The existence of compulsory military service has become a major theme in recent attempts to explain the development of Lithuanian society and politics in the early sixteenth century. Much of the discussion has centered on the relationship between military service and feudalism. This article concentrates not on that question but on the nature of military service and the understanding it can provide of the structure and dynamics of the economy of Lithuania in the sixteenth century.

Lenin was one of the first political theorists to emphasize the enormous potential impact that manipulation of modern communications channels could have on a recipient population. It may therefore not be surprising that indices of penetration by the communications networks of the world's states suggest that the Soviet pattern is unique. For example, The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators places groups of states on a developmental spectrum and finds that the Soviet Union, as well as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, are “industrial revolution” societies, one stage behind the more developed “high mass-consumption” societies, where the United States, Canada, and much of Western Europe have been placed. It is true that according to the indices of Gross National Product and urbanization the Soviet-type states do cluster in the range that includes such states as Italy, Argentina, and Venezuela. However, if we look at percentage adult literacy or percentage voting, the Soviet-type states easily rank with the highest “high mass-consumption” societies.

One of the critically important trends in the government and politics of the East European Communist states in recent years has been the quite steady and rapid development in Yugoslavia of some striking forms of pluralization and institutionalization of power, and of some concomitant fairly well enforced legal restrictions on power. The development is often called by the Yugoslavs their movement toward “constitutionalism and legality.” However, though Titoism has been much studied, this particular movement, one of the most far-reaching and fundamental of all of the Titoist innovations, has received little explicit examination in Western scholarship, even in such a colorful manifestation as the exercise by the new constitutional courts of the power of judicial review over major legislation approved by the party. This article deals with the nature and dynamics of the movement and with some implications it may have.

With some justification, the 1960s may be called the decade of dissent. This is true even with regard to the Soviet Union, where broad sectors of the population have resorted to increasingly vociferous expressions of dissatisfaction with present conditions. If, when the decade began, overt alienation from the system was a relatively unusual phenomenon, the past ten years have given rise to an increasing stream of dissent in the Soviet populace. Among the intelligentsia, almost every rank and profession has been involved in oral, written, and organizational protest. Considerable attention has been devoted to this development by Western scholarship and journalism, and rightly so, for the voices of dissent provide an immediate insight into the tensions and conflicts within the rapidly changing society. One area of dissent, however, has received rather less attention in the West. This paper will attempt to survey the religious portion of the Soviet population, in an endeavor to illustrate the degree to which religious dissatisfaction during the past decade has been consonant with the general current of dissent within Soviet society.

The Seventh World Congress of Sociologists in Varna, Bulgaria, held in September 1970, marked a major stage in the development of social science, particularly sociology, in the one-party states of Eastern Europe. Taking place in the most orthodox country of an increasingly diverse bloc, the congress was characterized by the largest and best-organized participation to date of sociologists from Eastern Europe. One country in the area—Albania—did not participate at all; and Yugoslavia, which is probably the country with the most developed social science community and institutions, had a notably small delegation. Yet the fact is that for prestige reasons, if no other, the East European countries and the Soviet Union did their best to show the state of their current development of sociology. This was shown in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most delegates presented papers.