I was tremendously pleased when I read Steve Smith's thoughtful and erudite comments. Smith's piece is a work of substantial scholarship in its own right, and it nicely complements the discussion articles. I am quite in agreement with most of what Smith has to say, but I do want to respond briefly to the two significant criticisms that Smith makes. The first is that the articles do not sufficiently “attend to the issue of continuity between national identity and earlier forms of politicized ethnicity,” since Seregny and I “implicitly subscribe to the modernist paradigm of nation building.” The second is that the “interplay between nation and empire” and the “relationship between national and class identities” were more conflictual than we allowed.

If one examines the role of women in rural areas in different countries of the world, varying styles or patterns of development can be observed. A particular style found in socialist countries has been described as the “feminization of agriculture.” This pattern, prevalent in East European countries and especially in the Soviet Union, is largely a function of rapid industrialization and the demographic changes necessary to support development. In the Soviet case, for example, the absolute size of the rural population has been declining mainly because of rural-urban migration. Furthermore, this migration has been dominated by youth, a trend which, in combination with losses of males from the war years, has resulted in a rural population whose average age and proportion of women is rising.

Based on a wide range of sources, this article explores the aims, methods, and evolution of Romanian occupation policy in southwestern Ukraine and the local non-Jewish population’s reactions to it. It shows that the policy was more oppressive than is usually assumed and that it resulted in a substantial deterioration of relations between occupiers and occupied, especially in the countryside.

Whatever comfort Catherine II derived from her husband's murder in 1762 was hardly enduring. Peter III's apparition was to rise again and again to plague his ambitious wife. Kremnev, Bogomolov, Khanin, and–above all–dread Pugačëv, were all possessed by the vengeful demon of Peter III. Catherine was forced to exorcise her spouse's ghost even outside of the realm which she had usurped–in little Montenegro! At first a source of vexation to the Russian Empress, this false Peter III became curiously involved in Russian plans in the Balkans during Catherine's first war with the Turks.

Professor Halecki's article, “Imperialism in Slavic and East European History,” published in a recent issue of this journal was written as the first contribution to a projected scholarly discussion, among students in the field, of the relationship between Soviet expansion and the Russian past. It is my purpose to follow the distinguished historian of Poland in considering certain aspects of this significant question. In particular, I should like to do two things: sketch very briefly some important developments in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe and then comment not only on the possible implications of those developments but also on the larger issue of the background and motivation of the Soviet foreign policy of today. The first part of my article will be a companion piece to Professor Halecki's analytical outline of the history of the same area; the second will refer to some basic problems involved in our attempts to understand tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or, for that matter, any other society or nation. Throughout I should like to emphasize, to use Professor Halecki's felicitous expression, the need to adhere as strictly as possible to “the methods of historical science.”

Few major decisions of Soviet history can be ranked in importance with the decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress of December, 1927, to collectivize agriculture. Not only did it have tremendous consequences for the Soviet peasantry (and ultimately the peasantry of other Communist states), forcing them to leave individual for collective farming in a struggle that cost millions of lives, but it also created a form of agricultural organization which has become an unchallengeable element of Communist organizational orthodoxy. Only Yugoslavia amongst Communist states has dared to reject this orthodoxy, though there is abundant evidence that most of the peasants of Communist countries would reject it if they could.

In view of the immense importance of the decision to collectivize, it is indeed surprising that so little critical examination of its background has been undertaken by non-Soviet scholars, and that the Stalinist rationalization of the decision, doubtful though its validity is, is widely employed in Western scholarly studies.

At a very early stage of the Bolshevik experiment with economic planning it became obvious that the economy could not be made to function without the use of money and other financial instruments. In fact, a financial history of the Soviet economy would show a gradual but relentless expansion in the number and functions of financial instruments. This expansion has been gradual largely because Soviet economists, planners, and administrators have had both ideological (theoretical) and practical reservations about the appropriate uses as well as the potential abuses to which financial instruments can be put. The process has been relentless nonetheless, because for a number of essential economic functions the possible substitutes or alternatives to financial instruments are either impractical or nonexistent. Let me attempt to explain briefly the fundamental reasons for the ambivalence in Soviet financial policy.

Anyone familiar with Soviet history can identify A. I. Rykov: Lenin’s successor as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, a major leader of Right Communism, a victim of Stalin’s purges. But this tells us very little. Because of Rykov’s predilection for practical as opposed to ideological-literary work, his relative colorlessness in comparison with the other Bolshevik luminaries, and a lack of material, he has not been attractive to scholars. Yet Rykov looms large within the Bolshevik movement; he was prominent long before the revolution as well as after 1917. Furthermore, the seeds of Rykov’s positions of the 1920s—which clearly had an impact on the policies and politics of those years—were definitely sown before 1917.

All performance involves some kind of communication between performer and spectator. After the socialist realist model was established in the mid-1980s, Soviet professional theaters typically relied on conventional input from patrons: attendance, emotional reactions during performances, and applause. Known for its exceptional interaction with audiences, the Taganka Theater decorated its lobby to correspond to a production and even asked spectators to cast ballots indicating whether they enjoyed the performance of Ten Days that Shook the World. But for professionals, such efforts to bridge the gulf between the stage and the house were unusual.