On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin admitted to the Sixth Congress of Soviets that a year earlier he had been well aware that workers' control of industry would be “chaotic, shattering, primitive, incomplete.” He had known that the syndicalist flood which burst upon Russia in the spring of 1917 would have to be controlled before it engulfed the revolution itself. Nevertheless, for several weeks after the Bolshevik rise to power, the new regime fostered workers' control in the factories with the aim of consolidating popular support.

The Yugoslav nationalities question has always been a source of fascination for Western scholars. Inevitably, discussion has centered on the differences between the major Slav nationalities—the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. Less attention has been paid to the problem of the national minorities, although this issue has bedeviled the Yugoslav state since its formation in 1918. Minorities make up approximately a fifth of the Yugoslav population. In times of peace they have been the object of discrimination and exploitation. In times of crisis, the minorities have been the greatest single threat to the internal security of the Yugoslav state.

Over the years since 1918, four nationalities have proven particularly troublesome for the Yugoslavs: the Albanians, Hungarians, Germans, and Italians. The majority of the Albanians live in the autonomous oblast of Kosovo-Metohija (Kosmet) and are Moslem, belonging to the northern, Gheg, Albanian clan.

The last tsarist statute to deal with illegitimate children, the law of June 3, 1902, improved the lot of these “untouchables” somewhat but left them still in a most unfavorable economic and social position. It permitted proof of paternity and established the father's civil responsibility for support. But it denied to the father the right to acknowledge his child, and to the child the right to inherit from his father or to use his name. Some of the mother's property but not that of her relatives could be passed on to the illegitimate child if she acknowledged him in writing and if this property had been acquired by “honorable” means. “Legal” status could be conferred by the marriage of the parents or by adoption, but such marriage was permitted only if there were no children from a previous lawful union.

In 1924, immediately after Lenin died, the Central Committee of his party called upon all who had a shred of writing from his hand to deposit it in the party's archives. The holders hastened to comply. All his letters were ostensibly published in three substantial volumes, supplemented by items in a number of “Miscellany” (Sbornik) volumes, Not one letter to or from Inessa Armand appeared in that flood of Leniniana.

On February 27, 1939, Krupskaia died. Four months after her death, Bolshevik (No. 13, July, 1939) published the first of two letters from Lenin to Inessa on the “woman question.” The letters were not so much an expression of Lenin's views as a comment on Inessa Armand's. Planning in the course of her Bolshevik work with “working women” to write a brochure addressed to them, Inessa had dutifully submitted her outline to Lenin.