most Soviet and some Western historians see it only as a fragment of the general conflict between revolution and reaction. Closer scrutiny, however, belies the seeming simplicity of dialectics. The story is tortuous and involved; moves behind the scenes accompanied the fighting at the front. The gulf which separated the Bolsheviks from the Entente and from Poland did not preclude clandestine contacts, and Poland's leader Józef Piłsudski played his own game with the Soviet regime.

In the course of the nineteenth century it became clear that the unfettered speculation obtaining in philosophy frequently could not be useful in science. However, in the Soviet Union it is asserted that natural science can draw its correct "theoretical conclusions" only by relying upon the philosophic and the methodological teachings of dialectical materialism. Certain Soviet Marxists have, on allegedly philosophic grounds, rejected Western genetics, the resonance theory of the chemical bond, the principle of uncertainty of quantum mechanics, relativist cosmology, the relativization of space, time, and matter, probability theory, and symbolic logic. The intriguing question then remains whether Soviet dialectical materialists determine the validity of scientific theories and accomplishments on the basis of a priori judgments derived from philosophic analysis or whether the Soviet attacks on Western scientific thought are, rather, political and ideological in nature.

In a society with virtually all phases of the economy subject to planning an interest in regional economic planning almost inevitably arises. Such an interest has been evident in the USSR since the early 1920s, although not always to the same degree. Out of this interest evolved the notion of the economic complex, broadly conceived as a regional grouping of integrated economic activities. Inasmuch as these complexes were frequently thought of as geographic entities, the expression “territorial-production complex” (territorial'no-proizvodstvennyi kompleks), as well as some essentially synonymous terms, came into use. Interpretations vary somewhat, but, to judge from the frequency of reference to the concept in the professional journals of the geographers, economists, and planners, the idea seems to be a basic one among those concerned with regional planning.

The changes of 1962 and 1963 in the Soviet economic system in the wake of the decisions of the March and November 1962 plenums of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union constitute an important link in the chain of "permanent reforms" designed to cure the chronic malfunctioning of the Soviet planning and management system. These changes are especially interesting with respect to the perennial problem of economic regionalization.