Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter (1852) is considered by most critics—even by those who condemn his subsequent politics, judging them a mixture of vacuous pronouncements and ineffectual gestures—a genuine liberal statement. Literary critics who do not go so far as to claim that the work contributed directly to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1861—a view Turgenev himself occasionally espoused—at least assert that Notes of a Hunter is as biting and affecting a criticism of serfdom as literature could level at the time. There is, I believe, a serious objection to this position. I am not referring to the argument that a cycle of twenty-two sketches mainly about a man out hunting with his dog can hardly have much to do with politics; there are so many references to social injustice that even the narrator's most seemingly mundane observations, such as his disquisitions on various hunting techniques, must be read as willful efforts to distract himself from the corruption of Russian life.

The speech of the worker Peter Alekseev, delivered on March 9, 1877, at the famous trial of “the fifty,” occupies a sensitive position in the debate concerning the contributions and participation of workers and peasants in the Russian revolutionary movement. Between 1877 and 1917, the speech was reprinted more than twenty times by both populists and Marxists, thus providing the Russian free press with one of its classic publications. Adam Ulam has recently questioned Alekseev's authorship of the printed text on two grounds. First, Ulam considers the printed speech too polished to have been written by a worker.

Ever since the Berlin blockade of 1948 the attention of historians of modern and recent international relations has been engaged by the problem of how Germany and its capital, Berlin, came to be divided, first among the major powers of the anti-Hitler Grand Alliance—Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—and then, in 1949, into two rival states, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. This problem lies at the heart of the much-debated question regarding the origins of the Cold War. This review article makes no pretense at being a comprehensive report on the literature of the German problem. My aim is, rather, to call attention to some recent contributions to the literature and place them in context.

The career of Aleksandr Gavrilovich Shliapnikov dramatically illustrates the interrelationship of politics and historical writing in Soviet Russia from the early 1920s until 1931. During that formative period, the Bolshevik Party sought uniformity in its ranks by the general suppression of dissent and a corresponding requirement that its historians regard their craft chiefly as an extension of party policy. Although Bolshevik historians increasingly felt compelled to justify the party's past and present policies, Shliapnikov resisted. He continued to advocate many of the opinions he had held in the early 1920s as a leader of the Workers' Opposition. Although he was condemned for his behavior, he began an equally controversial career as a historian of the 1917 Revolution.

Professor Ruslan Skrynnikov has now provided readers of Slavic Review with a brief summary of his views concerning the relationship of the first letter to Ivan IV, attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii, and the writings of the Ukrainian monk Isaiah. Since his article seems to have been long in press, it does not mention Skrynnikov’s own rather more extensive (although in places identical verbatim) article in a recent number of Russkaia literatura, nor does it take account of certain other recent contributions to the discussion of the Kurbskii-Groznyi apocrypha. Moreover, Professor Skrynnikov makes several statements that might lead those unfamiliar with the matter to premature and, in my view, erroneous conclusions.

Russia's balance of trade (torgovyi balans) and balance of payments (raschetnyi balans) were matters of great concern to the tsarist government before and after the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. Tsarist officials feared that the gold reserves required to maintain (or to go on) the gold standard would be lost if payments abroad exceeded receipts. Moreover, there was concern over the potential loss of political and economic independence if the government had to borrow abroad regularly in order to cover international payments deficits. Russia's foreign policy toward France and Germany was affected significantly by this consideration. Thus, considerable importance rested on the reported estimates of these two balances.

Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russian intelligenty possessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.

The fifth edition of V. I. Lenin’s Sochineniia is an imposing piece of work. Its fifty-five volumes, first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism between 1958 and 1965, are attractively bound, nicely printed, and reasonably priced. Perhaps for these reasons, they have sold over six hundred thousand copies in Russian alone and are now in their fourth large printing. In comparison with the preceding four editions, the fifth is far more substantial in content: the first edition of twenty-six volumes (1920–26) contained some 1500 writings by Lenin; the second and third editions of thirty volumes each (1925–32) had 2700 works; the fourth or Stalin edition of thirty-five volumes (1941, 1946–50) included 2927 items; and the fifth comprises almost 9000.

The ways in which members of a community think, act, or believe are always changing. Sometimes the pace of change is imperceptibly slow; at other times it is so rapid that it can distinguish an era from its recent past. The rural communities of Bulgaria have experienced rapid change over the last three decades. It began on September 9, 1944, when the Bulgarian monarchy was overthrown and the Bulgarian Communist Party emerged to lead Bulgaria on a path of socialist development. The seizure of power was a revolutionary act but, more important, from a sociological point of view, it was an act that made revolutionary change possible. My purpose is to illustrate several ways in which Bulgarian rural communities have participated in the revolutionary transformation of community and family life in the 1970s.

One of the most perplexing questions in The Brothers Karamazov is the manner in which Father Zosima serves as Dostoevsky's spokesman on matters of spiritual faith. Zosima's teachings emphasize humility, a mystical union of man and the world, and undifferentiated love; the key to faith for him is the individual's own emotion, the wisdom of the heart. In keeping with the deeply personal quality of Zosima's message, he teaches in the form of short homilies and stories from his own past. These often lack logical connectives, relying instead on repetition of certain images of nature and mystical community. Malcolm Jones has aptly remarked that Dostoevsky withholds specific guidelines from his seekers of faith, giving only the personal experience of individual characters, which is bound up with the symbolism of their own interpretations.