“If the mind is obligated to obey the word of command, it can at any rate feel that it is not free. But if it has been so manipulated beforehand that it obeys without even waiting for the word of command, it loses even the consciousness of enslavement.” All modern societies involve mass manipulation, especially now since the masses have become economically and politically important. Whether it is an election or merely a matter of consumption, the crucial factor is the behavior of the activated mass. Motivation research and public opinion polls are a way of gauging the anticipated reaction of the consumer and the voter. The asymmetry in decision-making between the masses and the businessman or the politician is thus diminished.

To summarize the nature of an entire social system in one brief article is a truly forbidding task; but to criticize such an effort is equally difficult. There is much in Zbigniew Brzezinski's essay with which I agree; and for the article as a whole I am inclined to express admiration. There are some statements with which I do not agree, some that I would express differently, and some things which I think are essential enough to have been added. In order to make it easier for me to state my views systematically, I propose to begin by indicating how I would have written an outline sketch of the Soviet social system. We shall then see where major disagreements or shifts of emphasis are located.

Professor Brzezinski's paper moves along a number of planes of discourse. Some of it is describable as general theory of modern dictatorship, some as analysis of a particular political order, that of Russia, and some as discussion of current Russian political affairs and tendencies. In these necessarily rather brief remarks, I shall be concerned chiefly with issues that arise under the first two headings.

In Section I, where the notion of totalitarianism is expounded as a comprehensive conceptual key to the nature of the Soviet and other like systems (presumably both Communist and Fascist), Professor Brzezinski stresses the difference in kind between “traditional” or “old-fashioned” dictatorship and modern totalitarian dictatorship.

Any discussion of the Council of Florence and the reception of its decisions in Moscow can hardly be construed as breaking new historical ground. At best, it can be described as still another visit to a well-worked excavation. The problem is too central to have suffered neglect, and a continuing stream of studies ranging from articles to monographs and general histories has touched upon the subject. Within recent years Father Joseph Gill has produced an excellent study on the Council and has appended an epilogue dealing with the reactions in eastern Europe. In his most recent monograph, Oscar Halecki devoted a substantial section to the immediate impacts and consequences in the Slavic East. In a memorable session of the 1954 meeting of the American Historical Association, three panelists devoted their attention to the Council and its aftermath in eastern Europe. One paper focused directly upon the reaction in Muscovy.

Like other aspects of Soviet life, economics has been revivified by Stalin's death. The most visible part of its reawakening has been an extensive discussion of, and experimentation with, institutional arrangements, though even questions of strategy and basic policy have also been exposed to an unwonted amount of free discussion. The real measure of this freedom, however, is that the search for theoretical clarification, which inevitably accompanies discussion of practical issues, has been allowed to develop in a way not permitted since the late twenties. One aspect of this dramatic change is the controversy which has developed around the use of mathematics in economics. After long aversion to any introduction of mathematical reasoning into analysis of economic relationships, the Russians are now thinking about the possible usefulness of input-output techniques in balancing supply and demand and in price planning and about the application of linear programming to enterprise planning, and have begun to resort to mathematical models to explore the abstract essence of practical problems.

Among the things the Russians like to boast about is publishing. Their presses are now producing about 64,000 books (in over a billion copies), nearly 640 million copies of magazines, and nearly 13 billion copies of newspapers each year. Although they define a book as any publication five pages or more in length and their average newspaper consists of four pages or less, the figures are still impressive. Most of their books do contain far more than five pages, their magazines seem to contain, on the average, as much textual material as those outside Russia, and their newspapers are almost devoid of advertisements and many of the other space fillers that make American newspapers so bulky. What the text of the Soviet newspapers has to do with the day's news is, of course, another matter.

By turning to the Central Committee in June, 1957, to defeat the temporary majority in the Presidium, Khrushchev had not only wrecked the concept of collective leadership; he had corrected the optical illusion of a meaningful separation of “powers” in the allocation of the top party-state posts within the Presidium of the Central Committee. In institutional terms, the ouster of four of the five first deputy chairmen of the Council of Ministers (plus Malenkov, a deputy chairman) from the Presidium and the packing of that body with the entire1 membership of the enlarged Secretariat and some regional party secretaries represented the absolute subordination of the policy making organ of the CC to its nominally executive arm, the Secretariat. Carried to its logical conclusion by the First Secretary's assumption of Bulganin's office as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in March, 1958, this ”coup d'etat” was not formally submitted for approval to the extraordinary Congress which left the leading party organs unchanged.

In view of the impressive rate of Soviet economic growth during the past three decades, it seems likely that the Soviet leaders may make good their promise “to catch up with and surpass” the United States' level of production. Although estimates vary, most analysts agree that in recent decades the rate of Soviet industrial growth has been two to three times as rapid as that of the United States. The present Seven-Year Plan, to be concluded in 1965, aims at approaching American economic output in all sectors. Even in the troubled area of agriculture, the achievements of recent years appear to have been considerable.

In January, 1888, when Chekhov was working on his first long story, “The Steppe,” he wrote to his friend, the poet Pleshcheev, at whose instigation he was writing that story for the review The Northern Messenger:

All through January I have been working away at my steppe, not writing anything else, and am therefore absolutely ruined. If the Steppe is published later than March I shall howl like a wolf. I'll mail it to you by February 1st. If you foresee that there will be no room for it in the March issue, let me know, my dear man: I shan't hurry with the Steppe and shall write something for the New Times and the Petersburg Gazette for the sake of an honorarium. To write long things is most boring and much more difficult than to write trifles.

The clash of Eastern and Western influences, which was of particular significance in the history of the Rumanian people, could not fail to leave its imprint also on the Rumanian Socialist movement. Socialism was first introduced into Rumania in 1874 by some Rumanian intellectuals who had fled from Bessarabia, a province of Tsarist Russia. Marxian ideas, in their more extreme form, were brought to Rumania in 1875 and following years by Nathan Katz (Dobrogeanu-Gherea) and other Russian political refugees who had established themselves in Iaşi, the capital of Moldavia. But the political maximalism and the internationalist orientation of these refugees soon met the opposition of the more moderate and nationally inclined Rumanian intellectuals, who had been educated at Western universities and were influenced by the reformist ideas of the Social Democratic movement in the West.

Like Thucydides, Xenophon and Josephus, Napoleon and Churchill, Leon Trotsky had to wait to write his major history until defeat had deprived him of the possibility of making history. But all his life he was a writer by avocation, and a history-maker by vocation. “Beginning in 1897,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I have waged the fight chiefly with a pen in my hand.” When he was writing for Iskra he chose a nom de guerre-not to say nom de plume; it was Pero, the Russian word for pen.

Unlike Lenin, Trotsky looked often at himself in the mirror of history and consciously treasured his personal historic role. After 1905, in which year he played a more important part than any other revolutionary leader, he chose the first moment of respite, exile in Vienna, to write Die Russische Revolution: 1905 (Vienna, 1908 and 1909).

Translation of foreign fiction and poetry in twentieth-century Russia developed into an important field of literary activity which, in terms of prestige, came to be considered even superior to the essay. This can probably be traced back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when Vasilii Zhukovsky, a major poet, built practically all of his poetic work on translations. Now Russia has a whole army of highly competent translators, occasionally joined by poets whose original work is well known both inside and outside Russia (Marshak, Zabolotsky, Tikhonov). Mikhail Lozinsky (1886-1955), who is considered by some to be the greatest Russian translator of all time, received a Stalin prize for his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy and was held in very high esteem in Soviet literary circles. Theory of translation is taught at the Soviet university, and the problems of artistic translation are often vividly and interestingly discussed in books and numerus articles by poets, critics, and scholars.

It is not my intention in this paper to discuss those two issues that always seem to be debated whenever Eastern Europe is mentioned: the argument over the importance or utility of the study of its history, and the game of defining its precise geographic limits or its internal unity. These issues may not have been exhausted-though they are pretty limp by now—but I think it may be more profitable to turn our attention to some of the substantive and methodological problems that confront the working historian, once he has accepted this area as a field of proper concern and once he has arrived at his own definition of its scope and limits.

More specifically, I should like to consider some of the problems connected with the intimate but ambiguous relationship of Eastern Europe-including Russia-to Western Europe, both as an object of historical study and as an influence on historical research and writing.

In recent years serious scholarly monographs and monographic articles on the history of Muscovite Russia from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century have been appearing in the Soviet Union with increasing regularity. They all suffer from a heaviness of style and from a degree of tendentiousness arising from ideological premises and nationalism. Nonetheless, they offer substantial additions to our knowledge and understanding.

The Formation of the Russian Centralized State in the Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries by L. V. Cherepnin is a treatment based substantially on his well-known careful analysis of documentary materials, Russian Feudal Documents of the Fourteenth to Fifteenth Centuries. Cherepnin's recent monograph is divided into six enormous chapters, the first of which is a very useful discussion of the historiography of the question.