The merchant is a shadowy if not invisible figure in the accounts of the political and economic life of the Russian state in the sixteenth century. Apart from a few exceptional cases, very little is known of his commercial dealings. His political-administrative activities rarely appear in discussions of the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and his immediate successors. Because few sources survive that permit an investigation of the merchant's place in the Russian economy, some scholars have concluded that the part the merchant played was minor.

When two diametrically opposed revolutionary movements gain the support of the peasantry of a given population, it is logical to ask whether this support came from all peasant strata equally or from one in particular. This question is especially relevant to the eastern Polish województwo of Wołyń in the 1930s. Overwhelmingly populated by Ukrainian peasants, the rural areas of Wołyń województwo were strongly influenced by both Ukrainian Communists (represented by the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, Komunistychna Partita Zakhidnoi Ukrainy, or KPZU) and Ukrainian Nationalists (represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains'kykh Natsionalistiv, or OUN).

Throughout the nineteenth century a major international issue facing the Great Powers of Europe was the volatile “Eastern Question.” As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, the question of the future disposition of its extensive territories (some 238,000 square miles in Europe alone in 1800) provoked an intense and prolonged rivalry among those European states with vested political and economic interests in the Near East. With its military power in decline and its frontiers menaced by powerful neighbors, the Ottoman Empire seemed on the verge of collapse at the beginning of the nineteenth century despite its imposing imperial edifice.

When the Communist Party took power in Rumania in 1944, it inherited a poor, agrarian society. In 1950, before the advent of planning, three-fourths of Rumania's labor force was still in agriculture; only 12 percent of the labor force was in the industrial sector. Per capita income for the country as a whole was the equivalent of thirty dollars and in agriculture it was close to twenty dollars. The new regime did not have to search very far for a general development model. It adopted the Soviet strategy of rapid economic growth through the priority development of heavy industry. Women have played a key role in this process; indeed, it may be argued that they form the linchpin of Rumanian growth strategy.

In the continuing debate among Western students of Soviet affairs about the direction in which the Soviet political system is moving, all participants agree that accurate analysis is imperative. How one interprets the evidence of change determines one's view of current Soviet reality and one's perception of the opportunities and threats involved in U.S.-Soviet relations. This crucial issue is addressed in the following pages by examining the current situation of an important, evolving institution, the USSR People's Control Committee (Komitet narodnogo kontrolia, or KNK). To a remarkable degree this organization, in its twelfth year of existence, demonstrates the continuing process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet polity.

The title of this paper might suggest that it is intended to describe Chaadayev's philosophy. This is not so. An attempt will be made, rather, to argue the following points: first, that Chaadayev is chronologically the first philosopher of Russia because earlier persons to whom that distinction has been attributed do not really deserve it; second, that, unlike these so-called predecessors, Chaadayev in his writings provides a body of material which qualifies as a philosophy and which is presented as such; and third, that his philosophy is distinctively Russian, even though Chaadayev combines many Western philosophical characteristics with his native Russian outlook.

Not long ago Randolph Starn observed that the word “crisis” is a particularly ambiguous term which historians have not always used with the requisite care. “One historian's crisis lasts moments, another's decades, even eras; political, social, economic, mental, or moral crises are blurred by one historian's insistence on treating them discretely, while another lumps them together under the confusing rubric ‘general crisis.’ “ Starn's strictures about the abuse of common terminology and about the confusion resulting from such abuse deserve our attention, especially now that Professor James Y. Simms has asserted that Russian historians have been wrong in thinking that there was an agrarian crisis in the late nineteenth century.

In responding to G. Hamburg's comment, it is necessary to reiterate briefly the argument that I presented in my article on the crisis in Russian agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century. I began with the premise that scholarly opinion—contemporary, Soviet, and especially Western—espouses the proposition that peasant husbandry was experiencing a deepening crisis as the last century came to a close. Scholars have argued that peasant well-being was declining steadily, especially in the 1890s relative to previous decades. After providing a definition of what the term “agricultural crisis” means, I proceeded to analyze what I considered to be the crucial indexes used to support the crisis hypothesis.