When a student of the origins of 1917 looks back through the literature that appeared on the subject during the 1920’s and early 1930’s, he is likely to be struck by the degree of consensus in Soviet and Western treatments of the problem on two major assumptions. The first of these, then almost as widely entertained by Western as by Soviet historians, was that, just like other “classical” revolutions, the Revolution of 1917 had to be viewed, not as a historical accident or even as the product of immediate historical circumstances, but as the culmination of a long historical process–stretching back to the abolition of serfdom, if not to the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth century of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The second, balancing, assumption, which even Soviet historians were then still usually prepared to accept, was that, notwithstanding its deep historical roots, this revolutionary process had been substantially accelerated by the additional strains imposed on the Russian body politic by the First World War.

The oldest Russian document has been called an “immunity charter.“ It dates from the first half of the twelfth century. Many other immunity charters have survived and are among our most prized sources on medieval Russia. Although few date back to the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, about five hundred remain from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and a recent survey lists 1,039 for the years 1504-84. Such documents have been found from each of the sixty-three districts (uezdy) which comprised the Russian state before Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan, and newly discovered charters, or references to previously unknown charters, are still turning up. The terms of individual charters are usually clear, but scholars have advanced conflicting views on what these documents, taken together, really tell us about Old Russian immunities. Is one justified in claiming that such immunities even existed? If they did, two vexing questions remain.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leavening effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt among the Rumanians of Transylvania. The Enlightenment in Transylvania—and in Eastern Europe generally —was a curious blend of natural law, rationalism, and optimism, drawn from the West, and nationalism, a response to local conditions. It is no coincidence that the first tangible signs of national awakening among the Rumanians manifested themselves at this time. In the thought of the Enlightenment they discovered new justification for their claims to equality with their Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler neighbors. For example, they applied the notion of “natural” civil equality between individuals to the relationship between whole peoples, and they accepted wholeheartedly the myth of the social contract as the foundation of society and as the guarantee of the rights of all those who composed it.

The pre-Soviet introduction of modern Turkestanian theater, long flatly denied by Communist officials, gave vigorous expression to social and political ideas current among local groups of enlightened private citizens in Western Turkestan just before the outbreak of the First World War. The innovation also strongly affected developments in the state-sponsored dramaturgy which appeared later. This new theater, differing radically from the old folk art, was inaugurated before a responsive audience at Samarkand early in 1914 with a performance of Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy's Padarkush (“The Parricide“).

Padarkush presents the spectacle of a father's willful refusal, despite repeated warnings, to meet specific religious and social obligations by giving his illiterate, adolescent son an education. This fatal error inevitably leads to the parent's violent death and the destruction of his family.

During the K'ang-hsi (1662-1722) and Yung-cheng (1723-35) periods, Russia was the only foreign country with which China maintained treaty relations, the only “Western” state to which China sent diplomatic missions, and the only foreign power granted religious, commercial, and educational privileges in Peking. These were most unusual phenomena in Chinese foreign relations in view of China's claim to universal overlordship. As the Celestial Empire and the Middle Kingdom, China normally maintained no treaty relations with other states, sent no diplomatic missions abroad, and allowed no foreign country to keep permanent establishments in the capital city of Peking. It may therefore be asked, what differentiated Russia from the other foreign states in Chinese eyes and what prompted the Chinese to accord Russia preferential treatment?