During the first half of the 1870s the character of the revolutionary movement in Russia changed considerably. At this time the movement spread its base of operation and its organizational effectiveness beyond the confines of St. Petersburg. The idea of a widespread revolutionary movement led by radical circles operating in several large cities was not a new conception in the 1870s. The efforts of Zemlia i Volia, Velikoruss, Ishutin, Karakozov, and Nechaev are all testimony to the emergence of a permanent underground opposition aimed against the ruling tsarist regime. Between 1869 and 1874, however, this process reached a new level with the activities of the Chaikovsky Circle, which managed to survive for five years under various names and in spite of even more various ideological approaches to the problem of revolution. This circle succeeded in building a truly nationwide network of affiliated groups which provided the initial revolutionary experience and loyalty to radicalism for many later members of the second Zemlia i Volia, Narodnaia Volia's executive committee, and the growing ranks of young Russian Marxists in the 1880s.

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.

Interest in Peter Tkachev, the angry young man of the Russian revolutionary movement in the 1860s and 870s, has generally been focused on his role as a “forerunner of Lenin.” Indeed, that is what Professor Michael Karpovich called him in an article published several decades ago. More recently Professor Albert L. Weeks has gone so far as to dub Tkachev “the first Bolshevik.” In his Tkachev biography Professor Weeks has included a study of similar Soviet opinions, that is, of the great debate in the early 1920s centering on the relationship of Lenin, Tkachev, and Auguste Blanqui, from whom Tkachev drew much of his inspiration.

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 mention of “gastronomy and Gogol” may immediately make us think of the good-natured pair in Old-Fashioned Landowners, who, if they were not eating, were sure to be sleeping. Or perhaps what comes to mind is that remarkable five-by-five figure of Peter Petrovich Petukh, whom Gogol appropriately described as a “round watermelon.” And who can forget how Sobakevich ever so quietly and “innocently” alone dispatched that noble sturgeon at the breakfast party given by the chief of police, or how the thoroughly tipsy Khlestakov bragged about the “dream of a soup” that was delivered to him in St. Petersburg from no other gastronomic paradise than Paris itself. Nor can we forget Khlestakov's other soup—the one more like the River Nile (with feathers)—which was so ill-received and yet eaten with such alacrity by the starving braggart. Perhaps only Vladimir Nabokov did not laugh at Puzatyi Paciuk and his ingenious way of transporting varenyky to his mouth without moving an inch—and he first had to dip them into a dish of sour cream that was placed on a low barrel in front of him. And what about that pan of fried eggs that was rushed onto the stage in Meyerhold's production of Gogol's The Marriage, in which one of the suitors for the hand of the merchant's daughter—much to the confusion of the others—is called “Fried Eggs.”

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.

Shrouded behind a veil of semisecrecy, the making of policy decisions in the Soviet Union has been a fertile source of endless speculation and research. From time to time, happily, it becomes possible to penetrate rather deeply into the arcana of the process and turn up some illuminating materials. The decision to cultivate the virgin lands is a good case in point, and now the older Western analyses of the politics surrounding that event can be expanded substantially on the basis of information published in recent years.

Interest in Finnish communism has been high in recent years and seems to be, at least in part, a reflection of two facts. First, the Finnish party, like the Communist parties of Italy and France, has been able to poll at least 20 percent of the popular vote in parliamentary elections. Second, the father of Finnish communism, Otto Kuusinen, was from 1957 until his death in 1964 a member of the Secretariat and Presidium (Politburo) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The reader should, however, keep in mind that Finnish communism has a long and dramatic history dating back to the formation of the party in 1918. This history falls logically into three periods: 1918-30, when the party was in theory legal but in practice illegal; 1930-44, when the party was formally proscribed; and 1944 to the present, a period during which the party has been able to act in the open as a registered, legal organization.

Scattered through Goncharov's correspondence, memoirs, several critical essays, and even his novels are many statements about the nature and purposes of art. They reflect the prejudices as well as the special insights of the practicing artist. Little interested in systematic aesthetic philosophy, Goncharov wrote about art sporadically, sometimes to defend his own work, often in the heat of current controversy. His writings on art were not intended to contribute to a comprehensive theory. Nor were they designed as a program. Goncharov did not formulate an aesthetic position and then seek to demonstrate its validity in artistic compositions. On the contrary, many of his opinions derive from a later period, when he was already an established novelist. Though they remain constant enough to permit us to extract a consistent viewpoint, Goncharov's aesthetics seem to have more bearing on some of his works than on others. Nevertheless, they provide an invaluable (and little studied) guide to the mind of the artist.

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).

Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.