The intent of this article is to join in the slowly rising chorus of voices expressing dissatisfaction with the methods used so far in the analysis of Communist political systems. I shall argue, perhaps in rather circuitous fashion, that political scientists in the West have failed, by and large, to apply to the Communist world the rich store of concepts developed for the comparative study of political systems and that the concepts that have been used have been applied in ways that are objectionable. If, as is at times maintained, our discipline tends to be provincial or ethnocentric in its methods, this tendency has been most pronounced, perhaps, in the study of Communist systems. As a result, very little work done has been genuinely comparative. The discipline has failed to place the Communist world into any of the several systematic conceptual frameworks it has developed.

First of all, I should like to support as strongly as I can Professor Meyer's plea that the study of the Soviet Union and of communism be integrated with the study of comparative politics. For a number of reasons Soviet and Communist studies have developed apart from the rest of political science in this country. Among these reasons is probably the general growth of area studies with their noncomparative stress during and especially after World War II. More particularly, the government's need for information about Communist countries and the mobility of personnel in this field between government agencies and universities have bent some of the scholarly work in it in the direction of intelligence work. Also, in the study of these countries, refugees from them have played a significant role. Quite naturally, they have been more inclined to deal with the countries of their origin alone and to see them as unique than to compare them with non-Communist systems.

At the outset I should emphasize that the following comments, while occasioned by Professor Meyer's paper, are not always aimed at it. To be sure, many facets of the paper raise questions that I would like to discuss with Professor Meyer in detail, but this should by no means be interpreted as indicating opposition, only as a request for amplification. Professor Meyer's concept of entrepreneurship as being the “overriding motive force of Communist rule” is innovative and deserving of attention. The suggestion that Soviet development is divisible into a number of separate periods each characterized by its own distinctive political “system“ is, to say the least, provocative. Throughout the paper there are the insights and new departures for which Professor Meyer is noted, which we have come to expect from him and for which we are grateful to him.

I concur with Professor Meyer that Communist area studies must rejoin the main lines of the discipline of political science. An unfortunate methodological separation has existed much too long, a separation that might be figuratively characterized as a “loose, bipolar system,” with Sovietology at one pole and systematic political science at the other. The schism between Kremlinology, deductive reasoning, and, frequently, spectral evidence, on the one side, and scientific concept formation, empiricism, verification, and theory-construction, on the other, must come to an end. Professor Meyer's paper is a contribution toward this objective, both on its own merits and for the critical discussion that it will undoubtedly stimulate.

The recent resurgence of interest in the West in Karl Marx's thought has centered largely on his early writings, particularly the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (published for the first time in 1932 in the original German), and on the role which the theme of alienation played in Marx's thought. Much of the literature stimulated by this renewed study of Marx has been concerned with the extent of continuity (or discontinuity) between the early and later views of Marx and the relevance of his concept of alienation to modern industrial societies. The fact that the young Marx's writings have provided intellectual support for various “revisionist” groups yearning for a “humanistic socialism” in European Communist countries has also undoubtedly focused attention on these works in the West.

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy direct taxes were levied on the basis of periodic fiscal surveys. The records of these surveys were called soshnye pis'ma, pistsovye knigi, and perepisnye knigi (sokha registers, cadastral books, and census books respectively). Extant copies, though often fragmentary and considerably fewer than the total number of books originally compiled, represent our best source of information about the socio-economic history and population of Muscovy. Statistical data from these books span the period from the 1480s to 1717 and bear directly on such problems as population size and movement, identification of topographic features, the social and economic composition of urban and rural society, taxation, trade and manufacture, and the peasant economy on church, private, and state lands. Two of the most useful kinds of information are the enumeration of the taxed population, in terms of households and male occupants, and the quantitative and qualitative description of taxable property.

Pokrovskii never wrote the three final volumes of Russkaia istoriia s drevneishkikh vremen that were to carry his synthesis from the eve of 1905 to October 1917; and his postrevolutionary survey of Russian history failed to include the October Revolution. On the basis of his articles and lectures, however, it is possible to present a coherent picture of his ideas on the roots, significance, and prospects of the Russian Revolution. This article is concerned with the long-range issues involved in Pokrovskii's evaluation of the Revolution, though he also wrote a great deal on the immediate causes and the actual course of events between 1905 and 1917 and on the subsequent civil war.

Despite a continuing interest in Moravian and Methodian studies little progress, if any, has been made with regard to some basic issues. There is still a diversity of scholarly opinion as to the very nature of Methodius's episcopal dignity, as well as to the location—or even the existence—of his episcopal see. Methodius has been considered by various scholars in turn to have been a bishop “at large“ without a permanent residence, a missionary bishop, a land-bishop (chorepiscopus), or, finally, a titular bishop of Sirmium on the River Sava who was active mainly in Prince Sventopolk's domain north of the Danube with a see either in Nitra, Velehrad, or elsewhere. Thus, on the one hand, we have differences of opinion on the nature of Methodius's episcopal dignity and, on the other, a general scholarly agreement that he had the function of archbishop of Moravia. The persistence of conflicting interpretations of the episcopal dignity of Methodius and the acceptance of the notion that he was archbishop of Moravia, a title for which there is no evidence in the sources, warrant a reexamination of the Methodian problem in an attempt to eliminate some of the contradictions.

The intimate friendship between Pavel Borisovich Axelrod and Karl Kautsky, stretching over almost half a century, had an important bearing on the Russian Social Democratic movement and international socialism. Kautsky, who, after Engels’ death in 1895, became the most authoritative exponent of Marxism and the major theorist of the Second International, followed developments in Russia with interest and leaned heavily on Axelrod in forming his opinions about events in that country and its Social Democratic Party. The German socialist's curiosity was aroused not only because he recognized, as early as the 1890s, the potential importance of the Marxist movement in Russia but also because Russian Marxists were especially eager to obtain his advice. “Whenever a controversial question arose,” wrote the Menshevik Rafael Abramovich, “whenever a problem emerged, the first thought [among Russian Social Democrats] was always: What would Kautsky say about this? How would Kautsky resolve this question?“

Every tenth-year anniversary of the October Revolution has been the occasion for a burst of publication by Soviet scholars to celebrate the event. Each successive decade has witnessed an ever larger output of documentary and memoir collections, symposia, monographs, surveys, brochures, and textbooks. The half-century year 1967 promises to be the culminating point of this effort, with hundreds of historical publications of every type now appearing or promised.

I had some advance acquaintance with this anniversary historiography during the month which I spent as an exchange scholar in Moscow and Leningrad in the fall fall of 1966 under the United States-Soviet cultural exchange agreement.