Soviet Music affords an interesting study for the sociologist as well as the musician. For it reflects, in its ideological evolution, the changing course of Soviet society. The evolution of Soviet music may be divided into three principal phases: (1) from 1917 to 1921, marked by attempts to create a new revolutionary art on the ruins of the old; (2) from 1921 to 1932, signalized by the rise and fall of the concept of proletarian music sui generis; (3) from 1932 to the present, governed by the principle of Socialist Realism, within the national tradition, thus effecting the connection with pre-revolutionary art as “cultural heritage of the past.”

The Origins of the Russian ballet reach back two hundred years to the reign of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, Peter the Great's niece (1730–1740). Anna was devoted to ostentatious amusements (balls, fireworks, tableaux), and in the summer of 1734 ordered the appointment of Jean-Baptiste Landé as dancing-master in the Military Academy which she had founded at St. Petersburg in 1731 to prepare sons of the nobility for positions in the army and the civil service. Beside teaching at the Academy, Landé also organized a private class which is the original ancestor of all further development of the ballet in Russia. Here he taught not only social dancing, but the principles of dramatic stage dancing, drawing his pupils both from the most gifted students in the Academy and from the children of wealthy urban families.

When the Germans made their mass exodus from the Baltic States in 1939, they admitted thereby that their alleged cultural mission in the Baltic area, which had been conducted for several centuries, was a complete failure, and that they had not succeeded in their push to the northeastern Baltic, regarded in Germany since early medieval times as the land of milk and honey. Foodstuffs were available there in quantity, such as dried and smoked meats and fish, honey, vegetables, rye, oats, barley, and wheat, as well as raw materials (timber, tar, hemp, flax, rope, sailcloth, tallow, wool, hides, potash, wax, furs and amber). There was an increasing demand for these goods in Western Europe, the population of which had considerably grown since the early Middle Ages.

The So-Called Expanded Version of the Russian Law (Lex Russica, Pravda Russkaya) consists of three parts: the revised Pravda of Yaroslav's Sons; Vladimir Monomach's Statute; and some supplementary enactments. It is at the end of the third part that clauses dealing with slaves and grantees are placed (Sections 110–121). Some students of Russian legal history call this collection of articles a special “Statute on Slavery” to correspond to Vladimir Monomach's “Statue on indentured laborers” (Zakup). It may be dated in the second half of the 12th century, possibly in the reign of Prince Rostislav of Smolensk and Kiev (1160–67).

The Thirty Years War at first centered in Bohemia and, after the disastrous Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, Protestant partisans were forced to seek refuge in the neighboring states of Saxony, Silesia, Hungary and Poland. As their hope of an early return to their native land waned, they scattered to more distant lands, such as Holland and England. A few of the bolder exiles sailed on Dutch and English ships to America.

In Newspapers and in magazines, as well as in books (including The Encyclopaedia Britannica and The American Year Book) these two spellings are encountered, and a divergence of opinion exists as to which of the two is more correct or more desirable. The following explanatory remarks may be useful, as an unpretentious voice from the past, to those who will be in charge of bringing about a satisfactory solution of Central European problems. These remarks are not prompted, in the slightest degree, by the spirit of antagonism or animosity; on the contrary, they are intended as a contribution toward the removal of controversies, from a wider and more exact perspective, based on personal travels and experiences in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia, including the period September 10–25, 1938.

Mihaly Babits, modern Hungary's most erudite poet, represents (though he never participated actively in politics) the enlightened principles of Count Istvan Szechenyi, the nineteenth century statesman. Count Szechenyi was considered by Lajos Kossuth “the greatest Hungarian,” despite their political differences. Babits, Szechenyi-like, believed that politically, socially, economically, and culturally Hungary should be an equal of western Europe, without ignoring the obligations of her central and southeastern European geographical position.