G. Ya. TARLE. The Soviet Public Anti-War Movement (the late 1940s-mid- 1980s)

The author traces the history of the peace struggle of the Soviet people from the moment the World Peace Movement emerged in 1949 to the mid-1980s. The article concentrates on the specific features of this struggle at different stages of the world- wide peace movement, the role the Soviet organisations played in it and the forms of its cooperation with peace forces elsewhere. The article emphasises that the role of the popular masses in history is partly manifested precisely through the anti-war movement.

S. S. DMITRIEV, A. S. NIFONTOV. An Exceptional Jubilee of a Soviet Historian

In January 1986 Academician Nikolai Druzhinin, one of the oldest Soviet scientists, will be 100. The article surveys his life and scientific activities, his work as an editor and a science organiser, investigate his world outlook, his teaching methods and offers an assessment of his place in the Soviet historical science. The authors discuss his major works on the Decembrists, on the history of Moscow, his textbook for higher educational establishments on 19th-century Russia, and his monographs State-Owned Peasants and the Reform of Pavel Kiselyov and The Russian Village at the Turning-Point: 1861 - 1880.

V. Ya. FILIMONOV. The Role of the Soviet State in Regulating the Town- Countryside Relations: the Market, Credits and Taxes (1921 - 1925)

The author looks at most important channels which connected the town and countryside in the period under review. He relies on his analysis of the Soviet state to regulate market relations, the tax and credit policy to trace the emergence of the system, determined, on the one hand, by the specific features and the tasks of the restoration period, and, on the other, by the law-governed patterns of the transition period. This led the author to a conclusion that by the end of the restoration period there had mainly emerged a relatively integral system regulating relations between town and countryside which made it possible to embark on the road of reconstruction together with the restoration of the country's productive forces.

Z. Kh. SARALIEVA. "Labour Question" in the Revolutionary Press in 1905 - 1907.

The article analyses the theoretical substantiation and propaganda in the broad working masses the Marxist interpretation of the "labour question" implemented by the Leninist party through the central and local Bolshevik and democratic press during the first bourgeois-democratic revolution. The question comprised the following components: the social and economic conditions of the working class; the Social- Democratic programme demand of an 8-hour working day: struggle against unemployment and lockouts; urgent need of the unity of the working-class movement. This persistent and consistent propaganda helped the working class and the broad popular masses supporting the proletarian vanguard realise their place in the struggle and better understand revolutionary aims.

L. N. KUTAKOV. From the History of Soviet-Japanese Diplomatic Relations

The author analyses the international situation obtained in the Far East in the early 1920, political struggle in Japan around the relations with the Soviet Union and traces the protracted diplomatic negotiations which took place in 1923 - 1925. He demonstrates that the USSR was willing to establish good-neighbourly relations with Japan and that the Japanese ruling circles strove to obtain some economic and political con-sessions from the Soviet Union. The author relied on documents kept in the Archive of Soviet Foreign Policy, The article is concluded with a brief survey of Soviet-Japanese relations in later years. on Soviet and Japanese documentary publications and memoirs of Soviet and Japanese political figures and diplomats.

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