During the interwar period, the leadership of the Soviet Union did a onehundred- eighty degree turn in its policy toward the political link-up between Austria and Germany. The Soviets first denounced the victorious Western powers’ prohibition of the Anschluss. Later they showed outright opposition to the Nazi drive for German unification in Central Europe. The Austrian Communist Party and international communism promptly executed the same turnabout. In accordance with the new line, during and at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union joined the Allies in supporting the restoration of Austrian independence and sovereignty.

As the First World War entered its third year in August 1916, an equilibrium of sorts had been established. Bloody battles at Verdun, the Somme, and the Isonzo, and the offensive of Brusilov had amply demonstrated that neither group of belligerents had the capability of delivering a “knockout blow” to the enemy, to use Lloyd George's phrase. It was for this reason that so much importance was attached to the impending intervention of Rumania, strategically located astride the flanks of both warring coalitions and possessing an army of six hundred thousand men. It was widely believed that Rumania's adherence to the Entente would have a decisive impact on this stalemate. Paul von Hindenburg captured this conviction when he wrote: “Judging by the military situation, it was to be expected that Rumania had only to advance … to decide the world war… .“

As a result of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bucovina in 1939-40, the Soviet Union was left with the largest Jewish population in Europe. Given this large population, the fact that the Soviet Union had the greatest number of Jews who survived World War II has aroused the interest of researchers and drawn attention to the role of Soviet policy in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Some of the reasons for the survival of Jews in Soviet-annexed territories seem obvious. In contrast to other European countries, only part of the USSR was occupiéd by German armies. Therefore, Jews could find refuge in the unoccupied regions. This simple and generally sufficient explanation is not the only one which has been offered, however. Some Western scholars have argued that the Soviet government had a specific policy designed to rescue Jews from the danger of annihilation. Soviet propaganda, particularly that aimed at Western audiences, maintained that millions of Jews owed their lives to Soviet rescue operations during the Holocaust.

The Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), who spent the last seventeen years of his life in Western Europe, wrote a total of five books of verse: the first two, Molodost (Youth, 1908) and Shchastlivyi domik (The Happy Little House, 1914), are largely derivative and, by the poet's own admission, immature; the last three, Putem zerna (Grain's Way, 1920), Tiashelaia lira (The Heavy Lyre, 1922), and Evropeiskaia noch’ (European Night, 1927), form the limited body of his mature work. It is on the basis of the last three collections that Khodasevich's modest reputation has been established. It is ironic that the relative obscurity of Khodasevich's best work bears witness to the vagaries of exile about which he often wrote. Indeed, in 1922, the year Khodasevich left Russia, Valéry published Charmes, Proust died while polishing his novel, Eliot founded the journal Criterion and printed The Waste Land in its pages, and Joyce's Ulysses was released in a small Parisian edition.

During the six months prior to his death in 1922, Velimir Khlebnikov attempted to consolidate in writing the momentous experiences of his brief life. The major works of this period represent various types of summations. Zangesi is a mosaic of Khlebnikov's poetic experiences. Otryvki iz dosok sud'by (Fragments from the Boards of Destiny) contains the poet's final mathematical formulas for the laws of time. “Razin. Dve Troitsy” (“Razin: Two Trinities“) might well be regarded as his own Apologia pro Vita Sua. But despite its importance as a biographical testament, “Razin: Two Trinities,” like many other pieces, has been misrepresented in the Collected Works. The absence of any substantive commentary can lead one to suppose that it is a complete and polished composition. However, an examination of the manuscript reveals it to be an unfinished and untitled fragment—in fact, little more than a rough draft. The basic text, written in an unusually large and legible hand, is laced with corrections in Khlebnikov's more typical minuscule script. No fair copy is known to exist.

Popular literature often appropriates the structural patterns of folklore. V. P. Adrianova-Peretts has observed that in Russian narrative literature prior to the 1760s it is difficult to draw a distinct line between folklore and formal literature. Discussions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian adventure tales, the first body of original prose fiction to enjoy widespread success in Russia, have traditionally noted use of folkloric motifs, usually citing isolated moments rather than basic, underlying plot structures as examples. In fact, however, the fairytale plot, as outlined by Vladimir Propp in The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, forms the skeleton of most Russian prose tales of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The first (and last) Soviet scholar to survey the history of the Imperial Free Economic Society (Imperatorskoe Vol'noe Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo, or VEO) arrived at the reasonable conclusion that this important organization deserves far greater notice than it has hitherto received. The same is true of the Society's remarkable and remarkably neglected library, barely mentioned even in the same scholar's monograph but preserved almost intact in Leningrad today. The later activities of the Free Economic Society—the oldest (1765-1919) and most influential economic society in Russia—will be pursued elsewhere as part of a broader inquiry, but a brief note on its library is offered here to alert researchers to the potential usefulness of this unique store of economic, social, technical, and statistical materials.