“Cadres decide everything,” Stalin proclaimed in 1935. The slogan is familiar, as is the image of Stalin as a politician skilled in the selection and deployment of personnel. But who were his cadres? The literature on the prewar Stalin period tells us little even about his closest political associates, let alone those one step down the political hierarchy—Central Committee members, people's commissars and their deputies, obkom secretaries—or in key industrial posts. Only the Old Bolsheviks and the military leaders seem to emerge as individuals. The rest are relegated to that servile and faceless bureaucracy about which Trotsky wrote from afar. Their very anonymity (which might also be described as our —and Trotsky's—ignorance) has become part of a sociological generalization.

The demographic development of the serf population in imperial Russia, particularly its rate of natural growth during the thirty years preceding the emancipation in 1861, has been the subject of considerable controversy. On the basis of data from the tax censuses (revizii), abolitionists sontended that the serf population was dying out, implying that the death rate consistently exceeded the birth rate. Many Soviet historians and demographers have subsequently advanced this view, seeing a demographic crisis as one dimension of the collapse of the feudal serf system. A Western scholar, Professor Daniel Field, has recently lent his support to this interpretation. But was serfdom so socially oppressive or economically stifling as to affect natural population growth adversely? Other contemporary statisticians and later historians—either less opposed to serfdom or more skeptical about the accuracy of population data—have avoided the issue.

The reign of Alexander II witnessed an extraordinary expansion of women's medical education. The post-Crimean War regime saw the establishment of the first Russian medical courses which trained female physicians and the creation of a contingent of women doctors far outnumbering that of any contemporary European state. This remarkable advance of Russian women in the medical profession grew out of the experimental policies and the somewhat erratic nature of Alexander II's rule, which introduced sweeping, but often uncoordinated, domestic reforms and allowed favored statesmen to develop competing policies in their respective ministries. During the period 1855—81, the popular press, reveling in its recent release from Nicholas I's censorship, transformed the question of women's medical education into a major issue of public controversy.

The majority of nineteenth-century literary critics identified The Devils as an antinihilist novel. The basic theme of Dostoevsky's work, the journal in which it was published, and the author's own journalistic commentary on his novel all seemed to link Dostoevsky to such conservative writers as Pisemskii, Leskov, and Krestovskii. Modern critics, both Soviet and Western, are aware that The Devils has qualities which make it vastly superior to the antinihilist works of the writers mentioned above. But in stressing Dostoevsky's artistic superiority, there is a danger of underestimating the powerful influence of badly written conservative novels upon his desire to write The Devils.

In the labyrinthine world of Rumanian politics, it was easy enough to find striking examples of corruption in high places and low, year after year, both before and after World War I, and to dismiss the country's parliamentary form of M government as a sham or as an imitation of the West. But in 1919 many Rumanian had reason to expect the future to be brighter than the past. The approximate doubling of Rumanian territory and population and a happy ending, to the long-fought struggle for national unity seemed a most auspicious foundation for Rumania's new postwar life. Social justice and the exigencies of the modern world were being addressed by the advent of universal suffrage for men and the first stages of extensive land reform.

Ever since the Berlin blockade of 1948 the attention of historians of modern and recent international relations has been engaged by the problem of how Germany and its capital, Berlin, came to be divided, first among the major powers of the anti-Hitler Grand Alliance—Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and France—and then, in 1949, into two rival states, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany. This problem lies at the heart of the much-debated question regarding the origins of the Cold War. This review article makes no pretense at being a comprehensive report on the literature of the German problem. My aim is, rather, to call attention to some recent contributions to the literature and place them in context.