In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.

Much attention has Been Paid to Lenin's attack on Stalin in the last months of 1922 and early 1923, and rightly so, for this episode was critical in the career of Stalin, and, possibly, in the history of Russia. To a major extent the non-Bolshevik observer was until 1956 dependent on the testimony of Leon Trotsky for knowledge of this hidden struggle. This was only a limited disadvantage, for Trotsky was a first-rate writer, and the documents that he produced have proven reliable without exception. But Trotsky did not have in his possession a number of important documents pertaining to the affair, nor did he, and other scholars, exhaust the resources of his archives in this connection.

The recent successes achieved by Khrushchev in concentrating in his hands the instruments of power over the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union point once more to the decisive role played by the Party apparatus in the process of consolidation. While the attention of students of Soviet affairs had been focused on the basic component of the Party machine, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, headed by Khrushchev, it is, nevertheless, of interest to recall the existence of a rather obscure but important unit of the Party bureaucracy, namely, the Party Control Committee.

There are times in the life of a Totalitarian Party when it may feel the need for stock-taking and a readjustment in the direction of freedom and democracy; what course the party takes at such a moment may be crucial in determining how the system itself will evolve in the future. In recent years the Polish and Hungarian parties have provided two dramatic examples of this occurrence within Communist totalitarian states. Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to the fact that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia also passed through such a phase after its break with the Soviet Union.

Americans who have emigrated from Eastern European countries often provide for testamentary legacies to relatives still residing in the "old country." Foreign residents are sometimes the legal heirs when Americans die without leaving wills. Since it is common knowledge that money sent to Eastern Europe, to Communist-controlled countries, can not be fully and freely used by the beneficiaries, American courts are frequently required to decide what to do with the legacy. They must recognize that it was the intention of the deceased Americans that their beneficiaries receive a fair share of an estate, often earned in the United States through lifelong hard work by the former emigrees, a share corresponding to the true purchasing power of the dollar, yet they have to recognize the situation that may occur if the legacies are transmitted abroad.

Does a centralized system of direct controls necessarily provide the most effective method of control? A case study of the postwar Yugoslav banking system raises serious doubts on this score. The Yugoslav National Bank has not lost any control and may even have established a firmer control over the country's monetary system since 1954. At that time, it moved closer to the traditional central bank role of exercising indirect control over independent banks instead of performing all its functions through its own branches, over which it had direct control.

Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals felt themselves cut off from the uneducated masses and thought the gap could be bridged by some form of harmo niouscivilization. In Russia, a new liberalism spread after 1811-15, when young Russian officers returned from Germany and France, and culminated in the December, 1825, uprising. Less political, but much more numerous and influential, were the young philosophers who discovered the old Greek authors, Voltaire, and Hegel.

When one is considering the progress, in Poland, of the recent events which are commonly referred to as the "thaw," it is important to keep well in mind certain specific features of the Polish nation and of the Communist rule in that country. They help to explain why the "thaw" took the course it did, why it was a rather more outspoken process than one might expect on the basis of the analogous phenomenon in the Soviet Union, and why, for a certain time, it seemed to be escaping the control of the state apparatus—only to stop short of any demand for complete freedom.

In the years since the end of the Second World War American interest in Russia has steadily grown, and Russian studies in the United States have expanded at a rapid rate. In 1956, as the first decade of postwar development in this field drew to a close, a number of those concerned with Russian studies became convinced that a review of the record and a new look at the goals to be sought in the study of Russia would be beneficial. A general assessment of Russian studies in the United States was therefore made by the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, a body of scholars engaged in research and teaching relating to Russia and Eastern Europe appointed jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.