A chance archival discovery prompted the question which forms the title of this article. Unfortunately, my attempts to answer the question soon revealed that the attribution to Feofan Prokopovich of the celebrated treatise, Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei (The Right of the Monarch’s Will in Designating the Heir to His Realm), rests on sand. In fact, it gradually transpired that nearly every other major work traditionally and for the most part unquestioningly ascribed to Prokopovich is similarly open to doubt. The ramifications of these findings branch throughout the field of early modern Slavic studies, since the Prokopovich of scholarly tradition is one of the most important literary and historical figures of his time (16817-1736) in both Russia and the Ukraine.

In a recent article in Voprosy istorii KPSS entitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.

The legitimacy of ruling Communist parties rests, in large part, on their alleged identity with the working masses. Ties to the citizenry are crucial for these parties if they are to retain Marxist credentials and, thereby, their rationale for taking power and maintaining an authoritarian system. All political systems, authoritarian ones included, seek willing obedience from citizens if for no other reason than efficiency. But as a subset of authoritarian polities, Communist states have an additional burden. No ultimate truth, national interest, or religious purity sanctioned their road to power, although national interests are increasingly used by many Communist parties to attain greater credibility with citizens. Instead, Communists' identity with the interests of working people constitutes the primary rationale for their hold on government.

Isaak Babel'’s masterpiece of revolution and civil war, though a collection of short stories, is also a book shaped into an artistic whole by patterns of style and a central action or plot. Renato Poggioli detected two major stylistic strains in the work —the “epic-heroic” and the “pathetic“—an insight that criticism has yet to pursue. Though much of Red Cavalry is devoted to genre sketches and anecdotes (many told in the speech of its characters, or skaz), the epic and pathetic modes function as polarities about which the diverse tales are organized. Each has its own language and clusters of imagery, and their interplay lends the work its distinctive shape and meanings.

The final subchapter of the prose text of Doctor Zhivago takes the narrative, at least by implication, beyond the Stalin era. In these last four brief paragraphs of the epilogue,1 lurii Zhivago’s surviving childhood friends, Misha Gordon and Nika Dudorov, now at the twilight of their lives, are reflecting on Zhivago’s literary legacy and on what lies ahead for Russia in the 1950s. In the first paragraph they are shown sitting at a window overlooking Moscow as a summer dusk slowly settles. They are reading from an album of Zhivago’s writings that his half brother Evgraf had compiled some years previously.

The 1959 and 1970 published Soviet censuses list several hundred categories of occupations. Yet far more types of employment exist than are indicated by this number of categories. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles published by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example, is composed of approximately 20,000 jobs. The sparsity of categories in any census is a product of the lengthy process in which (1) specific questions regarding employment are designed; (2) respondents interpret the questions and either answer or fail to answer them; (3) answers are coded into specific occupational categories; and (4) these categories are selected and sometimes grouped together for the purpose of the actual census publications. The selection and grouping of categories are of primary concern since here, as at earlier stages, the potential exists for deliberate or inadvertent distortions and for the compromise of the detail and precision of the census.

Over a decade ago I published an article in this journal which discussed the factors underlying the freedom of action which tsarist diplomacy displayed in the years prior to World War I. The article resulted from a conviction that it was necessary to account for Russian freedom of action in the face of the traditional interpretation that foreign debts had greatly restricted Russian diplomatic independence.

In my note, I maintained that Russia ran a current deficit during the industrialization era and that Russian trade statistics were not biased in the directions suggested by Sontag. 1 refrained from making comments on the foreign policy implications of the current account deficit, as I did not feel qualified to do so.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been charged with the responsibility of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information on the economy of the USSR. This review analyzes the quality of the CIA’s research, compares it with academic Sovietology, and raises certain questions regarding the internal mechanisms of the agency. For obvious reasons, the inquiry is confined to the unclassified materials produced by the agency. Moreover, I will be reviewing only a selected proportion of the published materials. The sheer volume is overwhelming: a request for publications produced a box weighing forty pounds. While my general comments refer to older materials, I will be concentrating on the most recent publications. The number of publications and variety of subject matter prohibit a traditional review article. Consequently, I intend an overall and much more general evaluation of research by the CIA.