The article reconstructs the ambivalence of the relationship of Czech society to the Habsburg monarchy and its legacy. While this period can be retrospectively contrasted with the twentieth century as a time of relative stability, it is also recognized in Czech collective memory as a time of national subalternity and inequality. Sometimes the imperial legacy is also blamed for the absence of civic virtues in Czech political culture. The study traces the roots of these Czech approaches in the thought of Czech historian and national leader František Palacký (who proposed federalist reform of the empire) and the ideas of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk (who declared “de-Austrianization” to be a doctrine of the new state as well as a basis for new civic virtues). The essay also touches on popular culture images in Hašek΄s Schweik and the phenomenon of Jára da Cimrman, which contribute to an ambivalent and infantilizing image of the times of empire.

The collection of Zemstvo Publications (Kollektsiia zemskikh izdanii) in Leningrad is undoubtedly the most important source of materials for the study of the zemstvo institutions which existed in Russia from 1864 to 1917. Because the work of these institutions touched every phase of Russian society, the collection is valuable for countless other topics as well. Containing approximately 100,000 volumes, it was formed in the 1950s from the library of the former Free Economic Society. It is little publicized and has not been utilized, even by Soviet scholars, to the degree it deserves. As of June 1966 the collection had been used, according to the staff, by only two American scholars, although access to it is granted to almost any scholar who has a card for the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, of which it is a branch.

The collection is one of the fonds which make up the Fondy Vol'nogo Ekonomicheskogo Obshchestva (Fonds of the Free Economic Society), which are housed in a room of the Fontanka Embankment Library at 36 Fontanka Embankment, Leningrad, approximately three blocks from the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library. In the same building are the main library's newspaper collection and newspaper reading room and various other reading rooms for graduate and undergraduate students.

In the continuing debate among Western students of Soviet affairs about the direction in which the Soviet political system is moving, all participants agree that accurate analysis is imperative. How one interprets the evidence of change determines one's view of current Soviet reality and one's perception of the opportunities and threats involved in U.S.-Soviet relations. This crucial issue is addressed in the following pages by examining the current situation of an important, evolving institution, the USSR People's Control Committee (Komitet narodnogo kontrolia, or KNK). To a remarkable degree this organization, in its twelfth year of existence, demonstrates the continuing process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet polity.

Today in several of the countries of Europe where the capitalist economic system still prevails and where Communist parties are not in control of the government, one of the principal means by which the Communists exert their influence is through trade unions. News analysts predict that when and if the Communists in France and Italy attempt to seize power, they will first paralyze these countries through general strikes conducted by the trade unions. In Czechoslovakia the rise to power of-the Communist Party was greatly facilitated by Communist control of the trade-union movement.

On the other hand, in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Germany, the non-Communist trade union movement has acted as one of the most important bulwarks against the growth of Communist parties.

The Origins of the Russian ballet reach back two hundred years to the reign of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, Peter the Great's niece (1730–1740). Anna was devoted to ostentatious amusements (balls, fireworks, tableaux), and in the summer of 1734 ordered the appointment of Jean-Baptiste Landé as dancing-master in the Military Academy which she had founded at St. Petersburg in 1731 to prepare sons of the nobility for positions in the army and the civil service. Beside teaching at the Academy, Landé also organized a private class which is the original ancestor of all further development of the ballet in Russia. Here he taught not only social dancing, but the principles of dramatic stage dancing, drawing his pupils both from the most gifted students in the Academy and from the children of wealthy urban families.

Note: This article summarizes the result of a part of the author's research in the economic history of the Serbian lands and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The work was begun in Yugoslavia in 1938 and then continued, with interruptions, in England and the United States. It is the special aim of the author to investigate documents and reconstruct the commercial history of Ragusa during the period of the Commercial Revolution, principally the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in connection with the discoveries and the colonization of America. It is almost unknown that Ragusa was one of the principal commercial and naval powers in the period 1510–1667 and that it played an important role in the history of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the West Indies in general. The same goes for England, the Netherlands, Spain, and other regions. The author will center his work around three regions in which the role of Ragusan commerce and navigation was of extreme importance: (a) Spain and America, (b) England and the Netherlands, and (c) the Levant and the East Indies.

Over recent years, there has been a growing academic interest in the history of psychological disciplines and mental health in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. This article explores psychological sciences and social planning in post-Stalinist Hungary after 1956. The focus is on the psychology of work as a socially- and historically-situated discourse. The article demonstrates how psychologists started to promote their expertise to reform the practices of management and to “humanize” the conditions of work. They suggested practical remedies for everyday problems of worker motivation and social adjustment and introduced concepts from social psychology to improve the state of interpersonal relations at the workplace. The study argues that the workplace was a particular context in which a post-Stalinist reassessment of the government's ideology was acted out. To elaborate this more fully, both published texts and archival materials are analyzed in the framework of the governmentality thesis, as developed by Nikolas Rose. In this context, the concept of the “human factor” crystallized different but reconcilable interests between psychology experts and party politicians.

When a young peasant in early nineteenth-century Russia was conscripted into the army from the taxpaying population, he underwent a fundamental change in juridical status: born into serfdom, he became a “free” man (vol'nyi chelovek) with a civic identity. He also entered a world of bureaucratic regulation that governed his daily routine and formalized his social relationships. While the master had unlimited control over his peasants, who were in fact his personal property, governmental regulation to some extent mediated relations between military commanders and their subordinates. In military society the state sought to legislate those paternalistic values that customarily defined relations between landlord and serf, relations conceived in the image of a father supervising his child. Theoretically this relationship combined paternal concern for the welfare of the soldiers with strict discipline and punishment. Like the biblical God, commanders were supposed to be both merciful and “terrible.”