The sheer size of the Russian foreign debt in 1917 has profoundly affected our view of the influence of foreign capital on tsarist diplomacy. It has been argued by both Western and Soviet historians that Russian foreign relations were in good part influenced by, or even determined by, Russia’s debtor status to France and—to a lesser degree—to Great Britain. Thus a Western historian argued recently that in the last years of tsarist rule “foreign credit became a tool of power politics and a limitation on Russian sovereignty in general. … Between 1887 and 1917 Russian policy was tied to French policy, inasmuch as French investments were controlled, to a large extent, by the French Government.” Recently published Soviet works, while revising Stalin’s judgment that Russia was economically a semicolony of Western capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the capital, continue to assert that the “financial-economic dependence on the Entente countries pushed tsarist Russia into a military alliance with them.”

Discussions of Catherine II as an “enlightened despot” usually emphasize her attempts to reform the social and political bases of the Russian Empire and to gain the active support of the nobility and gentry in governmental activity. Catherine denned enlightened government as wellordered government, achieving its policy and programs through bureaucratic and political means rather than with the sheer force that many of her predecessors had used.

The term “Russification” is seldom used with reference to the period of Catherine II, even though it was in her reign that the Cossack Sech was abolished, the special privileges granted by Peter I to the Baltic provinces abrogated, and the first successful assimilation of Russia’s Muslim subjects into the Russian state accomplished.

The first part of Mikhail Chulkov’s short novel The Comely Cook was published in 1770 and appears to have enjoyed a considerable success with the Russian reading public of the eighteenth century, including the great military hero Alexander Suvorov. The work soon became a bibliographical rarity, and it was not until this century that it was reprinted. Given the embryonic state of the prose genres in Russia at the time Chulkov’s novel appeared, it is not surprising to find that much attention has been paid to the possible sources upon which he might have drawn. Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was a tendency to stress West European influences on Chulkov. In the Soviet period several Russian scholars have played down these influences and have sought to demonstrate that the novel was essentially a home-grown product written by a raznochinets in opposition to the neoclassical theories of noble writers.

The interwar period in Poland between 1919 and 1939 was punctuated by three significant crises in ethnic relations: the presidential succession of 1922, the Pilsudski coup of 1926, and the “pacification” of the Ukraine in 1930. This article is an attempt to sketch certain aspects of these crises based primarily on records of parliamentary debates. Within the walls of Parliament ethnic conflicts were aired and articulated openly. Here the claimants spoke to and with one another, rather than solely to their own particular clienteles.

The number of non-Polish inhabitants within the frontiers of post-Versailles Poland has been variously estimated at between 30 and 45 percent of the total population, depending on the source, time, and method of classification used in the estimate.

One of the most pressing problems facing the Soviet government in the 1920s was how to recruit the technical intelligentsia and professional classes behind the new regime. Just as the officer corps of the Imperial government was a necessary adjunct to the Red Army during the Civil War, so the businessman, the doctor, and the bureaucrat were essential to the functioning of orderly social and political institutions under the New Economic Policy. The story of the economic concessions made to revive the dormant links between city and countryside is well known. But the recruitment of trained personnel involved not only economic concession but also ideological conversion. Beginning in 1921 the Soviet leaders took great pains to legitimize their rule by portraying themselves as heirs to Russian national traditions and defenders of Russian soil against foreign intervention.