The nurturing bed of russian intelligentsia ideas and values in the 1890's was the kruzhok. The one infallible earmark of intelligenty since the time of the Masonic Lodges of the eighteenth century was their instinctive propensity, in whatever situation they found themselves, to coagulate into small kruzhki. In these kruzhki literature was assembled, exchanged, and discussed, referaty containing theses were presented and heatedly debated, and sooner or later kruzhki became the spring-board for more organized activity of an illegal or conspiratorial nature. If an individual did not manifest this penchant for kruzhkovshchina, it was a sign that somehow he did not belong to the intelligentsia.

In 1955 the present writer examined the struggle being waged against the peasantry by the Communist Party in the USSR and came to the conclusion that the liquidation of the Soviet peasantry as a class is inescapable.

Since then, significant new legislation has been passed in the field of agriculture in the USSR.

All these new measures have the same tendency of bringing the peasant class in the USSR a few steps nearer to eradication and the kolkhozes nearer to the status of sovkhozes.

Two Kinds of Socialist Property: The Soviet Constitution (Section 5) recognizes two kinds of property: state property and cooperative property. Both are qualified as “socialist.”

The career of the Soviet historian, E. V. Tarle, bears testimony to both the methods and effectiveness of Soviet demands for conformity in historical writing. Unlike many of his colleagues, who confined their research to obscure topics or resorted to the editing of collections of documents, Tarle treated events in Russian history which carried important political implications. Outstanding among these were his works on the Napoleonic invasion of Russia. Between 1936 and 1952 Tarle wrote three basically different interpretations of this invasion, each of which reflected the current trend in Soviet historiography at the time it was written. Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union bore an obvious resemblance to Napoleon's campaign in Russia, and Academician Tarle, under pressure, changed his story to conform to the changing “party line.“

The relatonship between wage and price levels is clearly an appropriate subject for study in a number of comparisons of relative wellbeing. In measuring real wage changes within any economy, for example, we must measure the relative changes in these two levels over a specified time period. If there has been no drastic change in the number of dependents per wage earner, the measure of real wage changes should ordinarily give us some indication of the change in the level of living. Likewise, a study of the relationship between wage and price levels in two economies as similar as those of the United States and Canada would also seem to produce meaningful results. But what happens when we attempt to compare price and wage levels for economies where the institutional differences are very considerable?

The formation of a Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was accomplished slowly, and as the result of the steady pressure and constant guidance of the Communist International between 1919 and 1921. When the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC) was finally established in the latter year, this outcome represented a compromise between the extreme, doctrinaire policies of the Comintern and the more moderate Czechoslovak-oriented views of Bohumil Smeral, the party's first leader. Moreover the party was by no means the genuinely Bolshevik party anticipated by Lenin and the Comintern, and showed evidence of its deep roots in the social democratic movement and of its origin in a country of democratic traditions and intense national pride.

On January 21, 1920, a man named Ernst Barth stood up in Germany's Supreme Court at Leipzig to hear sentence passed upon him. The charge was “Attempted Treason”; the verdict, guilty; his punishment to be three years’ detention in a fortress. A tragic and now all but forgotten episode, the effort made to secure national rights for the Lusatian Sorbs at the Paris Peace Conference, had ended, in a German courtroom.

Tragic this episode surely was. In postwar years a small Slavic community in Germany found itself the object of bitter suspicion which had not existed before. “Die wendische Gefahr“—“The Wendish Danger“—found a place among the less felicitous journalistic cliches employed in the Weimar Republic. For more than a few Germans after 1918 the word “Wend” summoned up an image of treacherous men conspiring to tear yet another province from the prostrate Reich.

One's usual sense of chronology and politics suggests that Russian poetry after 1917 was quite different from Russian poetry before 1917 and quite different from postwar European poetry. Perhaps the historians and politicians have again persuaded us into oversimplification, because Russian poetry did not change that way until the institutionalization of repression under industrial expansion in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

That Brjusov early became a Communist Party member was politically exiting to his friends, important for the Party, but not artistically significant. Like any “change,” it followed not from the character of the new but from the failure of the old, in this instance, from Brjusov's creative attrition. Brjusov did not so much become a member of the Party as he stopped being a non-member, much in the sense that he stopped being a Symbolist when the social principles and patterns which tolerated the esthetic values associated with Symbolism altered and, in alteration, required fresh satisfaction and different values.

In 1959 the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism in literature became a quarter of a century old. And yet, despite this rather venerable age for a literary “school,” its aims and methods are almost as vague as they were at its birth, at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. This in spite of the fact that the official artistic credo of Soviet belles lettres exhibits the same passion for quasi-scientific definitions and statistical devices as do the periodically forthcoming definitions of the current implications of Party policy, united as they are by the insistence that the “science” of Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action.