In the years since the end of the Second World War American interest in Russia has steadily grown, and Russian studies in the United States have expanded at a rapid rate. In 1956, as the first decade of postwar development in this field drew to a close, a number of those concerned with Russian studies became convinced that a review of the record and a new look at the goals to be sought in the study of Russia would be beneficial. A general assessment of Russian studies in the United States was therefore made by the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, a body of scholars engaged in research and teaching relating to Russia and Eastern Europe appointed jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

Sometime in the late 1880's or early 1890's the following conversation took place between Emperor Alexander III and Countess Aleksandra Andreevna Tolstaja, the correspondent, confidante, and cousin of her illustrious namesake, Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj:

The Emperor. Tell me who you think are the most remarkable and popular persons in Russia. I know how honest you are and I am sure you will tell me the truth. Of course you mustn't think of including me in the list.

Countess Tolstaja (smiling). I won't include you.

The Emperor. But just whom will you include? That's what interests me.

Countess Tolstaja. First of all, Lev Tolstoj.

The Emperor. I expected that. Who else?

Countess Tolstaja (thinking). I'll name you one more person.

The Emperor (impatiently). But who is it? Who is it?

Countess Tolstaja. Father Ioann of Kronstadt.

The Emperor (laughs). I had forgotten about him. But I agree with you.

From about 1930 to 1950 linguistic work in the Soviet Union was dominated by the officially recognized theories and practices of the so-called Marr "school." For the most part, any but minor deviations from the theoretical foundations established by Nikolaj Ja. Marr (1865-1934) were severely suppressed. In 1950, however, Stalin officially repudiated Marr's theories and disbanded the group of linguists who had followed in his footsteps.

Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals felt themselves cut off from the uneducated masses and thought the gap could be bridged by some form of harmo niouscivilization. In Russia, a new liberalism spread after 1811-15, when young Russian officers returned from Germany and France, and culminated in the December, 1825, uprising. Less political, but much more numerous and influential, were the young philosophers who discovered the old Greek authors, Voltaire, and Hegel.

In the summer of 1812, through the efforts of Bettine Brentano, a meeting took place in Teplitz between Beethoven and Goethe. Beethoven describes it in a letter to Bettine:

Liebe gute Bettine! Könige und Füirsten können wohl Professoren machen und Geheimeräthe &. und Titel und Ordensbänder umhängen, aber groβe Menschen können sie nicht machen, Geister, die über das Weltgeschmeib hervorragen, das müssen sie wohl bleiben lassen zu machen, und damit muβ man sie in Respect halten; wenn so zwei zusammen kommen, wie ich und der Goethe, da müssen auch grobe Herren merken, was bei unser Einem als groβ gelten kann.

Many basic features of Marxist ideology have an idealistic and equalitarian content. The Soviet Union, while certainly influenced by Marxist ideology, has steered a fairly pragmatic course in its economic policies. True, when faced with alternative methods of achieving an objective, the planners are more likely to choose, all other things being equal, that method which conforms more closely to accepted ideology. Should the alternatives differ substantially in potential effectiveness in achieving the given ends, however, the more effective is likely to be chosen even if it happens to be less acceptable in terms of ideology.

The kolkhozy are rural associations based on the principles of coöperative management, public ownership of the principal means of production, collective labor, annual planning of production, and remuneration for labor based upon the socialist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” They are now in the second phase of their development. During the first phase, which ended approximately in 1939-40, the Soviet authorities were concerned primarily with grouping individual peasants into coöperative enterprises. Eighteen and a half million peasant families were united into 242,000 agricultural coöperatives (artels) comprising a total of 488,000,000 hectares (1,205,000,000 acres) of land.

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.

Although comprehensive economic data on the Russian economy during the period of the Crimean War are not available, there are some surprisingly complete series of data on prices in both internal and foreign trade. The implications that can be drawn from a study of changes in the price level cover a wide area, especially when they are studied in the light of earlier work on the monetary and fiscal problems of the period.

Eastern Orthodoxy, unlike Roman Catholicism, is organized on the principle of autocephalous national churches—each constituting an independent administrative entity. This fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Christianity causes the thinking Orthodox Christian to be confronted with a dilemma. He wants the Church to be close to the communicant and the clergy to teach him and pray in his own language, and yet if he desires that the whole Church be able to perpetuate itself and propagate the faith, he must grant to it a sufficiently centralized organization and at the same time combat all fissiparous tendencies. Thus, on the surface at least, there appears to be a conflict between Christ's injunction that there be “one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16) and the actual establishment of national churches which can easily render unto Caesar what may be correctly regarded as “things that are God's“ ( Matthew 22:21).

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.

Under the secret agreement on the Balkans which Churchill and Stalin concluded in the Kremlin on October 9, 1944, the British share of responsibility in Greek affairs was defined as 90 per cent. The United States took part neither in this particular deal nor in the talks as a whole. Harriman attended them only as an observer. President Roosevelt, however, made clear to both the Prime Minister and the Generalissimo that the United States would not be bound by any decisions taken by the two, that he reserved his rights in any of the matters that might be discussed, and that America, not only militarily but also politically, had interests that were world-wide.

During the three-power diplomatic exchanges that preceded the conclusion of this arrangement, both the British and the Soviet governments became fully aware that the United States government acquiesced in it on the understanding that the agreement defined merely respective spheres of military operations in the Balkans and therefore would be of strictly wartime duration.

The question before us is to what stage of social and economic development—or, to borrow a term from geology, to what socio-political formation—Kievan Russia belongs.

Chronologically, as we know, the Kievan period included the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Those three centuries witnessed the rise and blossoming of feudal institutions in western and central Europe; they represent what may be called the feudal age par excellence. It seems only natural that one should be inclined to place Kievan Russia in the same category and characterize its sociopolitical regime as feudal. Yet until recently Russian historians have been reluctant to do so. They did not raise any definite objections to the study of feudalism in Russia: they simply ignored the problem.

It is quite natural that the study of history in Latvia could not be established on a firm scientific basis before Latvia achieved its independence. As soon as the Latvian State University was founded in 1919, historical and archaeological departments were established in it. Young scientists were trained by their elder colleagues in all auxiliary sciences, such as paleography, diplomatics, sphragistics, numismatics, etc. A Committee for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments was created, which established in the vicinity of Riga an open-air museum, where certain ethnographically rare farm buildings, old wooden chapels, and other architectural antiques were placed. Other archaeological items not transferable to the open-air museum were taken over by the Committee and proclaimed of national importance, such as old Latvian burial pits and tombs, ritual oak trees, certain old Latvian castle mounds, ruins of castles of Latvian rulers of the early medieval era (such as: Tervete, Bauska, Koknese, Gercike), and numerous ruins of castles of the Prince-archbishop and the Livonian Order of the Terra Mariana (1207-1562).

This paper focuses on some salient features of the Hungarian “long sixties” through the rear-view mirror of a highly-acclaimed popular musical album by Tamas Cseh and Geza Beremenyi entitled “A Letter to My Sister” (1977). The article argues that the “Letter” owes its enduring success to its unique chronological and narrative arch: the years of childhood set in the sombrest Stalinist 1950s, while the opening up of the country's political and cultural landscape in the 1960s shaped the freedom and hope intrinsic to modern teenage life. Finally, in the portrayal of the crisis-ridden young adulthood set in the 1970s, it is impossible to set apart the failure of the “great generation” from that of Hungarian society and, more broadly, east European socialism. Implied in this narrative arch is that this local version of the “long sixties” carried the unprocessed legacy of the “short fifties.”