Feudalism is difficult to define. One may follow the example of Marc Bloch by stressing what feudalism is not. Clearly the feudal patterns which various scholars have described are always subject to the objection that some available data do not fit. Indeed, this defect is inherent in virtually any attempt to generalize.

However, because scholars have asserted that feudalism existed in sixteenth-century Lithuania, it is of interest to ascertain whether their assertions are reasonably accurate under the more common criteria for determining the existence of feudalism. I have come to the conclusion that when judged by those criteria, the social and political order of sixteenth-century Lithuania may not be regarded as typical feudalism except from a Marxist point of view. I am inclined to regard the early sixteenth century as a period when tendencies were developing which point, rather, in the direction of a dynastic state.

The intent of the framers of the Electoral Law of June 3, 1907, was, as Peter A. Stolypin would have it, “constitutionalist,” but it was very nearly the antithesis of “democratic.” In reverting from a broadly representational to a Prussian-style, tax-property, categorical basis, Stolypin sought no fundamental revision of the principles underlying the Electoral Law for the Imperial Duma of November 11, 1905. He was committed to the concept of a constitution providing for representative government, but in accordance with his own predilections he wished to revise the terms of representation in a way that would ensure a preponderance of “trustworthy” elements in the Duma while still permitting most major segments of public opinion to be represented.

Officially the one-centeredness of the Communist world ended in 1943. In that year the Communist International, which had recognized the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as the hegemon, was dissolved, because the new political situation demanded the “great flexibility and independence” of the various “sections.“ The people's democracies that a few years later came into being in Eastern Europe emphasized, as Brzezinski has noted, that they “were to be sovereign—not Soviet. Their relations with the USSR were to be, naturally, ‘friendly’ but founded on mutual recognition of the principles of independence and noninterference in internal affairs.“ Thus ideologically the transformation of international communism into a complex with many allegedly independent power-holding and power-seeking Communist parties was proclaimed long before Togliatti in 1956 asserted that the Communist world was becoming “polycentric.”