The eighteenth century marked a crucial new period in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Muscovy the church had been an institution of paramount importance: it possessed enormous wealth, exercised considerable influence on the theocratic politics of Muscovy, and held a virtual monopoly over culture and art. During the eighteenth century, however, this awesome power and wealth all but vanished. The secularized state wrought fundamental changes in the church: it replaced the patriarch with a more tractable Synod, gradually exploited and finally sequestered the church's lands and peasants, and in general transformed the church into an “integral part of the Russian state structure and administration.” The church's ascendancy was correspondingly weakened in both society and culture. The ecclesiastical leadership made little headway against the abiding problems of superstition and paganism, and it failed to stem the spread of the Old Belief and of secular culture throughout the population.

For over a century scholars have been intrigued by one of history's most famous apocryphal works, the “Political Testament of Peter the Great.“The central theme—a warning of the danger Russia represents to all her neighbors —has always been a relevant topic for discussion. However, a satisfactory explanation of the document's genesis is yet to be given. One thing is clear: the “testament” is a forgery, an attempt to “frame” Peter I. But who is the culprit? The question has aroused the instincts of the detective in many historians and set them on the miscreant's trail.

Suspects were not lacking. Initially, circumstantial evidence pointed to Napoleon as the author or inspirer of the fabrication, since it was in 1812 in France that the first published version of this document appeared. Soon, however, suspicion fell on C. L. Lesur, one of the emperor's propagandists and the author of the work which contained the published text.

The nineteenth-century Russian writer Melnikov-Pechersky is not well known in the West. Yet this contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is a major literary figure who produced a series of fascinating sketches, stories, and tales about Russian provincial life as well as two epic-length novels concerned with Old Believers, In the Forests (V lesakh) and On the Hills (Na gorakh). How does one account for the relative obscurity of so important a writer outside his native land? First of all, very few translations of his works (no English ones whatsoever) have appeared in the West. Thus little biographical and critical material on Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who signed all his mature fiction “Andrei Pechersky,” is available in languages other than Russian. Second, in the USSR, as in prerevolutionary Russia, both general and scholarly assessments of Melnikov are frequently clouded by extraliterary considerations. In other words, the reception traditionally accorded him has been ambiguous, or at best lukewarm.

Modernist prose forms often present the reader with the paradox of cerebral, structurally complex works which express an irrational or antirational content. These works seek an almost geometric perfection of form while simultaneously rejecting intellect as a totally inadequate means of conceiving contemporary experience. Strikingly often it is a witch of a rather special breed who provides the essential thematic and narrative elements without which the intellectual pattern of the novel could not crystallize out. That voyantes and sorceresses should people the prose of Western surrealists such as Andre Breton is not too surprising, but it is surely a nice problem that two of the most self-consciously modernist Soviet novels, Fedin's Cities and Years and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, should depend for both their compositional and moral energies on witches.

The Russian puppet theater (kukol'nyi teatr or Petrushka) is not well known in the West. There are passing references to it in general histories of puppetry and the like, but unfortunately these are more often confusing than enlightening. One learns, for example, that the Old Russian version of the Polish marionette theater, the szopka, was the “bertep [sic] meaning Bethlehem,“ or that the first known description of a Russian puppet show appears in “Adam O'Leary's [sic] Travels in Russia and Persia.” Perhaps even more unfortunate, Petrushka has been neglected by native scholars as well. Their failure to deal seriously with the origins of the Russian puppet theater has been particularly glaring, and they have also largely ignored its early history. Most have, in fact, been content to view the entire period before the 1630s, when Adam Olearius appeared with his famous illustrated description of a performing Russian puppeteer, as terra incognita.

Czechoslovakia has undergone revolutionary changes in its political and institutional structure several times in the twentieth century. In 1918 the leaders of the Czechs and Slovaks decided to sever their political umbilical cords to Vienna and Budapest, giving birth to the Czechoslovak Republic, a democratic state that differed considerably from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from which it had emerged. In 1938 this democracy gave way to a semiauthoritarian regime, the so-called Second Republic. The Second Republic existed for a few months at Hitler's sufferance, only to be divided into two parts, both controlled by the Third Reich from 1939 to 1945. In 1948, after a three-year attempt to harmonize Communist and non-Communist parties in a left-leaning National Front government, Czechoslovakia became for twenty years an autocratic Communist state. During these two decades the methods of rule varied from totalitarian (1948-53) to what might be called moderately authoritarian (1963-67).

A previously untapped source of evidence about the Beseda circle, a seminal institution in the development of the Russian opposition movement on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, has come to the author's attention since the appearance of his article on Beseda in the Slavic Review (“The Beseda Circle, 1899-1905,“ September 1973, pp. 461-90). This is the unpublished personal notes of Prince D. I. Shakhovskoy, a member of the circle throughout its existence. Although Shakhovskoy's transcriptions of the circle's discussions are much less systematic and detailed than those preserved in the circle's papers in the Maklakov archive which served as the basis for the Slavic Review article, his notes are of considerable value because they are devoted precisely to those early years of the circle's existence (1899-1903) which are poorly represented in the Maklakov papers. (The transcripts of only two meetings prior to 1904 are preserved there.)

The Soviet statistical authorities first published an input-output table (for 1959) in their statistical yearbook of 1960; they had recommenced issuing their general abstracts in 1956—a direct consequence of, and only a few weeks after, the Twentieth Party Congress—following a lapse of nearly two decades. The input-output table as published was incomplete, and the coverage of the annual abstracts has only modestly increased since it reached its present size in 1958. The lacunae have presented a challenge to Western economists in three respects. The first difficulty is in reconstructing a series only part of which has been officially published. The best example of this lies in the reconstruction of input-output tables described below. The second challenge is to estimate aggregates (including the filling in of time series) which the statistical authorities of the USSR choose either not to make public or to publish in nontabular form.

Explanations of the success of Soviet rapid industrialization during the 1930s, whether put forward by Western or Soviet scholars, have generally presupposed the “extraction” of a substantial net contribution from the agricultural sector. According to this view the rapid pace of industrialization, especially during the early years of the campaign, demanded an agricultural contribution well in excess of what might have been obtained by relying on the voluntary acquiescence of the peasantry. Forced mass collectivization, by replacing private (peasant) discretion over the amount, composition, and marketed share of agricultural output with centralized administrative coercion, has been supposed to have ensured the necessary increased flow of agricultural products to industry and urban centers and to have severed the potentially constraining link between the pace of industrialization and peasant willingness to expand output and particularly, marketings in the face of increasingly adverse terms of exchange.