While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

The overthrow of the civilian government by the military in Greece on April 21, 1967, produced among its multiple consequences an intense foreign interest in that nation. Since that spring, over fifty books and more numerous articles on the Greek “junta” have been written to satisfy the curiosity of an international clientele. Included in this literary melange are the works of journalists, scholars, celebrities, persecuted prisoners of the regime, and politicians. Together these authors tend to fall into the two broad categories of apologists for the post-April regime or—the larger group—its opponents. One may thus select from a plethora of impressions, opinions, and interpretations, with the knowledge that the works of professional scholars compose only a small segment of the total bibliography.

In the nineteenth century Russia and the United States emerged as nations on the periphery of the West European economic and political vortex. Their relations with each other had been, for the most part, prompted by or integrated with some larger issue involving the powers of Western Europe. Economic relations were no exception. Both nations were traditionally exporters of raw materials to industrialized, urbanized nations, which in turn were prepared and eager to exchange manufactured goods for raw materials. Russian and American products were therefore competitive rather than reciprocal, and profitable mutual exchange of goods had not developed. Both nations were debtor nations and had relied on the surplus capital of the small and large investors of Western Europe to provide the beginnings of internal transportation and industrialization.

But the impervious geode
Was entered, and its inner crust
Of crystals with a ray cathode
At every point and facet glowed
In answer to the mental thrust.
Robert Frost, “All Revelation”

A crucial year for Osip Mandel'shtam was 1930: it was in October of that year, in Tiflis, on the way back from Armenia, that poetry returned to him, after five years during which he wrote almost no verse. The Armenia poems (numbers 203-218) are among the first of the “new verse,” and, with their theme of penance for unproductivity and attempt to transform the factors of disturbance—the sense of limitation, confinement, deprivation—into sources of new energy, they testify to Mandel'shtam's current concern with the operations of his work. Moreover, at this juncture Mandel'shtam gives programmatic attention to the principles of his writing.

Tomáš Masaryk, the founder and first president (1918-1935) of interwar Czechoslovakia, devoted considerable time to founding, tracking, and attempting to take over newspapers and journals. In this article, Andrea Orzoff argues that journalism possessed central importance in interwar Czechoslovak political culture. Every party had its own press apparatus, making newsrooms into logical extensions of the usual arenas of political contention. But especially for Masaryk and his longtime collaborator Eduard Beneš, newspapers were a means of communicating directly with the electorate, thus subverting or evading the constraints of parliamentary politics. Orzoff offers various examples of Masaryk's successful and unsuccessful attempts to meddle in the affairs of the interwar press. She concludes that print culture helps scholars understand interwar Czechoslovak democracy and its closeness to Austro-Hungarian political culture. Particularly, the history of interwar journalism helps clarify the activities and opinions, long mythologized, of the Czechoslovak “freelancer president.”