Lenin selected from the "populist heritage" and praised at various times those points which might strengthen his attempt to make a revolution, and condemned whatever parts did not relate well to a particular phase of his program. Wielders of Soviet power since Lenin have continued to demonstrate this artificial ideological flexibility in their efforts to perpetuate the victory of 1917. As political and national requirements have changed, the regime has demanded that interpretations of the revolutionary populist movement complement these developments.

Since the inception in 1954 of Soviet economic aid to non-Communist underdeveloped countries, commitments have grown to over $6 billion and deliveries to $2.7 billion. Concomitantly an extensive literature on the subject has emerged. Per unit of aid money, the attention paid to the Soviet programs is much greater than for a comparable flow of resources from other countries. Undoubtedly circumstances that go beyond conventional considerations about international capital flows are responsible for this interest. Writers take various approaches, such as the motives of the donor, contract terms, contribution to the development of recipient countries, impact on alignment with bloc politics, and so on. With few exceptions the investigators attempt, one way or another, to estimate the payoffs accruing to the donor from such international transfer of resources. Yet there is no comprehensive record that could serve as a basis for the numerous appraisals and evaluations. Ironically, at the milestone of one and a half decades of Soviet aid activities the "authentic" sources on the subject still use varying figures.

When the economic reform (NEM) was introduced in Hungary in early 1968, it was announced that political reforms aiming at the "democratization of the socialist system" would also be made. The Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) and the government stated that economic decentralization would be accompanied by the "strengthening of socialist democracy and the broadening of the participation of the masses in political activities." Several measures were taken to promote this objective through discussion and debate–but not through dissent or decision-making. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which seriously affected the entire East European bloc, Hungary's move toward democratization became less pronounced and the government's policy definitely more cautious both in words and deeds. In this study I attempt to analyze the meaning and scope of the political changes that took place in Hungary in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia, giving special attention to the concept of democracy, the organization of the party and government, the position of the mass organizations, and the meaning of the increasing group conflicts.

The novel is the only major literary genre whose origins and development we have been able to watch in detail. It also seems to be the only genre whose development depended more on the customers than on the makers. Richardson, who wrote Pamela because he noticed how popular a continuous story in the form of letters could be; Fielding, who exploited Richardson's success in his parodistic Joseph Andrews; Scott, who produced innumerable historical romances, gamely trying to match demand with supply; Dickens, who accidentally struck a gold mine with the first chapters of The Pickwick Papers; Dostoevsky, who made extensive use of the conventions of popular, sensational novels—all are typical of the way the novel evolved. In other literary forms the discrepancy between merits and rewards, creativeness and popular expectations, and originality and response has been so frequent as to become proverbial. But this is not true of the nineteenth-century novel, where it is unusual to find a writer like Stendhal, who gained his reputation only after his death.

The imprisonment of Andrei Siniavsky in 1965 stilled, in mid-career, the most original and enigmatic voice in contemporary Soviet literature. At the time of his arrest he was known in the USSR solely as a gifted, liberal literary critic and scholar. Abroad he was known as Abram Tertz, a mysterious Russian author—possibly not even a resident of the Soviet Union—who had written a brilliant, devastating critique of socialist realism, two short novels (The Trial Begins and Liubimov), six short stories, and a small collection of aphorisms (Unguarded Thoughts).