starting all over again to achieve a modern way of life. It would of course be going too far to say that they came without traditional institutions and values, but the important point is that we started with a self-selected group of leaders and without a traditional society of landowners and peasants who had lived in the country for centuries. The only other countries that have shared this experience are Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. We are in many respects the most successful country in the world, but the process by which we achieved this success cannot very well be repeated by others.

For reasons such as this there is a sense in which it may be easier for Englishmen, or Poles, or Indians, or Chinese, to understand the process by which contemporary Russian institutions have evolved. Their experience to this extent at least has been closer to the Russian than ours. This is not a fatal handicap for us, but simply one we should be aware of and seek to overcome. So long as we recognize the differences between the way we have developed and the way they have developed, and are wary of transferring our assumptions and values to their history, there is no reason we should not study them with confidence that we can reach useful conclusions. Salient Themes in Russian History

In seeking to identify the salient themes over a period of more than a thousand years in the history of the diverse peoples who comprise the USSR today, a useful approach is to analyze a major turning point in their history as a reflection of both the heritage of historically formed institutions and the legacy that may have a bearing on contemporary problems. Such a major turning point was represented by the emancipation of the serfs by Emperor Alexander II in 1861, which was compared by contemporaries with Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves. Together with related reforms in the 1860's the emancipation was one of the most important efforts at government-administered social change up to that date. This is a useful vantage point from which to view both the historical antecedents of the political, economic, and social patterns characteristic of midnineteenth-century Russia and the subsequent transformation of the county from an agrarian to an industrial way of life.

The emancipation and related reforms directly affected no less than 42 million Russian citizens in the 50 provinces of European Russia, of whom about half were held as serfs by some 600,000 gentry landowners, and the balance were held in bondage by the state and the crown. The serfs and state peasants were freed from their obligation to till the soil and perform certain other services for their owners, but the emancipation was not an unmixed blessing. The settlement left the peasants with somewhat less land than they had tilled on their own account under serfdom, it burdened them with quitrents and redemption payments which in the end proved too heavy for them to bear, and it required them to share these burdens collectively within the framework of the village commune so that their individual freedom was still restricted.

The gentry kept more than their fair share of the land and received compensation for the balance, but they too had their problems. Less than 5 percent of the gentry were major landowners who held 45 percent of the serfs. The great majority of them had not owned enough

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serfs to support them, and had earned their living predominantly as government officials, officers, or professional men. Many of them had been in debt before the emancipation, and many more failed to adapt themselves to the commercialization of agriculture.

The 42 million serfs and state peasants ultimately affected by this settlement comprised 70 percent of the population of the 50 European provinces of Russia, which also had another 12 million rural and 6 million urban inhabitants. The Russian Empire included in addition at this time 16 million inhabitants in the Caucasus, the Steppe region, Siberia, Finland, and Poland for a total of about 76 million. The circumstances in which this momentous body of reforms in the 1860's was carried out, reflect characteristic features of the historical development of Russia that help to explain contemporary Soviet attitudes and policies. These circumstances may be summarized in terms of five themes: the predominant role of the state; values that stress collective at the expense of individual interests; a purposeful economic policy; a multinational society; and an international position of relative insecurity. Since we are particularly concerned with understanding the features of contemporary Russia that seem alien to the experience of the West-European and English-speaking countries, the brief discussion of these themes will emphasize the relatively unique features of Russian developments.

It is a striking feature of the emancipation and the accompanying reforms that they were undertaken by the state for reasons of national policy as determined by the emperor and his bureaucracy. Although the Russian autocracy as it existed in the 19th century was not a totalitarian government in the modern sense of the term, for it administered directly only a small share of the gross national product and did not seek to regulate in detail the lives of most of its citizens, it nevertheless played a larger role than any other major government in the 19th century. The Russian emperor could decide on his own authority to change fundamentally the status of 42 million peasants and 600,000 landowners, and possessed the legal and administrative institutions necessary to give effect to this decision. The emperor did not run the country like a dictator, and the bureaucracy was very modest in size by modern standards, but neither was there any alternative political authority in the country that could counterbalance the emperor. There were by this time no regional princes, or leaders of political, economic, or social interest groups, who could challenge the authority of the imperial government, and its power was limited primarily by a customary allocation of authority that left most provincial administrative matters in local hands.

The relatively unchallenged position of the state is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Russian society, and may be held to account for both the achievements that have made Russia great among nations and for the excesses that have made it an object of fear at home as well as abroad. It would doubtless be an oversimplification to say that historical experience has taught the Russians that unless they are united under a strong state they will be plundered by foreigners, but to a greater extent than most other peoples the Russians have seen themselves as facing the choice of unity under an autocrat or subjugation by a foreign power.

The political and geographical environment within which the modern Russian state was formed confronted it with harsher alternatives than those prevailing in Western Europe, and the models on the basis of which the Russian rulers constructed their political system were also different. The first and most influential of these models was the Byzantine Empire, from which the concept and practice of autocracy were derived. Although both Russia and the West have a common heritage in the traditions of the ancient world as transmitted by Greece and Rome, the rulers of Russia received this tradition through a Byzantium in which the state played a preponderant role with the church as its principal ally. Byzantine writings were the principal source of political guidance for the princes of Moscow until the 18th century, and other political lessons gained from association with the Mongol and Ottoman empires likewise stressed the importance of centralized authority.

The development of autocratic institutions in Russia was based as much on practice as on theory. The Kievan principalities to which the origins of modern Russia can be traced, flourished between the ninth and thirteenth centuries in the river systems stretching from the Baltic to the Black seas. The security of these principalities depended less on their own efforts than on the larger international security system which was managed by the Byzantine Empire. When the empire declined, the defenses of the entire orbit were weakened, including those of Kiev, and the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century virtually destroyed these early Russian principalities.

It was in a less hospitable geographical and political environment to the northeast that the remnants of these early principalities gradually formed a new state under the leadership of Moscow. In the face of oppressive Mongol rule and the petty bickering of a dozen or more little principalities, the rulers of Moscow gradually beat their fellow princes into submission. Vasily II (1425-62) was known as the Blind because of an injury received in civil strife; Ivan III (1462-1505) as the Great because of his services in extending the lands and prestige of Moscow; Ivan IV (1533-84) as the Terrible, or the Dread, because of his violent confiscation of much of the property of his landowners in his efforts to assert his authority over them; and Peter I (16891725) was Great because he borrowed successfully from Western models for the purpose of strengthening the authority of the state over society. In the course of this process the traditional autonomy of princes, church, landowners, towns, and peasants was eroded. The country exploded into civil strife in the first decade of the seventeenth century, but when order was restored it was at the expense of local rights. When the peasants were finally enserfed in the mid-seventeenth century it was an act designed to ensure order and revenue under conditions which free men would not tolerate.

Autocracy and serfdom were thus modern institutions in Russia. One normally thinks of the West-European and English-speaking countries as having moved in modern times toward a broadening of participation in political decisions. In Russia the trend between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was in the opposite direction. Even after 1906, when new fundamental laws that included a parliament were in effect, the Russian political system was described not inaccurately as "a constitutional monarchy under an autocratic tsar."

Granted that a vigorous political life was finally achieved with a variety of organized parties and a modicum of civil liberties, it is significant that this limited form of a pluralistic society lasted only one decade.

Values are more difficult to discuss than political systems, because they are inevitably more imprecise and less easily defined. At least by comparison with the experience of the West-European and English-speaking peoples, the dominant outlook of both state and society was one that stressed collective welfare at the expense of individual welfare. Not only did the very act of emancipation in 1861 demonstrate the subordination to authority of the individual, whether peasant or gentry landowner, but the social structure of the country also supported this attitude. The principal social groups recognized by law-gentry, clergy, townspeople, and peasants were organized as corporate bodies, in some cases with tax-assessing and tax-collecting responsibilities. Persons with grievances took action through corporate bodies rather than as individuals, and it was not until after 1900 that political parties representing like-minded individuals replaced these traditional institutions.

Similarly the Russian Orthodox Church supported the authority of the state. Its theology drew on Byzantine and Muscovite traditions which saw a state-oriented Orthodoxy as the true Christian faith in contrast to the individualism of the heretical Roman Catholics and Protestants. The important trend of Slavophile thought among Russian intellectuals likewise contrasted the traditional values of Russian social institutions, especially the village commune, to those of the West. To be sure there were also countervailing trends which included the widely popular dissenting sects, as well as the Westernizers who opposed the Slavophiles, but most of the adherents of these views were against traditional authority rather than in favor of individualism.

Among the political parties which emerged at about the turn of the century, the preponderant trend despite their great diversity was toward collective values. This was, of course, the case with the Bolshevik and Menshevik branches of the Social Democratic Party who espoused Marxist socialism; and it was also true of the Socialist Revolutionaries, whose populism rested on the strong belief in some form of agrarian socialism. A more conservative political trend, including the views of the emperor and his immediate supporters, favored corporate forms of society in which different social strata ran their own affairs along traditional lines. Of all the political doctrines, only those of the Western-oriented liberals, represented particularly by the Constitutional Democrats, believed that Russia should and would abandon its traditional institutions and adopt the norms then prevalent in Western Europe. Western liberals both then and since have found it difficult to understand why liberalism in Russia was so weak, and have tended to attribute it primarily to the late development of a middle class. Yet Russia had socialism without a large working class, and liberalism like socialism is an ideology and not simply the reflection of an interest group. The answer should rather be sought in the historical experience of the Russian people, in which the values of collective interest have predominated.

The reforms of the 1860's also mark the watershed between a relatively stagnant serf economy and one of the most rapidly industrializing economies that the world has known. The state did not emancipate the serfs in order to clear the way for industrialization, but rather with the more limited objective of commercializing agriculture in the belief that this would provide a better basis than serfdom for a stable society. The political and social reforms that accompanied the emancipation drew significantly on Western models and laid the basis for a society in which merit, education, and equality under law gradually came to predominate over the traditional system of privilege. These reforms were nevertheless all made within the context of an agrarian and autocratic system, and were not designed at the time as a step toward an industrial society of the Western type.

When industrialization finally came to be recognized in the next generation as necessary and desirable, it took an institutional form significantly different from that in the countries that had industrialized earlier. In the West-European and English-speaking societies, capital, entrepreneurial skills, and markets had been provided largely by the rapidly growing middle class. In Russia they were provided to a much greater extent by the state, or under its auspices. Mining and manufacturing, frequently on a large scale, had a tradition in Russia that went back in some instances to the 17th century, and in both the earlier and the more modern periods there were strong-minded and affluent entrepreneurs with great industrial achievements to their credit. Yet the role of the state in economic growth was always large and tended to become relatively larger in the last decades of the empire. The foreign loans administered by the state were a critical source of capital, and the state also used its authority to mobilize the export of grain and other raw materials which maintained the international position of the currency.

Once industrialization got underway, it proceeded more rapidly in Russia than in most other countries. The average annual rate of growth of industry in Russia for the entire period from 1885 to 1913 was greater than in any other major country except the United States and Sweden. To be sure, this rate of growth can be explained in part by the relatively low level from which Russia started, but by the First World War it was the fifth in rank in terms of gross production, and was surpassed only by the United States, Germany, Britain, and France. Its per capita level was lower than any of the West-European states, but the direction and rate of its development were clear to all. As industry grew, society was also transformed apace. Some 13 million peasants moved into the cities in the four or five decades before the First World War, enrollments in schools and universities multiplied rapidly, and children of peasants and workers began to enter the ranks that had formerly been reserved for the privileged.

One must thus accustom oneself to thinking about the Russian empire in its last phase as being autocratic in politics, collective in social values, and at the same time dynamic in economic growth. This is an incongruous mixture by Western standards, and there were many both within Russia and abroad who believed that politics and values would soon have to adapt themselves to the imperatives of industrialization as understood in the West if they were to survive. Subsequent developments have not borne out this view, however, and our minds