Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Dentsovtch contains only one reference to Iosif Stalin: “In the room someone was yelling: ‘So the old man with the moustache will have mercy on you! He wouldn't believe his own brother, let alone slobs like you!’ ” Despite these disrespectful words, the novella's condemnation of Stalin and the society controlled by him is basically an indirect one. As Georg Lukács observes: “Solzhenitsyn's achievement consists in the literary transformation of an uneventful day in a typical camp into a symbol of a past which has not yet been overcome… . Although the camps epitomize one extreme of the Stalin era, the author has made his skilful grey monochrome of camp life into a symbol of everyday life under Stalin.“ Understated, allusive, and deceptively simple, the novella, published with Khrushchev's personal approval in December 1962, marked the crest of the party's anti-Stalin campaign. Within months Khrushchev called for a brake on prison-camp literature, and Solzhenitsyn began to encounter increasingly severe and decisive critical opposition.

At the death of the Orthodox Metropolitan Pavel Nenadović in 1768, the educational level of the great majority of his Serbian and Rumanian coreligionists was still very low. In the seventy-year period since the regions in which they lived had again come under Habsburg rule, only feeble and shortlived initiatives had been made to improve their lot. Literacy rates were minuscule, printed matter rare, and schools of any sort so few and so scattered as to make formal education a distinct oddity. This was true even of the Serbs, whose settlements in southern Hungary included a relatively large number of well-off merchants and peasants, and whose statutory position as leaders of the Orthodox minorities was thereby reinforced. Still worse off were the Rumanians, many of whom were just emerging from a pastoral economy and extreme cultural backwardness. Even among the lower Orthodox clergy, the ability to read and write in any language was deemed extraordinary. The literacy problem was complicated by the fact that both Serbs and Rumanians used variants of Church Slavonic instead of their own vernaculars as their literary vehicles.

Enclosed in a letter, written in September 1815 by William David Lewis (1792-1881) to the United States minister in Sweden, Jonathan Russell (1771-1832), is an interesting and unique example of an American's effort to compose verse in the Russian language. Though only a curiosity of Russian literature, “Yankee Doodle” illustrates the degree of facility gained by one of the first American students of Russian after more than a year of study. Of additional interest is the pronunciation guide which Lewis furnished Russell—rare evidence on how Russian was actually spoken in the early nineteenth century.

Beginning with Catherine II's Municipal Charter of April 21, 1785, Russia's statesmen made repeated efforts to improve the ineffective and antiquated manner in which urban affairs were administered in the Russian Empire. By the beginning of the 1840s, however, the problem of modernizing the administration of Russia's cities was no nearer to a practical solution than it had been a half-century earlier. The growing number of administrative duties which fell upon the shoulders of city authorities sometimes made urban officeholding nearly a full-time responsibility, and Russia's urban classes were understandably reluctant to serve in elective offices which took so much time away from their personal business affairs and offered so little prospect of reward.

When this study was originally prepared nearly thirty years ago, it was part of a larger government memorandum. As such it was written within a framework of exploring problems of economic relations with the USSR after the war, with the expectation of a large and mutually beneficial trade in mind. At the time, I presented a general analysis of these problems in a longish pamphlet. I was unable, however, in that publication to touch upon the problem of Soviet policies on, and relations with, international cartels, because the government document in question was classified as “secret,” as was the information I had obtained in the course of preparing it. The recent declassification of that document by both the Department of State and the Department of Justice (from whose Antitrust Division a large body of valuable information had been received) has caused me to consider publication of the material on the four case studies of Soviet participation in international cartels—to wit, the cases concerning matches, phosphates, potash, and platinum. I feel that such publication is warranted essentially for two reasons.

Historians are generally agreed that during the first two years of World War I American feeling against Germany was far stronger and more intense than against Austria-Hungary. While relations between the Germanic and American peoples had not been truly friendly since the 1880s, attitudes in the United States toward Austria-Hungary were much less antagonistic. Historically there had been little direct contact between the latter two countries. It scarcely seemed necessary to Americans. The area was not only remote geographically but also remote from the national interest. As a result, there appeared to be no deep-rooted bitterness or resentment in the historic relationship between the two nations. Indeed, in the period immediately preceding the war, relations between Austria-Hungary and the United States had consisted largely of diplomatic formalities even though before the war, Austria-Hungary, next to Italy, had furnished the largest European immigration to the United States. Americans for the most part were unaware that Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire composed of many diverse ethnic groups. Few Americans knew of the vast numbers of immigrants who had come from Austria-Hungary from the areas of Slovakia and Bohemia.

Stalin's little-known 1928 caper, the production and distribution of bogus hundred-dollar bills, was preceded by an even less known venture of the same sort. Specialists in East European history have left it unexplored during the decades which have passed since it occurred, and several aspects of the plot behind it, as well as some of its most powerful supporters, remain unknown. It happened in 1925, and involved a string of high-ranking Hungarian civilian and military personages, with a prince at one end and a bishop at the other.

An historian of early Russian history faces many methodological problems, not the least of which is the paucity of sources for the Kievan and Mongol periods. Because of the dearth of material, historians of the medieval Russian town, such as M. N. Tikhomirov and A. M. Sakharov, have generally presented a static conceptualization of urban society, thereby obscuring the dynamic processes and nuances of historical development. Despite the many studies of Novgorod, one can fairly state that historians have often described fourteenth and fifteenth-century Novgorod as though it were virtually unchanged since 1136, when the town declared its independence from Kiev. While recognizing the importance of the Sovet gospod (Council of Lords) and posadnik (mayor), some historians have nevertheless insisted that the veche (assembly) was the sovereign body of the republic. Its meetings were open to the town's citizens, and though the veche at times degenerated into brawls, no prince or posadnik could effectively govern without its concurrence. Indeed, George Vernadsky characterized Novgorod as a democratic republic, somewhat reminiscent of the Greek polis, while Tikhomirov viewed Novgorod's political traditions as similar to those of the urban communes of medieval Europe.