Count Sergej Witte claims that the Holy Brotherhood (Svjashchennaja Druzhina) was his idea and he explains it in the following way. On the morrow of the assassination of Alexander II, he wrote a letter to his uncle Fadeev in which he expressed the opinion that the only way to vanquish terrorism was to appeal to counter-terrorism by means of a secret society. Witte at that time was in Kiev in charge of the Southwestern Railroad. In his answer Fadeev told his nephew that his letter was on the tsar's table and that Witte would soon be called to St. Petersburg. Indeed, a few days later Witte received the invitation to come and meet Count I. Voroncov-Dashkov, commander of the bodyguards of the Emperor in Gatchina.

Some years ago, Robert V. Daniels, in his analysis of the Communist theory of state, concluded that, according to Marxist theory, the oppressive function of the state is a secondary consideration and only explains the origin of the state, but not its continued existence; that although the state originates only in class struggle, in order to ensure its continued existence, the state creates order, modifies the class struggle, and serves the common interests of society; that when the class struggle is terminated by the proletarian revolution, the state as such does not wither away, but only its oppressive functions so wither.

A Russian journey which the writer was privileged to take in the summer of 1958 as a member of the traveling party of Governor Adlai Stevenson afforded a rather unusual wealth of opportunities to meet and talk with local Soviet officials. While it was not a "field trip" in the research sense, it did yield a miscellany of observations on local governmental institutions, practices and personalities, some of which may be of interest to students of Soviet government and politics. The term "local" government is taken here to cover all levels up to and including the union-republic governments.

The literature on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution has generally ignored the part played by the peasantry. The present article is an attempt to fill that gap, first by examining the activities of the peasantry during the revolution itself, and secondly by attempting to give an account of the forces at work during the preceding years which caused the peasants to support the urban rebellion when it broke out.

Traveling in Yugoslavia one is struck by the great contrasts and variety of its cultural and physical landscape. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in agriculture and in the rural life and economy. The importance of agriculture and the peasantry in the total economy can easily be seen since roughly 56 per cent of the population derives its sole or principal income from agricultural production, and agriculture contributes close to 30 per cent of the country's national income. Before 1945 Yugoslavia was predominantly a land of peasant subsistence farming, using primitive methods of production.

The recently published correspondence of maxim gorky and leonid andreev reveals many hitherto hidden aspects of the relationship between these two writers. In a graphic way, the letters show the rise of this significant personal and literary friendship, the strains and stresses which led to a cooling of attitudes, and finally the vain efforts, especially on the part of Andreev, to keep alive a relationship doomed to failure.