The foreign travels of Petr Il'ich Chaikovskii have never been a particular issue to scholars of his life and work. Even in such demonstrably important cases as his visits to the opening of the Bayreuth Festival and to Paris during which he heard Bizet’s Carmen for the first time, his tours—which brought him as far as New York City for the opening of Carnegie Hall—are treated perfunctorily, without objectivity, balance, or due regard for the impact his travel may have had on his music. This is not surprising, since Chaikovskii was not by profession a touring virtuoso; it is his musical composition which looms large in the biography as a whole. An experience which was called “the high point of earthly glory” the composer was destined to achieve, however, merits examination in detail. Chaikovskii himself claimed his visit to Prague in February 1888 constituted the “best and happiest days of [his] life” and brought him a “moment of absolute bliss.” An investigation of why Chaikovskii considered his stay there important is essential. Because the exploration of these questions depends on a scrutiny of Russian sources, this article will also be an investigation of how documents are used (or misused) to write history.

The 1959 and 1970 published Soviet censuses list several hundred categories of occupations. Yet far more types of employment exist than are indicated by this number of categories. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles published by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example, is composed of approximately 20,000 jobs. The sparsity of categories in any census is a product of the lengthy process in which (1) specific questions regarding employment are designed; (2) respondents interpret the questions and either answer or fail to answer them; (3) answers are coded into specific occupational categories; and (4) these categories are selected and sometimes grouped together for the purpose of the actual census publications. The selection and grouping of categories are of primary concern since here, as at earlier stages, the potential exists for deliberate or inadvertent distortions and for the compromise of the detail and precision of the census.

Despite their often disparate recollections of Ivan Bunin, émigré writers, critics, and memoirists agree that he was vociferously opposed to the fiction of Fedor Dostoevski, especially his major novels. They recall repeatedly that Bunin looked upon Dostoevskii as a “loathsome writer” and that he indicted Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov for what he believed to be their strained atmosphere, brittle construction, unwieldy style, and, most importantly, their monotonous characters, especially conscience-stricken criminals and suffering heroines. The émigré literati further contend that Bunin found particularly abhorrent the Christian mysticism of Dostoevskii’s world view. In Bunin’s opinion, they report, the ontological flights and falls of Raskol'nikov and Alesha Karamazov were but a lame excuse to “have Christ shoved into vulgar novels.” Valentin Kataev recalls that Bunin raged apropos of Raskol'nikov: “Dostoevskii sticks your nose into impossible and inconceivable abominations, into spiritual filth—From here has come everything that has happened to Russia: Decadence, Modernism, Revolution, young people who are infected to the marrow of their bones with Dostoevshchina—[ who are] without direction in their lives, confused, physically and spiritually crippled by war, not knowing what to do with their strengths and talents, at times, their exceptional, even colossal talents.” Significantly, Bunin’s dislike of Dostoevskii continued until his death. A. Bakhrakh reports that on November 7, 1953, the last day of Bunin’s life, the writer promised that “should I live and God give me strength, I will try again to remove Dostoevskii from his pedestal.”

This paper should begin with a series of disclaimers. It cannot pretend to be an analysis of all of Trotskii's ideas on economics and the economy, because this would call for a long book and because this author has not gone through the Trotskii archives or read all relevant published works. There is plenty of room for much more research on these matters, and I hope that Baruch Knei-Paz's admirable book on Trotskii's political ideas' will be followed by one that “reconstitutes” the great many fragments in which Trotskii's economic ideas are presented. Trotskii was not a professional economist, any more than Lenin was, but he did have much to say on economic affairs. What I shall do here is describe and analyze some of Trotskii's more important opinions and pronouncements.

“If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen,” writes Solzhenitsyn toward the end of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago,“what is the good of them? Are they anything more than the barking of village dogs at night?” He adds parenthetically: “I should like to commend this thought to our modernists: this is how our people usually think of literature. They will not soon lose their habit. Should they, do you think?” The statement— with its flavor of the tag-end of a Russian proverb culled from Dal', even the bit about the village dogs—is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn. What clever critic safe in his armchair, however pricked by ornery oldfangledness, would care or dare to contend with it?

Over a decade ago I published an article in this journal which discussed the factors underlying the freedom of action which tsarist diplomacy displayed in the years prior to World War I. The article resulted from a conviction that it was necessary to account for Russian freedom of action in the face of the traditional interpretation that foreign debts had greatly restricted Russian diplomatic independence.

To comment on Sidney Monas’s “GULag and Points West” is not an easy task. The article as a whole lacks focus and consistency, and it is simply not clear what moved Monas to compose this often diffuse collection of misrepresentations and misconceptions. In the past I have been an admirer of the author and his scholarship, but it is difficult to extend my admiration to this essay.

One of Monas’s intentions may have been to provide an overview of Solzhenitsyn’s writings which have appeared since his expulsion from the USSR. If so, the effort is highly flawed. While he does discuss—often in rather pedestrian fashion—Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, Lenin in Zurich, From Under the Rubble, and certain of Solzhenitsyn’s recent publicistic writings, Monas omits all consideration of such significant works as the ninety-six-chapter version of The First Circle, published in 1978, or the important chapters from the “Red Wheel” historical cycle which Solzhenitsyn has been publishing in recent issues of the journal Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia. This omission necessarily skews any analysis of Solzhenitsyn’s thought.

In my note, I maintained that Russia ran a current deficit during the industrialization era and that Russian trade statistics were not biased in the directions suggested by Sontag. 1 refrained from making comments on the foreign policy implications of the current account deficit, as I did not feel qualified to do so.

In his recent study of publishing in eighteenth-century Russia, Gary Marker has called attention to the importance of publication and distribution of the printed word as one measure of the reception of Western thought into Eastern Europe. For historians of the Balkans, no less than for Russian specialists, a crucial aid in this type of study has been the publication of systematic retrospective national bibliographies. Nowhere in the Balkans has this concern for retrospective bibliographical control been so closely linked with historical scholarship as in Greece. Even before the monumental publication of Émile L. J. Legrand's multivolume Bibliographic hellénique, modern Greek historical and philological study was closely linked to bibliographical coverage of Greek imprints during the Turcocratia. Since World War II, this concern for retrospective national bibliography has been closely identified with the study of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment and Greek literature from the fall of Byzantium to the modern period.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been charged with the responsibility of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information on the economy of the USSR. This review analyzes the quality of the CIA’s research, compares it with academic Sovietology, and raises certain questions regarding the internal mechanisms of the agency. For obvious reasons, the inquiry is confined to the unclassified materials produced by the agency. Moreover, I will be reviewing only a selected proportion of the published materials. The sheer volume is overwhelming: a request for publications produced a box weighing forty pounds. While my general comments refer to older materials, I will be concentrating on the most recent publications. The number of publications and variety of subject matter prohibit a traditional review article. Consequently, I intend an overall and much more general evaluation of research by the CIA.

My essay is basically a review of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago, The Oak and the Calf, and the BBC interview of February 1979. Other works are mentioned in passing, but I tried to limit myself (as the title indicates, but without being too rigid about it) to works written since Solzhenitsyn’s passage West. In no way does the essay pretend to “sum up” or definitively evaluate the work of Solzhenitsyn. It is not even my own last word on the subject. As John Dunlop indicates, Western historians have tended to take an increasingly dim view of Solzhenitsyn without perhaps proper respect for his literary talent and rhetorical power, whereas those whom Dunlop calls “the best Western literary critics” have tended to roll over and play dead when confronted with his ideological illiberalism and incapacity to enter into dialogue. Though Dunlop professes to admire “centrism,” he seems to have missed my middle course.