The concept of a profession as a social institution is a rather nebulous one. It is sometimes used to refer to any clearly defined vocational group. More traditionally it refers to a “learned profession,” the classic examples of which are divinity, medicine, and the law. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. XII, p. 478) defines a profession, in this sense, as “a vocation founded upon prolonged and specialized intellectual training which enables a particular service to be rendered.” It is this meaning of the term that is here intended.

The following reflections have been occasioned by the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. Their purpose is to try to grasp the nature and to gauge the extent of the change between the Russia of today and that of Stalin's time. Naturally, no more can be done within the scope of a brief paper than to indicate some of the areas that may be relevant in this connection and to arrive at some provisional conclusions. In looking for those areas, various curiosities and incongruities of the Moscow Congress may serve as guiding beacons.

The USSR placed on the agenda of the Big Three wartime conference at Yalta in February 1945 the question of the Turkish Straits. Of this 200-mile natural channel, less than 60 miles—the Bosphorus coming from the Black Sea and the Dardanelles going to the Aegean—are true straits, joined by the inland sea of Marmara. Ever since 1841 the transit of naval vessels through the Straits has been regulated by international agreement. The latest regime was established by a convention signed at Montreux in July 1936, authorizing Turkey to remilitarize the strategic waterway and, if it were “threatened with imminent danger of war” or actually engaged in war (Articles 20 and 21), to permit or disallow at its discretion the passage of warships through the narrows.

It is not surprising that Western statesmen and students of politics everywhere have recently begun to give major attention to what are variously termed guerrilla warfare, irregular warfare, paramilitary operations, la guerre révolutionnaire, insurrectional warfare, resistance movements, and other, allegedly military, doctrines. Of course, irregular armed struggles are not a unique feature of mid-twentieth-century politics; however, they have occurred with great frequency in our time and, more important, they have resulted in baffling victories over vastly better armed, better trained, and more numerous forces. President Kennedy, in response to the apparent superiority in military doctrine possessed by Communist forces in Asia, has ordered the rapid expansion of United States “guerrilla and counter-guerrilla forces.” On a more prosaic level, the publication in a national Sunday-morning newspaper of excerpts from a celebrated pamphlet on guerrilla warfare by Mao Tse-tung suggests that “guerrilla warfare,” along with “massive retaliation,” has entered the popular Cold War vocabulary.