Descartes argued that the initial operation in the solution of any complex problem must be its subdivision into a series of smaller, less intricate, and therefore, hopefully, more tractable problems. Following that strategy, this study will examine one particular aspect of the purges—the destruction of the Soviet diplomatic corps—in an attempt to shed more light on the general nature of the purges and to assess the relationship, if any, between the purges and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s. The central tasks, then, are to describe the impact of the "Great Terror" on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and its embassies, and to evaluate the significance of these developments for both domestic politics and foreign relations of the USSR.

Tsar Paul I died at a critical moment in the affairs of Europe. During the last fifteen months of his life he had become estranged from Great Britain and Austria, his erstwhile allies, who were being hard pressed by their French enemy on several fronts. By the beginning of 1801 the tsar's government seemed on the verge of concluding an alliance with Napoleonic France. Russia's “cold war” with Britain heated up as the tsar ordered the confiscation of British merchant vessels in his ports and the incarceration of British seamen. A British fleet under Admirals Parker and Nelson was dispatched to the Baltic to deal with the new threat to British interests. Then, quite suddenly, the tsar was dead.

During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, much of Western Europe was caught up in the phenomenon known as the witch craze. Before it finally ended in the early eighteenth century this mass hysteria had claimed a goodly number of victims, mostly women, who were seized, tortured, tried, and executed, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence, for alleged maleficia against their neighbors and heresy against the church.

Once the accusation of witchcraft was leveled against someone the judicial process, either formal or informal, was set in motion to determine whether the suspect was indeed a witch. On the Continent this was facilitated by torture and the Malleus Maleficarum, a manual of procedure compiled by the two German Dominicans Sprenger and Krämer and published in 1486.

In examining the development of Tsvetaeva's lyric verse, it is possible to discern a recurrent thematic strain: a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role. I will try to show that Tsvetaeva, in the process of rejecting, via her poetry, this key ingredient in a person's self-concept—namely, the sex role as defined by society—along with a rejection of other limiting social norms, developed images of the self that transcend social roles. Moreover, the working out of this poetic identity is not continuous but falls into several chronological stages.

In discussing a poet's self, critical method prescribes that a distinction be maintained between the individual and the poetic persona. Without negating this methodological stricture, it is important to keep in mind that for some poets an adequate interpretation requires one to perceive that the persona is an elaborate poetic projection and mythologization of the individual.

The Bolshevik Revolution had little immediate effect on the periodicals, news-papers, and publishing houses that were already in existence in 1917. During the first few months after the takeover, Communist Party papers appeared along with satirical journals, such as The Scourge (Bich) and The New Satyricon (Novyi satirikon), that remained steadfastly opposed to the new regime. Then, in the middle of 1918, the government ordered the closing of all opposition news-papers and magazines, and authors suddenly discovered that the places where they could publish were limited. The civil war brought further hardships; shortages of food and firewood plagued everyone in the cities, but writers also suffered from the paper shortage that made publishing virtually impossible.

Despite the harsh material conditions of the next several years, a vigorous cultural life endured in Petrograd, thanks in no small part to a number of organizations that aided artists, musicians, writers, and scholars.

In recent years, Soviet officials and scholars have expressed increasing concern about the "lack of discipline" among industrial workers in the USSR. Labor productivity remains low, and it is improving at an unacceptably slow pace. At the same time, "shirking," "idling," on-the-job drunkenness, and industrial accidents are widespread. But the most troublesome manifestation of the Soviet worker's lack of discipline is the high rate of labor turnover.

The late Allan M. Cartter was chancellor and executive vice-president of New York University from 1966 through 1972 and then professor in the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and director of its Laboratory for Research on Higher Education. An economist, he devoted the last fifteen years of his short but brilliant life to predicting academic trends, a subject which economists and educational administrators, until recently, have both neglected or mishandled, to our great misfortune.

This book, his last and most important, is one of a series sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. It does not mention Slavic studies or any problems peculiar to them. Moreover, every field of study differs in some ways from every other: Russian and East European studies, for example, constitute a relatively new field, with a faculty corps which will have especially large retirements in the 1980s because of the way it blossomed after World War II.