From the end of the eighteenth century until the Revolution of 1917, the Jewish communities of Vilna (Vilnius), Odessa, and Warsaw stood out as the prominent intellectual and cultural centers of Russian and Polish Jewry. In the period immediately following the Partitions of Poland, the preeminence of the northern region and Vilna, its major city, was acknowledged by all. Characterized by the rich Talmudical tradition associated with Elijah ben Solomon (1720-1797), the famous Gaon [Sage] of Vilna, and his disciples, Vilna signified then, and to a great extent continues today to signify, the values of intensive traditional learning combined with deep religious piety. In fact, in the literature on Russian Jewry, Vilna is often referred to as the Jerusalem of the North, indicating its special character and place in the history of East European Jewry. However, while Vilna symbolized the traditional world, over the course of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community of Russia was moving in a different direction. The political, economic, social and especially demographic forces of the modern period significantly altered the basic character of the Jewish community of the Russian Empire.

The ultimate course of Lithuanian history was determined at the outbreak of the Second World War by the provisions of the secret protocols to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. In the original agreement of August 23, Lithuania was placed within the German sphere of influence with both powers recognizing Lithuania's interest in the Vilnius area which since the 1920 coup by General Lucjan Żeligowski had been under Polish sovereignty — to Lithuania's constant chagrin. In this same treaty, Latvia and Estonia were allotted to the Soviet Union. On September 28, however, this agreement received significant alterations, and Lithuania was now placed within the Soviet sphere with only one strip of land in the Southwest of Lithuania to be left for Germany. In exchange for this, the province of Lublin and parts of the province of Warsaw were transferred to the German sphere.

Estonia emerged from World War I economically devastated, with no significant industrial base to build its economy. Yet, within twenty years, it had come to play an important economic role among the Baltic states and seemed destined to assume an equally important position throughout northeastern Europe because of its wise development of its vast oil shale deposits.

For analysts as much as for advocates of ethnic nationalism, language is an important elemental symbol of national identity. The relationship between language and nationalism has received attention in the scholarly literature, as has the role of linguistic problems in the resurgence of minority nationalism in the USSR, along with state-sponsored intervention in linguistic processes in that country.

One of the most spectacular developments concerning the Baltic States in the last ten years is the interest of the People's Republic of China in the fate of the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians.

Translating and publishing of Baltic drama in an organized fashion has been going on since the fall of 1973 at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (SIU-C) under the auspices of the Baltic Theatre project. A group of some twenty individuals of Baltic descent consisting of university professors, graduate students, and volunteers from other walks of life have translated more than sixty Baltic plays. Three of the translated plays have been produced by the Theatre Department of SIU-C and four others by either profesional American theatres, universities, or amateur groups. The first volume of a Baltic-drama anthology, Confrontations with Tyranny, has been published recently.

It was in late 1964, in a major address before the 8th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, that Tito condemned “various negative ‘traditions’” in the sphere of Yugoslav historiography. He called for resolutely “stamping out nationalistic interpretations of the cultural achievements and legacy of the past.” Tito deplored “un-Marxist, uncritical and unscientific appraisals of events and personalities in national history” which were sometimes mere repetitions of “certain bourgeois-nationalistic assessments.” He specified, “For instance, only the positive aspect of certain movements, events and persons is stressed while their negative side is hardly ever mentioned, or, if so, only in general terms and reluctantly. Further, we come across cases, although less frequently, where some sort of superiority of one national history and culture over another is stressed in some indirect way.” Tito warned that nationalistic conceptions in Yugoslav historiography often assumed a political character and led to disputes of “ugly proportions.” In 1966 Tito had occasion once again to warn that some historians were poisoning relations between the nationalities of Yugoslavia by discussing “who had what great men and when” and which nationality had “a more glorious past.”

The development of university courses and programs in Ukrainian studies is a recent phenomenon in the ninety-year-old history of Ukrainians in Canada. It begins only with the end of World War II and coincides with the influx of the postwar immigration. Not only did this newest Ukrainian-Canadian population provide the bulk of the teaching staff for Ukrainian programs, but also the development of courses and programs was greatly stimulated by the educational needs of the various generations in this sector of the Ukrainian population. Prior to 1945, university courses in Ukrainian studies did not exist at Canadian universities. In evaluating the late arrival of Ukrainian studies on Canadian campuses, one should not lose sight of the fact that Slavic studies in this country are a relatively new development, stimulated by the last war and in particular by the need to deal with the Soviet allies. The first courses in the Russian language were introduced only in 1943, at Carleton College and Dalhousie University. The development of Ukrainian programs quickly followed the instroduction of Russian studies in Canada.

Romanian historiography since 1944 has accurately reflected the political realities that have faced the Romanian Communist Party both its relations with the Soviet Union and its plans for the “socialist transformation” of Romania. Since the Romanian communists have based their claims to legitimacy on historical rather than on ideological considerations from as early as the “liberation of Romania from fascism,” which occurred on August 23, 1944, the essential task of Romanian historiography has been to provide a “scientific basis” for validating the varying claims advanced by leaders of the Romanian communist movement in search of legitimacy.

The New York Times welcomed, as did we all, the appearance of two excellent recent books, Hedrick Smith's The Russians and Robert Kaiser's Russia. But the reviewer began by saying, “It is amazing—worse it is alarming—to realize how little one knows about the Soviet Union.”1 This notion that we know little about Russia is an old one, of course, and has had its uses. One need but recall Churchill's famous tag about Russia as enigma wrapped in mystery to remember that declarations of ignorance can be used to spur action. Nonetheless, it should be clear by now that whatever else may be said about the notion of our ignorance concerning Russia, one can no longer simply say that it is true. American scholars for many years now have probed with remarkable success all aspects of the Russian experience. Yet the notion persists that we do not know Russia at all well. Why does this notion persist? What can, or should, be done about it? While definitive answers to such questions are too much to expect of any brief essay, the goal of this paper is to sketch at least the broad outlines of what appear to be some reasonable answers.

Personal independence of scientists, particularly in social sciences, presents a multidimensional problem. We propose to base our observations mainly on the careers of scientists in Poland, as seen against the background of the relations between the power elite and the cultural elite in a communist country. There are differences in time and place, but certain general tendencies can be observed.

The Soviet discovery of the approach of postindustrial society is not an incidental one. Since converging trends are observed in both capitalist and communist economic systems, the inclusion of macroplanning and more significant activity of the public sector could not be left unnoticed by the Soviet authors. For if convergence is viewed as a “capitalist policy” toward integration, postindustrialism stresses behaviorism with an accent on the consumer demand whose outlook became subject to extended modernization and technical acceptance of societal transformation. Soviet observers claim that in the capitalist environment, objective economic principles are replaced by purely biological determinants, because technocracy and consumerism are the very functional representatives of oncoming social values. Parenthetically then, planning and welfare-state designs are modes to “socialize” capitalism, since the two systems, as western economists claim, possess common values in terms of dynamic growth with no particular doctrine of implementation. Therefore, capitalism not only enforced hybridization of two ideologies, it became a virtual variant of socialism, converging around an industrial nucleus with increased participation of the public sector. Thus, capitalist convergence and revisionism in certain socialist countries are inbred, because by recognizing certain Marxian truisms but by ignoring class struggle, western societies approximate reinterpretation of Marx in the eastern bloc. The latter is a direct contradiction of the Soviet aim of establishing a classless, community-oriented society.