1917. A revolution explodes, the most violent in history. Within a few weeks a society rids itself of all its leaders: the monarch and his lawyers, the police and the priests, the landowners and civil servants, the officers and employers. There is no citizen who does not feel free—free to make his own choices and decide his own future. Before long everyone has a plan in his pocket for remaking the country. As the bards of the revolution foretold, a new era in the history of man is beginning.

Among the theories about the origin of the Russian heroic epic songs (byliny), the theory of their aristocratic origin has aroused the greatest controversy. This theory was advanced by the main representative of the so-called historical school, Vsevolod Miller, at the turn of this century. In the introduction to his Ekskursy he compared the byliny to grandiose ruins, in whose upper chambers and towers princes once lived, but in whose sheds that were still habitable some unpretentious Olonets peasants had finally settled. Miller dealt with this problem in greater detail in his Ocherki, stressing first that the byliny sang of princes and retainers and their military feats. He argued that “they were created and disseminated among the population that was, in its development and social standing, close to the princely court and retinue, belonging, according to contemporary notions, to the ‘intelligentsia.'” The byliny were, according to Miller, composed among the cream of the society, where the pulse of life throbbed more strongly, where there was affluence and leisure, and where there was a demand for songs.

The gestation period of Marxism in Bulgaria before a Marxist party came into existence in 1891 is one of the least studied periods in the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party. In Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, where most of the work on BCP historiography has been done, attention has primarily, and understandably, gone to the activities of Dimitŭr Blagoev, the so-called father of Bulgarian Marxism, whose early career as propagandist and organizer of the new movement included a notable effort while he was a student at the University of St. Petersburg to form the first Marxist group in Russia. The story of the penetration and dissemination of Marxism in Bulgaria, however, is by no means exhausted with accounts of Blagoev's life to 1891. Yet, Bulgarian Marxist historians have done little to date to reconstruct this story in monographic investigations of the kind they have produced for other phases of their party's history. Of the general accounts they have produced, the best one, relatively speaking, is in the latest Istorita na Bŭlgarskata Komunisttcheska Partiia, which devotes fifteen pages (out of 699) to Blagoev's early activities and the party's prehistory, including the founding congress of 1891.

For seventy-five years a furiously controversial legend has hung over the name and reputation of the eighteenth-century Russian poet Vasilii Vasilievich Kapnist. It began at a meeting of the Polish Historical Association on December 7, 1895, when Professor Bronislaw Dembiński, of the University of Lwów, read a report about his discovery of a document in the Preussisches Geheimes Staatsarchiv stating that a Ukrainian gentleman named Kapnist had secretly gone to Berlin in April 1791 and talked with the Prussian minister of state, Count Ewald-Friedrich Hertzberg, about the Ukrainians’ desire to get Prussian help in freeing themselves from Russia. Professor Dembinski's paper, published in 1896, was promptly brought to the attention of Ukrainian readers by the Ukrainian historian M. S. Hrushevsky, who expressed the opinion that the Kapnist who secretly visited Berlin was “undoubtedly none other than the well-known author of Chicanery [Kapnist's comedy Iabeda].“

In the famous train ride scene of Anna Karenina, Anna reads “an English novel” and imagines herself the heroine—caring for a sick man, making speeches in Parliament, and riding to hounds (1:29). That she is reading about other people distresses her, because she wants to do all these things herself. She envisions herself joining “the hero of the novel [who] was about to attain the English notion of happiness—a baronetcy and an estate.” The English novel traditionally conveys a sense of orderliness, propriety, and happiness in marriage and home, and if we judge from appearances, Anna's daydreams of English happiness find fulfillment at Vozdvizhenskoe. There is a deliberate accumulation of things English on Vronsky's estate, as if these outward trappings might assure stability and well-being. When first we see Anna on the estate she is riding a “kob” (both the horse and the word are borrowed from the English). Vronsky has a racing stable and stud farm, and keeps an English trainer and jockey in his employ; his horses are clipped short in the English fashion. The nursery furnishings are all imported from England, including the head nurse.

If, in a nation where comprehensive statistics on social problems are rarely if ever published, legislative action and press attention to such problems may be taken as an indication of the seriousness with which they are regarded, then the Soviet Union's alcohol problem is serious indeed. On April 8, 1967, the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved a decree, On Compulsory Treatment and Labor Re-education of Habitual Drunkards (Alcoholics). This decree, which went into effect on September 1 of the same year, provides for one to two-year terms in special “treatment-labor” medical institutions for excessive drinkers who violate “labor discipline, public order, and the rules of the socialist community.” The new institutions were subordinated not to the Ministry of Health but to the RSFSR Ministry for the Preservation of Public Order (MOOP, now renamed MVD). While it contained a number of significant departures from earlier legislation, the decree's most important point was its “preventive” emphasis. Previously an offending drunkard had to be on trial for a crime in a people's court before proceedings for compulsory treatment could be instituted.

The first book of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains an episode from the Allied War Council at Olmütz, on November 27, 1805, five days before the Battle of Austerlitz. With the Council over, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes Prince Boris Drubetskoy, a new aide-de-camp, to present him to Tsar Alexander. Coming out of the emperor's room as they approach is a tall man in civilian dress who has a striking face and sharply projecting jaw, which gives him a peculiar vivacity and keenness of expression. “Who was that ?” asks Drubetskoy. “He is one of the most remarkable but to me most unpleasant of men—the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski,” replies Bolkonsky.

When one thinks of Poland in the nineteenth century, the revolutions of 1830 and 1863 come immediately to mind. Yet not all Poles believed that the problem of the relations between Poland and Russia could be resolved only by revolution. There were many who preferred reconciliation. The number in the one camp as against the other at any particular time was a direct reflection of the political atmosphere in Russia. Whenever conditions gave rise to hopes for liberalization and reform among the Russians themselves, the policy of reconciliation would gain adherents among the Poles. This was the case under Alexander I, at the beginning of Alexander IPs reign, and following the revolution of 1905.

The word "intelligentsia," according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, entered the English vocabulary in 1920. Its source was undoubtedly Russian, where it first became current in the early 1860s and a decade later acquired the status of a household word. The Russian etymology of "intelligentsia" has long been a subject of controversy. The question recently acquired additional interest when a young American scholar, Mr. Alan Pollard, demonstrated that the novelist P. D. Boborykin, who liked to take credit for introducing the word into Russian, had no right to the claim. Without going into this complicated matter, I should like to call attention to evidence indicating that the German word Intelligenz was used as early as 1849 to describe the same phenomenon as "intelligentsia," namely, a group distinguished from the rest of society by its education and "progressive" attitude. The fact that this usage antedates the Russian by more than a decade suggests that die Intelligenz may have been the direct inspiration for the Russian concept.