For nearly two hundred years the history of the Raskol, the Russian Church schism of the seventeenth century, was a secret one. To be sure, the Old Believers wrote, and in enormous quantities, but they wrote—by hand—secret manuscripts, copied secretly and circulated secretly. And, except for official condemnations of schismatic teachings and the publication of laws directed against the raskol'niki, more or less serious historical investigation started only in the last years of the reign of Emperor Nicholas I and was confined to printed but highly restricted memoranda passed around in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Even the nature and the chronology of early Raskol historiography raise questions about the nature of the schism. Why was the history of the Raskol secret for such a long time? Why were the Old Believers persecuted by the government for so long? Was it all, as the government maintained, because they were ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, fanatical, and disobedient toward the Church?

To map out a convincing genealogy of the Russian revolutionary Marxist movement (and, from 1903, of its Bolshevik wing) was always a concern of its leaders. Revolutionary Marxism made its Russian debut with Plekhanov's booklet Socialism and the Political Struggle only in 1883, some thirty-five years after the Communist Manifesto and almost sixty years after the Decembrist uprising. It was thus a latecomer both to European Marxism and to the Russian revolutionary movement. How was it to define its own relationship to these forerunners? To emphasize only the Marxist heritage meant to isolate the young movement from the formidable tradition of revolt already built up in Russia. But to identify the emergent Marxist movement too fully with this tradition would undermine its claim to be possessed of a new message, to be the prophet of a new age.

Historians have Described the gentry as the most powerful and influential social group in eighteenth-century Russia. The gentry developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a social class, or estate, from the fusion of the old feudal aristocracy with the younger military and administrative service class. The view that the gentry was the pillar of absolutism and of the Russian state was virtually unchallenged during the eighteenth century. The special status of the Russian gentry derived principally from the fact that its members constituted the first social group that could not be treated arbitrarily by the state. The Russian state recognized certain rules of conduct in respect to the gentry, and by and large observed those rules, at a time when other social groups possessed no safeguards, as individuals or collectively, in their dealings with the state.

It is difficult to decide what is of the greatest Importance in all the vast mass of diaries, reminiscences, biographies, and other books about Tolstoi—the fantastic drama of his life, his extraordinary character, the effect of this character upon his magnificent art, or the projection of his prodigious mind on his philosophy and belief. The fact that Tolstoi himself was a living contradiction of the separateness of experiences and ideas is a sufficient reason for not attempting to isolate any one of them from all the rest. But, whether because his understanding of himself fell short of that of other human beings or because he was forced by the very power of his understanding to turn about and attend to his other task—that of understanding how to live with himself and with his fellow men—Tolstoi chose to divide his life into independent periods. The fourth and last one, in which, he said, he “hoped to die,” enlarged (or, as some would have it, narrowed) his understanding until it became prophecy, or religion, or a huge moral ax which he leveled against himself and the surrounding world.

In May 1927 Sir Austen Chamberlain precipitated the first great international crisis of the post-Locarno period by denouncing the Anglo-Soviet trade agreement and severing Britain's diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Although Germany was not directly involved, the dispute nevertheless was to have a profoundly disturbing effect on German-Soviet relations. By raising the possibility of a wide-ranging diplomatic, economic, and perhaps even military confrontation between London and Moscow, it strained Germany's diplomatic system, which rested on the Locarno Pact (1925) and the Treaty of Berlin (1926). Thus it posed some fundamental questions for the German Foreign Ministry: Were the policies associated with those agreements compatible with each other only in fair weather? Did Germany have the freedom to remain neutral if the dispute should deepen? In short, was it still realistic to believe that Germany could maintain equally intimate ties with London and Moscow? Because Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann had previously denned a balancing role as the sine qua non of Germany's international revival, the imbroglio soon led to a great debate in the Wilhelmstrasse. The issue on which it turned was, as a leading participant observed, “whether Germany's ties with Russia are worth enough to our present and future political interests so that it pays to assume the political expenses and risks involved in maintaining them.”

While the presence of women—chiefly disreputable camp followers—in military hospitals was not new, during the Crimean War women of a different sort undertook to care for the patients, with the French army the first to provide this service. When the horrors of the British hospital at Scutari (Uskudar) became known, British wrath was aroused. In The Times of October 13, 1854, an article by William Howard Russell stated: “Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good … and they have the help of the Sisters of Charity These devoted women are excellent nurses.” Immediately a letter to The Times demanded: “Why have we no Sisters of Charity?”

The Beilis case—a charge of ritual murder brought against an obscure Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a Kiev jury in September 1913— has more than once been called Russia's Dreyfus Affair. As a shorthand summary, the comparison serves well enough. In both instances an innocent nonentity was plucked out of obscurity to become the object of a contest whose larger implications, while they agitated politics and opinion, escaped the victim or left him indifferent. Beyond this, points of difference loom larger than those of similarity.

A Polish economist visiting a university campus began his discussion of Soviet growth in the following way: “We may divide Soviet postwar experience into two periods: 1950-58, the period of difficulties of production; and 1958 to the present, the period of the production of difficulties.” The division into two arbitrary periods may give the appearance of sudden change to what were actually continuous trends in the Soviet economy; nevertheless, for purposes of the present discussion I will consider the recent period to be the years of the Seven-Year Plan.

Following its political break with Stalin's Russia, Yugoslavia has, since the early 1950s, increasingly turned away from the centralized socialist planning that characterizes the Soviet economic system. The main impulse for the gradual elaboration of a distinctive national system came from two directions. First, the Yugoslav conception of federalism was based on the association of six regions (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro) with very distinct national, historical, and social traditions and in different stages of economic development. This meant balancing central economic direction with concern for regional needs and interests. Second, the break with Stalinist Russia in 1948 no doubt stimulated a desire to develop, together with political and ideological independence, a distinctive national economic philosophy of communism in contrast to the overcentralized planning bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.