The intent of the framers of the Electoral Law of June 3, 1907, was, as Peter A. Stolypin would have it, “constitutionalist,” but it was very nearly the antithesis of “democratic.” In reverting from a broadly representational to a Prussian-style, tax-property, categorical basis, Stolypin sought no fundamental revision of the principles underlying the Electoral Law for the Imperial Duma of November 11, 1905. He was committed to the concept of a constitution providing for representative government, but in accordance with his own predilections he wished to revise the terms of representation in a way that would ensure a preponderance of “trustworthy” elements in the Duma while still permitting most major segments of public opinion to be represented.

In the historiography of the Russian intelligentsia, liberal Slavophilism has suffered a sad neglect. Whereas Marxist and Populist historians alike have hallowed the radical Westernizers, the liberal Slavophiles have been relegated to a minor position, and Slavophilism presented as an ideology of obscurantist conservatism. In one respect this is understandable: the liberal Slavophiles were above all moderates and did not offer the violent expressions of resentment against the existing order that appealed so much to the revolutionary mentality. But although moderate, Slavophilism in the forties and fifties was a powerful progressive force, instrumental in bringing about the Great Reforms. In their concrete notions of reform and their determination and ability to carry them out, the liberal Slavophiles far surpassed the Westernizers, who in the forties were still groping in the labyrinth of Hegelian philosophy and who in the fifties were disoriented by the failure of the revolution of 1848.

The heliocentric allusions in Antiokh Kantemir's First Ode make it one of the earliest poetic statements in Russian literature to support the Copernican theory. As such it is often cited, and it is certainly the best known of the poet's four surviving odes. Yet neither the precise date of the poem's composition nor its origin is known, though attempts at solving both these problems have been made with a view to explaining the change in Kantemir's poetic style after he left Russia in January, 1732. Though he was then only twenty-three, some of his best satires had already been written, and his poetic output declined after that date.

It was along the eastern shore of the Adriatic, in Dalmatian coastal towns and on neighboring islands, in the narrow belt of territory that had escaped Turkish conquest, that the Croatian Renaissance developed. The literature of this period is considered the beginning of Croatian creative writing and the foundation of the Croatian revival, known also as the Illyrian movement, that occurred three centuries later. Why did this Slavic literature develop in this small territory, which had been taken away from the Hungaro-Croatian kingdom and annexed to the Venetian Republic (1409-20) and whose high administrative, military, and often ecclesiastical officials were imported from Venice? A brief survey of what took place during several centuries on this Dalmatian coastland—rocky and barren, but surprisingly rich in events of political and cultural importance—may provide some explanation.

The Soviet Union, as an administrative state par excellence, is a Parkinsonian nightmare. Although the leadership is armed with broad powers and unhampered by formal restraints in its control of the bureaucracy, it is nevertheless hard pressed to keep the huge administrative structures of the Soviet system efficient and responsive to central direction. The success or failure of a regime depends in large measure on how effectively it can get its policies translated into action by the bureaucracy.

Most schematic descriptions of the Soviet system by Western commentators, especially those written in the early 1950's, emphasized the division of the state into several highly centralized, vertically structured, and functionally specialized administrations—party, police, armed forces, and the economic bureaucracy. Within these broad categories there was frequently even further vertical-functional fractionization. For example, within the industrial bureaucracy there were various specialized ministries and a separation between planners and managers.

In the early months of 1841, when Lermontov was briefly in Petersburg on leave from the Caucasian front, he played a practical joke on his literary friends by solemnly convening them for a reading of a new novel and presenting them instead with a short and unfinished tale of the supernatural. The circumstances surrounding this episode were chronicled by Countess E. P. Rostopchina, herself a popular author of the period:

Once he declared that he would read to us a new novel entitled Shtoss, the reading of which he calculated would take at least four hours. He insisted that we gather early in the evening and that the doors be locked against outsiders. All his wishes were fulfilled, and about thirty selected persons assembled.

Officially the one-centeredness of the Communist world ended in 1943. In that year the Communist International, which had recognized the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the hegemon, was dissolved, because the new political situation demanded the “great flexibility and independence” of the various “sections.“ The people's democracies that a few years later came into being in Eastern Europe emphasized, as Brzezinski has noted, that they “were to be sovereign—not Soviet. Their relations with the USSR were to be, naturally, ‘friendly’ but founded on mutual recognition of the principles of independence and noninterference in internal affairs.“ Thus ideologically the transformation of international communism into a complex with many allegedly independent power-holding and power-seeking Communist parties was proclaimed long before Togliatti in 1956 asserted that the Communist world was becoming “polycentric.”

In mid-October, 1878, an outbreak of the plague occurred in the obscure village of Vetlianka on the Volga. Eruptions of various virulent diseases were no rarity in the region of the lower Volga, but this particular calamity made a forsaken village world-famous. It embroiled Russia in a violent diplomatic and press campaign with Germany and Austria; it played a major role in the growth of a legacy of mistrust and suspicion of German motives in Russia; it once again made Russians and foreigners painfully or joyfully aware of the lamentable inadequacies of Russian administration; and, above all, it presented Bismarck with a welcome weapon in his campaign for the conclusion of the Dual Alliance of 1879. A purely domestic event, seemingly devoid of any international significance, thus came to play a major role in the development of the foreign policies of a number of great powers.

The Baltic countries, which were absorbed by the Russian Empire between 1721 and 1795 (Estonia and Livonia in 1721, Latgale in 1772, Lithuania in 1793 and 1795, and Courland in 1795), have played a significant role in Russian economic life, and have been regarded as an important, if not a vital Russian outlet to the Baltic Sea. Before the First World War 20.6 per cent of all Russian imports and 28 per cent of all Russian exports passed through the Latvian territory alone. This was not only because Latvia is situated on the most direct trade routes between Russia and Western Europe but also because of her excellent harbors—Riga, Liepaja (Libau), and Ventspils (Windau). Three of Russia's principal railroad lines converged on these ports. In 1912 the port of St. Petersburg handled 2,500,000 tons of shipping.

Agriculture continues to present the regimes of the Communist world with some of their most important economic and political problems even after the trials of collectivizing are past. There are constant pressures, on the one hand, to make the collective system much more productive by improving organizational efficiency and raising the level of technology. On the other hand, the official ideology commits these regimes to eventually abolishing the collective system itself by transforming the collective farms into institutions of state property. There are indications, moreover, that this commitment may not be postponed indefinitely. The issue of how to establish a viable, permanent, and uniform organization of agriculture with completely nationalized enterprises has recurrently arisen in the Soviet Union over the last decade: in Khrushchev's “agro-town” proposal of the early 1950's, for example, with its implicit aim of eliminating the private plots of collective farmers, and in the later fairly large-scale experiments with a system of fixed wages in collective farms and with direct conversions of collective into state farms.