The constitutional-reform movement in Russia passed through three stages of institutional development before its ultimate demise in revolution and civil war. In the first, occupying about a decade between the mid-1850s and the mid-1860s, the reform movement was concentrated in the corporate institutions of the landed gentry.

The 1860s witnessed an important but somewhat neglected stage in the evolution of intelligentsia attitudes toward the peasantry and other lower strata of society. It is best represented by writers who devoted themselves to portrayals of the narod, urban and rural, and who were known collectively (although they were by no means a cohesive group) as the raznochintsy writers of the sixties. They included F. M. Reshetnikov, N. V. Uspensky, N. G. Pomialovsky, A. I. Levitov, N. A. Kushchevsky, and M. A. Voronov. The biographies of these men are remarkably similar. They were all from uneducated families of the lower classes. Caught up in the ferment of the sixties which penetrated even to the most backward and obscure areas of Russia (from which most of them came), they made their way to St. Petersburg, seeking to free themselves from the age-old restrictions which Russian society had imposed on people of their social origins.

The name of Solzhenitsyn so dominated the Soviet literary scene in the 1960s that the ordinary Western reader might be forgiven for supposing that in the writing of fiction he was the lone star in an otherwise featureless sky. This is far from being the case. Solzhenitsyn himself, in a recent interview with Western correspondents, pointed out that there are a number of other writers of major stature at work in Russia today, though understandably he was inhibited from naming any of them.1 In fact, in the return to the moral concern, insight, and compassion which are the great heritage of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Solzhenitsyn has been by no means alone. On the contrary, he is merely primus inter pares among a whole school of writers who have made it their aim to digest and reassess Russia’s apocalyptic recent past, and in the light of it to reflect on man’s moral nature.

Russian revolutionists in the 1870s had a long history of opposition to build on—from the massive Pugachev peasant rebellion during the reign of Catherine the Great to an aristocratic conspiracy (Decembrist Revolt) at the end of the reign of Alexander II. They also drew on a rich indigenous fund of social criticism and programs, the latest and most important of which were the writings of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, the proclamations of the Land and Liberty group, and the radical economic articles of Chernyshevsky.

In the first days of 1938, Kalman Kanya, Hungary’s foreign minister, privately expressed the opinion that there was nowhere in Europe a “will to war” and that, barring accidents, peace seemed assured for at least a year. In a technical sense Kanya’s prediction was borne out by events, but he clearly did not foresee the Central European upheavals that were only months away. In the crisis over the Austrian Anschluss, Hungary was to remain a powerless bystander, unable, and to a certain extent unwilling, to raise a voice of protest. The Czechoslovak crisis was an entirely different matter. Virtually all politically conscious Hungarians believed that Prague’s time of troubles should be exploited to obtain territorial revision and strengthen Hungary’s position in East Central Europe. But, as previous historians of this subject have indicated, Hungary’s course in the unfolding Czechoslovak crisis was hesitant and indecisive.

Less than a year before his recent death, the distinguished émigré poet-critic Georgii Adamovich published one of his last essays in the New York Novyi Zhurnal. One section of it was particularly striking. Here was the “dean” of Russian émigré criticism and the author of hundreds of critiques and articles over the past fifty years questioning the purpose of literary criticism and whether there was a need for it at all: “In criticism … what is amazing is that behind all the innumerable articles and pieces of research, even the most penetrating of them, one never discerns the least perplexity about why, in fact, the article was written… Do Tolstoy, Dickens, and the others really require explanation and commentary ? Wasn’t Tolstoy right …that ‘criticism is when the foolish write about the wise’ ?”

The period of the 1930s has been called the time of the “Diplomatic War.“ During these years Nazi Germany seized the initiative in international affairs and tried to impose its will on the other states of Europe. The reaction of Britain and France to the threat of German expansion was appeasement until March 1939, when, with Hitler’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, it became clear that the Führer’s aims were not limited to the German-inhabited areas. Thus the states of East Central Europe found themselves in a highly vulnerable position: in the West they faced increasing political and economic pressure from the Reich; in the East there was the Soviet Union with its very exportable Communist ideology which would have undermined the political and social order of all these states. In this situation the East Central European states all sought some way of being independent from their two powerful neighbors.

Students of the Soviet political system have frequently noted the high turnover rates and the short terms of office of middle and lower ranking Soviet party and governmental officials. Soviet leaders have striven to combat the formation of informal structures within the party and governmental bureaucracies which, if allowed to go unchecked, could erode the control of the central political leadership.

Messrs. Campbell, Cohen, and Lewin have very usefully augmented my fragmentary efforts. It is good to have Dr. Lewin's informed judgment concerning the prospects for modest, steady growth in off-farm agricultural output during this period. He has sketched the direct link that Professor Campbell queries between the first plan's targets and the “waste, turbulence, sacrifice, and destruction” that gave rise to a whole new state system. Professor Cohen supplies illuminating detail on the relation of the Stalin-Bukharin struggle to the formulation of the First Five-Year Plan. His suggestion that regional leaders' efforts to get more projects for their regions had the effect of driving up the plan's investment (and therefore output) targets seems especially important. The proposition that Stalin's “socialism in one country,” having won out over Trotsky's stress on “permanent revolution” in the out-side world, should turn out to embody renewed domestic revolution (or civil war) is a major insight. Professor Campbell's eggs and bacon analogy is likely to become a permanent addition to our pedagogy, especially since this dietary problem still exists in the USSR.

A decorative belt in the form of an indented frieze, which in Pskov is called a “runner” (begunok or begunets), surrounds the drums supporting the domes and graces the apses of Pskov churches to form one of their most distinguishing features. It consists of three bands, the two outer ones formed of quadrangles, while the inner one is made up of interlocking triangles whose apexes alternately point upward and downward (fig. 1). Above the begunki, on the drums, usually there are additional decorative “brows” formed by a series of indented arches. But these are not unique to Pskov and will not be dealt with in this paper. The ornamentation on the apses usually is composed solely of the Pskov begunok.

On the afternoon of August 14, 1872, Sergei Nechaev, for nearly three years the object of an intensive police search in several countries, went to a café on the outskirts of Zurich. The author of the famous “Catechism of a Revolutionary” had already broken one of his personal rules by spending several consecutive nights under the same roof; in showing himself in public during daylight hours he violated another.

The golden era of the study of folklore in the Soviet Union was the first decade after the Revolution, when the party and government, occupied with more urgent tasks, let the literary scholars and folklorists do their work relatively undisturbed. In 1925 the so-called “magna charta libertatis” for Soviet writers was issued by the Central Committee of the party, which permitted “free competition of various groups and currents.” As a result, the 1920s turned out to be rich and fruitful in literary scholarship, including folkloristics. In the study of folklore, different trends could freely coexist and thrive side by side. The most important of them were the historical school, Formalism, and the so-called Finnish school. The historical school continued the traditions of its leader Vsevolod Miller, whose first concern had been to find reflections of concrete historical reality in Russian byliny (epic songs). Thus the tendencies of the historical school are found in the commentaries to some bylina collections in 1918 and 1919, and also appeared strongly in the works of the brothers Boris and Iurii Sokolov, both of them disciples of Miller.