Sergei Witte often expressed sympathy for the many non-Russians in his country. Jews, Poles, and other peoples who were not Russian or Orthodox Christian frequently faced discriminatory laws in the businesses, education, and government of the Russian Empire. But there were basic contradictions in Witte's political career. On the one hand, he held very progressive views and stood for abolishing laws that discriminated on the basis of ethnic origins. Such laws, he felt, hindered the growth of Russia's productivity. Yet this modern outlook contrasted with his admiration for the old traditions of the Russian monarchy, whose absolute powers were often the source of discriminatory laws in the first place. When the Russian emperor Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists in 1881, Witte briefly joined a secret society dedicated to seeking out and destroying terrorists...

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BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
A Siberian peasant and self-proclaimed holy man, Gregory Efimovich Rasputin entered the circle of personal acquaintances surrounding the Russian imperial family sometime after 1905. Tsar Nicholas and especially Empress Alexandra welcomed Rasputin because of the healing powers he supposedly possessed; he seemed to be able to treat the imperial couple's only son, Alexis, who suffered from hemophilia...

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"His rarest quality was a physical, intellectual and moral courage that set him absolutely apart from the rest of mankind, and because of this we understood each other perfectly." CATHERINE THE GREAT

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"I have great bundles of grain but I have no mill and there is not enough water close by to build one. But there is water enough at a distance if only I shall have time to build a canal, but the length of my life is uncertain. Therefore, I build the mill first and have only given the order to build the canal, which will better force my successors to bring water [to put the mill to use]. PETER THE GREAT

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Wang Ming (1904-1974) was the leader of the "Internationalist" group within the Chinese Communist Party that opposed Mao Tse-Tung's (Zedong's) nationalist "deviation" and favored, instead, disciplined compliance with each shift in the Comintern line. As such, Wang emerged as a major rival of Mao in the 1930s...

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Was the postwar collapse of the Allies' coalition inevitable?

Viewpoint: Yes, the grand coalition of the Allied powers was doomed to collapse after World War II because it was built only on the common interest of defeating the Axis; mutual mistrust and postwar self-interest caused the Cold War.

Viewpoint: No, the collapse of the grand coalition was not foreordained; it was caused by the United States breaking from its pattern of traditional isolationism after the war and the Soviet policy of territorial expansion, among other factors.

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The massive loss of lives during World War II reflected less the direct effects of combat than its secondary consequences: famine, disease, privation, and not least outright murder. In Europe it began in Poland in 1939, as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany collaborated to annihilate race and class enemies. In 1940, when Russia occupied the Baltic states, the executions and deportations were on such a scale that many survivors subsequently welcomed the Germans as liberators--and then took up arms to seek revenge against their former persecutors...

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Is the Cold War over?

Viewpoint: Viewpoint: Yes. The Cold War is over because most communist states are defunct or struggling to survive in the international community.

Viewpoint: Viewpoint: No. Although the United States stands as the most powerful country in the world, many Cold War antagonisms continue to pose difficulties for American leadership.

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As early as July 1941 a mortally threatened Soviet Union was calling for a "second front"--an Anglo-American invasion of Europe across the English Channel. The appeal was sufficiently compelling that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt made successive attempts to present the invasions of North Africa in 1942 and Italy in 1943 as meeting Soviet criteria. Joseph Stalin was unimpressed, and since then Soviet and post-Soviet historiography has stated or implied that the Western allies delayed invading the European continent unnecessarily, if not hoping to weaken the U.S.S.R. then to spare the lives of their own men at the expense of Russia's.
The most common rejoinder is that Russia had no comprehension of the difficulties involved in preparing and mounting a cross-Channel invasion against an alert and competent defense. It has been suggested that the invasion could have been mounted in the summer of 1943 with good chances of success given the weakness of German forces and defenses compared to 1944. This hypothesis, however, depending heavily on statistical comparisons, has found little support beyond its originators. D-Day remains best understood as a one-time operation, absorbing such a high percentage of U.S. and British material and psychological resources that it could not be undertaken without near-absolute chances of success...

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There is considerable debate as to how much the priest Silvester influenced Russian Tsar Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible. According to Nikolay Mikhaylovich Karamzin, the great early-nineteenth-century Russian historian, Ivan the Terrible only acted virtuously when he was guided by Silvester, and all that was good in Ivan ought to be attributed to Silvester. Yet, another great nineteenth-century Russian historian, S. F. Platonov, denies Silvester both the credit for Ivan's farsighted policy of strengthening Russia's southern frontier and the opprobrium for Ivan's brutal responses to the social crises that destroyed the Muscovite state by the 1580s. Most twentieth-century experts on Ivan, however, argue that Silvester must assume some blame for Ivan's later violence and debauchery, viewing the Tsar's maniacal behavior as a direct consequence of, and reaction against, Silvester's stern treatment of the youthful Ivan...

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