The war of conquest presents the conqueror with two major problems: first, the isolation of the adversary by diplomacy and his liquidation by force; second, the justification of such aggression to his own supporters and to the outside world. Two tasks of the historian follow: the first is to fit into an understandable pattern what happened before, during, and after the conquest; the second is to tell us how the conquerors explained why the conquest should have happened, why it had to happen as it did, and—whenever there is evidence—how the conquered viewed the same sequence of events.

“Patterns” is a term infrequently used in our historical writing; many historians associate it with certain more modern sciences. I have chosen it here in order to stress the need for a somewhat more highly elaborated methodology in the study of the matters discussed below. We are so far from adequate understanding of many of these subjects that we cannot be squeamish about borrowing any applicable method from the faster-moving sciences—whether these devices are to be called “matrices,” “models,” or “patterns” will be a matter of taste. I have, for present purposes, chosen the last, for what I should like to do is to suggest a comparative approach to the history of Muscovite-Tatar relations based upon systems, or patterns, of phenomena so arranged that the logic of the arrangment provides information concerning phenomena about which there is no direct evidence.

The final conquest of the Kazan khanate by Muscovite armies occurred in 1552. The periods immediately preceding and following this event—that is, the years between 1547 and the late 1560s—were of paramount importance to the history of Muscovite political thought, for they witnessed the appearance of a considerable number of significant historical and ideological works. Most of these works were written in one of the two centers, that is, either at the tsar’s court or the metropolitan’s chancery. The former produced official court chronicles, while the latter—particularly under the direction of Metropolitan Macarius—compiled interpretative works of a historical and religious character.

The seventeenth-century chronicles record an interesting event under the year 1574:

At that time Tsar Ivan Vasil'evich enthroned Simeon Bekbulatovich as tsar in Moscow and crowned him with the crown of the tsars, and called himself [simply] Ivan of Moscow; he left the city and lived in Petrovka. All the offices of tsardom he passed to Simeon, and himself rode simply, like a boyar with shafts, and whenever he comes to Tsar Simeon, he sits at a distance from the Tsar’s place, together with the boyars.

That such an event did in fact take place, we have the testimony of contemporary witnesses, the English envoy Danyell Silvester and the imperial envoy Daniel Printz a Bucchau, as well as official documents which have been preserved from the time of Simeon’s reign as tsar.

The obscurity of poems is differently motivated. The later poems of Wallace Stevens are obscure in part because what he wished to say, the one thing that he was trying more and more monomaniacally to say, namely, that there is an imagined life greater and more real than the ordinary life of the senses, became increasingly complex and intractable and hence more difficult to say. The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had to say involved, if said plainly, the danger of death.

All her life Zinaida Gippius remembered how startled she was when as a young girl she was told that the Russian word predmet was devised and introduced into the language by Karamzin at the very end of the eighteenth century. The discovery left her wondering how the Russians who lived before that time could discuss all sorts of basic things without a word denoting “object” in the language. We may well be startled in a similar way when we stop to realize that the handy adjective “surrealistic” was coined only in the late 1920s. Furthermore, the word did not initially mean what it came to mean later. When Vladimir Maiakovskii encountered the French Surrealists during his trip to Paris in 1927, he was not sure just what their movement was about but from their behavior concluded that they must be the French equivalent of his own LEF group.

Despite the fact that the relationship between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church had an important influence on the course of events in the eastern provinces of the German Empire, no monographic study has been devoted to the subject. Works dealing with church history, the nationality question, or the Kulturkampf have given a certain amount of attention to the problem, but without elaboration of the issues involved and as a rule with limited reliance on primary source material. This article may well be the first attempt to grapple with the problem during the period 1871 to 1914. In addition to the standard published works on the subject, numerous archival sources have been consulted, especially those of the Prussian state and the German Empire.

Historians have little reason to believe that the so-called intelligentsia corresponded to any real group of men in Russian society. It is true that the term has been used very frequently in the past one hundred years, but it has been denned in so many ways and been the subject of such bitter partisan debate that it has lost any objective meaning. Historians in the West can hardly communicate on the subject any longer, for no two of them seem to give the term quite the same meaning. The confusion extends even to terminology. The Russian word intelligentsiia has passed directly into the English language as a collective noun. But what then is the term for the individual—intelligent or intellectual? Some historians carefully use the Russian noun; others accept the English noun as the approximate equivalent.

One of the most interesting political anachronisms of this century was the Polish demand for colonies. The movement developed rapidly in size and intensity in the early 1930s and reached its climax in 1938-39. Ironically, the Poles clamored for colonies at a time when plans were being prepared to turn Poland herself into one of the first colonies of the Third Reich. In pursuing this course of action the Poles fell victim to the spirit of voluntarism, confusing the will to power with the precondition for greatpower status.

The origin of the Polish colonial movement may be dated October 1, 1918, when an organization called Polska Bandera (Polish Flag) was founded by a group of twenty-five men for the purpose of popularizing the importance of the sea to Poland’s national interest and encouraging Polish youth to participate in inland and maritime navigation.

The symposium on “Comparative Politics and Communist Systems” (Slavic Review, March 1967) represents, I believe, a general consensus among social scientists in Slavic studies that the study of Communist countries should be integrated into developments in the social sciences in general. The question is how this should be accomplished. The symposium participants argued for immediate and direct integration through various models such as the developmental or bureaucratic model. Another group, represented by the Communist Studies Conference of the American Political Science Association and the recent Carnegie grant for comparative communism, proposes that comparative communism be considered a major subcategory of comparative analysis. At least in the initial stage, it is reasoned, the various Communist systems should be compared with one another. I would suggest, however, that before either scheme is accepted the net be cast wider for a broader, more flexible organizing device.

In his article “Between Author and Reviewer,” published in the June 1967 issue of Slavic Review, Mr. Konstanty Zantuan takes me to task for my review of Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s book on Slavic Renaissance literatures. A discussion of the wider issues raised by Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s book could be interesting. Unfortunately, it is not possible to conduct such a discussion on the basis of Mr. Zantuan’s article. Despite a self-assured tone and quite copious references to Polish scholarly literature, the article reveals poor orientation in die subject, and its author occasionally deals with the evidence in an inadmissible, cavalier way. An examination of a few instances taken at random should suffice to prove this.