should not be closed to the possibility that societies may be successfully modern within quite a diversity of institutions and values.

It has been noted that the emanicipation of the serfs applied only to the 50 provinces of European Russia, and this draws attention to the fact that Russia was a multinational empire the different parts of which retained their distinctive character. It is difficult to avoid referring simply to "Russia" and "the Russians," yet at the end of the 19th century only 43 percent of the population of the country was Great Russian. Another 22 percent were Ukrainians and Byelorussians, differing to some extent in language and political and social traditions but nevertheless members of the linguistic family of Eastern Slavs. The numerous minorities comprising the remaining 35 percent of the population were much more distinctly foreign. These included Finns and Swedes in the Grand Duchy of Finland; the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians in the Baltic provinces; the 6 million Poles and 4 million Jews living in the territories acquired in the partition of Poland; the Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijani, and numerous smaller minorities in the Caucasus; the native peoples of Siberia; and a substantial population of Turkic and Persian-speaking Moslems in the areas of Central Asia annexed in the 1860's.

What was significant about these non-Russian peoples was not only that they comprised such a large proportion of the population, but also that they lived for the most part in contiguous groups on the borderlands around the Great Russian core, and adjacent to Russia's neighbors. Only the Poles among these minorities had had their own independent state in modern times, and initially Russia placated these various peoples by letting them retain their traditional institutions. In the course of the 19th century many of these peoples were aroused by the dominant nationalist trend, however, and came to feel that their interests would be better served by autonomy or even independence than by Russian rule. The Russian government met this trend with a policy of centralization and Russification that greatly intensified the discontent prevalent among the minority peoples. The Jewish minority in the Western territories was particularly discontented because of the discriminatory policies of the government which prevented them from leaving the territorial "pale" to which they were confined except under special circumstances, and discontent turned to hatred when the government adopted a policy of savage anti-Semitic pogroms in the later years of the empire.

As a country of diverse peoples Russia bore a strong resemblance to Austria, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Until the 19th century it was common for different ethnic groups to live together under the rule of dynasties, and in the traditional context there were compensating considerations of security and economics which made these arrangements acceptable. In an age of nationalism, however, those minority peoples that had a possibility of establishing viable independent states saw liberation as their highest goal. As a consequence of defeat in the First World War, the Austrian and Turkish empires exploded under these pressures, Russia lost its Polish, Finnish, and Baltic territories, and even the relatively stable United Kingdom lost part of Ireland. The significance of the minorities problem for foreign policy lies in its relationship to the international system. In the case of Russia, the leaders of many of the national minorities were not

only among the most vociferous advocates of political, economic, and social change, but were also prepared to seek the assistance of Russia's enemies in achieving their goals.

In evaluating the foreign policy of a country, one may distinguish between policies more or less directly concerned with territorial and economic security, and those involving more general theoretical and ideological considerations. In the case of Russia, the policies in the first category might be considered to include the concern for adjacent territories that an enemy might preempt for hostile purposes, the search for warm-water ports, and the desire to incorporate peoples traditionally regarded as "Russian."

Finland and the Baltic provinces were considered to be important initially because they flanked a major commercial outlet, and the establishment of the national capital at St. Petersburg early in the 18th century made the region politically sensitive as well. The region most vital to Russian security since the 16th century has been Eastern Europe. All the wars that have threatened the security of Russia have been fought in this region, and in this context even the partition of Poland may be seen from the Russian standpoint as a measure designed to counterbalance the power of Prussia and Austria. It is significant that at the time of the First World War both liberal and conservative statesmen in Russia proposed to establish a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe resembling in significant ways the Warsaw Pact organization today. Russia's interest in this region was also related to its desire to regain from Poland and later from Austria the territories occupied by Eastern Slavs who had once formed a part of Kievan Russia.

Russia expanded toward the region of the Black Sea and the Caucasus initially in the course of its campaigns against the retreating Mongols, and later in the course of numerous wars with Turkey involving considerations relating both to security and to the desire for a commercial outlet through the Turkish Straits to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Christian minority peoples in the Balkans and in the Caucasus looked to Russia as a liberator from Turkish rule. The Russian expansion into Central Asia in the second half of the 19th century, on the other hand, reflected primarily a concern that Britain might gain influence in this power vacuum if Russia did not move in first.

The Russian position in Central and East Asia followed Russian expansion into the vast and virtually unpopulated expanses of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries. There was no substantial presence in this region until the 19th century, and the construction of the trans-Siberian railroad and the establishment of a warmwater port at Vladivostok paralleled in some respects the American conquest of the West. The search for fur-bearing animals led the two countries to mutually profitable arrangements in the northern Pacific until Russia withdrew from Alaska in 1867. Russia also participated with Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan in the establishment of extraterritorial rights in China, and in addition it gained a position of influence in northern Korea. By the turn of the century Russia had over-stepped the limits of its strength in this region, and it retreated under the pressure of Japan in 1905. In the Arctic region it met with no foreign opposition, however, and with the establishment of Arch

angel in 1584 and Murmansk in 1915 it obtained sea outlets which were useful when others were blockaded.

The foreign policy considerations that were generally of a more theoretical and ideological character were associated initially with the view that Moscow, succeeding Rome and Constantinople, was the center of the true Christian faith; and in a nineteenth-century version, that Russia was to become the eleventh (and final) civilization destined to replace Western Europe in the forefront of the progress of mankind. Ideological motivations of this type, reinforcing more practical considerations, led Russia to seek influence among the Western and Southern Slavs, the Rumanians, Greeks, Georgians and Armenians who were Orthodox but not Slavs, and also the distant Ethiopians.

A more effective ideological concern was reflected by Russia's leadership in the various coalitions that sought to stem the tide of revolution emanating from France. As the most active member of the Quadruple Alliance, Russia sought in the first half of the nineteenth century to preserve the territorial settlement of 1815, and it intervened in Greece and Hungary to defend the authority of the legitimate monarchs. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century Russia cooperated with Germany and Austria to defend the traditional institutions that it saw threatened by French ideas and British power. As a modern Germany came to occupy a dominant position in Central and Southeastern Europe, however, Russia turned to cooperation with France and Britain to restore the balance, and it was as their ally that she entered the First World War.

It would be difficult even for a well-programmed computer to calculate the many complex interactions of domestic and international forces that affected the equilibrium of the political, economic, and social system of Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. That it was a delicate balance, we can judge from the fact that even the relatively minor defeats in the Crimea in 1856 and in East Asia in 1905 were enough to release domestic forces that led to major reforms in the 1860's and a revolutionary crisis in 1905-6. Although the experience of Russia in the First World War through 1916 did not technically constitute a defeat, the strain on the resources of the country was immeasurably greater than anything that Russia had experienced since the Napoleonic wars, and the collapse when it occurred was correspondingly cataclysmic.

The empire had gone a long way in finding its characteristic solution to the challenges of modernization, but even under the most enlightened leadership at least another generation of peace was needed to make the transition from a predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial way of life. Under the strains of war, the grievances of many sectors of society broke through the political restraints that could barely contain them in times of peace: the peasants demanding more land, the workers demanding better compensation, the national minorities demanding equality or independence, the intellectuals demanding that Russia adopt one or another of the European ideologies perceived to be more appropriate to the modern era, and the various revolutionary movements with their non-negotiable demands.

The USSR in Historical Perspective

One may well ask whether the collapse of the empire in 1917 was not a sign that the salient themes of Russian history that had characterized the empire had by now run their course, and that the revolution marked a sharp break with the past. A revolution there certainly was, in fact, two revolutions: the first in the spring of 1917 which brought to power the moderate provisional government, and the second in the autumn which was in many respects the most radical that the world has known.

The Russian revolution was radical in the sense both that it represented the opposite end of the political spectrum from the imperial government which it succeeded within 240 days, and because it sought to institute a nation-wide program of economic and social planning with public ownership of the means of production in place of the traditional system of property, rank, and privilege. Civil strife in many forms had to be resolved before this doctrine could be given effect, but when the Soviet system in its contemporary form began to emerge in the late 1920's it became apparent that in many significant respects the salient themes that characterized the empire continued to retain their vitality.

The predominant role of the state, the prevalence of collective values, and an emphasis on policies in support of rapid economic growth are so characteristic of the Soviet system that one often thinks of them as essentially "Soviet" rather than "Russian" features. The USSR is likewise confronted by the problems of a multinational society similar to those faced by the empire, and its international position has reflected significant elements of insecurity despite the great military power that it commands. In what respects are the historical themes characteristic of the earlier period still valid today, and to what extent can they help us to gauge the temper of contemporary Soviet policy? In seeking to judge the attributes of a potential partner in a treaty that involves vital issues of national security, one can best evaluate specific foreign policies in the context of a comprehensive view of its society.

If one may judge the priorities of political leaders by the way they allocate the resources at their disposal, one may conclude that the Soviet leaders are primarily concerned with three interrelated objectives: the preservation of the Communist Party and the Soviet state in more or less the form in which they have emerged in recent years; the economic and social transformation of Soviet society; and the maintenance of the national security of the USSR through the strength of its own military power and through treaty relations with other countries.

The dual system of party and state in which the party directs and supervises and the state administers, appears to have achieved a relatively stable form since the mid-1950's. The process of legitimizing the political power which the Bolsheviks achieved in 1917 was a long and agonizing one. It included a struggle involving civil war and foreign intervention that lasted until 1921, and a much longer struggle to gain control over Russian society. Throughout the 1930's the efforts of the party-state to mobilize the peasants and the urban manual and non

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manual workers, and of the rival leaders of the party to gain control over its membership and policies, led to greater losses of life and liberty than anything Russia had known since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even today the restrictions on individual freedom are such that one may question whether they do not reflect a lack of confidence in the people on the part of their leaders rather than the continuation of a traditional view of the proper relationship of state and society. Yet if one compares the experience of the peoples of Russia in the two world wars, it is clear that they bore the greater strains of the second war far better than those of the first. It ended not in revolution but in a society that has shown much more cohesion and purposefulness in the 1950's and 1960's than in the 1920's and 1930's.

The Soviet party-state in its contemporary form exercises immeasurably greater control over the resources and skills of the peoples of Russia than did the empire that preceded it, and its solution to the universal problems of extracting revenue from and allocating resources to conflicting interest groups is significantly different both from that of the empire and from that of most other contemporary societies. A comparison of the party to the central nervous system and of the state to the human structure of bones, muscles, and organs, conveys an idea of how the system works and like human systems it is subject to nervous as well as structural breakdowns.

The conflicting views of interest groups are expressed through the agencies of the party rather than through elections and lobbies, and the negotiations by means of which these conflicts are aggregated take place within the party apparatus that staffs the Central Committee of the party and its Politburo. Diversities of opinion and interest are no less characteristic of Soviet than other societies, but they are resolved within the administrative system rather than by electoral campaigns and parliamentary debate.

There is sufficient stability of leadership at the higher party levels to afford considerable assurance regarding the continuity of basic policy. Indeed, if the welfare of the Soviet system were one's primary interest, one might be concerned whether Soviet leadership is not too set in its ways to meet new problems imaginatively. At the same time the procedures for selecting the party leaders who manage this vast enterprise are not as public or as well established as those of other modern states. This absence of institutional precedents is more apparent than real, however, and in practice the new leaders who have succeeded the old have come from a rather small elite and reflect a rather narrow range of views regarding national objectives.

The stated goal of the Communist party leaders is to bring to the peoples of Russia the benefits of the scientific and technological revolution, and one may judge their progress toward this goal over a period of half a century by comparison with the record of other countries developing at the same time. On the basis of gross national product as estimated in the United States in the mid-1960's, the USSR ranks 20th among the countries of the world on a per capita basis. A comparable estimate made at about the same time by the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR, based on a somewhat different calculation of national income per capita, ranks the USSR 14th.