This article is an attempt to establish a certain number of conclusions concerning the Dioscuri which are different from previous surmises. These conclusions are: First, an individual, on horseback or on foot, shown stabbing another figure beneath need not represent the triumph of good over evil, or the vanquishing of a foe, and in a set number of cases does not represent this. Second, at least one kind of antique mystery cult did not develop from a puberty initiation ritual, but from something else. Third, much of pre-Greek, or perhaps Thracian, religion, as indicated by contemporary ethnographic survivals, may have consisted of one extended ritual which could be segmented for a number of different purposes, excluding that of puberty initiation, for which, in this context, I have found no trace. Finally, the Dioscuri were an anthropomorphized object, of an ascertain-able kind. The evidence leading to these conclusions is given below.

In the village of Mijatovci, in Hercegovina, at the site known as “Kalufi,” there was a tombstone dated to the fifteenth century on which is depicted a woman between horsemen (Figure 1). The same, or a similar, motif appears on other tombstones in neighboring graveyards (Figure 2, d, e). These horsemen have been identified with the Dioscuri. That is to say, they exhibit such striking features in common with classical monuments known to be representations of the Dioscuri that the possibility of chance coincidence is, in fact, eliminated.

The war of conquest presents the conqueror with two major problems: first, the isolation of the adversary by diplomacy and his liquidation by force; second, the justification of such aggression to his own supporters and to the outside world. Two tasks of the historian follow: the first is to fit into an understandable pattern what happened before, during, and after the conquest; the second is to tell us how the conquerors explained why the conquest should have happened, why it had to happen as it did, and—whenever there is evidence—how the conquered viewed the same sequence of events.

Since World War II, Polish legal theory has focused principally on the sociological aspect of the law, dealing with its origin and social function. Detailed research and analytical studies have supplied information about which social groups have in the past influenced the enactment of legal norms, what their motives were, and what benefits they derived from these laws. As a result of this research the law lost its sacred character. It ceased to be thought of as something extraordinary and came to be regarded realistically as an instrument for the realization of the interests of those groups which had influenced the enactment of the law. This kind of research, however, proved to be insufficient and somewhat one-sided. Consequently, new problems are being considered, and, of these, three are receiving special attention: (1) the evaluation of positive law, (2) the relationship between legal consciousness and socialist consciousness (which might also be called Marxist consciousness), and (3) comprehensive legal research. All of these problems have practical implications for us which, I trust, justify a brief discussion of them here. Inasmuch as these problems are still being investigated and discussed, I will confine myself to mere presentation of them and mention of the efforts that have been made toward their solution.

The Arts of Bulgaria since World War II are of considerable interest for the history of art largely because they so directly demonstrate what happens to the arts of a previously non-Communist country under Soviet dominance. Since the Communist take-over, not only has Bulgarian art directly reflected the Soviet political line but it has done this even more thoroughly than the art of the Soviet Union itself. For beautiful Bulgaria is such a compact and homogeneous little country—about 325 miles long and 215 miles wide, with a population of only 8 million people, about 90 percent of whom are of specifically Bulgarian stock—that its Communist government can control the arts with far greater ease than can the regime of so enormous and racially diversified a nation as the Soviet Union. Even long before World War II, Slavic Bulgaria had closer cultural links with Slavic Russia than did any of the other countries that fell under Soviet political domination as a consequence of the war. As might therefore have been expected, its arts have reflected the influence of the Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”—and the distinct but related and highly relevant Stalinist formula of an art “national in form and socialist in content”—more directly than have those of the other “satellites.”

The intent of this article is to join in the slowly rising chorus of voices expressing dissatisfaction with the methods used so far in the analysis of Communist political systems. I shall argue, perhaps in rather circuitous fashion, that political scientists in the West have failed, by and large, to apply to the Communist world the rich store of concepts developed for the comparative study of political systems and that the concepts that have been used have been applied in ways that are objectionable. If, as is at times maintained, our discipline tends to be provincial or ethnocentric in its methods, this tendency has been most pronounced, perhaps, in the study of Communist systems. As a result, very little work done has been genuinely comparative. The discipline has failed to place the Communist world into any of the several systematic conceptual frameworks it has developed.

“Patterns” is a term infrequently used in our historical writing; many historians associate it with certain more modern sciences. I have chosen it here in order to stress the need for a somewhat more highly elaborated methodology in the study of the matters discussed below. We are so far from adequate understanding of many of these subjects that we cannot be squeamish about borrowing any applicable method from the faster-moving sciences—whether these devices are to be called “matrices,” “models,” or “patterns” will be a matter of taste. I have, for present purposes, chosen the last, for what I should like to do is to suggest a comparative approach to the history of Muscovite-Tatar relations based upon systems, or patterns, of phenomena so arranged that the logic of the arrangment provides information concerning phenomena about which there is no direct evidence.

The final conquest of the Kazan khanate by Muscovite armies occurred in 1552. The periods immediately preceding and following this event—that is, the years between 1547 and the late 1560s—were of paramount importance to the history of Muscovite political thought, for they witnessed the appearance of a considerable number of significant historical and ideological works. Most of these works were written in one of the two centers, that is, either at the tsar’s court or the metropolitan’s chancery. The former produced official court chronicles, while the latter—particularly under the direction of Metropolitan Macarius—compiled interpretative works of a historical and religious character.

Afanasii Fet was a poet profoundly interested in philosophy, and yet it seemed to some that his verse lacked depth of thought; a realistic and very practical man, he wrote poems remote from the concerns of daily life, immersed in the ephemeral world of nightingales and roses. The key to this apparent contradiction is the concept of beauty that is central to the work of Fet and that enables him to maintain a consistent outlook on life and on art. Fet himself described this outlook as follows: “As poetry itself is the re-creation not of the whole subject but only of its beauty, so poetic thought is only a reflection of philosophical thought, and again it is a reflection of its beauty; its other aspects are of no concern to poetry.” In other words, an artist may take into account the “whole subject” in his practical concerns and strive to comprehend all facets of philosophy in his intellectual endeavors, but his art fulfills itself only in speaking of the beautiful.

In general histories of Russian social and philosophical thought we usually find a gap between 1790 (publication of Radishchev's Journey) and 1815 (the establishment of the first secret societies by the future Decembrists). This quarter of a century could boast neither a prominent personality nor a cause cèlèbre of government persecution. True enough, there was Karamzin and his Zapiska o drevnei i novoi Rossii (Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia); but the tract remained long unknown, and its author is usually dismissed as a lone figure whose impact on the development of the ideologies that were to matter was, at best, peripheral. General histories of literature treat this period primarily in terms of the philological debate between Karamzin and Shishkov and as prologue to Romanticism. Thus, in the one case, the period is described exclusively in terms of Russia's literary history, which is not very satisfactory to the student of social and political ideas; for literature—even as engagé a literature as was Russia's in the nineteenth century—is hardly an adequate source or form of ideology. In the other case, Radishchev must perforce be viewed as an isolated figure, a maverick, without either followers or immediate influence. Furthermore, the obvious implication is that there were no direct links between the Decembrists and eighteenth-century Russian ideas, so that the young rebels of 1825 must have been influenced exclusively by their experiences with the life and thought of Western Europe.

On the strength of the testimony of all contemporaries, however, the first decade of the nineteenth century was a period of great intellectual ferment, of exhilarating optimism about Russia's prospects for “modernization” (to use a fashionable term). Compared with the last years of Catherine II and with the reign of Paul, these decades also offered greater freedom, more opportunities for the expression of ideas and hopes. Could indeed the outrage and disillusionment at Alexander's so-called reactionary stance after 1815 be understood if it were not for the fact that his reign had opened on such a strong note of optimism and vitality?

First of all, I should like to support as strongly as I can Professor Meyer's plea that the study of the Soviet Union and of communism be integrated with the study of comparative politics. For a number of reasons Soviet and Communist studies have developed apart from the rest of political science in this country. Among these reasons is probably the general growth of area studies with their noncomparative stress during and especially after World War II. More particularly, the government's need for information about Communist countries and the mobility of personnel in this field between government agencies and universities have bent some of the scholarly work in it in the direction of intelligence work. Also, in the study of these countries, refugees from them have played a significant role. Quite naturally, they have been more inclined to deal with the countries of their origin alone and to see them as unique than to compare them with non-Communist systems.

Little study has been devoted to the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity. While some attention has been paid to the Crypto-Christians of Asia Minor, who were numerous, lived in groups, and endured a long time, the Crypto-Christians of the Balkans have been largely neglected, with the exception of an occasional work referring to only a single nationality, particularly the Greeks.

The Apostasy of Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov, one of the few surviving giants of the Executive Committee of Narodnaia volia, was among the most severe disasters which the Russian revolutionary movement sustained in the decade following the assassination of Alexander II. In the summer of 1888 Tikhomirov, the coeditor of Narodnaia volia's Geneva journal, published a pamphlet entitled Pochemu ia perestal byt' revoliutsionerom (Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionary), and early the following year he returned to Russia, having received a full pardon from the tsar.

In the words of Nikolai Apollonovich Charushin, a friend and colleague since the old days of the Chaikovskii circle, Tikhomirov's recantation produced the effect of an “exploding bomb” in both the official Russian and the émigré press. According to the liberal historian Bogucharskii, rumors were rife around Moscow that Pobedonostsev had made Tikhomirov's return conditional on his retiring to a monastery to atone for his sins. The Moskovskie vedomosti, of which Tikhomirov was subsequently to become editor, greeted the prodigal son with joy. Referring to Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionary, a Vedomosti writer noted that “here we find the frank confession of a man who took an important part in the criminal sedition of the last fifteen years, whose conscience has finally been awakened, and whose sanity has been restored, in place of that madness with which his comrades strive toward their absurd, impossible goals.”

At the outset I should emphasize that the following comments, while occasioned by Professor Meyer's paper, are not always aimed at it. To be sure, many facets of the paper raise questions that I would like to discuss with Professor Meyer in detail, but this should by no means be interpreted as indicating opposition, only as a request for amplification. Professor Meyer's concept of entrepreneurship as being the “overriding motive force of Communist rule” is innovative and deserving of attention. The suggestion that Soviet development is divisible into a number of separate periods each characterized by its own distinctive political “system“ is, to say the least, provocative. Throughout the paper there are the insights and new departures for which Professor Meyer is noted, which we have come to expect from him and for which we are grateful to him.

The seventeenth-century chronicles record an interesting event under the year 1574:

At that time Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich enthroned Simeon Bekbulatovich as tsar in Moscow and crowned him with the crown of the tsars, and called himself [simply] Ivan of Moscow; he left the city and lived in Petrovka. All the offices of tsardom he passed to Simeon, and himself rode simply, like a boyar with shafts, and whenever he comes to Tsar Simeon, he sits at a distance from the Tsar’s place, together with the boyars.

That such an event did in fact take place, we have the testimony of contemporary witnesses, the English envoy Danyell Silvester and the imperial envoy Daniel Printz a Bucchau, as well as official documents which have been preserved from the time of Simeon’s reign as tsar.

The purpose of this paper is to fill in some of the gaps in the history of the Polish Communist movement in the interval between the dissolution of the old and the formation of the new Communist party. English-language sources in particular devote little space to the period or contain serious factual errors. Consequendy, there is a need to put the record straight by presenting new evidence which has been appearing in Polish sources since the spring of 1956, when the prewar Polish party was officially rehabilitated. Obviously, not all the evidence is in as yet, and some of it may never be made available. Nevertheless, the new sources represent a significant step forward and throw light on some hitherto obscure segments of the history of Polish communism.

The obscurity of poems is differently motivated. The later poems of Wallace Stevens are obscure in part because what he wished to say, the one thing that he was trying more and more monomaniacally to say, namely, that there is an imagined life greater and more real than the ordinary life of the senses, became increasingly complex and intractable and hence more difficult to say. The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had to say involved, if said plainly, the danger of death.

The Russian Revolution has not yet achieved the status of the French Revolution as an academic preserve for battalions of professional historians, but few are likely to deny that its impact on the twentieth century is already more profound than that of the French upheaval on the nineteenth. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is now upon us, and it is a melancholy commentary on the uncertain intellectual climate of the Soviet Union that despite lavish funds, abundant trained personnel, and access to archives and primary sources unavailable in the West, Soviet historians have failed to produce a work of permanent importance on this crucial episode of modern Russian history. Yet the stifling orthodoxy of Stalinism has given way to the uncertain but relative freedom under his successors, and the auguries point to a further mellowing of the party line as Soviet society haltingly approaches the educational and living standards of the Western world.

I concur with Professor Meyer that Communist area studies must rejoin the main lines of the discipline of political science. An unfortunate methodological separation has existed much too long, a separation that might be figuratively characterized as a “loose, bipolar system,” with Sovietology at one pole and systematic political science at the other. The schism between Kremlinology, deductive reasoning, and, frequently, spectral evidence, on the one side, and scientific concept formation, empiricism, verification, and theory-construction, on the other, must come to an end. Professor Meyer's paper is a contribution toward this objective, both on its own merits and for the critical discussion that it will undoubtedly stimulate.