In early 1983 I concluded my book on Iu. V. Andropov with the prediction: “This is how Andropov's country will advance toward its own 1984 which hopefully will not correspond to Orwell's description.” Scarcely one year later the Soviet Union did actually enter 1984 — both in the chronological and in the profounder sense — but without Andropov. And it probably happened against Andropov's desires and expectations.

Western Ukraine comprises those areas of Ukraine annexed by the Soviet Union after September 1939. They are (1) Galicia, made up of the Soviet oblasts of Lviv, Stanislav (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Drohobych (now part of Lviv oblast) and Ternopil; (2) Volynia, made up of Rivne and Volyn oblasts; (3) Bukovyna (Chernivtsi oblast); and (4) Transcarpathia (Zakarpatska oblast). In the interwar period, the Galician and Volynian territories were governed by Poland, Chernivtsi was part of Romania and Transcarpathia was ruled by Czechoslovakia. Whereas the former areas were all annexed by the USSR after the invasion of Eastern Poland in 1939, Transcarpathia became part of the Soviet Union only in June 1945.

The purpose of this study is to present some preliminary and necessarily tentative results of a larger, ongoing and incomplete quantitative study of ethnic recruitment to and participation in central decision-making institutions in Communist societies. The time frame of the study is the post-Stalin period, more precisely, the 20th through the 25th CPSU Congresses, 1956-76. The concern of the larger study is to develop a model of consociationalism versus imperium as alternative approaches to the governance of multi-ethnic Communist societies. Clearly, a country such as Yugoslavia more closely approximates the former model, and the USSR the latter.

The Soviet population comprises numerous nationalities, but there are differences of opinion as to the exact number. One author claims that there are 128 to 132 nationalities or ethnic groups living in the Soviet Union. The last official figure was issued by the Central Statistical Administration in instructions for the 1970 census. At this time the Administration, in consultation with numerous scholarly institutions, determined that 122 nationalities or ethnic groups resided in the Soviet Union. Comparable information for the 1979 census is not available in the West.

In the last two decades the Soviet Union has definitively entered the age of television. Although a Petersburg engineer allegedly “laid the foundation of television” (by designing the cathode ray tube!) as far back as the beginning of the century, and a Russian engineer in Uzbekistan reportedly transmitted the image of a human face in 1928, the Soviets lagged well behind the Western world in the development of the new medium through the 1950s. In 1960, however, the Central Committee of the Communist party declared that “television, along with the press and radio broadcasting, is called upon to play an important role in the education of Soviet people in the spirit of communist principles [ideinost'] and morality, of intransigence toward bourgeois ideology and morality, [and] in the mobilization of the workers …. “ Thereafter, Soviet television progressed at a rapid rate. Between 1961 and 1975, the number of television receivers in the country increased more than eleven-fold. The enormous Ostankino Center in Moscow was built to serve as the main production and transmission base, and a network of cables, relay stations and earth satellites was established to carry broadcasts to the far corners of the Union.

Nicholas Dima, Bessarabia and Bukovina: The Soviet-Romanian Territorial Dispute. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982. v, 173 pp. Distributed by Columbia University Press. Maria Manoliu-Manea, ed., The Tragic Plight of a Border Area: Bessarabia and Bucovina. American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences. Humboldt State University Press, 1983. xii, 280 pp.

Here are two good books providing detailed information on Bessarabia, until 1918 a province of the Russian Empire, and, to a lesser extent, on Bukovina, once a province within the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary. They include useful theoretical though somewhat debatable considerations on the history and ethnic nature of both regions. They come to proper conclusions which seem amply justified by the data and analysis which preceded them. However, both books are inadequately edited, especially the second one, and include a few statements either based on superficial generalizations or even tinted with disturbing — though perhaps unconscious — ethnocentrism.