D. M. KUKIN. Corresponding Member, USSR Academy of Sciences. The Five-Year Plans and the Socio-Economic Progress of Soviet Society.

The five-year plans, which cover both socio-economic and cultural development, have been key factors in the work of the Communist Party and the Soviet people in implementing Lenin's plan of building socialism and communism in the USSR. The author considers the main tasks and results of the ten five-year plans (1928 - 1980) and the guidelines for the social and economic development of the USSR in the present, eleventh, five-year-plan period (1981 - 1985) adopted by the 26th CPSU Congress.

P. A. ZAIONCHKOVSKY. The Officer Corps of the Russian Army on the Eve of the First World War.

An analysis of the social, property, educational status and nationality of senior officers (from regimental to divisional and corps levels), with particular attention to the changes brought about by the First World War as compared with the period of the Russo-Japanese War.

G. L. ARSCH, V. N. VINOGRADOV, I. S. DOSTYAN, E. P. NAUMOV. The Balkans in European Politics (15th-Early 20th Century).

The article offers a periodisation of the development of international relations in South-East Europe from the decline of the Byzantium to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The authors examine the causes that gave rise to the Eastern Question in the second half of the 18th century, the role of such factors as the increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire, the development of national-liberation movements, rivalry between the Great Powers, and their interaction at different periods. The article also deals with the motives behind Russia's aid to the national- liberation movements, and the motives of British, French and Austrian attempts to preserve the Ottoman Empire as the cornerstone of their Balkan policy.

I. M. KRASNOV. The Rise of the American Workers' Movement and the Founding of the US Communist Party .

The United States, the author shows, did not stand aside from the world revolutionary processes generated by the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia. The founding of the Communist Party was an important event in the history of the USA. The author exposes the unscientific bourgeois concept of "class collaboration" and the allegation that the Communist movement is an "alien body" in the USA.

V. G. TRUKHANOVSKY. Corresponding Member, USSR Academy of Sciences. Britain's Strategic Nuclear Weapon.

The author takes as his subject the history of the creation of the nuclear weapon in Britain and the growth of her nuclear potential from the decision, in 1947, to make nuclear weapons, to the organisation of a modern nuclear strategic force. The article shows the influence this has had on the international relations, Britain's foreign policy and the Soviet-British relations. The relevant facts are carefully examined and assessed in the context of the Soviet Union's struggle for disarmament, peace and international cooperation.

V. I. SALOV. Crisis Phenomena in the Bourgeois Methodology of History .

With the deepening crisis of bourgeois methodology, the author writes, bourgeois historians, as a rule, wrongly interpret the concept of historism and reject the concept of law-governed change of socio-economic formations. Their attempts to find a way out of the crisis are of a palliative character and show up their inability to overcome the antithesis of the systems and historical approaches and to devise scientific criteria for a comparative historical approach. The crisis is associated with the "defensive" function of bourgeois methodology which is manifested in the hardening of anti- communism and anti-Sovietism.

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