Contemporary Soviet historians of biology have attempted to add historical prestige to Trofim Lysenko's controversial theory of evolution by reinterpreting past Russian social thought on evolution. One Soviet historian has not hesitated to go back as far as the eighteenth century to find Russian antecedents of various aspects of Lysenko's theory, although the relevance of this rewriting of history to the scientific merits of Lysenkoism remains at best obscure.

But the attempt does raise several significant questions: What were the major interpretations by pre-Marxist Russian social thinkers of evolution and particularly of Darwinism? What implicit assumptions about the process of evolution and the nature of man do these interpretations contain? What influence did they have on the development of a Russian Marxist interpretation of Darwinism?

It is obviously impossible to answer all these questions in a single article.

Like Balzac and Dickens, Dostoevsky is one of the great mythographers of the modern city; and, like them, he was a journalist as well as a novelist. The motley contents of his Diary of a Writer are, if not well known, at least available to the curious in English translation. His journalism before 1873 is a different matter: this work remains untranslated and largely unexamined, though it contains much that sheds light on his artistic practice—including the feuilletons, published at the very beginning of his career and called, significantly, a “Petersburg Chronicle.” What they show us is the young writer, in search of a persona, confronting the city and experimenting with the themes and attitudes that would later go into his myth of Petersburg.

The terms of the experiment were in good part furnished by the times.

In contrast to the purge of the “anti-party group” in June, 1957, the removal of Marshal Georgii Zhukov from power has occasioned relatively little comment from Soviet authorities. However, even if the agents of Soviet totalitarianism have remained silent about the reasons for the purge of Zhukov, a consideration of the dynamics of the totalitarian system may help us to reach an explanation.

This study will first explore the official charges on the basis of which his removal was justified in the Resolution of the Central Committee, Marshal Konev's speech, and subsequent statements. These charges were: (1) promotion of the cult of Zhukov in the Soviet Army; (2) reduction and curtailment of party control over the army; (3) misdirection in military matters, particularly in military science and organizational questions; (4) adventurism and Bonapartism.

The story of armed resistance to Soviet rule in postwar Lithuania is of interest both to historians and to political scientists. On the one hand, it unveils an important period of modern Lithuanian history and offers a glimpse into the dilemma of East European nationalism, caught between Nazis and Communists in World War II. On the other, it allows an insight into the nature of a movement that seeks to produce political changes by the use of violence. In an age when political practitioners use guerrilla warfare and paramilitary tactics as basic means of struggle for power, justification of a study of partisan movements seems hardly necessary. By showing academic interest, the social scientist merely recognizes their growing practical importance.

The Lithuanian partisan resistance to the Soviet regime now can be analyzed with the help of varied source material, including firsthand testimony of both nationalist and Communist origin.