Siberia, apparently, is an inhospitable region as far as Communist Party members are concerned. According to T. H. Rigby, both in 1939 and in 1961, a significantly smaller proportion of the CPSU membership was to be found in the Urals and Western and Eastern Siberian regions of the RSFSR than of the general Soviet population. This is surprising, he points out, in view of the area's “relatively small rural population” and its key industries being mining and metallurgy. Beyond the suggestion “that the general comfort and pleasantness of an area is an independent factor in its party membership levels,” one is immediately intrigued by the implications this may have for the political recruitment opportunities of ethnic minorities in these regions. Does it mean that native, non-European minorities have better chances to become party members because Europeans are reluctant to move there? Or, conversely, does it mean that Europeans, because of their higher levels of education, tend therefore to displace the non-Europeans? Is there evidence of any sort of “affirmative action” on behalf of ethnic minorities in Siberia insofar as recruitment into the party, and concurrently access to the better jobs, is concerned?

October 1819 was a key month in the history of relations between the Slavs. Alexander I spent the early part of it in Warsaw, drawing on the contitution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland and putting the finishing touches to his project for a pan-imperial constitutional charter. In Tsarskoe Selo the conservative historian N. M. Karamzin reacted with horror to the tsar's concurrent plan for the revivification of Poland. On 9 October, in the hope of securing official support for his archaeological and ethnographic studies, the Pole Zorian Dolega Chodakowski arrived in St. Petersburg. His first publication in Russian, which appeared later in the month in Moscow, argued that before the coming of Christianity the Slavonic peoples were ‘everywhere and in all respects’ identical. Behind these three events — Alexander's charter, Karamzin's sense of outrage, Chodakowski's arrival — lay three approaches to the bringing-together of the Slavs: the federal, the Russifying, and what I shall call the cultural. In various hands, these approaches were long-lived in pre-revolutionary Russia. Chodakowski's significance lay in the impetus he gave to the third of them.