In the 1970s, Brezhnev faced a turning point in the foreign policy. Having achieved remarkable diplomatic success through the conclusion of the Moscow treaty with West Germany and SALT I treaty with the United States, He wanted to improve the relations with the West further. But Suslov and other ideologues inside the Soviet leadership, concerned about the diminishing anti-imperialist nature of the Soviet foreign policy, called for a more active internationalist policy. Although Brezhnev rejected such an overall ideological offensive against the West, he recognized the need to launch counteroffensives against Chinese political and ideological challenges all over the world. To retain the Soviet position inside the international communist movement, the Soviets found it necessary to contain the Chinese influence in the Third World by supporting the liberation movements. Brezhnev, despite his will to make detente irreversible, thereby heightened the East-West tensions, which culminated in the collapse of the detente. As official Soviet documents are still unavailable, this account is based largely on the memoirs of former Soviet diplomats and East German archival sources.

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There has been a major development in the study of Stalinism from cultural perspectives over the last two decades. One of the topics which historians have recently extensively discussed is how Stalinism and the authority of the one-Party state were represented at various public festivals, propaganda events and ritualistic Party meetings. However, the Party congress has so far drawn scant attention from historians as a Soviet political festival-cum-ritual even after the "archival bonanza". At the congresses between 1927 (the Fifteenth Congress) and 1934 (the Seventeenth Congress), Stalinism was carefully orchestrated as a means of projecting the authority of Stalin and the Party for consumption by the mass Soviet public. The means of orchestration included the careful selection of the date of convening; the special delegate's numbers given to Stalin and other top officials; propaganda events which represented the bright future of the USSR; and the gift-giving to Stalin by local Party organs. Time and again, these "scenes" were also reproduced in post-congress propagandas, by which the memory and significance of each congress became "homogenized". The Party congresses therefore constituted an essential part in the consolidation of the Stalinist regime in the late 1920s- early 1930s.

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This paper attempts to elucidate how peasants after the Emancipation were treated by the government and society through analysis of the introduction process of the Narod school system during the Era of the Great Reforms. The first half of this paper indicates that the Tsarist government did not intend to create a Russian nation by fusing the peasant estate into other estates in the Russian Empire. Specifically, the Ministry of Public Instruction, which was responsible for the institutional design of Narod schools in the period of the Great Reforms, had no clear perspective on peasant education, because its focus had been on elite education such as Universities and Gymnasia since its establishment. Therefore, the initiative to construct schools in villages was left to spontaneous contribution from the peasant collectives, and the government was assumed to furnish very little financial assistance and to adopt no specific diffusion policy. On the other hand, the emerging secular pedagogues became involved in active movements for peasant education, envisaging peasants as a part of the Russian nation. Their enthusiasm was to compensate the nonresponsive attitude of the government. The second part of this paper examines such concrete activities of pedagogues.

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There are not only few academic works on this theme in Japan, but also few archival documents accessible to the researchers. The documents in the Russian archives, except minor ones published, have to be read on the spots and still more there are many restrictions and even prohibitions to the access. For example, the documents of each internee (uchetnaia delo and uchetnaia kartochka) in the RGVA (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv) are accessible only to the relatives. The GHQ documents (censored letters of the internees and interrogations of the repatriates) owned by the Hoover Institute, Stanford University and partly in the National Diet Library of Japan, have been scarcely used. As for the Japanese documents, individual records made at the landing time and the copies of above-mentioned Russian documents owned by the MHL (Ministry of Health and Labor) are also accessible only to the relatives. In spite of these difficult conditions, Japanese researchers have recently read the documents and written articles on the Lager' system, the real conditions (coldness, hunger and heavy labor) of the Japanese internees, and so-called democratic movements (anti-militarist at first, then pro-Soviet) etc. The author especially emphasizes organized studies among Japanese researchers as well as in cooperation with those of former Soviet Union.

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