In October, 1942, the civil war which had been going on in Yugoslavia since November, 1941, began to seem an extremely serious matter with grave international implications. Britain, the United States and the Yugoslav government-in-exile were behind Drazha Mikhailovich and the Chetniks, who were fighting the Partisans and the Liberation Front who, backed by Russia, were fighting the Axis. That looked to me pretty close to war between Britain and us on the one side and Russia on the other. Could the United States do something about it? I gathered from an assistant secretary of state that the American government had no working policy for such problems. It left them to British hands — and at that time the British hands most active in reference to the Balkans were smeared with Rumanian oil and itching for Yugoslav metal deposits. Although the American government planned to invade the Balkans, it had no intelligence service of its own in Yugoslavia. And it seemed unable to take the initiative toward the formation of a commission of British, American and Russian army officers to go to Yugoslavia and assume command of the resistance to the Axis — a step which would make Yugoslavia into a symbol of Allied unity rather than a scene of conflict between the allies.

A survey of certain current movements of American opinion regarding the Soviets is valuable as a barometer of interallied weather, especially in view of the likelihood that casual day-to-day revelations of American attitudes and feelings concerning our Ally during the war-years will have considerable power for good or evil in regulating both the mood and the sympathies which Soviet representatives will eventually bring to the peace table.

Much water has flowed under the bridges since President Coolidge wrote, on December 6, 1923, “Whenever there appears any disposition to compensate our citizens who were despoiled, and to recognize that debt contracted with our Government, not by the Tsar but by the newly formed Republic of Russia; whenever the active spirit of enmity to our institutions is abated; whenever there appear works meet for repentance — our country ought to be the first to go to the economic and moral rescue of Russia.”

Next spring the whole Polish nation will celebrate the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the insurrection which Thaddaeus Kościuszko, after participating in the American Revolution, conducted against the invaders of his own country. Without knowing at the present moment under what circumstances this celebration will take place, we all feel that Kościuszko's program of 1794, summed up in the words: “Freedom, Integrity, Independence,” is once again our program for Poland's future.

The permanent significance of these three ideas throughout our whole history is one more proof of the continuity of Poland's development. It was in vain that Kościuszko opposed the partition of Poland, but even that partition and the following century of foreign domination could not interrupt the continuity of Polish national life. What a distinguished American historian, writing recently about Czechoslovakia, has rightly called “the vital immediacy of the past,” is an even more important truism as far as Poland is concerned. Therefore any concrete discussion of our future aims must be based upon the “consciousness of historical realities.”

Planes bringing President Beneš and his collaborators — both Czechs and Slovaks—back to their country may land at a time when much sporadic fighting will still be going on in and around Germany. Underground forces will have aided, or joined, the Allied armies. Will the accumulated rage against the invaders lead to a mêlée in Czechoslovakia? We make no gratuitous predictions. If there is still much fight left in the German soldiers by the time the war reaches Central Europe, the country may be a scene of horrors. The SS-men are sure to go on killing to the bitter end. But the majority of German officials and evacuees from the Reich, as well as many of Henlein's and K. H. Frank's traitorous henchmen will have fled to Germany in time. Moreover, many Czechs and Slovaks who have been sent to the Reich can be swapped for Germans, if Germany is willing and able to negotiate at the moment. The more accurate rulings are prepared by the United Nations for the orderly prosecution of war criminals, the better. Lists of crimes are being well kept.

L'Auteur responsable de la présente chronique se rappelle avec enthousiasme, mais non sans confusion, le jour de novembre 1918 où, dans le dernier fascicule d'une revue clandestine, il résumait fiévreusement les événements d'un Mois apocalyptique. Il s'excusait alors de la pauvreté d'un historique improvisé, balbutiant, lacuneux, bref, tout à fait indigne du formidable spectacle qu'il avait la charge de commenter. Les mêmes émotions, une gêne pareille, le chroniqueur beige de Renaissance les éprouve, à vingt-cinq ans de distance, à la veille, dercchef, d'une victoire qui est très certaine et d'une paix qui l'est beaucoup moins… .

A l'heure actuelle nous entrons dans cette année 1944 qui restera mémorable comme la dernière de ce que nous avons appelé, et de ce que l'histoire universelle appellera la Guerre de Trente Ans du vingtième siècle (1914–1944).

A quarter of a century after I left my native country, I had a unique chance to rediscover Russia. As one of the officers accompanying Major General Donald H. Connolly of the Persian Gulf Command on a mission to Russia early this year, I travelled for weeks across that war-torn country. We enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity closely to inspect its three great cities, Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, which Hitler had coveted so much.

Kiev actually endured German occupation for more than two years. Moscow flung back the Nazi hordes from its very gates but, most heroic of all cities, Leningrad withstood the most terrible siege in history and is only now resuming its new life.

Some ten years after Alexei Peshkov had won fame as a writer under the name of Maxim Gorki (Maxim the Bitter), he came to New York in the spring of 1906 to raise funds for the Bolshevik movement in Russia. During the disaster that followed, I was in close contact with him and I shall set down my memories here. But before I do, it may be worth while to sketch briefly my own Russian adventures up to that time, for they throw light on the widespread interest here in the early movements to set Russia free.

In Princeton I had hungrily read in translation Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoyevski, Gogol, Gorki and other great Slav realists, and also American George Kennan's books on the early Russian revolutionists, books widely read all over our land. Then, living for two years or more on the lower East Side in New York, I became a friend and admirer of Abraham Cahan and his Yiddish socialist daily, Die Forwaerts, and through him I met many Russian Social Democrats and Social Revolutionists. When old Katharine Breshkovskaya, known and loved as “Babushka” (little grandmother), after twenty-eight years in Siberia, came to New York on a speaking campaign, Cahan gave me the first long interview.

In order to understand the poetic and prophetic significance of Endre Ady, the Hungarian poet, it is not enough to point out the pure poetic aspects of his work. No doubt, his supreme contribution is that of a poet; but he pursued political dreams, he was influenced by social events, he knew the kind of despair and possessed the kind of discriminating intelligence which should make him interesting to the non-Hungarian world as the symbol of twentieth-century Hungarian psychology. However, to take cognizance of a poet whose references are often definitely local and whose subtle implications, though moving towards the ideal of universality, are primarily explorations of the problems of his own nation affecting his own person, makes it necessary to show him in relationship to the politics, literary trends and social structure of the time that preceded his writings and activities and in relationship to his own time.

Ady's progressive spirit was misunderstood by many of his contemporaries. In the “gilded age” of Hungary, from 1867 till the first decade of the twentieth century, there was a bewildering confusion or dilettante complacency about poetic and patriotic values. The moral will of the nation, strongly attached to the interests of the “historical classes,” the aristocracy and the gentry, stepped between those poets who abhorred the jargon of transitory slogans, and those who were affected by expediency or by nationalistic sentimentalism.

Among the riddles of which the early history of Kievan Russia is full, the origin of the name of its capital city occupies a prominent place. Ever since Tatishchev's day, scholars for nearly two centuries have continued to propound all sorts of hypotheses regarding the names Kiev and Sambat, but up to the present not one has been so convincing or authoritative as to command the support of even a small group of specialists.

Most recently, in a Festschrift honoring the distinguished Ukrainian historian Hrushevski, two articles were devoted to this vexing problem, the first by G. Ilinski on the topic “The Sambatas of Constantine Porphyrogenitus” and the second by M. Tershakovetz entitled “The Legend of Kii, Shchek, Khoriv, and their Sister Lybed.” Ilinski reviews all previous suggestions in explanation of the name Sambatas as used by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the famous passage from The Administration of the Empire where the author, referring to the caravan of small cargo-boats assembled annually before the capital city on the Dnieper, writes, “They come down the river Dnieper and assemble at the strong-point Kioava, also called Sambatas.” Like the whole passage about the Russes, the latter place-name used by the Emperor derives from reliable official sources, and has given historians and philologists ample food for thought.