V. A. SHISHKIN. The October Revolution and the Soviet Government's Economic Relations with the Capitalist World (1917 - 1918)

Bourgeois historiography is at pains to prove that the foreign policy of the Soviet state in the early years following the October Revolution was devoid of any constructive ideas in the sphere of international cooperation. Yet it is a well-known fact that from its very inception the Soviet state positively replied to the question of the possibility of establishing economic relations with the capitalist world. The basic principles of the Russian Federation's foreign economic policy in relation to bourgeois states (full equality and mutually advantageous cooperation) and towards countries where the proletariat is in power were formulated in 1917 - 1918.

The underlying principles of Soviet foreign economic policy and the basic forms of economic relations with capitalist countries were elaborated in extremely complicated conditions of struggle against the "Left Communists" in the period of the Brest- Litovsk peace and found their embodiment in a number of documents of Soviet administrative and economic bodies. The author makes a detailed analysis of these documents. An extremely important role in working out the cardinal principles of the Russian Federation's foreign economic policy was played by V. I. Lenin. In conclusion the author emphasizes that the history of the rise and development of Soviet foreign economic policy provides graphic evidence of the closest attention devoted by the Soviet government to the problem of establishing economic relations with the capitalist world, of its sincere desire to promote mutually beneficial international economic cooperation from the very first days of Soviet power,

A. Y. GRUNT. The "New Barricade Tactic" and the Armed Uprisings of 1905 and 1917

The article is devoted to the question of the barricade struggle as an historically evolved form of the armed uprising. Analyzing the experience of the armed uprisings of 1905 and 1917, the author comes to the conclusion that the new element in the tactic of these uprisings consisted not in combining barricades with partisan warfare but in renouncing the barricade struggle as a defensive form threatening to doom the uprising, and in the revolutionary forces applying the offensive tactic as the only correct one for the achievement of victory.

Referring in this connection to Kautsky's views, A. Y. Grunt draws the conclusion that Karl Kautsky had no valid grounds for revising the ideas expounded by Engels, who never denied the role of the armed uprising in future revolutions but merely pointed out with full justification that the barricade tactic would have to be replaced by the offensive one. The author stresses that V. I. Lenin's elaboration of the tactical questions of an arr med uprising was based on the conclusions drawn by Engels.

A. A. AKHTAMZIAN. Concerning the History of the Brest-Litovsk Negotiations of 1918

The author draws on hitherto unknown documents relating to the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk in December 1917-March 1918. The materials found in the archives of diplomatic history, notably the German delegation's telegraph communication with its government (the so-called Kuhlmann's cryptograms), make it possible. to shed a new light, on the diplomatic situation prevailing, at the peace conference. Particular attention is devoted by the author to the events of February 9 - 10,. 1918, when Trotsky, acting in. contravention of V. 1. Lenin's directives, arbitrarily broke off the talks. The article also examines the political struggle which developed within the Bolshevik Party over the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace, showing the profound substantiation of Lenin's position, the insolvency of the attitude taken by "Left Communists" and the harm caused by the pernicious "Trotsky line". The article exposes the aggressive actions of German diplomacy, the predatory nature and adventurism of German imperialism.

I. V. BESTUZHEV. The Development of Ideas on the Future of Mankind in Pre-Marxian Social Thought

The article dwells on major problems concerning the development of ideas on the future of mankind in the world's social thought from the earliest times to the mid-19th century, the peculiar character of ideas on the future in primitive thinking, the development of religious conceptions of the future, utopianism, the concepts of the future in the philosophy of history. The author draws attention to the peculiar presentism of primitive thinking, reflected in contraposing the past and future to the present. The article briefly examines the evolution of religious conceptions of the future from primitive

mythology to developed eschatology of Buddhism, Christianity and Mohammedanism, emphasizing the important role played by chiliasm in influencing the ideology of popular movements in the remote past. The article analyzes the concept of utopianism as an arbitrary approach to the future of mankind, which, in contradistinction to eschatology, is no longer directly linked with providentialism and, at the same time, is not yet founded on a scientific understanding of the objective laws governing the development of nature and society. The author proposes a classification of utopian social doctrines according to the specific social system they reflect (primitive communal, slaveowning, feudal, bourgeois and socialist Utopian schemes with subsequent subdivisions). The author singles out the ascending and descending stage in the evolution of utopianism. The development of ideas on the future of mankind, examined in connection with the formation and evolution of three main conceptions of the historical process (the conception of regress from the Golden Age, the conception of cyclical development and the conception of social progress), is characterized as the shaping of direct historical prerequisites of scientific prevision, whose real history begins with the spread of Marxism. From this point of view the subject of the article is the pre-history of a scientific prevision of mankind's future.

G. A. MELIKISHVILI. Concerning the Nature of Early Class Societies

The author distinguishes three periods in the development of a class society - the early-class, the developed-class and the late-class (the period of transition to a developed classless society). To the first period he attributes the oldest class societies which arose in the East and in other parts of the world. The article maintains that the early class societies cannot be regarded as slaveowning, because slave labour played an insignificant part in their production and the exploitation of the slaves as such was marked by the tendency of closely resembling the protofeudal type of exploitation, which was very widespread in regard to the local population. "The Asian mode of production" described by Karl Marx on the example of the Oriental despotic regimes represents one of the varieties of the early class society. Parallel with this, the early class societies can be either slaveowning or early feudal in character, but in most cases they are distinguished by the coexistence or different socio-economic systems. As a rule, the early class societies developed towards feudalism; their transformation into developed slaveowning societies (as in Greece and Rome) was the result of an exceptional situation determined, side by side with internal causes, by the uneven character of development of interacting societies, which enables the more developed of them to shift the main burden of exploitation to the outside.

N. I. PAVL'ENKO. Controversial Questions of the Genesis of Capitalism in Russia

Of the whole complex of controversial questions concerning the genesis of capitalism in Russia, the author singles out the following four points which have given rise to the most serious divergence of views during the discussion: 1) characteristic of the phenomena connected with the "new period" in Russian history; 2) the role played by small-commodity production and simple capitalist cooperation in the genesis of capitalism; 3) the role of manufacture in the rise and development of capitalism; 4) establishing the chronological boundary of the period of capitalist development and the disintegration of feudalism.

The main content of the article is devoted to an analysis of V. I. Lenin's interpretation of the "new period" in Russian history and to the critique of the historiographical tradition of applying this interpretation to concrete research.

The author points out that researchers do not always draw a clear line of distinction between small-commodity and capitalist production, attributing to the latter small- scale enterprises employing hired labour. Yet this type of production, based on simple reproduction, existed for centuries. Conditions for the development of small- commodity production into capitalist production appeared in Russia only in the second half of the 18th century. The wide spread of hired labour in the transport system and in simple capitalist cooperation-an argument most frequently advanced by advocates of the early genesis of capitalism in Russia - is interpreted as a factor testifying to the sporadic appearance of the capitalist mode of production, for simple capitalist cooperation does not produce a stable form of new relations.

N. I. Pavlenko proposes to examine the history of the rise and development of manufacture in close connection with the destiny of the feudal formation. Prior to its disintegration in the second half of the 18th century, the prevailing feudal system deformed the emerging capitalist manufacturing enterprises and made them serflike in character. Only from the second half of the 18th century feudal relations lost their ability to exert a powerful influence on the nature of manufactory production.

The author disputes the opinion of those historians who assert that the process of disintegration of feudalism began in the early 17th century. The disintegration of feudalism and the development of capitalism are regarded by N. I. Pavlenko as two sides of a dual process whose beginning dates back to the second half of the 18th century.

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