Personal consumption is usually viewed as the major factor determining the standard of living of a population. Furthermore, to borrow Janet Chapman's phrase, it is “one of the grand criteria on which the performance of [an] economy will be judged.” To facilitate such an evaluation of East European economies, which have been operating to the present on the principles of Soviet-type planning, we have assembled in this paper the results of a statistical investigation of personal consumption in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Following the principle that context and comparison alone bring out meaning, we have selected those aspects that lend themselves most naturally to international confrontation: rates of growth and absolute levels of per capita consumption, changes in the relative share of personal consumption in total output, and changes in the structure of consumption by major categories.

If upon occasion in the past Nikita Khrushchev took an indulgent view of the Stalinist process of natural selection in the Party apparatus, it would hardly have been surprising. He was, after all, a most prominent product and beneficiary of it. Yet, without in any way criticizing the process as such, Khrushchev constantly manifested a nagging concern over its end results. In part this concern may be attributed, as it often has been, to a readiness to regard personnel changes as a panacea for difficulties in reality stemming from deep structural flaws in the Soviet economy and administrative system. And it can hardly be denied that in 1962 and 1963 Khrushchev was confronted with serious difficulties in agriculture and industry. But there is also little reason to doubt that he was genuinely worried about the effectiveness— and hence the quality—of Party cadres, or, furthermore, that there were grounds for his uneasiness.

Much valuable information on the dynamics of Poland's political life between the world wars is still to be uncovered in the records of national elections. Of particular interest are the contests of 1919, 1922, and 1928, since in all of these elections political parties were still allowed to participate directly (as they were not in 1935 and 1938), and governmental restraint and manipulation were not yet so massive as to cast doubt on the entire result (as in 1930).

The All-Russian Union of Railwaymen, formed in April 1917, was the largest labor association in revolutionary Russia and by far the most strategically located. The railway workers bestrode the system which carried troops to a crumbling military front and grain to great cities on the edge of famine. Exhausted Russia was so close to catastrophe that the railwaymen enjoyed the power to produce incalculable social effects merely by a stoppage of rail traffic for a few days. They had, moreover, an impressive revolutionary history. In 1905 their hastily and illegally formed organization had led all Russia in a general strike which quickly paralyzed the country and had been directly responsible for wringing a constitution from the autocracy.

“Prophetic” is a quality which few thoughtful readers would deny Zamiatin's We. For if its moral argument (the irreconcilability of “pure” communism and individual freedom) has, to a disturbing degree, been confirmed by the course of twentieth-century history, so have some of its boldest technological predictions (for example, stateenforced restrictions on human fertility, Communist-inaugurated space travel). Even its genre (an original blend of political satire and science fiction) has proven to be a prophecy of sorts, anticipating, as it does, the more celebrated satirical fantasies of Huxley and Orwell.