The “psychoprophylactic method” of preventing or minimizing pain in childbirth was developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s by Il'ia Zakharevich Vel'vovskii, a neurologist working at the Ministry of Transport's Central Psychoneurological Hospital for Southern Railroad Workers in Khar'kov. In 1951 the Ministry of Health adopted Vel'vovskii's method as standard procedure for normal births in all obstetrical institutions in the USSR and undertook a large-scale program to provide the facilities and trained personnel for its implementation. This decision was based on more than simple recognition of a successful medical innovation, particularly since Soviet obstetricians were far from giving it unqualified approval. It owed more to the political and ideological imperatives of Stalin's regime which were then intruding deeply into the work of Soviet scientists and physicians.

Like their zemstvo counterparts, the municipal dumas played a major role in determining the quality of life in tsarist Russia from the Great Reforms until the Revolution in 1917. During this period of rapid urban growth, the dumas had the authority to regulate housing conditions. They bore major responsibility for ensuring an appropriate level of public health and sanitation, welfare and social services and for developing public education, transportation, parks, and recreational facilities.

The restrictive municipal “counter reform” of 1892 destroyed some of the promise of urban self-government, however, and with few exceptions, city government entered the twentieth century with a reputation for apathy, indolence, and indifference to all but the narrow concerns of the tiny propertied elite to whom local affairs had been entrusted. Perhaps Den', a leftist paper, was too harsh when it characterized the record of a St. Petersburg duma as one of “criminal indifference and cynical unconcern.” But recently historians have taken a similar, if less biting view:

The calamitous fire which destroyed Moscow in 1812 precipitated a momentous urban renewal, which took on special architectural significance because it made Moscow one of Europe's foremost classical cities. To a greater degree than London, Edinburgh, Berlin, or Vienna, Russia's old capital acquired a “neoclassical” look despite the reappearance in it of much that was traditional and wooden. The purpose of this article is to stress the significance of the fire as a watershed in the city's history, noting those planning and building antecedents that gave rise to the new city after 1812.

The relationship between Chekhov's fiction and earlier nineteenth-century Russian fiction still awaits thorough critical investigation. Certain aspects of the problem, notably Chekhov's intellectual and literary reaction to Tolstoi, have frequently been discussed, but the question as a whole, as well as many specific facets of it, has not been adequately treated. For instance, until very recently, the name of Dostoevskii has been virtually absent from Chekhov criticism. The reasons for this are under-standable. In contrast to abundant information on Chekhov's attitudes toward Tolstoi and his works, the documentary record contains little evidence which sheds strong light either on the extent of Chekhov's familiarity with Dostoevskii's works or his opinion of them. Political or literary-historical preconceptions may also have imposed critical blinders. Despite the dearth of external evidence, it seems highly improbable that so widely ranging a reader as Chekhov would not have made some acquaintance with the major works of a writer of Dostoevskii's artistic stature and public prominence.

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.

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.