THE ZEMSTVOS DURING THE WAR 
measure with any degree of accuracy the effects of the World War 
itself upon the economic and social life of the country. Those effects 
were so distorted by the forces let loose in the post-war years and so 
confused with the disturbances of the revolutionary era that the at- 
tempt to isolate the phenomena of the War from the data of civil 
war and to analyze the former according to the plan followed in the 
other national series of this collection has been a task of unparalleled 
difficulty. Over and above the intricacies of the problem and its illu- 
sive character, the authors of the Russian monographs have had to 
work under the most discouraging circumstances and with inade- 
quate implements of research. For those who know the scarcity of 
the documentary material available, it will be a matter of no little 
surprise to find, in the pages of this Russian Series, narratives and 
substantiating data which measure up so well in comparison with 
those prepared by the collaborators in other countries. The achieve- 
ment of the Russian Division of the History is, all things considered, 
the most remarkable section of the entire collection. This is due, in 
the first place, to the fact that the authors, all of them exiles who 
live in foreign lands, have brought to this task not only the scientific 
disciplines of their own special fields but also an expert knowledge 
drawn from personal experience which in several instances reached 
to the highest offices of State. 
While these volumes in the Russian History constitute so very 
considerable an achievement, they cannot in the very nature of the 
case cover with adequate statistical or other specific data many of 
the problems with which they deal. No one is more conscious of their 
shortcomings in this regard than the authors themselves. Neverthe- 
less, with inadequate material and under hampering circumstances 
they have prepared a body of text and a record which, if admittedly 
incomplete as history, contains at least one element that would other- 
wise be lost for the future understanding of this great crisis in hu- 
man affairs, an element which no other generation working from 
Russian archives could ever supply. We have here the mature com- 
ment upon events by contemporaries capable of passing judgment 
and appraising values, so that over and above the survey of phe- 
nomena there is presented a perspective and an organization of ma- 
terial which will be a contribution to history hardly less important 
than the substance of the monographs. 
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