The significance of the reign of Alexander III as a turning point in the history of Russian Jewry is beyond dispute. This reign witnessed a sharp deterioration in the Jews’ economic, social, and political condition. Jewish hopes for emancipation from the prevailing discriminatory legislation were dashed. Instead of emancipation, the Jews were presented with new restrictions, on their residence rights, educational opportunities, economic and professional pursuits, and participation in the institutions of local government. Faced with starvation, many thousands of Jews chose to leave the Russian Empire. Others chose to convert to Christianity in order to throw off the yoke of persecution. Moving in the opposite direction, many Jewish intellectuals who had previously believed in the beneficial results to be achieved by assimilation began to question this assumption. Some began to turn to Zionism. Others turned to active Jewish self-defense.

In October 1917 the Bolsheviks under Lenin's leadership succeeded in gaining control over the chaotic city of Petrograd. Undoubtedly it was a great triumph for what early in 1917 had been a small, isolated group whose leaders were in exile either abroad or in Siberia. In analyzing the October Revolution, both participants and historians have given major credit to Lenin's brilliant planning and the disciplined, centralized party he had insisted upon as early as 1902. Thus those who opposed Lenin in October 1917 have usually been •branded as weak and indecisive with no positive program and no understanding of the real condition of Russia in 1917. As is often the case with the defeated, the opposition's program has received much criticism but little study. One of the revolutionaries so treated is Grigorii Zinoviev.

There can be little doubt that the name Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin (1872–1936) would be near the top of any list of important twentieth-century Russian writers neglected both in and outside their homeland. Even though he was regarded as an original and major poet by writers as diverse as Briusov, Blok, Gumilev, Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak, Kuzmin still awaits rehabilitation in the Soviet Union and rediscovery in the West. There are some signs of a partial rehabilitation in Soviet Russia today, but the chances for a full rehabilitation—a major publication of his works—are slight. Obstacles to a Western rediscovery exist as well. Clichés die hard and perhaps no harder than in literary history. Kuzmin himself must share part of the blame for the major one. By writing the article “On Beautiful Clarity” he unwittingly gave critics and literary historians the tag for comments on his verse. That the article is about prose and that Kuzmin chose not to republish it in his one volume of collected essays is ignored.

“The attitude toward the national question always constituted in Czechoslovakia the touchstone for political understanding of the defense of revolutionary positions,” the Czech-German-Jewish historian of communism in Czechoslovakia, Paul Reimann, wrote in 1931. In these few words Reimann expressed the dilemma of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. And to this dilemma my study is also devoted.

The peace treaties concluded after the First World War buried the multinational empire and created in its place a multinational republic. The Communists in Czechoslovakia labored hard to define their stand in relation to the national question. The purpose of this paper is to describe closely the policies of Communists toward Slovakia. We shall argue that confusion, inconsistency, ideological perplexities, and opportunism characterized the party's dealings with problems of nationalism and nationalities in that country.

One frequently discussed problem in Western approaches to postrevolutionary Russian literature has been the temptation to identify “rebels against the system” and to praise their work out of proportion to its merits. Writers attacked in the Soviet Union for their heretical views have a good chance of being lionized in the West. A strange and notable exception to this pattern is Viktor Shklovsky, one of the earliest and most outspoken defenders of creative freedom in the Soviet Union. Though his books and articles were viciously attacked by the Marxist critics throughout the twenties, Western critics, viewing those same books and articles from the distance imposed by time and place, have seen them as a series of surrenders which hastened or even precipitated the collapse of the Formalist movement.

A notable characteristic of Solzhenitsyn's earlier works, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichto Cancer Ward, was their apparent philosophical and aesthetic eclecticism. Their author seemed neither to reveal the intellectual origins of his work nor to articulate in his novels a coherent philosophy of history or theory of art. One critic was forced to conclude that artistically Solzhenitsyn was an “eclectic with conservative leanings” whose main concern was with truth and honesty in literature. The publication of August 1914 tended at first to allay this feeling. Parallels of both form and content could be drawn between the new novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Further reflection, however, suggests that the comparison with Tolstoy raises as many difficulties as it resolves. But this does not mean that the riddle of the origins of Solzhenitsyn's thought remains insoluble. When examined in conjunction with the Nobel Prize lecture and the programmatic letter of September 5, 1973, to the Kremlin leaders, August 1914 does reveal the sources of Solzhenitsyn's philosophical and aesthetic views.

The overthrow of the civilian government by the military in Greece on April 21, 1967, produced among its multiple consequences an intense foreign interest in that nation. Since that spring, over fifty books and more numerous articles on the Greek “junta” have been written to satisfy the curiosity of an international clientele. Included in this literary melange are the works of journalists, scholars, celebrities, persecuted prisoners of the regime, and politicians. Together these authors tend to fall into the two broad categories of apologists for the post-April regime or—the larger group—its opponents. One may thus select from a plethora of impressions, opinions, and interpretations, with the knowledge that the works of professional scholars compose only a small segment of the total bibliography.

Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev was long considered the real power behind the throne during the reigns of the last two emperors of Russia. He was said to have determined the reactionary policies of the 1880s and 1890s. Robert Byrnes has recently demonstrated that Pobedonostsev's influence was in fact considerably less than had been assumed. Byrnes quite properly maintains that Pobedonostsev had very little power under Nicholas II, that his importance for Alexander III began to decline after 1890, and that even at the height of his power Pobedonostsev could not always persuade Alexander to adopt his point of view. However, although Byrnes concludes that his influence was limited, he still attributes to Pobedonostsev considerable power in “his own special spheres of interest.“ Evidence exists, nevertheless, that even this assessment of Pobedonostsev's power needs to be reconsidered. An event occurred in March 1883 which demonstrates that he was not always in a position to determine policy at will even in matters of vital interest to him.