S. L. TIKHVINSKY. The Soviet Union's Struggle for Peace on the Eve of the Second World War

The article examines the foreign policy followed by the Soviet Union in the 1930's, which was chiefly aimed at containing the aggressive aspirations of German fascism through the collective actions undertaken by the Soviet Union, Britain and France in strengthening European security. Drawing on a wealth of documentary materials, the author graphically shows how the ruling circles of Britain and France, blinded by their anti-communism, took the course of abetting Hitler's aggression, and highlights the anti-national policy pursued by the ruling element of bourgeois Czechoslovakia and Poland. Emphasizing the great scientific-theoretical and political significance of objectively reflecting the history of World War II, the author points to a considerable extension of the documentary and historiographic basis of research into the given problem in the Soviet Union.

V. A. ARKHIPOV. Private Lease of State-Owned Enterprises in the Period of NEP

The article highlights an important aspect of the new economic policy, which has been inadequately reflected in historical literature - the use of private enterprise in industry under state control over the period from 1921 to 1930. Drawing on a wide range of sources including legislative acts, archive materials published in the 1920's and statistical data, the author traces the dynamics of the enterprises leased out to private businessmen, their proportion in industrial production, the methods of regulating relations with the lessees.

The author comes to the conclusion that the private lease of state-owned enterprises was based on Lenin's plan to adopt the new economic policy and was necessitated by the appalling economic dislocation reigning in the country as a result of the Civil War and foreign military intervention. Permitting the lease of small and often enough unprofitable enterprises, the Soviet state concentrated its efforts on the restoration and development of the rest of socialist industry. The sector of the privately leased enterprises played a definite auxiliary role in obtaining additional produce, thereby facilitating the attainment of the main political objective - consolidation of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry on the basis of commodity circulation. With the beginning of socialist industrialization the lease of state-owned enterprises was discontinued.

E. L. RUDNITSKAYA. Michael Nalbandian and the Russian Revolutionary Movement of the 1860's

The article is devoted to Michael Nalbandian - the founder of Armenian revolutionary-democratic culture, whose multiform socio-political activity and literary work as a poet and publicist is examined in close connection with the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, in which he played an active part. Nalbandian's ideological development is viewed by the author as characteristic of a typical representative of the commoner intellectual-democratic stage of the liberation movement in Russia, who traversed all the way from democratic enlightenment to revolutionary democratism.

The ideological and political content of his publicistic works is shown in close context with the programme and ideological platform of the clandestine "Land and Freedom" society which began to be formed in Russia in the years of the first revolutionary situation, with the propaganda spread by the free Russian press headed by Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, with the revolutionary preaching of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov. The author traces the ideological and organizational links of Nalbandian's efforts to rally the democratic forces of the Armenian people in Russia and Turkey with the all-Russian and European liberation movement, with the Italian people's struggle under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi.

R. G. SKRYNNIKOV. Yermak's Siberian Expedition

The article recapitulates the history of the first Siberian expedition undertaken by a group of the Volga Cossacks under the leadership of ataman Yermak Timofeyevicri. A number of authentic 16th-century documents in conjunction with newly discovered archive materials about Yermak have enabled the author to re-examine the chronology of the campaign and the relevant information about its participants and initiators.

стр. 190

V. V. SOGRIN. The Emergence and Struggle of Ideological Traditions in the U.S.A.

The author focusses attention on the ideological struggle in the U.S.A. during the first decades of independence, showing how in the course of heated debates on the paths of the social, economic and political development of the American nation there take shape heterogeneous ideological traditions. The democratic trend in American social thought is permeated with egalitarian socio-economic ideas and radical political doctrines. Counterposing it is the moderately conservative ideological trend, whose representatives are distinguished by their worship of economic liberalism, their faith in the justice of unequal distribution of property, justification of the right to political privileges and state power enjoyed by the economic elite. The author compares and correlates the democratic and the moderate Irends in American social thought with the various trends in the European Enlightenment.

A. I. PERSHITZ. The Periodization of Primitive History

There are several kinds of periodization of primitive history: special (archeological, anthropological, etc.) and general, or general historic. While each of them has given rise to conflicting views and opinions, the problem of evolving a criterion of general periodization continues to present the greatest difficulties. For a number of researchers this criterion is the level of development of the productive forces, but they have to take into account not so much the absolute as the relative productive forces and, in the final analysis, renounce the monistic principle of periodization. More productive is the criterion of the development of production relations, but here too there are some controversial points, the most important of which are connected with the conception of the correlation of primitive history with the history of the primitive communal formation. Can we accept the view of some researchers that the earliest period of primitive history was a "preformation" and the final period - a peculiar "non- formation period"? The article shows the vulnerability of such views. There are also some other questions that are open to discussion, notably the correlation of historical, archeological and anthropological epochs. But notwithstanding all the divergences in interpreting the division of primitive history, the variants of periodization elaborated in Marxist science stand opposed to some of the schemes still widespread in the West, in which an attempt is made to undermine the general theory of formations by singling out stages in primitive history similar to the formation stages of class history.

Permanent link to this publication: