Before the 1917 Revolution, about one hundred and thirty thousand people of Finnish origin lived on Russian territory on the south shore of the Gulf of Finland—from the Narva River in the west to the Neva River in the east, and in the region north of St. Petersburg. Their numbers remained fairly constant during the 1920s and early 1930s, but, after the Second World War, a great decrease was evident in the total Finnish population of the region, with only about twentyfour thousand recorded in the 1970 Soviet census. This drop in population is attributable not only to the ravages of the war but also to movements of people, including deportations that took place during the 1930s and 1940s.

Because Ihor Kalynets’ is a contemporary poet, whose poetry was almost immediately censured, it is not at all surprising that no critical articles have been written about him in the Soviet Ukraine. The situation is not much better in the West. Apart from a few brief biographical sketches, only two short essays have appeared, and they are introductions to two collections of Kalynet”s poetry: one by Roman Semkovych, which introduces Vidchynennia vertepu,and the other by Larissa Onyshkevych, introducing Vohon kupala.Both of these are more concerned with the poetry found in the given collection, however, than with anoverall appraisal of the poet’s work. Nonetheless, the articles point to the folkloreinspired origins of Kalynets”s verse and refer to the poet’s predilection for steeping his poetry in the linguistic and mythic heritage of the Ukraine.

In 1917, Ukrainian nationalists took advantage of the deterioration of central authority in the Russian Empire to make a bid for Ukrainian self-determination. The struggle for Ukrainian statehood continued under three successive national governments until 1920.The first year of the revolution, however, is crucial to understanding the evolution of the national movement in the Ukraine. In 1917, the Ukraine was as free of Russian interference and military occupation as it would be during the era of revolution and civil war. Ukrainian institutions and parties developed in freedom, democratic elections exposed the Ukrainian masses to nationalist agitation and measured their response, and the Russian government was forced to deal with the Ukraine as a distinct political entity.

On a midwinter day in Moscow at the very end of 1927, a package containing two kilograms of a substance, similar in color to “lime-flower honey,”1 which had been christened “Diolefin” by its makers was deposited with the scientific and technical council for the chemical industry of VSNKh. Just over four and a half years later, on a summer day in 1932 in laroslavl’ five hundred kilograms of this same material were removed from an autoclave in a newly built factory. These two events are seen as marking the beginning and end of the development and innovation of synthetic rubber, one of the success stories of the First Five- Year Plan; for the laroslavl’ plant, SK-1 (Sinteticheskii Kanchuk-l), with a design capacity of ten thousand metric tons, was the first large-scale plant to be built anywhere in the world.

In recent years, a number of scholars have argued that the traditional negative image of Paul I is in need of substantial revision. Even Boris Nolde’s seminal history of the Russian Empire presents the emperor in an uncomplimentary light, as a man who was greedy for territory but not an astute analyst of the information available to guide his decisions. If no one has yet claimed that Paul was an exceptionally wise and able man, some historians, at least, have shown that he was neither as foolish nor as mad as the partisans of Catherine and Alexander would have him be. Hugh Ragsdale has argued that Paul was far more aware of Russia’s international interests and more assertive in policy making than is usually thought.

Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) is considered by most critics—even by those who condemn his subsequent politics, judging them a mixture of vacuous pronouncements and ineffectual gestures—a genuine liberal statement. Literary critics who do not go so far as to claim that the work contributed directly to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861—a view Turgenev himself occasionally espoused—at least assert that Notes of a Hunter is as biting and affecting a criticism of serfdom as literature could level at the time. There is, I believe, a serious objection to this position. I am not referring to the argument that a cycle of twenty-two sketches mainly about a man out hunting with his dog can hardly have much to do with politics; there are so many references to social injustice that even the narrator's most seemingly mundane observations, such as his disquisitions on various hunting techniques, must be read as willful efforts to distract himself from the corruption of Russian life.

Professor Ruslan Skrynnikov has now provided readers of Slavic Review with a brief summary of his views concerning the relationship of the first letter to Ivan IV, attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii, and the writings of the Ukrainian monk Isaiah. Since his article seems to have been long in press, it does not mention Skrynnikov’s own rather more extensive (although in places identical verbatim) article in a recent number of Russkaia literatura, nor does it take account of certain other recent contributions to the discussion of the Kurbskii-Groznyi apocrypha. Moreover, Professor Skrynnikov makes several statements that might lead those unfamiliar with the matter to premature and, in my view, erroneous conclusions.

The fifth edition of V. I. Lenin’s Sochineniia is an imposing piece of work. Its fifty-five volumes, first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism between 1958 and 1965, are attractively bound, nicely printed, and reasonably priced. Perhaps for these reasons, they have sold over six hundred thousand copies in Russian alone and are now in their fourth large printing. In comparison with the preceding four editions, the fifth is far more substantial in content: the first edition of twenty-six volumes (1920–26) contained some 1500 writings by Lenin; the second and third editions of thirty volumes each (1925–32) had 2700 works; the fourth or Stalin edition of thirty-five volumes (1941, 1946–50) included 2927 items; and the fifth comprises almost 9000.